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Just a reminder: Power companies in the US are primarily government regulated monopolies. These are the same monopolies that duped the public into replacing i

Just a reminder: Power companies in the US are primarily government regulated monopolies. These are the same monopolies that duped the public into replacing incandescent bulbs with LEDs claiming they would save power. At the same time, though, these companies lobbied the regulatory bodies and stated that their projected profits were down, because consumption was 'lower than expected' and hiked our rates across the board. There is competition in the gasoline space. There is none or next to none in the power space. What do you think will happen to the costs of 'fueling' electric vehicles here in the US when 50% or more of our vehicles are electric? Time to revisit those rates!

pxmpxm 3y ago
The end game is pretty obvious: https://www.cnet.com/home/energy-and-utilities/electricity-bills-in-california-will-soon-be-based-on-income-heres-how-it-could-work/ https://www.cnet.com/home/energy-and-utilities/electricity-b...
- zbrozek 3y ago
  That's mid-game. The end-game is that these policies result in the grid becoming uncompetitive with self-generation plus fossil-fueled backup. Everyone who is able defects, leaving everyone unable holding the bag on a stranded asset.
  - jandrese 3y ago
    I think you are overestimating the number of people who will fully go off grid. Doing that requires you to overbuild your generation and storage capabilities a fair bit which is expensive and wasteful. Grid tie is better in most cases.
    - pixl97 3y ago
      >I think you are overestimating the number of people who will fully go off grid. They are for sure... At the end of the day the state is not going to let the grid collapse as a matter of national security. Grid connections will be demanded for a certificate of occupancy, and anyone that refuses will learn about all the military equipment our police forces have been gifted.
    - rnrn 3y ago
      $128 per month fixed charge for having a grid tie and not using it is also expensive. This income-graduated fixed charge surely pushes the break even point towards going off grid.
    - zbrozek 3y ago
      It's not going to happen overnight. It'll be a slow corrosion. We're already starting to see the first tarnish. In my town, PG&E wanted to charge a new home (on an existing street with existing utilities) >$300k for an updated hookup (mandated to be underground), so the owner declined and went the self-generation route instead. An occupancy certificate (at least around here) requires functional utilities, but doesn't specify where they come from. Folks who argue against the self-generation route tend to assume that solar and storage has to cover 100% of usage. That's unnecessary, and specifically why I called out fossil-fueled backup. For my own usage, a 14 kilowatt PV array, 20 KWh of battery storage, and a 2 kilowatt generator with remote start (controlled automatically) lets me fully disconnect forever. I haven't yet, mostly because I have NEM 2.0 and the very-high fixed grid charge hasn't kicked in yet. Once it does, there's little reason for me to stay. My system paid itself off in <4 years of avoided costs, but I did it on the cheap by buying used hardware and doing the installation myself. When I set out on the build, I projected my payback time to be closer to 7 years. Rates went up faster than I expected and my usage also went up more than I expected once the electricity was free. I ended up getting an induction cooktop, a heat pump, and an electric car. And I totally agree with you that this approach is wasteful from the perspective of global optimization of overall resource utilization. If this were Factorio and not the real world, the self-generation approach would be dumb. But in practice, the retail cost of electricity is rising fast while solar and battery costs have plummeted. That reduction in cost has really moved the needle on the microeconomics.
      - pxmpxm 3y ago
        I'm curious where are you located - 20kwh means you are fairly dependent on sunlight, right?
        zbrozek 3y ago
        94022 The large size of the array means that even an overcast day produces more than I usually need. The battery capacity only feels small when using the pool heat pump to warm up the hot tub, which drains one of the two 10 KWh batteries. The workaround is to preheat it during the day when there's excess solar and then only spend the energy to keep it warm. I do plan to increase the battery array size eventually, but mostly so I have enough peak power to both cook and do laundry at the same time without needing to do so during the day to avoid pulling anything from the grid.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
    End-game implies that this is an outcome that someone is deliberately aiming for? If so, who?
