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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 wit

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.

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.