And IIRC, electricity in Hawaii is so expensive because they generate most of it with diesel.
Each island is also its own isolated electric grid, so reliability is not great and shifting renewables to other islands isn't possible currently. Unfortunately, the ocean is deep between the islands and connecting them would probably cost close to a billion dollars all in. A bit of a stretch for our small state.
$0.50 a day for more reliable power.
Everything comes to Hawaii by boat or plane, and boats run on diesel. So our power plants burn diesel, instead of coal, because coal, while cheaper per unit energy, would be a whole additional supply chain just for power plants.
And yeah, there's more solar and wind every year, but not nearly enough to provide the overprovisioning and storage necessary to use it for baseline power.
The other islands burn diesel, from the refinery on Oahu.
The ships also burned heavy fuel oil until this year.
This isn't an issue. There are coal ships, coal trains, coal trucks, you name it. Storage is easier too, you just dump it.
For example, my own solar doesn't factor into the percentage of power generated in California. No one can tell you the price per kwh.
All PGE knows is that sometimes they send me power, and sometimes I send them power. They have no idea what my internal usage and costs are.
[1] https://www.hawaiianelectric.com/clean-energy-hawaii/integra... (red = saturated local electrical infra)
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/audit-of-hawaiian-electric-...
> Contrary to stakeholder criticism, Hawaiian Electric's support of Hawaii's groundbreaking 100% by 2045 renewable portfolio standard (RPS) has been strong, the audit found. "It has exceeded its mandated obligations" and criticisms "appear to be largely unfounded."
> The problem is cost, it said. Meeting the RPS and the challenge of integrating rooftop solar have led to increased workload and costs, the audit recognized. But Hawaiian Electric increased staffing "with little evidence of any business cases supporting these additions."
There's also this bit:
> Additional concerns and opposition to the plant have been raised by Native Hawaiians, who view all forms of volcanic activity as manifestations of the goddess Pele. To the Native Hawaiians who revere Pele, geothermal wells and energy production are a desecration of her body and spirit.
I think most research is focused on utilizing less unique space- rooftops, open plains, open ocean. Shorelines are tiny spaces for how ecologically unique they are, plus they tend to be highly desirable for other human uses as well.
I think it was somewhere in oceania that they were installing the protoype in. The unit looked sort of like (this)[https://imgur.com/a/ymulbWF] but wider and in hd of course.
By wider I mean it looked more like a catamaran style boat and the one in the imgur link is more like a monohull boat. The one in the video which they deployed maybe 15-30 yards off shore from a beach was where they installed it and it had branding from their company on the side and some bright yellow accents.
Fortunately there are still people working on it.
https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHED...
https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHED...
I see 17 and 15c off peak. Part peak is 23 for EV-B.
I've been in countries where cooking 1 dish on electric oven will cost you $1.
Much of Europe has price hovering in between 30c to 50c during day hours normal usage, and easily more than double of that during extreme peaks like ones you have in Texas now.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Again, I specifically mean day time office, and residential "retail" price, which is 2-3 times bigger than wholesale.
Which countries in Europe charge their electricity to consumers based on 'extreme peaks' at between 60 to 100 cents? https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
In France its 18c during peak hours and 12c at night. Retail obviously.
It's a bit higher than i remember, but still.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
Also note that the site contains not just "real-time" prices but also day ahead prices (selected by default) which due to instabilities are quite a bit higher then real-time prices.
[^1]: https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/les-donnees-de-marche
Essentially, they are willing to burn all sorts of rules and regulations in order to beat a neighboring state to attract businesses and individuals. They then make up for this loss by drawing federal dollars that are usually paid for by people and companies in those same states they drew people and businesses away from.
But they are absolutely willing to regulate where it helps them individually even if it is against purported principles.
And then, of course, there’s the annual hypocrisy where red state senators will decry any funding towards blue states (for example, emergency funding to California for fire disasters) but jump right into demanding as much money as they can get when there are disasters in their states.
Texas’s energy supply bounties hides this there but it’s evident all over the remaining red states.
Anyhow, the legal effect may be irrelevant if the gas producers wouldn't bother trying to export. I would imagine that producers are having trouble just delivering on their long-term, fixed-price contracts in Texas. The short-term prices might be so jacked up precisely because there's little to no surplus to export, period.
When there's a sustained negative-degree-weather event for over a week, many people start plugging in extra space heaters or run their electric central heater longer, which places a huge amount of strain on the grid.
Luckily there are many in the midwest who use gas for heating, since it's way more efficient in the long winter months.
There are other factors too, like some plants not being maintained to a level where they can operate at full capacity in freezing weather for weeks at a time (many can, but some are not maintained to that standard—see TX), so those plants can't just pop online like they normally would during the summer.
According to the utility, shortages are not anticipated in Arizona, but conservation will help maintain the interstate pipeline system.
https://www.kgun9.com/news/local-news/southwest-gas-asks-cus...
Parents got ~10" of snow yesterday night. But it's just business as usual.
Someone else speculated that this is due to a rise in Natural Gas costs. This would make some sense given that the rise is uniform across the region.
Disclaimer: I work in the energy space. I know nothing about what is happening here and these are personal opinions.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/
16.89 ¢/kW in 2019. Where did you get 30-40 ¢/kW?
