As a result of a snowstorm that struck the region last week

Fictional electric bills surprise residents of Texas

• The blackout exacerbated the situation at the time of the storm.

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• The bill amounts shocked residents.

  From the source

• Nobody expected this temperature to drop in Texas.

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Millions of Texans were shivering in dark and cold homes last week, when a winter storm destroyed the state's power grid, freezing natural gas production, and those who still had electrical power felt lucky.

Now many of them are paying a heavy price for it.

"My savings are lost," said Scott Willoughby, a 63-year-old former military who lives on Social Security payments in a Dallas suburb.

He said that he was about to empty his savings account, so that he could pay the 16,752 dollars electricity bill deducted from his credit card.

The amount is 70 times what he normally pays for all his facilities;

"There is nothing I can do about it," explained the frustrated American. "But it broke me."

Willoughby is among dozens of people in Texas who complained about rising electricity bills as commodity prices soared.

For customers for whom electricity prices were not fixed, and remained associated with fluctuating prices, the increases were dramatic.

There were angry protests and calls for action by lawmakers, from both parties, and prompted Republican Gov. Greg Abbott to hold an emergency meeting with lawmakers to discuss bills.

"We have a responsibility to protect Texans from surging energy bills due to severe winter weather and blackouts," said Abbott, who has been criticized for the state's poor infrastructure.

He added that Democrats and Republicans will work together to ensure that people "do not suffer because of high energy bills."

Texas residents faced a set of cold weather crises last week, when grid cuts and rising demand left millions without electricity.

Natural gas producers were not prepared for freezing weather, either, and many homes were without heating.

Now, millions of people are discovering that they do not have safe water because of burst pipes, or frozen wells, or water treatment plants, which have stopped working.

In recent days, electricity has returned to all Texas residents except for 60,000 people as the storm moved east, where it also caused blackouts in Mississippi, Louisiana, Virginia, and Ohio.

In Texas, part of the exorbitant electricity bills are due to the state's unregulated energy market, which allows customers to choose electricity suppliers from among 220 companies, in a system driven by market price fluctuations.

When demand increases, prices rise, and the goal, say electric power engineers, is to balance the market by encouraging consumers to reduce their use, and stimulating energy suppliers to generate more electricity.

But when a crisis hit last week, and power systems faltered, the state utility commission ordered a price hike to the maximum of $ 9 a kilowatt, pushing the daily electricity costs for many customers to more than $ 100 a unit.

And in some cases, like Willoughby, the bills are more than 50 times higher than their normal cost.

Many of the people who report extremely high fees, including Willoughby, are clients of Grady, a small company in Houston that provides electricity at wholesale prices, which can change quickly based on supply and demand.

The company provides the service directly to customers, and charges an additional $ 9.99 per month in fees.

Often times, the price is affordable.

But the model can be risky.

Last week, the company expected a huge jump in wholesale prices, which encouraged all of its customers (about 29,000 homes) to switch to another supplier when the storm arrived, but many were unable to do so.

Insane hike

Katrina Tanner, a customer at Grady who lives in Texas, said she had already paid $ 6,200 this month, more than five times what she did in the whole of 2020.

Tanner became involved in the company's services, at the suggestion of a friend of hers, two years ago, and was pleased at the time how easy it was to sign up.

And the American lady said that as the storm approached, during the past week, she noticed on the company's application, on her phone, her bill "going up, going up, and going up."

And "Grady" was able to take the owed money directly from her bank account, and she now has only 200 dollars left.

She says she was able to keep that much, because her bank prevented the company from taking more.

Texas residents have faced a bunch of cold weather crises over the past week.

16752

A dollar amount of the electricity bill for US citizen Scott Willoughby.

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