Par4QC
These are great questions.
For us, we were mostly on an 11 minutes on.... 11 minutes off plan. It was like that for most of the time the rolling blackouts were going on. They stopped at 8pm on Thursday. So, I'm going to be billed for all those stops and starts of power. My understanding is it draws a lot of power to cold start like that, and it happened A LOT.
A resident was speculating that the price we'd be charged would go from 10.5 cents per kwh to 900 per kwh. That's a ridiculous shift. Now, I don't know if that applies to one day, two days, three days, etc? I know many of us are very nervous about what that next bill will show. My current bill is only through 2/6 and is 97 bucks.
Did catch a local story showing a woman living in a 700sqft apt. who typically pays 50 bucks a month for power was hit with an over $2600 bill. That's a 50x situation. If my bill is 50 times the 97 it was last month, I'm just short of 5k for our bill. I ain't paying that. We'll just run off to the west coast and start over out there.
Many people are disconnecting their auto-pay feature and I'm doing the same if/when I learn of what they're going to do. That next autodraft won't happen until the end of March for me, and that's where the big bill could be waiting.
The only comparable situation I can think of is when my 40 dollar a month water bill jumped to over 300 one month many years ago. I went bananas over the phone and they sent this HUGE intimidating dude to my house within minutes of my call. Very tense conversation. He swore to me that if my bill said 300+ then 300+ worth of water ran through my meter and I would have to pay. They had me by the shorties on that one because I have to have water. Ultimately, they allowed me to break up the amount into 4 extra payments each month. To this day, I don't understand how my bill went from the 40 it was every single month to over 300. No usage change that I knew of. Some weird stuff.
If they hit us with a multi-thousand bill or even one that's 3 times as much as usual, I'll flip. Will pull the autopay and plot my next move. Like you said, the bill should be LESS for the inconvenience and disruption not more.
