Electricity prices are climbing more than twice as fast as inflation
Here in NJ a lot of people are complaining about electricity price increases. Upon looking into it, it seems that the reason is mostly a combination of population growth, shutting down old power plants, and not building enough new power plants.
Most people seem to blame price gouging from the electricity companies, but the electricity companies seem to be extremely tightly regulated and don't have much wiggle room with how they set their prices.
Haven't heard much talk about actually solving the problem and building more power plants, so probably we're going to see more articles like this in the future.
>Most people seem to blame price gouging from the electricity companies,
True or false: PSEG's annual profit every year for the last five years at a rate that greatly exceeds inflation while expenses are practically flat.
Their stock symbol is PEG, bee-tee-dubs.
There are very few theories of business and/or economics where profits increase while costs are steady where prices don't increase.
Are they (hold on a sec while I compose myself so I don't type a long string of obscenities) using that money to improve their service and keep rates steady or are they funneling everyone's money into the pockets of their investors and begging the state for free cash to maintain their infrastructure like they're some broke-ass bitches?
https://www.alphaquery.com/stock/PEG/fundamentals/annual/pro... does not look like the profit margin has increased over the past 5 years.
Also their stock underperformed the S&P 500 over the past 5 years.
I'm not really a finance guy so probably I'm looking at it wrong, but that seems like some pretty bad price gouging.
>...does not look like the profit margin has increased over the past 5 years.
Just tripled over the last 20 years from 6% to 18%?
Only morons accuse NJ/NY utilities of price gouging. Both states heavily regulate their utilities. Utilities may get large rate increases approved, but it's after they submit substantial evidence of their finances for the next year. The profit margins are basically state controlled.
Regulatory control of margins just incentivizes companies to find loopholes.
Look at all the bullshit that passes for business as usual with Florida utilities -- political campaign donations, self-dealing, constructed overbilling by related subsidiaries, etc.
Are you referring to PEG stock price or actual profit? Because their profits growth hasn’t really “greatly exceeded” inflation. Here is the last 30 years of profits[1] (you can change it to YoY to see how much their growth over the last 5 years is). They in fact posted a loss in 2021 and under performed 2022. They shot up in 2023 and then down to pre-pandemic levels in 2024.
They are not what I’d call a profitable company. I think their stock is reflecting the AI bubble as plenty of people are speculating on power companies
> There are very few theories of business and/or economics where profits increase while costs are steady where prices don't increase.
There is a very specific and relevant one: The one in which supply is inelastic. In other words, the one in which it's hard to build new power plants.
When that happens, the cost of operating existing power plants hasn't changed, but demand goes up. In normal economics, demand going up causes the price (and therefore profit) to go up, which in turn attracts more suppliers that increase supply and mitigate the amount the price can increase.
If the supply can't go up then price does. That's econ 101 and it's happening just as it's expected to -- it's simply what happens if you make it hard to increase supply.
2nd one, the investors. barely exceeding inflation is barely making a profit.
Yeah public utilities can rarely price gouge. They have to get government approval for their rates.
If "AI Datacenters" are part of the problem the answer is simple, charge them higer rates, high enough to motivate them to build their own generating capacity.
> They have to get government approval for their rates.
We need laws that prevent government employees from directly or indirectly investing in utilities.
The California Public Employees' Retirement System for example directly holds over 6.4 million shares of PG&E, and an additional 52 million shares via intermediaries.
> We need laws that prevent government employees from directly or indirectly investing in utilities.
> The California Public Employees' Retirement System for example directly holds over 6.4 million shares of PG&E, and an additional 52 million shares via intermediaries.
This seems.... good?
Put it like this - would you prefer public employee's retirement scheme did Nnot hold shares in it?
> Put it like this - would you prefer public employee's retirement scheme did Nnot hold shares in it?
Yes? Regulators should not financially benefit from doing or not doing their job.
Also, other government employees who work with (and sometimes over) regulators.
It's a clear conflict of interest, in the same way post-regulator industry employment is.
I'm guessing the argument would be whether that gives PG&E the right incentives or oversight.
I don't think it would seem good If the government were inclined to favor PG&E over consumers because "it's better for government employees", for example.
> but the electricity companies seem to be extremely tightly regulated and don't have much wiggle room with how they set their prices.
Sure they do; the wiggle room is referred to as profit
I wonder who could built and operate these plants...
The electric company that sends you a bill handles distribution (power lines within your city) not generation (power plants). Sometimes they are vertically integrated owning both generation and distribution. In de-regulated supplier choice states you can switch your generation provider. You cannot switch your distribution provider as each address only has one power line.
Definitely not the government, given how wasteful and inefficient they are.
I thought about the providers that are closing down power plants right now. But just out of interest who exactly is the "government" in arguments like this? Because no matter which party is controlling the government the sentiment never seems to change... always seemed like an of remark with no meaning besides yelling at clouds.
>Because no matter which party is controlling the government the sentiment never seems to change... always seemed like an of remark with no meaning besides yelling at clouds.
