CA’s retail electricity prices are so completely disconnected from actual costs that trying to choose a notionally correct price for selling to the grid seems i

CA’s retail electricity prices are so completely disconnected from actual costs that trying to choose a notionally correct price for selling to the grid seems impossible. Look, you can literally order your rate schedule off a menu! https://www.pge.com/tariffs/index.page https://www.pge.com/tariffs/index.page Of course, supplying you costs the same amount regardless of which appetizer or entree you order. The times of day that are cheapest and the times of day that are the lowest-carbon for the grid have nothing to do with which time of use tariff you happen to get billed. Here’s E-6, a common residential schedule, and you can look at the utterly insane 53 cent/kWh top rate and its unbundling: https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHEDS_E-6.pdf https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHED... So that’s 27 cents for peak summer generation. Surely, if you sell PG&E a kWh during peak time, they can avoid buying a peak 27 cents of power, which IMO they should pay you for. (Or they should *stop pretending it costs 27 cents to buy this power in the first place!) I will grant that PG&E still has to pay to distribute the power you sell them. Fine, although their distribution rates are still nuts. They must be taking a page from AWS’s playbook here. Maybe they shouldn’t pay you that whole amount when you sell them power. Oh, and it apparently only costs PG&E to generate 27 cents to generate that peak summer kWh for agricultural users. Go figure. And all these numbers are 5-10x the LCoE of basically any type of new generation. edit: Santa Clara sells power for about 14 cents/kWh, all in, for residential users: https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/home/showpublisheddocument/6253/638084314235470000 https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/home/showpublisheddocumen... I do not believe for a second that Santa Clara can buy and distribute power for half the claimed amount that PG&E pays just to generate it.