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Whenever I've run the numbers, a global power grid is much cheaper than the batteries needed for seasonal variations; the wibble factor being, as usual, politics. Batteries themselves are cheaper over their lifetimes than fossil fuels. The wibble factor for that being quite how long battery lifetime is. This is a Vimes Boots type of failure, as it means the rich can afford to spend less money than the poor. If there's a fair-priced market for mid-life batteries, and/or good financing available for packs that you want to keep around for a decade and may keep around for two decades before replacing, then this may help with batteries, but even then a grid is cheaper if you can do it (keep the batteries for mobile storage needs, which is mostly transport but also disaster relief). Global power grid is only going to happen if very large governments do it deliberately; this may well happen for the same reason China did the Belt and Road Initiative, though a suitable capacity global grid would by itself be about the same sort of scale (in both time and money) as the entire Belt and Road Initiative. Grids are also basically a requirement for cities: while one can put PV on the side of a skyscraper, this won't be suitable for every single person in every single apartment.
    - zbrozek 3y ago
      Curious also that utilities are also choosing point-of-use batteries over infrastructure upgrades: https://archive.ph/OXLgE https://archive.ph/OXLgE
- Eumenes 3y ago
  Seems to be a trend. The state of Maine is voting on a ballot initiative to take over the corporate ran power company and replacing it with state ran public utility. Naturally they included commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion in the charter, aka race and income based utility bills.
  - coryrc 3y ago
    Every place I have paid bills advertises discounts for the poor, mixture of government and private. The corruption of DEI does not benefit the little people, but the political consultants and PR departments.
jabradoodle 3y ago
> These are the same monopolies that duped the public into replacing incandescent bulbs with LEDs claiming they would save power. LED bulbs are more efficient, what is your point? > There is competition in the gasoline space. There is none or next to none in the power space. Really, how much of our oil comes from dictators that turn the tap down to manipulate the global oil price whenever it suits them? This is an insane statement.
- gruez 3y ago
  In the US? Probably near zero because we're self-sufficient.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Oil is still a global market and dictators turning off the tap will massively raise gas prices in the US. Currently gas prices in the US are rising because OPEC+ has reduced production quotas.
  - bdcravens 3y ago
    Exporting more than we import isn't the same as being self-sufficient, and regardless of the terms we use, has only occurred since 2019. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/imports-and-exports.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/imports-...
- bdcravens 3y ago
  I can't speak for OP, but these days a lot of conversation about efficiency and green is considered "woke", so it can be categorically dismissed without even considering the truth of things.
  - fbdab103 3y ago
    The Trump administration wanted to disband the Energy Star program[0] (Energy Star is a certification that a device meets certain efficiency standards). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Star https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Star
kibwen 3y ago
> There is competition in the gasoline space. The US government heavily subsidizes gasoline (and every other fossil fuel), which is just as market-distorting as what you describe. The market price does not reflect the real cost of production.
- gruez 3y ago
  >The US government heavily subsidizes gasoline (and every other fossil fuel), which is just as market-distorting as what you describe. The market price does not reflect the real cost of production. Source? AFAIK the articles/studies that make that claim use a very generous definition of "subsidies", which include stuff like accelerated depreciation[1], and not taxing externalities associated with carbon emissions. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidblackmon/2013/01/02/oil-gas-tax-provisions-are-not-subsidies-for-big-oil/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidblackmon/2013/01/02/oil-ga...
  - treyd 3y ago
    It's not gasoline directly, it's oil (and other fossil fuels) more broadly: https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuels-received-5-9-trillion-in-subsidies-in-2020-report-finds https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuels-received-5-9-trill...
    - gruez 3y ago
