5 ms·

We also have some of the highest energy prices in the United States.

by vondur 1y ago

justinzollars 1y ago
Yes. My energy costs have exploded over the last decade.
epistasis 1y ago
If the "we" means California, that that also includes me, and it's pretty clear that we don't have high costs because of the generation side, but because CPUC keeps on approving massive rate increases for grid costs. It costs ~$0.13/kWh to generate the electricity (which includes any battery costs), but $0.25-$0.50/kWh to deliver the energy across the grid. The utilities get guaranteed profits from rate-basing all the grid stuff, but the generation side is a more competitive market. Batteries could be used to greatly reduce grid costs by flattening peaks and decreasing grid congestion. If CPUC mandated that utilities took those cost-saving measures...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- aidenn0 1y ago
  Yeah, compare the Sacramento municipal rate[1] is compared to what SCE or PG&E prices things, and it's crazy. Average in California is $0.32[2]; I pay about $0.28, but I have a TOU plan and charge my car during super-off-peak so that brings my average down. 1: https://www.smud.org/Rate-Information/Residential-rates#Price-plans https://www.smud.org/Rate-Information/Residential-rates#Pric... 2: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_5_6_a https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
  - secabeen 1y ago
    Sacramento municipal has a lot of customers in a small space. Running a grid in and around a major city is significantly different than covering an entire state with lots of mountains and forests from Oregon to San Luis Obispo.
    - AlotOfReading 1y ago
      PG&E is expensive even when compared to the entire Western grid. I went and added up the revenues for all the major utilities in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, and Utah. That's APS, NV Energy, Pacificorp, PSCo, PSCNM, and SRP. All of their 2024 revenues combined are ~$22B vs PG&E's $24.4B, to cover an area 3x larger with just over half the population and even drier climates. All of those states have lower average rates as well. PG&E is uniquely expensive for no legitimate reason that I've ever been able to discern.
      - wahern 1y ago
        The jump in PG&E prices over the past 10 years is mostly to cover the cost of wildfire mitigation. LA, Palo Alto, Santa Clara, and the Imperial Valley have their own local utilities that charge customers 1/2 to 1/4 of what PG&E charges.[1] But PG&E covers the entire northern half of the state. Bay Area PG&E customers are subsidizing all those small communities nestled in the forests. Southern California Edison and San Diego have a mix of urban and forested rural closer to PG&E, with significant wildfire mitigation costs of their own, and their rates reflect that--2/3 to 3/4 of PG&E prices). Despite approving the cost increases, state regulators are now complaining that PG&E is spending too much on wildfire mitigation. For example, they're telling PG&E to shift from burying transmission lines to using covered conduction (i.e. plastic shielding around overhead transmission lines). But PG&E is pushing back because they're on the hook for the wildfire civil claims and argue the less costly mitigations are too risky. [1] See https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/196kjtu/pge_rates_vs_other_ca_utilities/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/196kjtu/pge_rates_...
        AlotOfReading 1y ago
        All of that also applies to pacificorp, which covers the Jefferson area of California. I'm actually double counting a bit in PG&E's favor as a result.
        wahern 1y ago
        The wildfire hazards aren't equivalent, nor the political pressures regarding those hazards. But it seems Pacific Power isn't too far behind: https://oregoncub.org/news/blog/pacific-power-asks-for-21.6-rate-increase-for-2025/2979/ https://oregoncub.org/news/blog/pacific-power-asks-for-21.6-...
- secabeen 1y ago
  > Batteries could be used to greatly reduce grid costs by flattening peaks and decreasing grid congestion. If CPUC mandated that utilities took those cost-saving measures... Can you math this out somewhat? I certainly can see some grid cost reductions from batteries, but we still need a pretty extensive grid to support baseline load and maintenance of rural lines. How would shaving the load peak from 100% over baseline down to a lower number help? Given that we are nearing the normal lifespan of much of our rural electric infrastructure that was installed in the mid-20th century, it's not surprising that we have a lot of spend to do. Private utilities love to defer maintenance, especially when it takes 80 years to notice.
  - epistasis 1y ago
    The math will be extremely dependent on each particular transmission alternative. The overarching term is "non-wires alternatives" of which storage is just one alternative. NYISO has a slide deck here, but unfortunately there's not much quantitation to the savings in their examples: https://www.nyiso.com/documents/20142/40044890/2%20Storage%20as%20Transmission%20Use%20Cases_20230918.pdf/0ee0027e-d194-24ff-68fd-1dee041d14c5 https://www.nyiso.com/documents/20142/40044890/2%20Storage%2...
- zdragnar 1y ago
  I'm in the upper Midwest; you're paying more to generate than I do on my residential bill. 10.9 cents /kwh in winter, 12.3 cents in summer. 1/3 coal, 1/3 gas, 1/3 assorted renewables.
- nielsbot 1y ago
  Rates should be lowered until PG&E profits are $0.