There are certain folks who, regardless of the issue, never fail to roll up their metaphorical newspaper, brandish it and hiss, "Gub'mint bad! Bad gub'mint!".
It's almost pavlovian. While some of those folks are likely sociopathic ancaps[0], the vast majority are just willfully ignorant people whose marionette strings are being pulled by the cynical scumbags intent on enriching themselves and the rest of the world be damned!
And more's the pity.
"US utilities plot big rise in electricity rates as data centre demand booms", 90 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44523686
"AI Data Centers May Consume More Electricity Than [Residents of] Entire Cities" (2024), 80 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42221756
"Meta data center electricity consumption hits 14,975 GWh" (2024), 60 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41421627
Here in Australia, the government is providing subsidies to households for buying batteries (backed by solar).
After paying $15k (after subsidies) for a 40kWh battery, our battery is filled by roof solar and grid provided renewable energy, when needed, at very cheap rates (6c/kWh). I pay $1 a day for grid connectivity. Our total annual energy bill will be approximately $500 for the foreseeable future.
I'm in NSW - curious on what you got, what subsidy/ies you were able to obtain.
I'd previously looked into this and it sounded like a package was required - PVC + battery - whereas I've already got 10kW inverter + 12kW panels, and basically just want something around that size (40kWh).
Street pricing seemed to be around the $9k installed per 10kWh, so a) your subsidy options sounds spectacular - around 60% discount? - and b) payback for me would probably be around 8 years.
But if I switch vendors (Amber I think is what one of my friends is on) I can engage in something analogous to wholesale market activity, 10m bidding / sales, rapidly decrease the projected lifetime of my battery, but potentially be $-positive even through the winter months.
But all that feels like something the power companies here in AU are going to try to try to undercut / tax.
5 x SigEnergy SigenStor Bat 8.0 (8kWh/battery) + 12kW inverter (Sigenstor EC) on single phase. The SRES battery rebate (https://cer.gov.au/batteries) was ~30%. Total was a bit under $15k. I already have 16.6kW of panels on the roof from 5 years ago.
There are two providers (Globird and Ovo) I have been researching that provide 2-3 free hours of electricity per day between 11-2pm. That + solar would easily fill the batteries, so that power bill might drop even more.
You should get some quotes from battery/solar installers (no doubt you have heard of solarquotes.com.au). Prices have dropped a lot this year.
Excellent info - thank you.
Yes, I've been through solarquotes.com.au a few times but haven't looked in earnest for some time. This is encouraging information.
I know my usage can easily be 15-20kWh in a day, and I can get a week of overcast though it's not common.
The 'free' electricity offers presumably are in return for a guarantee to feed-in to them outside sunlight peak, I suppose?
I assume the power providers have come up with ToU and FiT tariffs based on a LOT of data, so we here with our spreadsheets and one or two datapoints aren't likely to come out far ahead, but it sounds like break-even within a few years is feasible.
They don't require that we feed in at any specific time, but they do price their peak rates quite high so you have to ensure you have enough storage to not consume at those times.
No doubt their models and prices will be updated once more large homes BESS are installed.
I have a relative with a 30kWh battery on Amber. They spent AU$10k for it after subsidies.
They don't expect to ever pay for electricity again - instead their biggest problem with Amber is what to do when they are overproducing. They got charged $2.50 the other day when they didn't curtail production and had to dump power into the grid!
15Kwh Lifepo4 48V 300Ah is less than $2k USD. You are overpaying a lot for installation.
You need inverters to run them, and you can't just put more battery on one inverter. The price is about 1:1 now for battery and inverter costs when I looked into it last.
You absolutely can put multiple batteries on one inverter. The limiting factor is the DC bus bar and breakers, not the inverter, which just needs to be sized to consumption.
Yes there's nothing stopping you, but economically a given kW battery installation stores about 4 hours of power.
There's 4 to 6 hours of peak renewable energy per day.
If you add more batteries, you increase power and energy at the same time and ratio: so for any practical home battery system you're cycling the cells daily, which means you your power for charging must match.
If you put more batteries on one inverter, then you're scaling a lot of other costs (BMS, bus bars and space) but you'll never actually be able to utilize that capacity - it'll sit idle most of the time because you can't get it in and out of the cells fast enough.
Well, I suppose our perspectives differ. My own solar installation is off-grid, so the battery pack is sized to last for 4-7 days. I don't have the luxury of tapping the grid if they tap out, and running the generator's quite expensive.
Are your figures, notably 4-6 hours of generation, overlooking the potential for home battery owners to buy power in during off-peak (cheaper) periods, for either their own usage, or for selling back to the grid, at other times?
I've costed it and it doesn't work out. But you can realize why without doing the calculations: unlike solar, batteries aren't surface area limited. So better capitalized producer can achieve better economies of scale and just build warehouses of the things to do exactly that. Which is what they do - and thus off peak power trends towards a tiny margin over the warranted kWh cost of a battery.
