Texas woman sues over $10K electric bill during blackout
Everything’s bigger in Texas, even electricity bills.
A Texas woman has filed what could be a billion-dollar class-action lawsuit against Griddy Energy, an electric company she claims billed her nearly $10,000 this month, CNN reported Thursday.
Lisa Khoury, who lives in a Houston suburb, accused the company of having “committed price gouging” during Texas’ massive winter storm and power outages last week, charging her a total of $9,546 from Feb. 1 to Feb. 19, according to a copy of the bill filed with the suit, filed Monday.
The proposed class in Khoury’s lawsuit, which is “seeking monetary relief of over $1 billion,” would cover all of the state’s residents who use the company and received excessive charges following the storm.
Prior to that, Khoury had been charged anywhere from $200 to $250 monthly, according to the suit, which accused the company of negligence for having “failed to shield consumers from excessive electrical bills.”
The company currently addresses the “Why is my bill so high?” query on the FAQ section of its site.
“This has been the coldest storm in more than 30 years in Texas and brought unprecedented weather across the country. As a result, the ERCOT electricity market has been experiencing extremely high pricing due to increased heating demand from the cold weather.”
Noting that prices lowered “dramatically” as of last Friday, the company cautioned that, in the storm’s aftermath, there could “still be some extra volatility in the market.
“Its [sic] a good time to be mindful of the griddy app and make sure you’re getting price notifications,” Griddy continued.
“We charge [customers] the wholesale, real-time price of energy, which changes every 5 minutes,” the company told CNN in a statement. “You effectively pay the same price as a retail or energy provider or utility.”
The company released a statement last week blaming the state Public Utility Commission for “a non-market pricing mechanism for electricity mandating prices reaching as high as hundreds of times normal prices.”
Griddy also said it would seek relief from regulators for affected customers.