  - epistasis 1y ago
    While that's an interesting proposition, that could at most reduce our rates by their profit rate, which is not nearly enough. We need systematic changes to fundamentally lower costs to more reasonable rates, like what other smaller municipal utilities deliver in California, which are 1/3-1/2 the cost. The problem is not profit, but how profit is established. PG&E takes a fixed rate of profit of the total cost, so they are incentivized to make everything as expensive as possible. This is in contrast to most market based systems, where a new competitor with lower costs gets to directly take the lowered cost as profit. We instead use regulatory boards, Public Utility Commissions, to determine which investments utilities can make and what prices they can charge customers. This is highly regulated, but the outcomes have been terrible. Even Arizona, whose equivalent of the PUC has been disastrously corrupt, or places like Ohio, which has sent state legislators to prison for their corruption on utility matters, have far lower rates than we do in California. We have bad regulation in California. That's the fundamental problem. Gavin Newsom, and all the governors who came before, have failed us on our electrical grid. That said, clearly high electricity prices are not a huge problem for our economy, and the high cost of living from high housing costs is clearly a driver of expense for everything a utility does, but we fundamentally have not had the right controls on the grid to keep costs reasonable. We have not set up a system where PG&E profits from delivering lowered costs. Our regulation prevents us from achieving what Marx calls the "falling rate of profit" as we would usually see with a market. Something must change, but simply eliminating PG&E profits won't do it, it's not enough.
- const_cast 1y ago
  Also California is somewhat unique because it has the extreme energy demand of the likes of Texas coupled with natural disasters like wildfires. California gets really hot and AC needs to be blasting. Factor in that California also has a huge economy (datacenters...) and it's clear the grid is under an amount of stress that is not typical.
dawnerd 1y ago
I just love paying higher rates to cover the fines for all the fires that have been started.
- rconti 1y ago
  But at least the dollars we pay for electricity aren't the dollars they spend to advertise to us constantly about how safe they are. /s
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
  Someone's gotta pay to make sure people who build $2M houses in firezones don't have to pay ridiculous insurance premiums...
  - timewizard 1y ago
    Someone's gotta repair and replace 100 year old crumbling infrastructure that they operate for profit in a fire zone during a wind storm. Naw. Let's blame the tax payers for existing instead.
    - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
      Fires are a natural occurrence in California. They happened before humans were there. They're caused by dry conditions and the absence of sufficiently recent fires to have cleared out the abundance of fuel (i.e. dead trees). The source of the fire is not particularly relevant because the fire is the inevitable natural consequence of the conditions. If it isn't caused today by a power line it will be caused tomorrow by a lightning strike. But if a lot of homes burn down and the insurance companies and/or homeowners have more political power than the electric utility, the liability gets shifted there by the politics. And then your electric bill is going to suck in order to pay for the people who built their homes in an inadvisable place.
      - timewizard 1y ago
        > They're caused by dry conditions and the absence of sufficiently recent fires to have cleared out the abundance of fuel They're made possible by that. The stacking of fuel, on it's own, does not magically create fire. > The source of the fire is not particularly relevant Of course it is. We're talking about liability and costs. It's extremely relevant. > caused tomorrow by a lightning strike. Then no one should live in California at all. Lightning can strike anywhere. Yet we have a precise map of where all our infrastructure is. Just because one category of risk is difficult to manage does it give you a free pass to ignore others that are easier. > homeowners have more political power than the electric utility Do you honestly expect this wouldn't be the _norm_? Why shouldn't it be? You really want to live in a state where a utility has more political power than you? And supposing they did, are you suggesting that would be better than the current outcome? > who built their homes in an inadvisable place. Take a look at the map of the lightning fires from 2020. Show me which people were in an "inadvisable place." We're talking about millions of people here representing billions of dollars of economic activity. Do we want to measure risk realistically? Or are you just enjoying some bizarre modern schadenfreude of watching someone's life burn to the ground because you don't like the plot of land they were on? What about those who inherited that land and home? It's a weird form of inhumanity that exists here.
cobbzilla 1y ago
But if we can figure out how people can live inside batteries, the housing problem is solved!
bob1029 1y ago
I'm paying 13 cents per kWh in the MISO/Entergy region. Moving across a certain invisible line in Texas can cut your electric bill in half or better.