Okay, I think you're in a different part of the world to me, then - I can generate about 85kWh in a day here, mid-summer, about 34 degrees south, and that's throttled by my 10kW inverter.
I could go higher with a better inverter, but energy providers in Australia, or at least my part of it, basically drop all pretence once you go over 10kW feed-in, and the already pitiful rates they'll offer as standard asymptote towards zero.
Time of usage tariffs vary quite wildly here, but it's not uncommon to have close to 70c at peak hours, and 20c at off-peak. These fees are complicated by the daily connection charge, which is around $1.00 but varies on your location, provider, and your ToU and other schemes.
Some 'pretend to be a wholesaler' options exist here, but our wholesale pricing is bid and sold in 10m blocks, not 15m, as per your other note.
Also, we have ~6 hours a day where peak pricing is generally applied, and maybe ~9 hours where we're at off-peak pricing - so the math tends to be more compelling.
6.2kW 48V -> 230AC inverter is $300
And if you run the numbers, the battery which can deliver 6.2kW is only about 1.5kwH in capacity. This matters because while discharging slowly is fine, to gain any economic benefit you need to be able to charge at essentially full power.
If you have 100kwh of batteries and only 6kw of AC connection then it would take 3 days of typical solar charging to get them to full capacity. And any kwh sitting there that you don't charge/discharge is costing you money for grid batteries - the economics still depend on being grid interactive.
The best demand signal in my local grid for example is exactly 1 hour wide. Which means s you get 4 15 minute intervals to basically try and dump power for the best price.
This is actually very regressive policy because it only rewards people who 1) own their own home and 2) can afford a significant capital investment. And under current retail rate structures it shifts the burden of maintaining the grid onto those who can't afford to make these investments and who will end up seeing there rates rise unless the cost of grid connectivity is increased.
It's also economically questionable because it's simply much cheaper to build and manage a smaller number of large batteries then thousands of home batteries.
I understand why these schemes are politically attractive; people like to own their own stuff. But there is a very real chance this increases the cost of energy here.
I'm curious how you see this potentially increasing the cost of energy? Why can't we do both large systems and small distributed systems?
I see the following benefits:
1. Stabilises the grid
2. Smooths peak demands. Check the Price and Demand graph here: https://www.aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-...
3. Increases supply -> energy prices decrease?
4. Accelerated move away from coal generation and towards renewables.
5. Job creation (solar and storage installation)
Drawbacks:
1. Renters, lower income houses and apartment dwellers don't have access the subsidies
2. Exposure to dodgy installers and systems just like we saw with the Australia solar scheme.
That would be cool if I could afford to own a house.
A great example of what's possible when policy actually aligns with long-term sustainability goals
How does the cheap rates work? You get subsidised grid rates because of the batteries?
In Australia it's common to have Time of Usage (ToU) billing.
Figures depend on provider and plan, but sometimes cheap (as per parent's 6c / kWh), but during the midday to 6pm range it may be up to 60c.
So, grid rates aren't subsidised, but having a storage medium means you can arbitrage power quite easily.
The AEMO (Australian Energy Market Operator) website has some good data can see price of electricity in realish time. This is for the NEM (which is east coast states + South Australia), the west coast is on a separately managed grid with no interconnection.
https://www.aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-...
You can also view the breakdown of where the grid is sourcing energy from (i.e. what portion of the grid is supplied from solar pv etc at any given time).
I know that some big industrial users (large factories etc) can optimize/spin up production lines etc based on the spot price. Although I'm not sure if they use the same public AEMO data there might be a dedicated api or similar involved.
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I think the administration's energy density should be extended for all things. Lets take transportation: Can't use federal lands, waterways, airspace or highways unless the airplanes, trains, ships, trucks and cars are powered by the highest energy density (nuclear).
Also, anything that uses airwaves: So, nuclear powered phones, watches, airtags.
This would be the biggest breakthrough for humanity. We have nuclear powered submarines but miniaturization of nuclear stalled since then.
This. Nobody is free, until everybody got a thermonuclear warhead.
I love the way cars explode in Fallout. I mean, random car crashes have historically been the epitome of excitement, 4k war footage made me pretty indifferent towards bloody windshields and burnt out station wagons. I really think, the intensity of an unexpected fission event projecting its authority through my eyelids could make me feel something again.
Nuclear submarines were developed at about the same time as civil nuclear power plants (and you could actually argue they were developed earlier or reached maturity earlier). Nuclear submarine power was a sort of ‘killer app’ for nuclear power, rather than a derivative of civil nuclear power stations.
Most of the things you cite, like phones, cars, airtags, can already be powered just off batteries and the electric grid, so the actual source of the energy is already abstracted away.
A large-scale nuclear plant will be way more efficient than a bunch of mini-plants, so having battery electric cars + nuclear power plants already gives you nuclear powered cars without even having to invent anything new.
We only need to focus on fuel generation (power plants), and the small number of remaining places that don't just take power from the grid (planes, ships, other things that have their own fuel/generator on board).
