They also probably get spicy metadata on when you shower, wash, go on holiday etc with these smartmeters and you probably agreed that they can sell that data to whomever tge like when agreeing to their tos 👍

That’s a very rosy picture, but they skipped a very important detail, alas. Or well, a few.

First, selling your power to the power companies in Texas is great! Except the amount they pay you is always going to be substantially less than the price you’re going to pay later to import a kwh.

We have the Freedom™ to pay two seperate charges for power: the delivery cost, and the power cost. This is a great Freedom™ because it lets the power company pay you the power cost for your exported power, but you get to pay both halves when you no longer have that kwh in your batteries later.

Also this is just an attempt to get someone else to pay their CapEx to catch extreme usage events, and the incentives being paid out to people who have spent tens of thousands of dollars is still tilted in the power company’s favor. The article itself even says it’s helping them make a bigger profit: if it was a fair set of incentives, well, then that wouldn’t be what’s actually happening, would it?

And, worse, any non-Texans might not catch how unlivable shit gets if your A/C starts screwing with the set temperature when it’s 110F outside. The article says it turns it ‘off’, but the impact I’ve seen from some friends who have one of these plans setup is that it simply sets the temperature to something like 86; high enough to stop the usage, but not quite enough to kill you or your pets if you’re not aware it’s done it. Still, not the most pleasant.

Still, it’s a good idea and a step in the right direction, but we need (lol, lmao) actual real regulation around this and the incentives to be a little less… lame. They’re very much structured around the ‘well, what else are you going to do with your excess?’, rather than with a real intent of fair dealing.