Texas won’t fix electricity overcharging during blizzards

New York. The state of Texas will not correct the $ 16 billion in electricity it overcharged to consumers in the state during the recent snowstorm and frost, as it is too difficult to recalculate prices, the Public Electric Power Commission reported Friday .

“That egg is too scrambled,” said the president of that state commission, Arthur D’Andrea.

This response comes after an independent agency estimated that the state kept prices inordinately high for 33 hours longer than it should during the cold and snowstorm in Texas last month, which exceeded consumer costs by $ 16 billion.

In the midst of the blizzard and in the face of supply problems and high demand during the storm, which left millions of homes without electricity, the state’s governor, Republican Greg Abbott, ordered wholesale prices to be raised to a peak of $ 9,000 per megawatt hour, up from $ 22 for a typical day.

According to D’Andrea, correcting mismatched invoices can lead to unexpected and difficult to predict imbalances.

According to the independent panel that reviewed the increases, the rise in energy prices should have stopped when selective power outages began to be imposed and not when the energy emergency ended almost two days later.

A large number of consumers reported electricity bills in excess of $ 15,000, while some companies that generate renewable energy and must purchase electricity at market price were forced to go out of business.