Looking forward to the DoT getting in on this. Cars have to go! Busses trains and bikes only! No other mode of transit can be funded, not dense enough!
Careful what you wish for, Ford has played with the idea at least once before.
Nuclear power aside, that's a gorgeous concept car
We control nuclear proliferation by making enriched uranium (U235) very, very hard to acquire.
While I'd love to see more nuclear reactors in our society. The "nuclear everything" argument breaks a core tenant of US national security policy, making U235 very hard to get.
Why did you interpret your parent as is they were serious about putting nuclear power in every device?
It was extremely clear to me that it was a comment to show the stupidity of the admin insisting that energy density was the right/only heuristic for evaluating which fuel sources to use/support.
Joking aside, I think small nuclear power sources tend to use much, much more problematic stuff than enriched uranium. Stuff that’s producing enough thermal energy through natural decay, rather than criticality in a reactor. You know, the Mars rover‘s pictures are censored in some areas… that’s where the radioisotope batteries are located.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery
Proper reactors are impractical scaled down, as far as I know. Inside a large submarine or aircraft carrier is probably the smallest practical scale for a reactor and I bet there is a ton of trade-offs.
>Joking aside, I think small nuclear power sources tend to use much, much more problematic stuff than enriched uranium.
The rover ones use Pu-238.
> You know, the Mars rover‘s pictures are censored in some areas… that’s where the radioisotope batteries are located.
The Curiosity and Perserverance rovers each have one MMRTG (multimission radiothermal generator), and I've never seen a picture of the rover where it is censored, and its actually explicitly called out and shown and drawn attention to in lots of NASA publicity stuff.
Looks like I misremembered or confused the censoring stuff. Thanks for the correction.
Why would those nuclear "batteries" be censored from Mars rover imagery? To prevent bad actors from acquiring the stuff for a dirty B?
Yeah, the Mars Liberation Front may use it to attack City 1!
It‘s the battery tech, which is classified military stuff. I presume it’s a thing you put in submarine detectors deep in the ocean, or compact spy satellites.
But indeed, it’s the type of radioisotope that’s dangerous to just be around, where minuscule amounts could fuck up the whole village. But terrorists would probably rather get their hands on emitters from the medical field than fly to mars.
Non-weapon fissile material Thorium is an option.
Thorium isn't fissile, it's fertile. All thorium reactors work by breeding that thorium into uranium.
Commercial reactor fuel isn't weapons-grade to begin with.
This cannot be stressed enough: commercial reactor fuel is 5% enriched. Bomb material is 90+% enriched.
I don’t relish the idea of a distracted driver sending text messages while driving a nuclear car.
I bet the crew on the submarines is much more focused on what they are doing…
Authoritarian rulers favour loyalty over competence, so it makes sense. This means that you will have people in positions who are incompetent and shouldn't be there.
Very sad. The Trump's party should not be called MAGA but MALR, Make America Like Russia. They are doing mighty good progress in that direction.
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The tearing down what this admin dubs the "green new scam" is hugely responsible for this. De-funding & clawing back great investments towards the future, investments that would both power America and fuel our industrial base, drive huge economic growth.
It's not just bad for energy generetion either! China is also building a huge war chest of IP patents. Its incredibly sad to see this un-forced error, this sabotage of America, this destruction of our leadership. To walk back to a fake Great Again idiocracy obsessed only with doing the opposite of the liberals.
> China is also building a huge war chest of IP patents.
My understanding is that China doesn’t care about abusing patents they don’t own. Is this incorrect? Do they value patents only when they hold them and enforce them?
Asking sincerely.
They don't use those patents internally, they discovered they can block progress in the west by spamming patents on absolutely everything and thus made it one of their strategies. The goal is to grind our industry to a halt and it's starting to work.
Why even bother? We're our own greatest enemy.
In an adversarial conflict the goal isn't for it to be a fair fight.
I'm not sure there is an adversarial conflict for most of us.
Well they usually just ignoring the patents and just copying it. The problem is when state actor, potentially, can fund applications for patents and act as a bad actor in the future. Application costs tens thousands of dollars. I actually came across this a few days ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44911423. Prusa, the creator of 3D printers, mentioned that Chinese companies are filing patents on parts he and his team originally released as open source. Just another clear example of how, for some reason, we in the West keep tolerating if not indirectly supporting this kind of behavior.
> Chinese companies are filing patents on parts he and his team originally released as open source
They didn't intentionally or exclusively targeting open source, the "# of patents" are very explicit KPI requirement for tech companies in China. Every team gotta grind patents as much as they can.
>" Just another clear example of how, for some reason, we in the West keep tolerating if not indirectly supporting this kind of behavior."
Live by the sword, die by the sword. It is the West that first turned patents into the weapon for big corps to fuck the rest of the world. Well now they're tasting it themselves
Can't really argue with that. I basically expect similar behavior to patent trolls in Europe and the US. And because of the Western sense of untouchability and the illusion of their own importance, they’ll allow themselves to be at least partially paralyzed by a flood of lawsuits.
