> we have an overabundance of "green" energy here in California, yet energy prices are through the roof, we are looking at potential, rolling blackouts this summer, and we have to sell excess power to other states each month. why?

You're absolutely right.

Here in Marin county, you can opt in to using renewable energy, which my wife and I have. The public renewable utility rate is significantly cheaper than the standard PG&E rate. However, I am forced to pay more than the actual cost that the public renewable utility charges, because -- due to California state law -- my electric bill comes from PG&E, who -- despite not making the electricity -- has responsibility to charge the consumer. Of course, PG&E charges a 'convenience and distribution' fee that eradicates the difference in pricing between the renewable resource and their own electricity. Note that, if I opt in to using PG&E generated electricity, they kindly 'waive' the fee. Thus, despite the renewables being cheaper, I do not get the benefit as the consumer.

I have contacted my state senator and representative, and they sent me back a form e-mail about how they are 'standing' up to PG&E. Give me a break.... this is something that is easily legislated.

> PG&E, who -- despite not making the electricity -- has responsibility to charge the consumer. Of course, PG&E charges a 'convenience and distribution' fee

I understand your frustration that the amount of the fee cancels out the cheaper cost of renewables in your case, but providing local distribution has a cost (maintenance of poles, wires, etc) over and above the actual energy generation cost, so there will always be a fee for this, unless you figure out a way to get the renewables to your house without the local distributor (and assuming that you don't put solar/batteries on your house).

Also, there is a cost (for storage, load dispatching, frequency regulation, etc) to turning the variability of renewables into the steady stream of available power that consumers expect.

Again, it's possible even including the cost of all of these necessary services, the renewables should still be cheaper than the non-renewables, but it's never going to be zero.

This all makes sense, but why then is the "standard" (coal-fired?) electricity the same price as the "renewable" electricity? Why does the utility "waive" the distribution fee?

In fact, passing it on to the consumer as an option doesn't make any sense to me. The utility negotiates bulk price and averages it out for consumers. If anything the conversation with the utility should be entirely about matching behavior to supply and/or dynamic pricing, and not at all about renewable vs non-renewable voltage.

Mostly because of the historical way the business model worked - the portion of your bill that varies based on energy usage is all out of proportion to the portion of the cost to the energy company that comes from varies based on energy usage. Basically, the electric companies' business model is like the cell phone companies' - build infrastructure, charge by usage - which means that low-cost energy sources, especially out of PG&E's control, are disastrous for their business model. It's a serious problem I've heard a lot of talk about in renewable energy policy circles, and the generally accepted idea of a functional market structure in this new world is to have a grid company, which charges only that distribution fee, and a generation company, which charges you for the cost of generation.

But we're not there yet, so PG&E needs to find ways to not lose money on the grid hookup for customers who buy cheap forms of energy (or are, godforbid, energy-neutral with relation to the grid).

Grid companies are tricky because there’s no market there. It is almost the textbook definition of a natural monopoly.

You’re either hooked up or you’re not. Or you run multiple “grids” somehow which seems more economically wasteful and is legislatively tricky in terms of rights (to run lines, overhead or underfoot).

It seems like the cost of maintaining poles and transformers goes up a lot every year...

How to keep them honest?

It seems like you would have to regulate to the point of ($pure distribution company) being essentially a government enterprise in all but name.

Yes. I mean, for those reasons, PG&E is already a highly-regulated natural monopoly; they just happen to bundle in the more normal generation market with the naturally-monopolist grid market. (Which is part of what makes their lobbying work so problematic, since they're so regulated that they're almost a government branch themselves.)

Splitting the company into a 1) a government or quasi-government enterprise to handle the parts not suitable to the market, and 2) a much-less-regulated company handling the more market-amenable activities, could give the system as a whole a lot more of the efficiencies of a market system.

And if you don't do it right things can get all screwed up in a hurry. California tried to do this with some really bad rules (power companies must by power in an unregulated spot market but sell into a regulated market for some number of years) in 2000 and ended up with the bankruptcy of PG&E, rolling blackouts, $40 billion lost by the state of California due to manipulated inflated prices, and the only successful recall of a California Governor in history. [1] for the gory details.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis

Yeah, designing a market is hard and needs professional economists involved, not just politicians riddled with conflicts of interest and taking all their information from lobbyists.

I think the post I answered was referring to PGE's Solar Choice program, which I agree is not a good deal for a consumer.

But it's marketed specifically as a program where you pay a premium to fund the greening of the grid [1][2]. It actually states that you will pay a premium for this plan.

