it isn't just california either, deficient and neglected infrastructure is basically a national-scale problem. around my area we blew up two substations during

it isn't just california either, deficient and neglected infrastructure is basically a national-scale problem. around my area we blew up two substations during a heatwave last summer. we constantly get brownouts at 4-6pm during the post-work peak load such that I'm almost not even comfortable running the freezer/etc anymore (brownouts are really hard on motors). and now you want to push all the gas heating (and this area gets cold!) onto the grid too? a lot of this is that urban and suburban areas are subsidizing rural and ex-rural areas - more than half of my bill is already capacity-charges and delivery fees and not the actual cost of the electric, and we're still blowing up substations regularly due to strained and overloaded infrastructure. Where is the money going? Mostly to keeping miles and miles of power lines out to the middle of nowhere, I'd think. That's a problem America is going to face in a lot of "ghost town" scenarios - when "the mine dries up" or "the train doesn't stop here anymore" and a place stops existing, the infrastructure costs to service the 20 people still living there don't. Repaving the roads every couple of years, plowing and salting them during the winter, etc aren't free and the reality is that in some areas there's really almost no economic activity anymore to justify the cost. We just have covenants and mandates that prevent ever undoing it. And that runs up the bills for everyone else. We have 400k people in this county of 700mi^2, and that's suburban, not-particularly-dense either. Another county we have 40k people in 2700 mi^2. Should everyone in the former have to subsidize the lifestyle of the latter? We are talking about 2 orders of magnitude less density here, while it's not quite 1:1 there's no doubt they are incurring significantly higher infrastructure costs for their lifestyle and we are paying for it. And since people won't pay for it, what we end up with is everyone's infrastructure falling into neglect, to pay for a handful of rural customers.