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Re:‘This Did Not Go Well’: Inside PG&E’s Blackout Control Room by bsder on Saturday October 12, 2019 @10:25PM (#21237876)
And yet when you try deregulating it, you wind up with Enron.

In my opinion, electricity needs to now become a government function. The more people install solar panels and batteries, the less profitable electricity is going to be.

It's a death spiral eventually completely dominated by the fixed costs of keeping the network connected and enough electricity production in reserve rather than the variable costs of baseline consumption.

Re:‘This Did Not Go Well’: Inside PG&E’s Blackout Control Room by coredog64 on Sunday October 13, 2019 @12:10AM (#21238301)
The CA-Enron fiasco was not “deregulation”, it was “reregulation”. CA said that utilities could not purchase power on the futures market, but had to buy it on the spot market. Enron, by some strange coincidence, always had to take plants off line during peak hours, leading to high spot prices.

There’s nothing deregulated about forbidding futures contracts.

Re:‘This Did Not Go Well’: Inside PG&E’s Blackout Control Room by AnthonyMouse on Saturday October 12, 2019 @10:59PM (#21238046)
> The more people install solar panels and batteries, the less profitable electricity is going to be.

There are really two alternatives here. One is that solar+storage never manages to provide cheaper electricity than existing nighttime baseload generation methods. Then the big change is that time of day metering becomes cheaper during the day (when solar generates) and more expensive at night (when baseload generators justify their existence). But that isn't going to destroy the power grid, it's not a fundamental change, it just changes the pricing.

The other alternative is that solar+storage does become cheaper than baseload generation methods even at night. In that case the power grid is destroyed because most people simply stop needing it. It becomes cheaper to over-spec the solar panels on your roof and the batteries (or whatever) in your basement to handle unusual conditions, or suffer not being able to run your air conditioner one or two days out of the year, than to pay the full cost of operating the power grid just to handle those one or two days a year. But in that case there is nothing to privatize/nationalize/whatever because the residential power grid simply ceases to exist.

Re:‘This Did Not Go Well’: Inside PG&E’s Blackout Control Room by TKWasRight on Sunday October 13, 2019 @01:01AM (#21238479)
It pretty much is...the marketing folks can't talk with the distribution/transmission folks without SEC liaison...the whole industry is governed by NERC, split up into regional authorities...WEC, ERCOT, MISO, etc...I'm not sure what you mean by "when you try deregulating it..."...Who is deregulating it and where?