1. https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/solar-and-vehicles/opt...

2. https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/PG-E-s-eco-friendly-...

I am not referring to PGE's solar choice program. Marin county runs its own green energy, independent of PG&E. PG&E owns the wires. I get it costs money to run the wires. However, it is wrong to waive the fee for those using PG&E services. It's anti-competitive and bad for the state.

No, but I did work for a bit on simulating renewable energy integration into the grid. That's where I learned about things like storage, load dispatching, frequency regulation, and local power distribution.

People like you commenting in threads like this are the reason I keep coming back to HN. Thanks for your insights.

This crosses into personal attack and also breaks the site rule against insinuating astroturfing without evidence.

Could you please (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not do this again?

Sorry. Won't happen again.

Appreciated!

That's because solar usage has created a "duck curve" I would imagine it would be even more unfair to make normal energy users pay for that: https://youtu.be/YYLzss58CLs

And the use of air conditioning is what causes the annual peak (which is what the transmission and distribution systems are built to serve). Is it unfair for people who don't have air conditioning (or live in more temperate areas) to pay a premium so that others can have air conditioning?

This is why California is moving to Time of Use rates (TOU) in late 2019/2020 (depending how they push off the date due to IT challenges).

Nope, you can smooth that out by moving power east to west. 1000 miles is ~two time zones and has minimal transmission costs. Get their solar in the morning and give them some solar in the evening and you can kill off one bump at each end. Continental US is 4 time zones wide so you only have a morning bump on the east coast and an evening bump on the west coast to deal with. Extra cheap wind capacity in the middle of the US can provide power for either bump.

It's really more about corruption than anything else. PG&E still charges vastly increased rates in California despite huge drops in wind and solar prices.

>Nope, you can smooth that out by moving power east to west. 1000 miles is ~two time zones and has minimal transmission costs.

That is probably a bit more complex and a bit harder than you are implying. Attempts to interconnect the main grids are large projects that take many years to do. The Tres Amigas SuperStation is an attempt to unite the Eastern Interconnection, Western Interconnection) and the Texas Interconnection). First announced in 2008. It will carry 5 GW of power which seems like a lot until you consider that the US uses about 4,000 terawatt hours per year,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tres_Amigas_SuperStation

>...It's really more about corruption than anything else. PG&E still charges vastly increased rates in California despite huge drops in wind and solar prices.

PG&E gets maybe 10% of their power from solar, Much of that power they have to pay the RETAIL rate for since rooftop solar is heavily subsidized - of course it is going to have to increase what it charges other people.

There's really nothing special there. Grid operators balance generation and demand, and need to continually update their models. E.g., generate less during midday and more in the late afternoon. It's a hard job sure. That's why we hire experts to do it.

The problem is that utilities want it both ways. They want to charge you peak usage despite the fact that "peak" generation is actually becoming one of the cheapest times for power.

If they allowed free-market pricing in that power they could easily find a use for "curtailment" -- people would crank their ACs or charge their cars if the price kWh dropped below a certain point.

Here in CA, you have three components to your bill: generation, transmission, and distribution. Adjusted for inflation, generation costs are going down (where true competition exists), while the transmission and distribution costs are going up.

More information: https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuarhodes/2018/04/30/no-wind...

I have an acquaintance that works a PG&E, and he said something to the effect that the infrastructure cost for the electric grid is what actually costs money, and the actual generation cost is relatively negligible.

The customer cost structure although is inverted based on generation, and not on grid fees. He also talked about how the CA govt uses them as a subsidy funding source and that can create a state where PG&E is close to insolvency sometimes.

He also talked about the utility death spiral: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/this-is-what-th...

> The customer cost structure although is inverted based on generation, and not on grid fees. He also talked about how the CA govt uses them as a subsidy funding source and that can create a state where PG&E is close to insolvency sometimes.

PG&E has expended large sums on lobbying, particularly against expansion of public power companies into areas PG&E currently serves.

Presumably your friend would explain this has PG&E charitably protecting it's opportunity to lose money, but I think that doesn't quite reflect the reality.

Precisely the opposite. The issue is that this distorted cost structure really doesn't work in a market where there's cost competition on the generation side and customers are being exposed to that competition, as PG&E's cost doesn't go down by nearly as much as customer's bills when cheaper energy sources are used.

Their distortion of public policy through lobbying is a bad thing, but their incentives are actually pretty understandable given the wacko market structure.

> The issue is that this distorted cost structure really doesn't work in a market where there's cost competition on the generation side and customers are being exposed to that competition, as PG&E's cost doesn't go down by nearly as much as customer's bills when cheaper energy sources are used.

