Most of California’s electrical costs are due to transmission and distribution, and I believe a lot of those costs stem from reducing power-related wildfire risks.

Last time I checked, 11 states received the majority of their electricity from renewable sources, and 10/11 had cheaper rates than the national average, with California being the exception.

PG&E (California's electric utility) books over $2 billion a year in profit - the equivalent of a $110 charge per month on every California household's bill at their 12.5% profit margin. Despite that, they claim insolvency and fight payouts to fire-injured taxpayers

They claim insolvency? What are you talking about? They went through bankruptcy in 2019-2020. 4 years ago.

I pay $100 per month, this calculation can't be right.

Businesses and farms use WAY more power than the average home.

This probably includes states with abundant hydro power. That's a much cheaper reliable source of renewable energy.

I wonder how much of the costs are due to "negawatts", investment in energy efficiency. Do that enough and you layer large capital costs on the system that the utility can charge for.

Texas could be a good example that is ramping up more battery usage without having massive energy prices. Granted the energy system in Texas needs other changes (feb 2021 winter storm for instance!) but it could end up being a good template in the long run.

They use natural gas to charge up their batteries. [1] This is a different use case than California.

1: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-storage/texas-wi...

The article mentions this:

> In Texas, many batteries today are actually increasing carbon-dioxide emissions, according to one analysis. That’s because operators focus on maximizing revenue and sometimes charge with coal or gas power.

Sounds like they're still using using environmental externalities to subsidize their costs.

Regardless, the results are the same. Batteries are the future.

People are leaving California because it's too expensive. It's nice to internalize externalities. But if the result is that people leave then it's not really solving the problem. You've just shifted the emissions to Texas. Same for manufacturing that goes to China.

This assumes the losses to emigration are higher than the efficiency improvements. I suspect that's not how it works out in practice, but I don't have the data to support this.

It's also reasonable to assume internalizing externalities can drive efficiency improvements everywhere. Would batteries by as efficient and available for installation in TX if CA hadn't subsidized them for a decade prior?

Other states can free-ride off of some of these innovations. But we also have to put up with the ways in which California regulations regarding fuel efficiency or whatever else hurt our markets. It's not clear that California's subsidies outweigh these effects.

Without data, we're firmly restricted to the realm of hypotheticals, but even there I'm struggling to comprehend how this would work. Can you provide an example of such an effect?

California said they want no ICE vehicle sales by 2035 or something. They're also restricting ICE 18 wheelers. This has a huge impact on the viability of manufacturing these products for nationwide purchase. My guess is the goals will not be met. California may even have a backlash. But in the meantime markets will have been collateral damage.

People leaving California is a good thing both for California and the places they go.

There’s a massive housing crisis in CA. Getting people out of it reduces demand which is the only solution if you persistently cannot or will not solve supply.

The Texas energy grid is actually greening rapidly. Although everyone deploying solar in Texas should also deploy a local battery. If you don’t you can’t run your solar when the grid is down.

Exactly. In San Diego the peak electricity price is $0.75/kWH, the highest in the continental USA. There is literally a functional nuclear reactor sitting idle a few miles north at San Onofre, and NIMBYs oppose nearly everything all new construction and upzoning.

California is not a good model for almost anything these days, just look at the high speed rail project. Cost of living is worsening for the middle and lower classes who are emigrating to other states. The government is corrupt and inefficient, spending vast sums on homelessness while achieving effectively nothing. Progressives can't blame anyone but themselves since California is a one party state with no real opposition.

A nuclear plant will earn money based on wholesale prices, not retail prices, and certainly not one-time peak retail prices. Wholesale prices are much lower. Note that for much of the day it's around $0.04/kWh. Batteries will reduce the evening peak.

https://thundersaidenergy.com/downloads/california-electrici...

Calling SONGS-2 or 3 functional is a stretch given their steam generator problems.