This isn’t about protecting knowhow or actually producing anything, but about generating as much legal and financial friction as possible. The difference is that in China it can be semi-state-backed or at least tolerated, so it’s not just a bizarre parasitic business model like in the West but also a geopolitical tactic.
No matter the Country, all IP laws and practices are backed by government, otherwise how they can be enforced.
The monolithic West, comprised of only bad actors, none good. Even the previous poster's example of the open source parts is invalid because the organization was part of the West.
Obviously gp forgot that open source projects fall under the ambit of open source law, witten by open source legislators and adjudicated by open source court circuits /s
The "west" absolutely has a monolithic IP jurisprudence, rules codified by trade agreements and passed laws[1]. This has harmed open source in the past, such as the multi-decade, recurring issue where folk have the license to make use of the source code, but not the associated trademarks.
1. As evidence, I offer the great mobile patent wars of the 2010's, which played out similarly across multiple countries the suits were filed, except the home-countries where the scales were the scales were thumbed.
Whatever China does is what China does. The point is, Europe and the USA care, and patents have leverage in nations under the rule of law.
Meanwhile in china they set factories on fire because they are not paying the wages. Chinas graphs are as dubious as the sovjet unions and they have used up the working population that drove these economic miracles.
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Other nations comparable in wealth and power to the US have figured out how to build out green energy at scale.
The US wants to pretend that is completely impossible and we should keep burning fossil fuels instead.
Please learn some critical reading skills.
We know how to build green energy at scale. Were not doing it because its politically undesirable to a chunk of the country and the fossil fuel industry.
Then you don't know how to do it.
Knowing how to do something doesn't meanings knowing how to get it done. Which means convincing the right people to get it done.
If that isn't happening you don't know what you're doing.
So once I release a product and go into maintenance mode I no longer know how to release products?
Uncalled for attack.
I don't think nationalism should be re-enforced even for 'ends I like'. I think it's better to convince people to do something on the merits. So I asked if there was a reason to push 'but China' and if you look below, someone gave me that. Which is what makes HN powerful and worth visiting. Attacks, not so much.
Fossil fuels are more expensive than new renewables and storage. This has to do with intentional sabotage of domestic energy supply for the benefit of the fossil fuel industry by the current federal administration.
Trump literally justified his actions based on climate change being a Chinese hoax. He recently claimed that China has no wind power turbines when they install 70% of them.
Thank you for answering my question and giving me a reason for it. Now I understand.
It’s relevant because every single time the American green energy transition is brought up, people like you make bad-faith attempts to derail the conversation by going “it doesn’t matter what we do because China will still make tons of carbon”, and this information is demonstrating that’s not true. China is actually making considerable progress in decarbonization, and it’s us— and only us— who are the laggards.
Huh? I'm 100% pro green power.
Calling out jingoism/nationalism isn't anti-green. Nowhere did I say China makes any carbon. I said 'nationalism bad'. But thanks for the attack and down votes.
If you want to remove all regulations, you too can have impressive growth.
I've heard many things about China. "No rules" isn't one of them.
Potentially, but in this case the administration is doing the exact opposite and making it harder to build by adding new regulation (and interpretation) that makes it harder to build new power generation.
If you remove bad regulations and enhance the good regulations, then yes.
Isn't that supposed to be the Republican position? Get rid of all these job-killing regulations?
Imposing bureaucratic offset requirements etc. for renewable generation is the opposite of that. It can't really be news that Trump is a hypocrite, but water is wet again today.
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> This cabinet is one of the most impressive on paper cabinet i've ever seen
How can I be on you side since said this without any source. I had to spend 15 minutes going through each of the cabinet members profile (and the ones in previous presidencies). While there are a few people with good experience in the present cabinet, majority of the members don't seemed to have any experience for the job they where hired for
> This is only for federal lands, which correctly falls under the interior. They have a specific amount of land to give out, they want the energy projects on that land the have the highest impact. This is very Elon thinking to solve the current crisis. Helps solve the energy problem, while getting the most kwh produces per parcel of land given out.
That's clearly complete bullshit because for most places where someone wants to build a solar or wind project the alternative if the solar or wind plant is not approved is not a coal, gas, or nuclear plant. The alternative is no plant.
As far as I can tell, coal is middle of the pack in terms of energy efficiency [0] and less than half of the energy is captured as electricity, which doesn’t seem particularly incredible in relative or absolute terms.
Although comparing fossil fuel efficiency to renewable energy efficiency is a bit odd in one sense because while you’re technically wasting energy with renewables, there will always be more tomorrow, at least on human time scales.
[0]: https://www.pcienergysolutions.com/2023/04/17/power-plant-ef...
When it comes to energy the efficiency of a generation system is pretty much meaningless metric. Price per kilowatt hour is what rules the roost. Renewables particularly solar have become the cheapest form of electricity in history. This is driving demand for storage which is driving exponential cost reductions in that field as well.