That doesn't explain why, if the market is regulated in such a way that PG&E is losing money serving customers to the point of near insolvency, they spend large amounts of money fighting the transfer of those money-losing customers to expansion of municipal utilities.

So far as I can tell from quick reading, PG&E's lobbying is focused on:

1. Pushing liability for disasters (natural and artificial) from the company onto customers and taxpayers.

2. Getting regulators to allow them to lower the safety margins on their infrastructure (a major cause behind the San Bruno explosion).

3. Fighting Community Choice Aggregation programs, which sound most similar to what you describe.

CCA programs are not as you described - they would not remove PG&E from the electricity market in cities. Rather, they allow cities to generate or purchase their own electricity and deliver it over PG&E grids. As I described, this takes away PG&E's major revenue stream (per-kWh rates) while leaving them with their fixed cost (grid maintenance).

> Fighting Community Choice Aggregation programs, which sound most similar to what you describe.

No, I'm taking about campaign spending (lobbying was imprecise) against things like the recent move to expand SMUD service area into West Sacramento. (Not the only recent proposed public utility expansionart they've opposed, but the one I'm most familiar with.)

Well yeah. As long as they can fight off these changes that fuck up their business model, they're still profitable.

Utilities will have to come to the realization that they will transition into small scale ISO/grid operator roles vs monopolies that get a guaranteed return on generation and transmission.

In theory, if you can pair generation and consumption more locally (such as a solar roof powering the car sitting under it), transmission costs can drop as well.

In the small scale, producing infrastructure that can bill your meter going both ways only increases the cost.

But in the large scale, not having to build and maintain more high-power distribution towers across hundreds of miles of difficult to access terrain decreases cost.

I'm a layman, but renewables only seem to me to make that worse, not better.

You can't plop down a coal plant in a city, but you still have some freedom to choose its location, and you can scale it to the needs of the local area and just burn as much as you need. Meanwhile, solar and wind might go way down for a whole day or more, and so you need to ship energy from where it's being generated.

Renewables do make for more intermittent supplies of power. However EVs have the potential to smooth that out. Charging speeds across a city can float somewhat with available power and most consumers will not care or even notice.

At some point those cars can actually be part of the grid's storage capacity, if the infrastructure is built to allow the car to put some of it's capacity back onto the grid during low availability. EV drivers willing to have 20% of their battery be drained when they need to drive can get paid a small amount for leaving their vehicle plugged in while not in use.

* generation, transmission, and distribution*

For those of us not in this space, what's the difference between transmission and distribution?

Generalizing/simplifying: Transmission is long distance - high voltage, think steel towers with wires.

Distribution is from a local transformer (substation) where high voltage gets turned to lower voltage (12 kV) and then sent via utility poles to your home. Near your home there will be a utility pole with a transformer that brings the voltage down to 110. You share that transformer with a handful of neighbors.

Your answer is good. To add to it, the large "transmission" grid usually covers extremely high voltage lines: 115 kV, 138kV, 230kV, 345kV, 500kV, 765kV and up. It is managed by both utilities and RTO/ISO organizations that manage large sections like air-traffic controllers. Distribution is typically below ~100kV and is really more in the 11kV range and managed by the utilities almost exclusively. Building new transmission lines can be ~$1 billion projects.

With all due respect, but it seems apparent that you are not familiar with how electric distribution utilities work, especially in a deregulated state like California, how CAISO and its market mechanisms work, or how CPUC works.

If you are a reader that is not well-versed in how the grid works, please disregard the parent's comment.

I work in this space. I view this noisemaking as harmful to the public as they likely do not fully understand how the electricity delivery system (the grid) works, and this only serves to infuriate them and increase distrust.

With no actual details to back up your rather rude accusations against the GP, I'm not sure how useful this mini-rant really is... Care to lay some education on us instead of just hand-waving in a smarter-than-you manner?

To be honest, the GP's post itself reads like a rant and actually does not back up any of its claims. So while I agree that this post did not add value, neither did the GP.

Funny thing with utilities. They are a sort of commons, yet always regarded as evil until proven innocent.

Most utilities are effectively monopolies. Evil comes with the territory.

And yet, how many utility poles and wires do you want in front of your house? I don't think we really want anything other than a monopoly doing our distribution.

It would be much better for the perception if there were a clean split in the business of the utilities where the distribution monopoly does just distribution and nothing else. But I'm not sure if that would actually solve any real problems.

They're regulated no?