      Your source has the exact issues that I mentioned in the previous comment, and fails to address them. >Explicit subsidies accounted for only 8 percent of the total. The remaining 92 percent were implicit subsidies, which took the form of tax breaks or, to a much larger degree, health and environmental damages that were not priced into the cost of fossil fuels, according to the analysis.
      - treyd 3y ago
        Tax breaks are equivalent to subsidies at the scale that fossil companies operate at.
ta1243 3y ago
The cost of charging my electric car with my solar panel? Hmm, I suspect it will be about the same price as now.
- zapdrive 3y ago
  Not all of us are lucky enough to have an year round sunlight supply.
  - bdcravens 3y ago
    Correct, though at the same time, those with more sunlight tend to have higher electricity usage during the sunniest months.
  - ta1243 3y ago
    So there's a big conspiracy theory to get rid of gas and replace it with electricity so "Big Electricity" can gouge people in Alaska?
nozzlegear 3y ago
If this is a concern you could just modify your house for solar power and then charge your car for free? There’s the initial cost of the solar installation of course, but at least you can sleep easy knowing the sun isn’t part of the deep state trying to raise rates on you.
bdcravens 3y ago
> There is none or next to none in the power space. In states with deregulated markets, there's tons of competition. Gasoline pricing is highly regulated. Pricing arguments are a distraction from the idea that spewing garbage into the air just to buy groceries when there's an alternative is terrible.
- gruez 3y ago
  >Gasoline pricing is highly regulated. In what jurisdiction? In most developed countries they're anything but. Prices go up and down in response to crude oil prices and other factors. If that counts as "highly regulated", I don't know what you'd call prices that are set by government review boards.
  - bdcravens 3y ago
    Yes, they have to price greater than what they pay, but they have limited ability to raise prices in terms of demand. This conversation is a bit ironic, considering the number of politicians that use gas prices as a talking point (and their followers who parrot those points)
    - gruez 3y ago
      > Yes, they have to price greater than what they pay, but they have limited ability to raise prices in terms of demand. That's a very creative interpretation of "regulated" means.
      - bdcravens 3y ago
        So do you believe that government has little to no influence on gasoline prices?
        gruez 3y ago
        I'm not sure makes you think that. I feel like you're trying to move the goalposts. My objection is with your characterization of gas prices as being "regulated", not that the government has zero influence over gas prices.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
Electric cars use 1/4th the energy of ICE cars (https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/evtech.shtml https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/evtech.shtml). Petroleum for transportation currently accounts for 27% of US energy usage (https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/ https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/). If 100% of cars switch to electric (not happening any time soon) - we only need 25% * 27% = 7% more electricity. We'll be on pace to add that much just in solar in 3 years. It's not going to be a problem to handle electric vehicle adoption over 15 years.
- zapdrive 3y ago
  > Petroleum for transportation currently accounts for 27% of US energy usage > 25% * 27% = 7% more electricity There is no relation between amount of petroleum used and amount of electricity generated in the data provided by you. All you can say is we need the equivalent amount of 7% extra of total energy used today. You did not provide any data about how much of total energy used is electricity . If electricity is 7% of total energy usage, then we need 100% extra to charge all the cars. TLDR: your math is wrong.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
    > There is no relation between amount of petroleum used and amount of electricity generated in the data provided by you. There is. > All you can say is we need the equivalent amount of 7% extra of total energy used today. No. We know how many BTU equivalent are used for electricity generation vs gasoline for transportation. And how much BTU equivalent is needed to power electric cars. > TLDR: your math is wrong. It probably is. Looks like transportation is 36% not 27% - that comes out to ~9% instead of ~7%. The point still stands.
    - zapdrive 3y ago
      > We know how many BTU equivalent are used for electricity generation vs gasoline for transportation. And how much BTU equivalent is needed to power electric cars. Show us the data. > There is. There is literally no relation. "Cars use 27% of total energy in US. And 25% of 27% is equal to 7% of electricity generated." HOW??