We also have some of the highest energy prices in the United States.

by vondur 1y ago

We also have some of the highest energy prices in the United States.

justinzollars 1y ago

Yes. My energy costs have exploded over the last decade.

epistasis 1y ago

If the "we" means California, that that also includes me, and it's pretty clear that we don't have high costs because of the generation side, but because CPUC keeps on approving massive rate increases for grid costs. It costs ~$0.13/kWh to generate the electricity (which includes any battery costs), but $0.25-$0.50/kWh to deliver the energy across the grid. The utilities get guaranteed profits from rate-basing all the grid stuff, but the generation side is a more competitive market. Batteries could be used to greatly reduce grid costs by flattening peaks and decreasing grid congestion. If CPUC mandated that utilities took those cost-saving measures...

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
aidenn0 1y ago
Yeah, compare the Sacramento municipal rate[1] is compared to what SCE or PG&E prices things, and it's crazy. Average in California is $0.32[2]; I pay about $0.28, but I have a TOU plan and charge my car during super-off-peak so that brings my average down. 1: https://www.smud.org/Rate-Information/Residential-rates#Price-plans https://www.smud.org/Rate-Information/Residential-rates#Pric... 2: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_5_6_a https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
- secabeen 1y ago
  Sacramento municipal has a lot of customers in a small space. Running a grid in and around a major city is significantly different than covering an entire state with lots of mountains and forests from Oregon to San Luis Obispo.
  - AlotOfReading 1y ago
    PG&E is expensive even when compared to the entire Western grid. I went and added up the revenues for all the major utilities in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, and Utah. That's APS, NV Energy, Pacificorp, PSCo, PSCNM, and SRP. All of their 2024 revenues combined are ~$22B vs PG&E's $24.4B, to cover an area 3x larger with just over half the population and even drier climates. All of those states have lower average rates as well. PG&E is uniquely expensive for no legitimate reason that I've ever been able to discern.
    - wahern 1y ago
      The jump in PG&E prices over the past 10 years is mostly to cover the cost of wildfire mitigation. LA, Palo Alto, Santa Clara, and the Imperial Valley have their own local utilities that charge customers 1/2 to 1/4 of what PG&E charges.[1] But PG&E covers the entire northern half of the state. Bay Area PG&E customers are subsidizing all those small communities nestled in the forests. Southern California Edison and San Diego have a mix of urban and forested rural closer to PG&E, with significant wildfire mitigation costs of their own, and their rates reflect that--2/3 to 3/4 of PG&E prices). Despite approving the cost increases, state regulators are now complaining that PG&E is spending too much on wildfire mitigation. For example, they're telling PG&E to shift from burying transmission lines to using covered conduction (i.e. plastic shielding around overhead transmission lines). But PG&E is pushing back because they're on the hook for the wildfire civil claims and argue the less costly mitigations are too risky. [1] See https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/196kjtu/pge_rates_vs_other_ca_utilities/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/196kjtu/pge_rates_...
      - AlotOfReading 1y ago
        All of that also applies to pacificorp, which covers the Jefferson area of California. I'm actually double counting a bit in PG&E's favor as a result.
        wahern 1y ago
        The wildfire hazards aren't equivalent, nor the political pressures regarding those hazards. But it seems Pacific Power isn't too far behind: https://oregoncub.org/news/blog/pacific-power-asks-for-21.6-rate-increase-for-2025/2979/ https://oregoncub.org/news/blog/pacific-power-asks-for-21.6-...
secabeen 1y ago
> Batteries could be used to greatly reduce grid costs by flattening peaks and decreasing grid congestion. If CPUC mandated that utilities took those cost-saving measures... Can you math this out somewhat? I certainly can see some grid cost reductions from batteries, but we still need a pretty extensive grid to support baseline load and maintenance of rural lines. How would shaving the load peak from 100% over baseline down to a lower number help? Given that we are nearing the normal lifespan of much of our rural electric infrastructure that was installed in the mid-20th century, it's not surprising that we have a lot of spend to do. Private utilities love to defer maintenance, especially when it takes 80 years to notice.
- epistasis 1y ago
  The math will be extremely dependent on each particular transmission alternative. The overarching term is "non-wires alternatives" of which storage is just one alternative. NYISO has a slide deck here, but unfortunately there's not much quantitation to the savings in their examples: https://www.nyiso.com/documents/20142/40044890/2%20Storage%20as%20Transmission%20Use%20Cases_20230918.pdf/0ee0027e-d194-24ff-68fd-1dee041d14c5 https://www.nyiso.com/documents/20142/40044890/2%20Storage%2...
zdragnar 1y ago
I'm in the upper Midwest; you're paying more to generate than I do on my residential bill. 10.9 cents /kwh in winter, 12.3 cents in summer. 1/3 coal, 1/3 gas, 1/3 assorted renewables.
nielsbot 1y ago
Rates should be lowered until PG&E profits are $0.
- epistasis 1y ago
  While that's an interesting proposition, that could at most reduce our rates by their profit rate, which is not nearly enough. We need systematic changes to fundamentally lower costs to more reasonable rates, like what other smaller municipal utilities deliver in California, which are 1/3-1/2 the cost. The problem is not profit, but how profit is established. PG&E takes a fixed rate of profit of the total cost, so they are incentivized to make everything as expensive as possible. This is in contrast to most market based systems, where a new competitor with lower costs gets to directly take the lowered cost as profit. We instead use regulatory boards, Public Utility Commissions, to determine which investments utilities can make and what prices they can charge customers. This is highly regulated, but the outcomes have been terrible. Even Arizona, whose equivalent of the PUC has been disastrously corrupt, or places like Ohio, which has sent state legislators to prison for their corruption on utility matters, have far lower rates than we do in California. We have bad regulation in California. That's the fundamental problem. Gavin Newsom, and all the governors who came before, have failed us on our electrical grid. That said, clearly high electricity prices are not a huge problem for our economy, and the high cost of living from high housing costs is clearly a driver of expense for everything a utility does, but we fundamentally have not had the right controls on the grid to keep costs reasonable. We have not set up a system where PG&E profits from delivering lowered costs. Our regulation prevents us from achieving what Marx calls the "falling rate of profit" as we would usually see with a market. Something must change, but simply eliminating PG&E profits won't do it, it's not enough.
const_cast 1y ago
Also California is somewhat unique because it has the extreme energy demand of the likes of Texas coupled with natural disasters like wildfires. California gets really hot and AC needs to be blasting. Factor in that California also has a huge economy (datacenters...) and it's clear the grid is under an amount of stress that is not typical.

