Even with a cap, it feels like it would just take one freak occurrence (power plant/transformer/blizzard) meltdown to erase any potential savings from subscribing to dynamic pricing.

Nah, just switch over to a generator for your bare essential needs and hunker down for a bit.

You can't go into a dynamic environment and only plan for upsides.

Fixed pricing is basically dynamic pricing + insurance. In the expected case, you pay more over any period of time if you take the insurance. If you can afford the risks, going without insurance tends to be cheaper.

In California TOU plans, there are caps on all three of:

1. Price per kWh - $1 last I checked

2. Hours per day at max price - ~9

3. Days per year max price charged - ~10

Even in the worst case, not too scary.

With the horror stories in Texas, I was assuming significantly worse caps. Regardless, I have very little consumption I can time shift to off-peak hours (laundry? dishwasher?), so dynamic pricing would unlikely ever work out for me.

I want to see electricity meters configurable with a "max I am happy to pay per day" setting. When that limit is near, they beep/alert you. When you hit the cap, they turn off the whole house.

You could adjust the limit as you please, with a default of perhaps $100 - but they spare you from million dollar bills, even with uncapped dynamic pricing.

If a reasonable number of these were deployed, the prices would never spike super high, because there would always be someone else willing to turn off their tumble dryer to save 50 bucks.

There’s circuit breakers with wifi connectivity that lets you turn off load through an api. Could code this up or use their apps for energy management.

Consumer demand just isn’t there for this type of product yet

It's easier to use and get cutoff later

Just hoping that everything in fridge doesn't spoil until billing resets at midnight? That doesn't sound like a gamble most people would be willing to make, especially on a regular basis. I would imagine that at least for the (shrinking) middle class and above that widespread instability in the grid will drive the sale of a lot of PV systems and battery storage.

From my experience with regular power outages in the Seattle metropolitan area, your fridge will last 24 hours after the power goes out, if you don't open the door.

Your water heater will provide water hot enough for a quick shower for a couple days.

Sure, that doesn't sound like a stretch, though most people would find that not being able to open the fridge for many hours would cramp their style...

Oh the humanity!

That's a neat idea and all but what do you do when it's -20° out? Everyone around you simultaneously needs heating but no one's trying tumble dry anything.

but you've hit your daily limit? It's one thing to charge your Tesla later, it's anything

If you live in an area that can drop to -20, you should be prepared for HVAC failure.

Just like when I lived in Iowa, the car always had blankets in the trunk. When I lived in Arizona, there was always a gallon of drinking water in the trunk (it works in the radiator, too!).

Just common sense.

While I completely agree with you (and still carry blankets in my trunk in AZ!) the freeze in Texas was an anomaly that may nor may not have been reasonable to plan for:

> Texas experienced temperatures over 50 °F [28 °C] below normal. Records more than a century old were broken

How many people have planned and can execute plans for once in a century events that happen at scale?

I’d consider myself more prepared than most, but if a large chunk of Phoenix lost power in the middle of the summer for more than 24 hours, I think the result would be even worse. There was a study from a few days ago that predicted >12k deaths during a heat wave+power outage. That makes me reconsider not getting whole house batteries ;-)

Exactly, a market based solution!