Grid scale renewable + storage installations are now becoming competitive with natural gas. Coal is an obsolete energy source. That people in this administration are trying to weelend at Bernie's this corpse of an industry gives me serious doubts about the praise you lap on them.
Creating and exacerbating a whole host of problems with some idea that an AI-God will then rescue us isn't "impressive" - it's mentally ill. These are the same types of people from the articles about LLM psychosis, except these people are in positions of power so we all get to suffer their delusions. Except for Trump himself who is closer to being the LLM side of the dynamic.
I mean... Us humans have done that countless times in history. Cannons, Tanks, Nukes, Space... One thing history proves is that if one side can develop a next gen weapon that you can't defend against, your civilization ceases to exist.
Every single one of those advancements caused more problems than they solved. We don't need AGI for "AI" to be more dangerous. Just some kind of super trojan would do.
It seems like you're still assuming an AI-God, in the form of a supremely-powerful weapon. As it stands, the genAI capabilities of the US and China seem relatively on par. So it's not clear that incremental gains necessitate throwing everything possible at this one thing.
Meanwhile California is shutting down dams and nuclear plants.
The last shutdown of a reactor in CA was 2013 -- https://www.eia.gov/nuclear/reactors/shutdown/ Diablo Canyon got a reprieve and has 5 more years to go.
Dam removals have multiple factors behind them, from pure economics (cheaper to remove than repair) to environmental -- restoring fisheries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dam_removals_in_Califo...
We need all the non-carbon power we can get, and it's a shame to remove existing power sources but as electric power is eminently fungible, that loss can be mitigated with other sources.
Meanwhile, efforts to modernize the US electric grid have been stalled by Red states that are ideologically opposed to renewable power. There's plenty of potential power to be generated that is hamstrung by that resistance (pun intended).
The other thing that people forget is that dams, in almost all cases, have a finite lifespan. Both the engineering and (mostly) the silt buildup mean that every dam eventually has to come down or otherwise be involved in a massive infrastructure project rivaling the cost and complexity of building a new dam.
Silt buildup is a trope that often gets repeated as a reason for tearing down dams, but it has no effect on power output. Generating capacity is determined by vertical pressure head, i.e. how far the water drops as it passes the dam, and not by how much water is held by the reservoir. It's factually incorrect to say that silt buildup causes a decrease in generating capacity.
No expertise in the field, but that makes sense as far as momentary output is concerned. The amount of power generated over a period of time, however, would be entirely by the quantity of water stored behind the dam. At some point it would no longer be economically worthwhile to keep it online.
> it's a shame to remove existing power sources
Maybe other people are thinking about different dams, but the ones that were in the news semi-recently for being dismantled were producing something like five wind turbines worth of energy. China has built five turbines in the time it took you to read this comment.
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I can't speak to any particular dam closure but there's a lot more to maintaining dams than one might believe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiUOBdEUqjY (Practical Engineering - All Dams Are Temporary)
For context: $0.18/kWh in US vs. $0.32/kWh in France and $0.36/kWh Germany. The administration is making an attempt to address the issue of every growing demand for more electricity and remove barriers for additional power to come on-line. "To compete globally, we must expand energy production and reduce energy costs for American families and businesses." https://www.energy.gov/articles/secretary-wright-acts-unleas...
> The administration is making an attempt to address the issue of every growing demand for more electricity and remove barriers for additional power to come on-line
By cancelling and stalling solar and wind projects while propping up coal of all things? That makes no sense.
Look at the biggest products of the areas around Washington DC. You'll find coal, more coal, and "things we found while mining coal"
Solar and wind projects are not a panacea. They consume minerals and fossil fuels at a rate that the church of climatology never discuss, and actively surpress.
I know they're removing subsidies for solar and wind, but are they going beyond that? Leveling the playing field (and finally admitting that intermittent sources require batteries in order to be compared to true base load alternatives) seems like a rational thing to do.
Some states have vastly higher energy costs, tho, don't they? Bit weird to compare the whole US to selected European countries, which represent completely different energy strategies and subsidy policies, while also being heavily affected by the war in Ukraine.
Yeah, new england for example has high energy costs because of 1) a lack of local energy sources and 2) reluctance to build new gas pipelines.
> selected European countries
The two largest in the EU by population (20% and 15%) and GDP (24% and 16%).
Well, yes, then compare them to California and Texas not some mix of flyover states.
I mean, what’s the point anyway? Taxes, subsidies, natural resources, industry and geography are so vastly different between those countries.
It's $0.11 kWh here and we have plenty of renewables and a growing population. OTOH I have city owned utilities and not a public company.
For comparisons sake the average is $0.076/kWh in China and $0.074/kWh in India.
I pay $0.0825/kWh in the Southern US.
Here in California I'm paying close to 0.60/kwh. Throw a rock across the border to Nevada and I'm paying 0.10/kwh
>For context: $0.18/kWh in US vs. $0.32/kWh in France and $0.36/kWh Germany.
That's as may be, but my electricity bill is 1/3 for kwhs of electrcity, and 2/3 for "delivering" said power.