dawnerd 1y ago

I just love paying higher rates to cover the fines for all the fires that have been started.

rconti 1y ago
But at least the dollars we pay for electricity aren't the dollars they spend to advertise to us constantly about how safe they are. /s
onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
Someone's gotta pay to make sure people who build $2M houses in firezones don't have to pay ridiculous insurance premiums...
- timewizard 1y ago
  Someone's gotta repair and replace 100 year old crumbling infrastructure that they operate for profit in a fire zone during a wind storm. Naw. Let's blame the tax payers for existing instead.
  - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
    Fires are a natural occurrence in California. They happened before humans were there. They're caused by dry conditions and the absence of sufficiently recent fires to have cleared out the abundance of fuel (i.e. dead trees). The source of the fire is not particularly relevant because the fire is the inevitable natural consequence of the conditions. If it isn't caused today by a power line it will be caused tomorrow by a lightning strike. But if a lot of homes burn down and the insurance companies and/or homeowners have more political power than the electric utility, the liability gets shifted there by the politics. And then your electric bill is going to suck in order to pay for the people who built their homes in an inadvisable place.
    - timewizard 1y ago
      > They're caused by dry conditions and the absence of sufficiently recent fires to have cleared out the abundance of fuel They're made possible by that. The stacking of fuel, on it's own, does not magically create fire. > The source of the fire is not particularly relevant Of course it is. We're talking about liability and costs. It's extremely relevant. > caused tomorrow by a lightning strike. Then no one should live in California at all. Lightning can strike anywhere. Yet we have a precise map of where all our infrastructure is. Just because one category of risk is difficult to manage does it give you a free pass to ignore others that are easier. > homeowners have more political power than the electric utility Do you honestly expect this wouldn't be the _norm_? Why shouldn't it be? You really want to live in a state where a utility has more political power than you? And supposing they did, are you suggesting that would be better than the current outcome? > who built their homes in an inadvisable place. Take a look at the map of the lightning fires from 2020. Show me which people were in an "inadvisable place." We're talking about millions of people here representing billions of dollars of economic activity. Do we want to measure risk realistically? Or are you just enjoying some bizarre modern schadenfreude of watching someone's life burn to the ground because you don't like the plot of land they were on? What about those who inherited that land and home? It's a weird form of inhumanity that exists here.

cobbzilla 1y ago

But if we can figure out how people can live inside batteries, the housing problem is solved!

bob1029 1y ago

I'm paying 13 cents per kWh in the MISO/Entergy region. Moving across a certain invisible line in Texas can cut your electric bill in half or better.