I'm a bit confuse here. I thought utilities are regulated what is the reasoning for them being evil?

Yeah they're natural monopolies but they also regulated. I get that Enron mess California over but they got caught. What shady things that the electric companies in California are doing?

The post above yours is actually correct. I didn't read it as rude either although maybe a little dismissive. If you work in this space, you quickly realize just how complex everything is as the electric grid is the largest most complex machine on planet earth. The legal, economic, regulatory, and engineering aspects of it go pretty deep.

Utilities typically own generation plants as well as the high voltage transmission lines that transport electricity to consumers which then have their voltage lowered (think of a transformer as a device that lowers pressure) before going over smaller distribution lines into your house. Long ago, competition was fierce, so utilities went to the government and asked to be regulated. This caused forced consolidation and they began to effectively serve as monopolies and make a modest return on investment each year. In those days demand was fairly easy to forecast. The utility would make sure they always had enough generation online plus some extra to cover any emergencies like a unit tripping offline. The grid worked like this for decades and costs were fairly cheap. If the utility needed to build a new nuclear plant (example) they would have to go to the state commission and get them to approve raising the rates. Now, although rates were fairly cheap, there was a push to deregulate things. In theory, markets are less efficient in some ways, but more in others such as incentivizing new and more efficient technology. Remember the regulated utility doesn't make any more money by doing research and risking new technology.

With deregulation, we moved to the RTO/ISO model where lots of utilities band together and work with an RTO/ISO. The RTO/ISO chooses which units run via optimization. It wants to find a way to serve all the customers in the region, plus provide backup power, and do it very cheaply. Remember how the utility has to keep extra units online in case one trips? By banding together into what is known as a "pool" you can save lots of money as far fewer units need to be online as backup. The RTO/ISO does this as well. It also knows the cost of each unit and chooses the cheapest ones. This is slowly forcing more costly fossil fuels to retire as they simply aren't as economical. This causes an issue as even though wind/solar is awesome, it isn't as reliable as a massive coal plant with months of fuel waiting to be used. Making sure there are no blackouts is VERY important to grid operators. The industry is scrambling to address these issues as fast as possible, but it is a tough issue. Deregulation is a weird word as utilities are still regulated, but there are now market forces coupled into it as well helping push progress forwards. I hope that helps a bit!

I used to aim people at "PJM 101"[1], which is PJM's tutorial on how the power grid really works. But they put it behind a login for a while. I asked them why. Now, it's out from behind the login.

But now it's in Adobe Captivate, which is apparently what Adobe has convinced some former Flash users to use. Doesn't work in Firefox and tries to get me to install Chrome. Useful info, though. Explains clearly what a power grid does every day.

[1] http://pjm.com/Globals/Training/Courses/ol-pjm-101.aspx

I'm no electrical engineer, or Californian, but are you describing a situation like:

Old System- Centrilised generation distributed over a wide network.

New System - Decentralised Generation, distributed over a wide network.

Without knowing any specifics, wouldn't this increase the expected traffic through the network from something like O(N) to no. consumers to something like O(N^2)? With an associated increase in required infrastructure and maintenance costs? Could be quite expensive.

Electricity prices are fucky all over the place and the general theme is there's more profit to be made in export rather than domestic consumption, which can result in ridiculous economies where energy is being exported at top dollar and imported at bottom dollar.

The math is supposed to work out but, like you said, basically the overabundance of "green" energy doesn't do anything for domestic energy markets. It is implicitly earmarked for export consumption rather than domestic consumption. Energy managers get to reap the benefits twice, with both domestic and export prices remaining high rather than domestic prices continuously falling as supply comes online.

The same song gets played out all over, throw carbon credits into the mix and things can get pretty silly pretty quickly.

I think that we we get for thinking Potemkin markets for electricity will magically solve problems instead of just create more ones. So instead of having issues due to political considerations you also have private players gaming the system.

Here's a great article that talks in depth about this issue. The key point seems to be that CPUC approved a lot more natural gas power plants than required and have to let the Utility companies operate them.

http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-electricity-solar/

can you provide a citation on the potential rolling blackouts this summer?

Anecdotally, I have never faced a rolling blackout in 10 years of living here. And we generate excess energy, so would be surprised if this happens.

I don’t think they’ve happened since Enron was manipulating the market, right?

Correct. Gov Davis made a series of expensive moves which rendered the manipulations ineffective. Enron was caught overextended in the wrong direction when the market shifted which directly lead to the end of Enron.

> Anecdotally, I have never faced a rolling blackout in 10 years of living here.

