Texas racked up a $50 billion energy bill last week. It's not clear who's going to pay it.

Power lines in Houston
(Image credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

When demand for energy rose sharply last week in unseasonably frigid Texas, and power plants started going offline, the state Public Utility Commission (PUC) allowed wholesale electricity prices to jump to the maximum rate of $9 per kilowatt-hour, a 7,400 percent increase over the normal rate of 12 cents per kilowatt-hour, The Texas Tribune reports. "The rate hike was supposed to entice power generators to get more juice into the grid, but the astounding costs were also passed directly on to some customers."

Texas became national news because its power grid, overseen by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), nearly collapsed and 4.5 million customers lost power. But "now that the lights are back on in Texas, the state has to figure out who's going to pay for the energy crisis," Bloomberg News reports. "It will likely be ordinary Texans."

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Peter Weber, The Week US

Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.