My wife got a contract with our provider, we pay normal prices during the day but get 100% free power from 8 PM to I think 5 or 6 AM. Can't really complain.

What does "normal" prices man? After everything is said and done, what is your normal effective per-kWh rate? Most people I've seen with these plans only really get a good deal with a plan like that with a good solar or battery install, or are truly never at home except for those free hours.

She pays the bills, she's happy, when she's happy about anything to do with money, with me burning through power with my gaming on several nights per week; it's got to be all good news. Always check to see whether your utility can work a deal.

shit I would invest in a power wall and time shift my power usage to the night.

There are T&Cs like usage caps that make these deals much less valuable than the marketing conveys.

Interesting idea! I read caminante's comment about usage caps in context and I'd check before purchasing a powerwall but even if caps were in place with our deal; the powerwall could be nice as a sort of home UPS.

I was looking at it for that use myself, but unfortunately power supply in my area but iirc either the differential in price didn't actually make a ROI or the pricing didn't fluctuate =(

Sounds great for crypto miners!

You pay more per kwh than I do, you get rolling blackouts, and mine is nuclear energy...

Mine is 100% renewable and I haven't lost power at my location in years.

What rate do you pay including delivery? My rate indoors delivery charges, sometimes people see those as two separate things.

7 cents for delivery, zero to five cents for power. 2.3 cents/kwh as of a few minutes ago.

I'm just surprised because maintaining a grid in an extremely dense urban area that hasn't gotten above freezing in several weeks and getting nuclear power which is very expensive should be a good deal more expensive than the wild west that is Texas energy markets and it doesn't seem to be.

9.3c/kWh is greater than my 8.8c/kWh. Your rates swing from a bit cheaper to mine to a bit pricer than mine, while mine is always the same. You would have to share your actual effective monthly cost for us to know if you truly paid less on average, as if it stays on the higher end you're paying a lot more but if it's only on the lower end then you're a good bit cheaper.

Maintaining the grid in a dense urban area is actually usually cheaper than less dense areas. More customers per mile of cable to offset the costs. Customers in urban areas usually don't impart as much load. There's more utility owned property per customer in a suburb than in a city by a good bit.

Note that it was massively unusually cold, not that it was just cold. A large part of the grid failure wasn't electrical equipment failing, it was really more of a lack of natural gas supply. There's no real long term storage for natural gas, so when you start using more than what suppliers are making you get shortfalls. Residential customers take priority, so gas companies couldn't get more gas. Gas generators were the primary expected generation capacity, but they couldn't get enough gas. Electric demand kept increasing but capacity started falling. Rolling blackouts were attempted. Sites critical to gas generation and supply were not listed as critical industrial customers so their circuits were higher priority to shed load (non-critical industrial and commercial first) leading to further gas shortages which led to further plant shutdowns which led to more circuits being shed. Those gas lines have a good bit of moisture in them. When the gas is flowing, it's not really a problem. When the producers stop because of power issues, lines freeze. Lines were unable to be unfrozen, so gas capacity really couldn't be increased to theoretical capacity even when the producers got power back on. So we had a number of plants which should have been able to operate but there literally wasn't any gas left to burn.

There were some other failures. A nuclear plant had a cooling system pipe exposed which froze. Coal plants had open piles of coal freeze solid without equipment to break up the pile and move the coal. Some wind turbines we're offlined as they were worried about icing as they don't normally need de-icing. The skies were really cloudy so solar didn't have as much output. But the vast majority of power failures were failures in natural gas supply.

If you are where I think you are (where I am), this is also after all of the bribery scandals...