pxmpxm 3y ago

The end game is pretty obvious: https://www.cnet.com/home/energy-and-utilities/electricity-bills-in-california-will-soon-be-based-on-income-heres-how-it-could-work/ https://www.cnet.com/home/energy-and-utilities/electricity-b...

zbrozek 3y ago
That's mid-game. The end-game is that these policies result in the grid becoming uncompetitive with self-generation plus fossil-fueled backup. Everyone who is able defects, leaving everyone unable holding the bag on a stranded asset.
- jandrese 3y ago
  I think you are overestimating the number of people who will fully go off grid. Doing that requires you to overbuild your generation and storage capabilities a fair bit which is expensive and wasteful. Grid tie is better in most cases.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    >I think you are overestimating the number of people who will fully go off grid. They are for sure... At the end of the day the state is not going to let the grid collapse as a matter of national security. Grid connections will be demanded for a certificate of occupancy, and anyone that refuses will learn about all the military equipment our police forces have been gifted.
  - rnrn 3y ago
    $128 per month fixed charge for having a grid tie and not using it is also expensive. This income-graduated fixed charge surely pushes the break even point towards going off grid.
  - zbrozek 3y ago
    It's not going to happen overnight. It'll be a slow corrosion. We're already starting to see the first tarnish. In my town, PG&E wanted to charge a new home (on an existing street with existing utilities) >$300k for an updated hookup (mandated to be underground), so the owner declined and went the self-generation route instead. An occupancy certificate (at least around here) requires functional utilities, but doesn't specify where they come from. Folks who argue against the self-generation route tend to assume that solar and storage has to cover 100% of usage. That's unnecessary, and specifically why I called out fossil-fueled backup. For my own usage, a 14 kilowatt PV array, 20 KWh of battery storage, and a 2 kilowatt generator with remote start (controlled automatically) lets me fully disconnect forever. I haven't yet, mostly because I have NEM 2.0 and the very-high fixed grid charge hasn't kicked in yet. Once it does, there's little reason for me to stay. My system paid itself off in <4 years of avoided costs, but I did it on the cheap by buying used hardware and doing the installation myself. When I set out on the build, I projected my payback time to be closer to 7 years. Rates went up faster than I expected and my usage also went up more than I expected once the electricity was free. I ended up getting an induction cooktop, a heat pump, and an electric car. And I totally agree with you that this approach is wasteful from the perspective of global optimization of overall resource utilization. If this were Factorio and not the real world, the self-generation approach would be dumb. But in practice, the retail cost of electricity is rising fast while solar and battery costs have plummeted. That reduction in cost has really moved the needle on the microeconomics.
    - pxmpxm 3y ago
      I'm curious where are you located - 20kwh means you are fairly dependent on sunlight, right?
      - zbrozek 3y ago
        94022 The large size of the array means that even an overcast day produces more than I usually need. The battery capacity only feels small when using the pool heat pump to warm up the hot tub, which drains one of the two 10 KWh batteries. The workaround is to preheat it during the day when there's excess solar and then only spend the energy to keep it warm. I do plan to increase the battery array size eventually, but mostly so I have enough peak power to both cook and do laundry at the same time without needing to do so during the day to avoid pulling anything from the grid.
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
  End-game implies that this is an outcome that someone is deliberately aiming for? If so, who?
- ben_w 3y ago
  Whenever I've run the numbers, a global power grid is much cheaper than the batteries needed for seasonal variations; the wibble factor being, as usual, politics. Batteries themselves are cheaper over their lifetimes than fossil fuels. The wibble factor for that being quite how long battery lifetime is. This is a Vimes Boots type of failure, as it means the rich can afford to spend less money than the poor. If there's a fair-priced market for mid-life batteries, and/or good financing available for packs that you want to keep around for a decade and may keep around for two decades before replacing, then this may help with batteries, but even then a grid is cheaper if you can do it (keep the batteries for mobile storage needs, which is mostly transport but also disaster relief). Global power grid is only going to happen if very large governments do it deliberately; this may well happen for the same reason China did the Belt and Road Initiative, though a suitable capacity global grid would by itself be about the same sort of scale (in both time and money) as the entire Belt and Road Initiative. Grids are also basically a requirement for cities: while one can put PV on the side of a skyscraper, this won't be suitable for every single person in every single apartment.
  - zbrozek 3y ago
    Curious also that utilities are also choosing point-of-use batteries over infrastructure upgrades: https://archive.ph/OXLgE https://archive.ph/OXLgE
Eumenes 3y ago
Seems to be a trend. The state of Maine is voting on a ballot initiative to take over the corporate ran power company and replacing it with state ran public utility. Naturally they included commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion in the charter, aka race and income based utility bills.
- coryrc 3y ago
  Every place I have paid bills advertises discounts for the poor, mixture of government and private. The corruption of DEI does not benefit the little people, but the political consultants and PR departments.

jabradoodle 3y ago

> These are the same monopolies that duped the public into replacing incandescent bulbs with LEDs claiming they would save power. LED bulbs are more efficient, what is your point? > There is competition in the gasoline space. There is none or next to none in the power space. Really, how much of our oil comes from dictators that turn the tap down to manipulate the global oil price whenever it suits them? This is an insane statement.

gruez 3y ago
In the US? Probably near zero because we're self-sufficient.
- pixl97 3y ago
  Oil is still a global market and dictators turning off the tap will massively raise gas prices in the US. Currently gas prices in the US are rising because OPEC+ has reduced production quotas.
- bdcravens 3y ago
  Exporting more than we import isn't the same as being self-sufficient, and regardless of the terms we use, has only occurred since 2019. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/imports-and-exports.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/imports-...
bdcravens 3y ago
I can't speak for OP, but these days a lot of conversation about efficiency and green is considered "woke", so it can be categorically dismissed without even considering the truth of things.
- fbdab103 3y ago
  The Trump administration wanted to disband the Energy Star program[0] (Energy Star is a certification that a device meets certain efficiency standards). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Star https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Star

kibwen 3y ago

> There is competition in the gasoline space. The US government heavily subsidizes gasoline (and every other fossil fuel), which is just as market-distorting as what you describe. The market price does not reflect the real cost of production.