One party rule is almost never a good thing over the long run as politicians tend to become more self-serving and corrupt the longer they don't have to worry about being held accountable to voters. Instead they worry more about being accountable to their party leaders and funders who try to maintain the status-quo. Not sure the duopoly we have in the USA is preferable compared to say a robust democracy with smaller parties forming coalitions.

Take 30-60 minutes and read up on ranked choice voting, if you aren't familiar. I talk to a lot of people about it and the idea that we can vote any other way seems foreign to most.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting

A more laymans' terms comic that explains it with some FAQ built in: https://www.chickennation.com/voting/

It won't instantly change the world, but it will allow people to vote their true conscience vs. strategic voting, and allows smaller parties a chance at real power.

circular argument since the 2 party system will never implement it

False since it's already implemented in several states and cities. Florida Republicans have banned it in the state, though.

I don’t think California is ruled by progressives, unless your definition of progressive is anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan.

Please name someone who is remotely close to Ronald Reagan's politics and who is in charge in California. The left is in charge. They have a supermajority.

Richard Nixon was more liberal than today's CA Left on very many things. These comparisons are silly.

Nixon loved big government -- two of the federal programs most despised -- the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Nixon signed the Clean Air Act and Title which guaranteed equal educational opportunities for women. Nixon increased Social Security Benefits, proposed making more people eligible for welfare, and offered a plan for universal health care. Nixon's Detente sought to scale back or arms race with the Soviets. Nixon was quite liberal by current standards.

It would be worth looking at your investor-owned utility which has had an energy monopoly for half a century and has little incentive to innovate.

> The government is corrupt and inefficient, spending vast sums on homelessness while achieving effectively nothing. Progressives can't blame anyone but themselves since California is a one party state with no real opposition.

Seattle voted the two progressives on city council out (and Sawant retired) some time ago, homelessness has gone nowhere but worse since then. Like clockwork, we're adding another ~1000 street homeless/year.

As it turns out, the opposite-of-progressives don't have a solution for it either. Which isn't surprising, since they've held most of the council seats and the mayor's office for decades, it's just that now they don't have a progressive boogieman to blame for their failures. Meanwhile, Broadway and Pike and Denny and Pine look worse than they ever have, and so do the streets surrounding them.

It's almost like homelessness is an emergent property of a housing shortage.

What is the current composition of the city council? Are any of the members actually conservative, or just not-progressive? Why do you think things are so bad in the PNW compared to other places, if not the governance?

The council shifted hard-right last election, and Bruce Harrell (former council chairman and career politician who has blamed everyone but himself for the city's failures in years past) has a full slate supporting him.

The slate's politics seems to be pro-out-of-state-business/landlord/police, anti-density, anti-pedestrian, anti-homeless NIMBYism. Politically positioned as the common-sense solution to the insane progressive politics that have been ruining the city.

The metrics aren't exactly on their side. SPD continues to be an incredible combination of overpaid, unaccountable, incapable of hiring, useless, and actively dangerous to the public, the homeless numbers keep growing, rents and cost of living are rising, and the council is doing everything it can to stonewall the state's efforts to solving the housing crisis in the city.

> Why do you think things are so bad in the PNW compared to other places, if not the governance?

It might have something to do with the hundreds of thousands of highly paid people moving into an area which didn't build enough housing units to support them, thus displacing tens of thousands of people out of the margins and onto the street.

It probably didn't have as much to do with (a loud) minority of progressives that were on the council as we've been told.

I've only got a child's grasp of free market economics (and of musical chairs), but this seems to be the most predictable outcome of that sort of thing. When the number of people in an area exceeds the number of beds, some of those people will eventually be sleeping in tents.

The idea that the homeless are residents who have now been displaced is a misnomer, especially in Seattle. Seattle has abundant housing and welfare choices and very loose enforcement of any laws. Up north you can get a govt provided tiny home with high speed internet, if one were to choose to leave the streets.

