Griddy – Wholesale Electricity

Excellent program if it’s in your area, 9.95 monthly membership and then you pay wholesale cost which can be as low as 1.9 cents a kilowatt hour. Tells you hour by hour what you spent and what the upcoming price is. By avoiding using a lot of power from 1-5pm M-F...you definitely will save a lot. Dirt cheap overnight and weekends. Low on mornings and evenings. And they warn you if there is a short price hike so you can avoid running a lot of electricity then. Free enterprise at its best! 9.95 pays all their costs, then you get wholesale prices and distribution costs the same as the huge power companies. Unless you HAVE to use a TON of power from 1-5pm M-F....this will save you a ton of money. So far, after a month, I’m saving 40 percent compared to my reliant bill.

Griddy has a good app but persists in presenting the energy component of its rates as if that is the total rate. So when you see "Real-Time Cost", "Current Cost" and "Projected Cost" on their opening page, the amount is energy only, without all of the other charges you pay. Typically, this means when the "Real-Time Cost" is reported as 2.1 cents, the actual price per kilowatt hour for a Houston consumer is about 6.1 cents. This is because the charges by the utility that transports electricity over the net to your house are fixed and collected on a per-hour basis. Actually, Griddy's deal is probably the lowest cost alternative in the market, provided you are prepared to pay for a few minutes or hours of rates above $1.00 per kilowatt hour. In so doing, you will also get quite a few hours in which your costs are 4.5 cents per kWh, and even as low as 4 cents per kWh. If you review the Griddy app carefully you can track your usage and cost by the hour, but the data presented is energy-only, not total cost. It almost seems as if Griddy intentionally is obfuscating the true cost of its electricity. It really doesn't need to do this, because its prices are very good, but that's what they do.

ask user to change the rating

It started out great. I couldn’t believe the rates (Aug-Sep 2017). Then I started to see price surges reaching over $1.20/kw. Still telling myself I can accept the risk of price surges because their average monthly rate was really low. Starting Oct-2017, the average rate we pay is almost on par with fixed rate companies. I’ve noticed that the delivery charges were much higher than what I started out with. Of course there is no transparency on those charges. They only show you the hourly generation charges. Long story short.... I don’t see this as a wow service because you end up paying on par or to be honest a tad lower than a fixed rate deal (which would be ok) but you assume the risk of price surges. The concept of managing your use around real-time pricing is not realistic because unless you have a completely smart home that you can control remotely, it’s very difficult. The app is ok but the concept was meant for you to get variable rates and cut out the middle man for $10/month. I’m here to say that I don’t see that being the case. You’re trading a fraction of what you pay the fixed rate providers for the risk of price surges. Hope this helps...

response required

I signed up with Griddy on the 5th of July in 2019 thinking it would be a great way for me to still keep my electricity bill low while I searched for another fixed rate contract, especially since I was about to roll into the hottest months of the year. I was SO wrong. Because the price fluctuates with the market, the low price times can be great but during the high price times, even with the notifications from griddy of the high price, it was impossible for me to save money with their service. My average price per kWh during the month of August was 23.6 cents and I live in a two bedroom two bathroom apartment. I paid $330 that month and that’s with the monthly membership discounted. I have never paid so much for electricity in my entire life nor would I have signed up if I had known this would be the result. I give it two stars because the app always worked great and I liked the fact that it would notify me when the price got really high. However, I highly recommend you just do some research, read the fine print on your electricity facts label, and find a good fixed rate contract.

ask user to change the rating

Been using it a couple of days now and I've seriously been infatuated with it enough to check rates about every hour or two. Yesterday, it stayed at around 2.7 cent per kw/hr. No spike alerts. Check today and my usage shows a substantial spike of use for 1pm. Conveniently, apparently that's when the price spiked also... to over 20 homes the rate it had been all day. More weird is that I let my A/C run all day and night up precool the house. At 10:30am we cut the temp up by 10 degrees, shut everything off, and took the family to Six Flags. Are you guys secretly adding false usage and cost spikes to meet hidden quotas? What else would explain that? Been under two cents all day and got a random notification of an almost $1.00 kw/h spoke today that last nearly 30 minutes... pretty much voiding any gains made throughout the rest of the day. Also curious what my proposed usage was for that hour. As a software developer myself who created firmware for submeters in multi housing properties... you can betcha I'm going to be completely on top of this and find out.