gruez 3y ago
>The US government heavily subsidizes gasoline (and every other fossil fuel), which is just as market-distorting as what you describe. The market price does not reflect the real cost of production. Source? AFAIK the articles/studies that make that claim use a very generous definition of "subsidies", which include stuff like accelerated depreciation[1], and not taxing externalities associated with carbon emissions. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidblackmon/2013/01/02/oil-gas-tax-provisions-are-not-subsidies-for-big-oil/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidblackmon/2013/01/02/oil-ga...
- treyd 3y ago
  It's not gasoline directly, it's oil (and other fossil fuels) more broadly: https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuels-received-5-9-trillion-in-subsidies-in-2020-report-finds https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuels-received-5-9-trill...
  - gruez 3y ago
    Your source has the exact issues that I mentioned in the previous comment, and fails to address them. >Explicit subsidies accounted for only 8 percent of the total. The remaining 92 percent were implicit subsidies, which took the form of tax breaks or, to a much larger degree, health and environmental damages that were not priced into the cost of fossil fuels, according to the analysis.
    - treyd 3y ago
      Tax breaks are equivalent to subsidies at the scale that fossil companies operate at.

ta1243 3y ago

The cost of charging my electric car with my solar panel? Hmm, I suspect it will be about the same price as now.

zapdrive 3y ago
Not all of us are lucky enough to have an year round sunlight supply.
- bdcravens 3y ago
  Correct, though at the same time, those with more sunlight tend to have higher electricity usage during the sunniest months.
- ta1243 3y ago
  So there's a big conspiracy theory to get rid of gas and replace it with electricity so "Big Electricity" can gouge people in Alaska?

nozzlegear 3y ago

If this is a concern you could just modify your house for solar power and then charge your car for free? There’s the initial cost of the solar installation of course, but at least you can sleep easy knowing the sun isn’t part of the deep state trying to raise rates on you.

bdcravens 3y ago

> There is none or next to none in the power space. In states with deregulated markets, there's tons of competition. Gasoline pricing is highly regulated. Pricing arguments are a distraction from the idea that spewing garbage into the air just to buy groceries when there's an alternative is terrible.

gruez 3y ago
>Gasoline pricing is highly regulated. In what jurisdiction? In most developed countries they're anything but. Prices go up and down in response to crude oil prices and other factors. If that counts as "highly regulated", I don't know what you'd call prices that are set by government review boards.
- bdcravens 3y ago
  Yes, they have to price greater than what they pay, but they have limited ability to raise prices in terms of demand. This conversation is a bit ironic, considering the number of politicians that use gas prices as a talking point (and their followers who parrot those points)
  - gruez 3y ago
    > Yes, they have to price greater than what they pay, but they have limited ability to raise prices in terms of demand. That's a very creative interpretation of "regulated" means.
    - bdcravens 3y ago
      So do you believe that government has little to no influence on gasoline prices?
      - gruez 3y ago
        I'm not sure makes you think that. I feel like you're trying to move the goalposts. My objection is with your characterization of gas prices as being "regulated", not that the government has zero influence over gas prices.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago

Electric cars use 1/4th the energy of ICE cars (https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/evtech.shtml https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/evtech.shtml). Petroleum for transportation currently accounts for 27% of US energy usage (https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/ https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/). If 100% of cars switch to electric (not happening any time soon) - we only need 25% * 27% = 7% more electricity. We'll be on pace to add that much just in solar in 3 years. It's not going to be a problem to handle electric vehicle adoption over 15 years.

zapdrive 3y ago
> Petroleum for transportation currently accounts for 27% of US energy usage > 25% * 27% = 7% more electricity There is no relation between amount of petroleum used and amount of electricity generated in the data provided by you. All you can say is we need the equivalent amount of 7% extra of total energy used today. You did not provide any data about how much of total energy used is electricity . If electricity is 7% of total energy usage, then we need 100% extra to charge all the cars. TLDR: your math is wrong.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  > There is no relation between amount of petroleum used and amount of electricity generated in the data provided by you. There is. > All you can say is we need the equivalent amount of 7% extra of total energy used today. No. We know how many BTU equivalent are used for electricity generation vs gasoline for transportation. And how much BTU equivalent is needed to power electric cars. > TLDR: your math is wrong. It probably is. Looks like transportation is 36% not 27% - that comes out to ~9% instead of ~7%. The point still stands.
  - zapdrive 3y ago
    > We know how many BTU equivalent are used for electricity generation vs gasoline for transportation. And how much BTU equivalent is needed to power electric cars. Show us the data. > There is. There is literally no relation. "Cars use 27% of total energy in US. And 25% of 27% is equal to 7% of electricity generated." HOW??