As such, it seems like France and Germany may have an advantage there, no?
I'm in another European country. Here it's combined into the final kWh price rather than a separate line item. 7c/kWh for transmission fees.
The grid is owned and managed by a government entity, so the price is set by them with parliament oversight. Last year they had to reduce the price (from 10c/kWh), as they found out they'd been overcharging people for a few years and had a few hundred million surplus of revenue.
And yes they are investing quite a lot to modernise the equipment and put high voltage powelines underground (lots of forests here). My country has a population density comparable to Texas.
I have my last electricity bill, from France, something that's indexed on the "public price" (so it's possible you get extra discount, but I bet it's representative)
Electricity itself is priced at around 0,14 €/kWh (sparing you the 6th significant digits), so roughly $0,16/kWh at current exchange rates and taxes of of 0,034 €/kWh ($0,039/kWh).
Let's round it to up to $0.17/kWh, which is surprisingly close to your number.
The additional taxes are a "flat" fee of 1,8 €/month (2 $/month),
Then there is the registration itself, with sits at about $15 / month. (I can challenge myself to getting bills where the registration and taxes are bigger than the actual current.)
I'm not sure how I would get a nice number in "€/kWh", though ?
I actually checked a recent bill and it's ~USD0.012/kwh (EU0.10), plus taxes and fees (total cost ~USD0.13/kwh or EU0.11) for the actual electricity.
Then there's a USD0.175 fee for "delivery," plus an additional ~50% in taxes and fees for "delivery (total cost ~USD0.26/kwh or EU0.22) for "delivery."
Total cost: USD0.38/kwh or EU0.33
N.B.: The above detail was for the month of June. Prices do fluctuate and I'd expect that electricity prices for July, especially as hot as it's been here, will be more than for June.
>I'm not sure how I would get a nice number in "€/kWh", though ?
I just divided total cost, including taxes and fees (for electricity and for delivery) by the number of kwh used.
That's not very exact as some of the fees do not vary by usage, but I figured it was close enough.
It’s the same for me in Texas, delivery is easily 2/3 of my bill and fluctuates wildly. It’s not part of my quoted rate either, just tacked on.
0.16€/kWh in a western European country. 0.60$/kWh in California.
In an ideal world this should incentivise more people with single family homes and capital to invest in Solar + batteries and even with tariffs I am sure the breakeven time will still be less than 10 years (also after accounting for the fact that utilities will not be paying a lot for your electricity though time of use pricing and batteries may help a bit)
I live in the SF Bay Area. My rates have roughly doubled in about 5-6 years. I'm paying almost $0.50/kWh or more depending on what tier I'm in at the time. PG&E does NOT reward conservation or solar power usage. They say "We aren't make enough money! We need to raise your rates! We need to charge solar users to connect to the grid!" The exact same thing happens with water utility companies, when they first preach water conservation, and then complain they aren't making enough money so they have to raise rates.
PG&E wants to charge solar power users $80+/month just for the privilege of connecting to the grid even if they are fully self-powers through solar, and give new users $0 to return energy back to the grid.
The entire system is a scam, and every politician involved is a corrupt.
> PG&E wants to charge solar power users $80+/month just for the privilege of connecting to the grid even if they are fully self-powers through solar
If you're "fully self-powered through solar" just disconnect from the grid.
If you're using the grid as a battery where you feed power into it at 4PM and draw power from it at 4AM, that costs money.
This. 100%. The ability to draw 200Amps from the grid at no notice, 24x7 has real value, and costs real money to provide. If you want that ability, you should pay for it.
We really need to separate the reliability and grid maintenance costs from the usage costs. Bundling them together worked when electricity was a true monopoly, but it isn't that anymore.
If you're "fully self-powered through solar" just disconnect from the grid.
Somehow I doubt walking out to your breaker box and throwing the main switch is illegal.
I can't see any prosecution or charge resulting from never throwing it back on again, a day off is OK, so is a week, ...
Where there might be a problem is refusing to pay any connection charge for the X-monthly bill that now shows 0 units consumed.
Sounds like they'd need to throw the breaker and cancel any existing contract.
I can't see any prosecution or charge resulting from never throwing it back on again, a day off is OK, so is a week, ...
In California it's going to vary city by city but there are typically interconnect requirements for single family homes and ADUs. You're welcome to go full sovereign citizen and the city or county is welcome to deem your house uninhabitable and use force to evict you.
> A building inspector will happily red tag your residence
For what? For not having power connected?
Are people not allowed to have (say) propane only homes in California?
Are you able to cite any relevant law here that requires a building to be connected to a power grid?
> For not having power connected?
Yes.
And folks in Florida. And Arizona. And Colorado. And wherever else. Building codes and HOAs exist and absolutely have their own standards for habitability. It's not that hard to turn up news articles of folks who run afoul of this.
In California it is/was the energy code that required connection to the grid. In Arizona where a house could easily reach unsafe temperatures without working A/C there's almost certainly a safety aspect to requiring a grid connection.
Weird.
