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A comment on Northern California Cities Should Undercut PG&E Now. Parent comment

Re:Northern California Cities Should Undercut PG&E Now by pclmulqdq on Saturday February 08, 2025 @07:44PM (#42987501)
It sounds like your city was overprovisioned in terms of how much electricity they could supply, and you had the benefit of the cheapest power around (hydroelectric power is very cheap), so when you got plugged into the wider network that the power company was servicing, you got screwed. There's a good chance that power for neighboring towns got cheaper and/or more reliable after the deal given what happened with your power.

The town must have either been in huge financial trouble or on a privatization kick.

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Re:Northern California Cities Should Undercut PG&E Now by sidewndr46 on Saturday February 08, 2025 @07:52PM (#42987537)
its extremely unlikely that a town in Michigan was not connected to the Eastern grid
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Re:Northern California Cities Should Undercut PG&E Now by pclmulqdq on Sunday February 09, 2025 @12:32PM (#42992051)
Whether they were connected and whether they were selling the power are two different questions.
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Re:Northern California Cities Should Undercut PG&E Now by s1mplicissimus on Sunday February 09, 2025 @12:20AM (#42988666)
Your conclusion is a false dichotomy. A third option is that shareholders of the private company fattened up their profit margins.
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Re:Northern California Cities Should Undercut PG&E Now by maxerickson on Sunday February 09, 2025 @09:30AM (#42990901)
One potential reason I can come up with is the dam aging and becoming a liability.

The town may also have been putting other revenues towards the electric utility (so losing money on the service and billing).

It was probably just a mistake though.

My town charges about $0.11 per kwh, with a fixed monthly service fee making the effective rate for a small user closer to $0.20.

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Re:Northern California Cities Should Undercut PG&E Now by TheCraiggers on Sunday February 09, 2025 @12:36PM (#42992073)
I think you're spot on. Damn failures are on the rise, and usually it's due to the simple fact that maintenance is expensive and everything has a shelf life. A lot of these dams were built during the same time period and the cost to replace / maintain the aging infrastructure is tough for small communities to swallow. And they're all coming due at roughly the same time.

Selling to a larger company who hopefully has the capital to fix them seems like a bargain when compared to the cost of replacing a hydro dam (or even replacing it with a non-electric generating dam).

Of course, that does come at a cost, and it's probably spread across all rate payers.

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