What's the name of that program? A tiny home with Internet sounds nice.

> Seattle has abundant housing

Seattle has five-year waiting lists[1] for low-income housing, and practically no housing options for someone who is actually broke and homeless, even if they don't have an addiction.

It has some shelters, but shelters aren't housing. A shelter is a place you can (sometimes) sleep, it's not a place you can live in. And it doesn't have 9,000 empty shelter beds, to house all the street homeless, either.

You know where has abundant housing? NYC. A city with 10 times the population, but half the street homeless. Because the rest are housed. (A foreign concept to this city.)

[1] https://www.seattlehousing.org/housing/all/list

It isn’t the public’s responsibility to house you. Shelters aren’t meant to be your house

It is in New York, and NYC doesn't look like shit thanks to it.

But sure, I guess you like seeing thousands of street homeless all day, every day.[1] Because that's what you'd get, even if they were all sheltered (which Seattle won't do, either).

P.S. It damn well is the public's responsibility when public policies create the housing crisis.

[1] Which certainly put you in opposition to the expressed preferences of this entire city.

hard disagree that Seattle is not an extremely liberal administration

Could you name five extremely liberal policies that Bruce Harrell has enacted since taking office?

Or even, like, talked about enacting?

Seattle had had a majority progressive council until this year.

The same is starting to be true for Texas as well (which is an example of great market design).

Winter called. It disagrees with your rosy assessment of the Texas grid's greatness.

The greatness of the Texas energy market is the fact that the grid goes down all the time. So deploy solar and a battery so you don’t die in the winter cold and the summer heat.

Parts of California pay way more for energy because of starting fires leading to bankruptcy.

Other parts of California pay pretty normal rates.

What parts pay normal rates? Are they heavily dependent upon solar, wind, and batteries? Or are they using gas or nuclear?

Places that aren't on SCE, SDG&E, or PG&E. My utility is municipal, and my rates are about 17 cents a kWh. It's awesome.

If you live in Santa Clara your rate will be around $0.166 per kWh.

I think a lot of folks there have solar. And by 2026 they say they will have 50% of electricity sourced via sustainable means.

I hear it is 2x to 3x that much depending on time of day in Santa Clara. Also, people built solar when there were different rules. The new rules make it much less advantageous.

No. If you get the time of use plan in Santa Clara it's 4 cents more on-peak vs. off-peak [1]. The situation with PG&E's rates is completely asinine and is a political failure more than anything else.

[1] https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/home/showpublisheddocumen...

What's the point of a time of use plan if it only varies 4 cents? Does that change behavior?

Well, it's a 25% discount, it just doesn't sound like much because PG&E's rates are so insane.

> I hear it is 2x to 3x that much depending on time of day in Santa Clara.

Sounds like an amazing opportunity to make bank trading energy off-hours (as modeled by TX). Guess what technology enables exactly this!

Batteries charged by natural gas?

That's right, batteries! They enable us to capitalize on energy price fluctuations.

You can of course charge them however you like, but I have a feeling Santa Clara's purported 3x price fluctuations are not due entirely to natural gas.

You’re probably hearing that from people who are in Santa Clara but somehow served by PG&E rather than Silicon Valley Power (the municipal utility). Maybe they are right on the city boundary, or they live in some other city in Santa Clara County (SVP only serves the city of Santa Clara). PG&E off-peak rates for Silicon Valley are 40-60 cents/kWh.

How is paying a lot for energy not the future? It seems to be the trend worldwide.

Most of the cost of energy is the fossil fuels themselves, or taxation to discourage use. The cost of photovoltaic power seems to be governed by a scaling law, that has held for several decades now. [1] It is now cheaper than fossil fuels in sunny regions for electricity generation, without subsidy or other incentive. Even cautious estimates of further improvement, produce rather pleasing scenarios a few decades out.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices

> cheaper than fossil fuels

One needs to specify if this means "cheaper than a new construction fossil fuel plant" or "cheaper than operating an existing fossil fuel plant". Whether a CO2 tax is involved should also be specified. Things will really take off when existing plants can no longer compete (particularly in places like the US where overall demand is growing slowly, if at all). Of course, this will depress the price of the fuel (natural gas is in the doldrums in the US) which will delay things.

