$9,000 power bill during Texas blackout prompts class-action lawsuit By Irina Ivanova Texans hit with skyrocketing utility bills
A Texas woman who was hit with a $9,000 power bill this month has sued her electricity provider for price gouging in a case that highlights the risks some consumers face in the state s deregulated energy market.
The suit is the first of its kind after a harrowing week of snow and subfreezing temperatures that brought on skyrocketing energy prices for thousands of customers in the state and blackouts for millions of others. The economic toll of the extreme weather event could top $200 billion, putting the freeze on par with some of the costliest natural disasters to hit the United States.
Were regulators right to push power prices to the maximum in Texas?
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Yi-Chin Lee, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer
With power generators knocked offline and outages rolling across Texas on Feb. 15, wholesale electricity markets in Texas presented a puzzle. Power was trading between $1,000 and $2,000 per megawatt-hour, a very high price, but not one that reflected the severe power shortages crippling the state.
That evening, the Public Utility Commission stepped in, ordering the state’s grid manager, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, to declare a level three emergency and push wholesale prices to the maximum allowed, $9,000 per megawatt-hour, where they stayed for much of the next few days.
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Continues to Assess Impact of the Texas Extreme Cold Weather Event
TORONTO, Feb. 26, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) Just Energy Group Inc. (“Just Energy” or the “Company”) (TSX:JE; NYSE:JE), a retail energy provider specializing in electricity and natural gas commodities and bringing energy efficient solutions and renewable energy options to customers and carbon offsets, announced its third quarter results for fiscal year 2021 and updated its previous announcement advising that management is continuing to assess the impact of the extreme cold weather experienced in the State of Texas commencing on or about February 13, 2021 continuing through February 19, 2021 (the “Weather Event”).
The Weather Event resulted in the Company having to balance its power supply through the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) at artificially mandated high electricity prices and significantly increased ancillary service costs as described in the Company’s Management Discussion and Ana