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I would like to see a way more aggressive price scheme for power. Want to charge your Tesla, mine crypto on your 4090 setup, and have the AC running when you ge

by mlsu 3y ago

I would like to see a way more aggressive price scheme for power. Want to charge your Tesla, mine crypto on your 4090 setup, and have the AC running when you get home from work at 6PM? Good for you -- you'll pay $2.00 per kWh for the privilege. Mad about it? Turn off the computer, insulate your house better, or wait to charge the car. YOU have to pay for it because WE all collectively pay for it when they turn those peaker plants on and CO2 is dumped into the atmosphere. We already have such things, but the effect is greatly dampened because the utilities are so limited in what they can do. The only way to get people to change their behavior is with incentives.

nostromo 3y ago
Why jump directly to the stick approach and not the carrot approach? Make electricity cheaper at night. Demand will shift and it'll be a popular program rather than another eco tax that creates opposition.
ThatPlayer 3y ago
That's never going to be popular because the majority of people are coming home from work at 6PM. They want to be able to cook, shower, and relax. It's a minority of people (mainly those that are better off) who are able to shift their usage away from peak hours. At some point when the prices are too much, it becomes a tax on the poor, who need to use public electricity, to pay for the rich's private batteries. It would be better to take that incentive money and spend it on public utility batteries instead.
bastawhiz 3y ago
Great, I'll stop heating my home with a heat pump, electric water heater and dryer, driving a Tesla and Energica, and working from home and replace all that with propane appliances, the Dodge Challenger and Yamahas I've always wanted, and start commuting to an office. Because it would be cheaper. I use almost double the electricity of the average household right now, but I pay zero dollars towards fossil fuel energy and I pay extra for my energy to come from solar and wind. There are four adults under my roof. By all metrics, we're the "greenest" household in the neighborhood. If we switched to propane and gasoline, we'd have one of the largest carbon footprints instead. The economics of what you're suggesting just don't make sense. Despite our high usage, our carbon footprint is far lower. As a society we want people to use more electricity. There's no such thing as clean energy when you get it from fossil fuels. The idea that we'd incentivize people to use dirtier energy instead of spending money to improve our electric infrastructure is wild.
- ThatPlayer 3y ago
  But that wouldn't be 100% of your electricity because of lights and appliances, which are still at those absurd rates. What you should do instead is install a transfer switch and a generator at home. You could even get a natural gas generator to hook up to utilities and not have to worry about refilling gasoline or propane. That way 0% of your energy will be green!
  - bastawhiz 3y ago
    We don't have a natural gas line running down our street. If we were going all in on having our energy trucked in, why not coal?
- mlsu 3y ago
  If your energy truly comes from solar, you would have no problem. When solar is on, your energy is very cheap. It's if you are using that electricity at the "dirty" times that you should pay for the externalities. Right now, I can come home and charge my electric car at 6:00pm. California fires up a natural gas turbine so that I can do that. Do I pay extra? Not really! Rates are cheaper by a few cents in the late evening and early morning, but not nearly enough to change my behavior. That's what this is about, changing behavior. Two things are necessary for that: (1) things need to be priced to align consumer behavior (subsidies for green energy and pigouvian taxes for dirty energy) (2) consumers need to have full knowledge of prices Right now, we are actually not bad at (1) although in my ideal world the cost differential is far more extreme (the actual cost of energy is like 4c/kWh when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing -- as the gp comment says, we make a lot of energy!). We totally fail at (2). Most consumers don't know that energy is more or less expensive at different times of the day. They see a monthly bill. Of course, you're right if you don't close other loopholes it won't work. A gallon of gas would be $10 and a Dodge Challenger would cost $100,000 or more if externalities were priced in.

by mlsu 3y ago

nostromo 3y ago

Why jump directly to the stick approach and not the carrot approach? Make electricity cheaper at night. Demand will shift and it'll be a popular program rather than another eco tax that creates opposition.

ThatPlayer 3y ago

That's never going to be popular because the majority of people are coming home from work at 6PM. They want to be able to cook, shower, and relax. It's a minority of people (mainly those that are better off) who are able to shift their usage away from peak hours. At some point when the prices are too much, it becomes a tax on the poor, who need to use public electricity, to pay for the rich's private batteries. It would be better to take that incentive money and spend it on public utility batteries instead.

bastawhiz 3y ago

Great, I'll stop heating my home with a heat pump, electric water heater and dryer, driving a Tesla and Energica, and working from home and replace all that with propane appliances, the Dodge Challenger and Yamahas I've always wanted, and start commuting to an office. Because it would be cheaper. I use almost double the electricity of the average household right now, but I pay zero dollars towards fossil fuel energy and I pay extra for my energy to come from solar and wind. There are four adults under my roof. By all metrics, we're the "greenest" household in the neighborhood. If we switched to propane and gasoline, we'd have one of the largest carbon footprints instead. The economics of what you're suggesting just don't make sense. Despite our high usage, our carbon footprint is far lower. As a society we want people to use more electricity. There's no such thing as clean energy when you get it from fossil fuels. The idea that we'd incentivize people to use dirtier energy instead of spending money to improve our electric infrastructure is wild.

ThatPlayer 3y ago
But that wouldn't be 100% of your electricity because of lights and appliances, which are still at those absurd rates. What you should do instead is install a transfer switch and a generator at home. You could even get a natural gas generator to hook up to utilities and not have to worry about refilling gasoline or propane. That way 0% of your energy will be green!
- bastawhiz 3y ago
  We don't have a natural gas line running down our street. If we were going all in on having our energy trucked in, why not coal?
mlsu 3y ago
If your energy truly comes from solar, you would have no problem. When solar is on, your energy is very cheap. It's if you are using that electricity at the "dirty" times that you should pay for the externalities. Right now, I can come home and charge my electric car at 6:00pm. California fires up a natural gas turbine so that I can do that. Do I pay extra? Not really! Rates are cheaper by a few cents in the late evening and early morning, but not nearly enough to change my behavior. That's what this is about, changing behavior. Two things are necessary for that: (1) things need to be priced to align consumer behavior (subsidies for green energy and pigouvian taxes for dirty energy) (2) consumers need to have full knowledge of prices Right now, we are actually not bad at (1) although in my ideal world the cost differential is far more extreme (the actual cost of energy is like 4c/kWh when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing -- as the gp comment says, we make a lot of energy!). We totally fail at (2). Most consumers don't know that energy is more or less expensive at different times of the day. They see a monthly bill. Of course, you're right if you don't close other loopholes it won't work. A gallon of gas would be $10 and a Dodge Challenger would cost $100,000 or more if externalities were priced in.