There hasn't been a Stage 3 emergency (with potential rolling blackouts) since 2001, and nothing worse than Stage 1 (and only two of those) since 2007.

When did users on this forum get so lazy they can't provide a citation when making potentially bogus claims? The burden of proof should always be on the person making a claim, not the person reading it.

Rolling blackouts in the summer in California have been in the news perennially.

Yeah, isolated blackouts from a transformer explosion maybe, but not the demand-based blackouts from 2000-2001.

In fact, California is now a model for other western states on how to fix your energy grid:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/08/scorc...

Only if they've changed the definition of the word "perennially".

Doing a simple search only shows bogus data; rather than directly calling out the poster it's a bit more polite to ask them how they came to make that statement.

Here's the report from the FERC: https://www.ferc.gov/market-oversight/reports-analyses/mkt-v...

relevant parts: “In Southern California, lower-than-average hydro generation may create challenges as natural gas-fired generation, the replacement for hydro production shortfalls in past years, may be limited due to reduced gas storage capacity and local pipeline outages in the region."

"Limited operations at Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility, plus state rule changes reducing the rate at which natural gas may be injected and withdrawn from storage, may complicate pipeline operations."

the sky isn't falling.

(the Daily Caller is a right-wing rag - Ann Coulter is a columnist, for chrissakes)

Blackouts aren't mentioned once in that document. In fact, it looks likes someones slide notes in PDF form.

exactly, FERC is the horse's mouth that that alarmist was posting about. The down-votes are mystifying since I provided utterly relevant data and observation about the source of the controversy. Guess its as likely to be progressives with poor reading comprehension as coal-staters upset I rained on their propaganda.

> that Clean PowerSF program? not voluntary in the sense you can opt out of it.

It's opt-in-by-default for new accounts as they're rolling it out neighborhood by neighborhood, but you can still opt-out of it.

Just because there is a lot of green energy doesn't mean that everything is peachy. California also does a fair amount of importing as well during parts of the day with low solar. Also, just because you have solar doesn't mean everything is ok. The grid dispatcher in California (CAISO) has to make sure reliable power is available 24/7 for consumers and industry. This can be very challenging due to solar which is behind the meter (makes it difficult to forecast load) and can disappear quickly leaving you in a lurch. Vox has a pretty good video on YouTube on the infamous "duck curve" that you should watch. Essentially, you have a ton of behind the meter solar during the midday that suddenly disappears during the end of the day. It is difficult to forecast for this. You have to have other non-renewable baseload (gas, nuclear, coal, or maybe renewable like hydro)online to take the place of solar when it goes away....you're essentially paying for reliability in that case. Battery storage would work too in place of fossil fuels, but you would need a LOT of it, and we're not quite there.

The economic dispatch that CAISO runs optimizes for the cheapest dispatch to meet load and reserves like the other north American grid operators like ERCOT, PJM...etc. That is essentially the market driving things along with CPUC decisions. If you're unhappy with how California is treating renewables know that California is on the bleeding edge in this area where more has changed in the past 10 years than the previous 80.

PG&E and the other utilities largely ignored a lot of grid maintenance prior to ~2000. As a result, not much was spent on maintenance and prices were pretty stable. The past ~20 years, stuff started breaking and they have had to put a lot more money into maintaining the grid. This cost gets pushed onto customers in the form of higher rates. Plus, energy demand has largely flattened, so the maintenance costs cannot be offset by selling more power.

Electric cars should solve the "flattening demand" problem, but that will require expanding the grid to cover a lot more parking lots, particularly for apartment/condo residents.

> we have an overabundance of "green" energy here in California, yet energy prices are through the roof

I find Slicon Valley Power's prices to be reasonable. But they only serve a very tiny fraction of the population (Santa Clara, basically).If they can do it, it means the problem lies elsewhere.

They are the best power company. Very reliable, cheap, and you can opt to pay more for green power. They are owned by the city of Santa Clara.

California is like a third world country. I used to work in Santa Monica in this beautiful extremely expensive office complex and yet we would have power outages on a regular basis. It is funny in a way, because it is so sad, that this supposed "high tech center" can't even manage to keep the electricity on or pave the roads.

The great thing about the consistently increasing price of natural gas generated electricity is that it makes the off grid green energy alternatives that much more attractive.

Your best bet will eventually be to just go off grid by installing solar on your roof and use it all up during the day by either using it (laundry, dishwashing in the morning, heat/cool the house to the ideal temperature in the late afternoon before you get home - i.e. thermal battery) or storing it.