I love my municipal utility.
The cheapest possible PG&E (Silicon Valley) rate is off-peak (after midnight) winter rate. Looking at my January bill here right in front of me, that rate is $0.16675 for transmission + $0.05525 for generation. So that's 22.2c/kWh. That's the cheapest it ever gets.
The most expensive tier is peak (afternoon to midnight) in the summer, 62c/kWh.
"Northern California is the home of the first successful opposition to the promotion and development of commercial nuclear reactors in the U.S. In the 1950's northern and central California's privately owned utility company, PG&E, was planning to be one of the giants in the new field of nuclear energy."
I suppose Mexico might be cheaper as Nevada lacks water, particularly in remote regions where there'd be the least local resistance. Baja California has the Pacific and the Gulf of California; Sonora has the Gulf of California.
California's unique history of opposition to nuclear is unfortunate, but there are larger dynamics that are also suffocating nuclear in California; dynamics that at most are only marginally stronger in California as compared to elsewhere in the United States. Oregon or Washington could also build more nuclear plants. They already export a significant amount of electricity to California, especially to Southern California. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie) Nuclear is disfavored everywhere, and even where it's allowed and nominally profitable the RoI still sucks, so it doesn't take much friction to shift investment elsewhere. We need change at the national level to make nuclear practical again.
Though, now I'm genuinely curious why Mexico doesn't have more than its current two nuclear plants. PEMEX? (Note: Not that I think that Mexico is some third-world country bereft of regulations and organized opposition. I'm sure many of the reasons are similar as elsewhere. Still, I bet therein lie some interesting and informative stories.)
Nuclear compete with energy generated from fossil fuel, either locally or bought from neighbours, and future battery technology. The waste problem of nuclear is a problem, but not as big as the waste problem of fossil fuels.
On the TOU plan in NV, weekdays in June thru Sept, from 1PM to 7PM, it's ~0.45/kWh -- but rest of the time it's under 6c/kWh -- comparable [or less] than your rate.
Hard to believe we haven't figured out efficient, reliable, & redundant long-distance electricity transmission at this point.
I generated almost 100kWh today & have used ~half that; it sure seems like transmission is almost as big of an issue as storage.
> It didn't have to be this way :(
And, it's not! The claimed price is in the ballpark of double the actual price.
Lowest rate is $0.25/kWh and most usage will land at $0.32/kWh. Or so you'd think reading that PDF.
I divided my total electric bill by my total usage and got $0.44/kWh. There was a lot of usage in tier 2 because I don't live in the cold and dark. I use a computer and refrigerator. The various confusing surcharges and credits make knowing what any given kWh will cost very difficult.
We're getting fleeced.
No, the federal Energy Information Agency and Bureau of Labor Statistics are not wrong.
> Please take a look at an actual PG&E bill.
Looking at an actual bill will tell you what you pay, not what is typical in the state. And if it's a PG&E bill, it will tell you a significantly higher number than is paid in non-PG&E areas (which make up a majority of the state, and which include significant territories throughout Northern and Central California, including parts of the Bay Area, as well as pretty much all of Southern California.)
[0] https://www.pge.com/pge_global/common/pdfs/rate-plans/how-ra...
To add, Santa Clara city is served by Silicon Valley Power which I believe has substantially lower rates than PG&E.. there may be other such local providers..
The parent provided a figure: 16 cents.
Forget “the rest of California”, that's extremely high for the Bay Area. Last year, SF Area average retail electricity prices by month ranged between 22.9 ¢/kW and 24.0 ¢/kW.
https://www.bls.gov/regions/west/news-release/averageenergyp...
Most of my usage is in tier 2 at $0.31443/kWh. In practice the actual bill comes out to $0.44/kWh because of all the random other complicated cruft.
Check out slide 28: https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/uploadedFiles/CPUCWebsite/Content/Ne...
You can visualize at http://www.energyonline.com/Data/GenericData.aspx?DataId=22&...
In 2020 the highest wholesale electricity price spike in the US seem to have been $127/MWh with an average of $38/MWh.
It's tempting to single out technologies or particular energy sources here as the problem or solution. But the bottom line is that this is fundamentally a policy failure and not a technical problem. Price incentives and signals are probably part of both the problem and solution here. Although none of that will matter this winter of course.
The long term effect of this kind of price instability becoming a regular thing combined with frequent blackouts are going to be interesting. IMHO it's a great opportunity for technology that is basically proven to be highly effective both in providing grid resilience and cost reductions; i.e. clean tech. Nothing like 10x spikes in bills becoming a regular thing to cause people to look for solutions.
In my country, where I live, the per unit prices are fixed and any increases are announced. I doubt whether people anywhere could keep up with 10-30x changes in prices.
Given that this are wholesale prices it about how much the company selling electricity to end-users pays for it to (simplified).
This is marked up 10x for the consumer. Texas has a lot of competition and is usually marked up less that 2x.
The day-ahead contracts are high ($900) but the 15 minute and real-time prices are only $900 in a smaller region.
Still not great.
>Spot electricity prices at the West [Texas] hub have soared above the grid’s $9,000 per megawatt-hour cap
That's 10X more than even OP headline price.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Texas-Freeze-Rais...