The LCOE of solar is lower than the LCOE of fossil fuels. That includes setup costs. But it also of course wins without it for both sources because you don’t need to buy the fuel. It’s not yet there if you’re also looking at the broader cycle that includes operating battery storage. The LCOE of battery and hydrogen fuel tech then depends on the price of the energy. So it’s very difficult to define. But it is getting there.

The important point is that if one already has fossil fuel plants, you have to compare the marginal cost of operating those plants vs. the full cost (including capital cost) of replacing them with renewables (CO2 costs included if any). Otherwise, they'll just keep operating the fossil fuel plants. Eventually the fossil fuel plants will age out and be replaced in an apples-to-apples comparison, but that could take decades.

Not quite. LCOE is useful building out capacity but it varies tremendously based on land availability / suitability and the feasibility of getting it into the transmission system. So these things have huge error bars. These are also about cost of producing the energy. What we need to think about is also the demand for energy. Solar is infinitely cheaper (that is, negative prices) at the ideal times. But then it’s gone entirely at others.

Gas is very good for those consistent other times. Batteries are not. Batteries are better for the excess demand during those off times. they offset the backup peaker gas plants as mentioned in the article.

All of which to say the batteries can eat away at the margins of gas plants, but it is incrementally less cost effective to replace each one.

If you operate in an environment where you can supply renewables outside of solar time in quantities high enough to not need the gas, the gas plants will become a lot less useful. Hydro power is the king here. If you don’t have that gas is still probably pretty important.

It might get to the point where a lot of these gas plants are less profitable because they expected to be more relevant and will not be able to justify their fixed costs. But shutting down those plants is probably more expensive to society than just subsidizing them to stay open.

So it’s complicated. The energy and battery side of the inflation reduction act has been HUGE though. Society doesn’t really get how much of an important investment the Biden admin has done here

Thanks for the thoughtful reply! That does change my viewpoint a bit!

What a wonderful internet interaction!

Nuclear fusion has entered the chat.

Solar and batteries is fusion at a distance with almost no containment, embrittlement, or other technology challenges.

But with albedo changes and other negative environmental impacts. TAANSTAFL. That said, fusion is a long way off.

What's the cost per MWh on that again?

Last I checked, the going rate is roughly 3.5 Billion for 3 MJ. Cost coming down quickly though! Only a couple dozen orders of magnitude to go and it’ll blow solar out of the water!

Well, the cost estimate for ARC was $29/W(e,net) for the capital cost of the reactor, or about 2x the cost of Vogtle-3/4 (for entire power plants).

We’re so sorry, nuclear fusion is experiencing high latency and packet loss. Please try again in $(10 RANDOM %100) years.

Current nuclear fission reactors can safely and reliably supply all our electricity needs. France rapidly built out their nuclear fleet in response to the 1973 oil crisis, achieving more than 70% of their electricity generation within 20 years. If the political will is there, it can be done.

The problem is that Western elites are corrupt and incompetent. They foolishly outsourced their manufacturing to a rival nation, which is now the rising superpower. Germany shut down its nuclear reactors and spent hundreds of billions on solar, while their manufacturing sector implodes from high electricity prices.

Corporate elites are increasingly extractive as exemplified by rising wealth gap, housing / healthcare / education costs, enshittification of internet platforms, etc. Any narrative which justifies price increases is gleefully propagated by the media hegemons. Climate change is used to markup prices on everything so consumers can feel self-righteous paying through the nose. Yet none of this will make a difference. China, India, and Africa will continue burning the cheapest fuels available to support their development.

do they pay more, or are they charged more? there is a difference