> If you treat your savings from "good times" as extra cash to spend you're going to get burned to the ground by the bad times.

Exactly, though to give a lot of customers of these plans credit, they don't have the extra cash. Griddy's own marketing says that "96% of the time," the wholesale rate is well under the average retail per-kWh rate.

This is yet another one of those hidden costs of how being lower-income is very expensive, both in actual money, and in time. Vanishingly few people have the time to be as on the ball as they'd need to for plans like this to work. And you can automate it, but that costs money many of these customers don't have.

I have no problems with plans like this existing; my issue is we set people up to fail by danging the large-print number being a very small value, while not warning people of how catastrophically it can go--and has gone--very wrong.

Datapoint: I'm someone on the MISO grid, with fixed-rate electric billed at $0.15 for the first 300 kWh, $.11 for the next 700 kWh, and $.10 for the rest. Last month I used ~2500 kWh for a total of ~$267.

MISO's marginal cost to deliver a megawatt hour to my area is around ~$16-19 over the past hour or so[1]; with those prices, I'd save ~200. That's nothing to sneeze at.

During the blackouts ERCOT's prices[2] were around $7500 to deliver that mWh; at that cost I'd lose $18,483 by paying market rate.

I don't think the average person is equipped to properly price this risk. I don't think I'd know how to properly hedge it, either.

[1]: https://www.misoenergy.org/markets-and-operations/real-time-...

[2]: http://mis.ercot.com/misapp/GetReports.do?reportTypeId=12328...