I guess I'm glad I don't live in the US, I've built, bought, sold, renovated, and helped out others renovating a number of times in the past four decades and never run into such restrictions.
> In Arizona where a house could easily reach unsafe temperatures without working A/C there's almost certainly a safety aspect to requiring a grid connection.
Odd, given one doesn't follow from the other; you can have working A/C without a grid connection .. and it's better to build to the environment than waste power in any case .. the Pilbara easily matches Arizona temperatures and people have lived there for millennia w/out A/C - in more recent times rammed earth walls and high roofs with wide verandahs work to beat the heat w/out draining power.
the Pilbara easily matches Arizona temperatures
Arizona also famously prohibits collecting rain water. It's an unforgiving environment, and while there were people who lived there in pre-Columbian times they didn't do so in large cities.
Awww, look at you comparing temps on the cool coastal fringes of the Pilbara.
The interior gets hotter, Marble Bar for example.
> Pilbara is sparsely populated, Arizona's had much larger urban centers since the 70s
I fail to see how this is relevant to the design of individual buildings and the choices regarding passive Vs active cooling.
> A couple years ago Phoenix saw daily highs of over 43 for a month straight.
That occurs roughly every five years or so in interior (not coastal) Pilbara locations.
This year a W.Australian wheatbelt town much further south (cooler, and not in the Pilbara) saw a month of ~ 40 temperatures peaking at 45 .. a month of over 40 in the interior is expected yearly.
> It's an unforgiving environment, and while there were people who lived there in pre-Columbian times they didn't do so in large cities.
Much like the Pilbara, save for the "pre-Columbian" marker - before European colonization people lived in all parts of Australia, including the Pilbara, the Tanimi, and other desert regions, for tens of thousands of years.
Man, Californians have it rough.
This is because California has so much solar that it can’t use it all during the day:
https://www.gridstatus.io/charts/curtailment?iso=caiso
From here on out, batteries are where it’s at. Overprovisioning solar helps, but the demand isn’t there and they aren’t going to pay much for it. (More utility-scale batteries would increase demand for solar somewhat, for charging them.)
Meanwhile, California needs to maintain and improve the electrical grid to lower the risk of wildfires, but more solar in the wrong places doesn’t help much with that.
Batteries are just an extension of the thinking that PV or Wind are 'cheap'. There is slight U shape in the price where an initial fraction lowers the cost, but then it just additional cost overhead. Cost shifting some of the excess solar into the evening to reduce the peak load there is fine, but then your still paying for a pile of excess backup capacity to sit around idle for those days when the sun doesn't shine, and adding more batteries beyond a certain point is the same. They just sit around idle most of the time adding to the cost. I've posted here napkin math for how much a W of solar or reliable PV actually costs and been down voted but the math is easy when you stop believing that a W from PV/Wind is the same as a W from your local Gas/Coal/Hydro/Nuke plant.
All those gas plants and batteries sitting around idle soon start dominating the cost structure because the price of their produced watts starts to go exponential.
> All those gas plants and batteries sitting around idle soon start dominating the cost structure because the price of their produced watts starts to go exponential.
When they're barely used, price per watt stops mattering. It's just a fixed cost.
If the fixed cost of an idle gas plant dominates, that's a good thing. An idle gas plant doesn't cost that much, so if the final power price is that plus 50% I'm pretty happy.
If batteries are expensive for long rare gaps then don't use batteries for those gaps. Easy.
PG&E is passing the cost of wildfire upgrades to customers. I'm not sure if they're hitting risky areas harder than low-risk areas, but my bill makes it look like I'm subsidizing people's cabins.
I'm sitting here in Texas paying apg&e an average rate last month of .141. And I thought that was high because a while back it was .11. And its probably mostly all renewable energy since we have windmills as far as the eye can see all around us and wind that never seems to stop.
You can disconnect from the grid but just like having a lawyer on retainer cost something so does having the power company on retainer.
It's why cloud servers cost so much more than your own on-prem solution, and on-demand offices more than your own.
And if you want an engineer on call it's gonna cost you. If you work in software, think about it, how much would you charge for a job where they could call you anytime and expect you to start work.
You want to connect to a grid then you need to pay a certain percentage for upkeep regardless of the amount of electricity you use.
"The entire system is a scam, and every politician involved is a corrupt."
What an immature over simplification that means nothing. none of the examples you provided are an example of corruption
In Arizona, the power company also charges for a solar tie in. If I remember the wording correctly, it’s required if any electricity is generated on premises. So if I have a solar powered Air Conditioning unit with grid backup for the evening, I’d need to pay the tie in. That’s true, even if it has NO grid backup. Solar powered pool pump - pay the solar grid fee. Solar powered Gnome garden light? The way I read it, I’d have to pay the fee. I want to do a ton of solar projects without actually tying into the grid, but am concerned that 10 years from now, some overly enthusiastic intern is going to search Google maps for solar installs and check to see if those owners are paying the tie in fee. That’s when I’d get stuck with a retroactive back charge for the past 10 years and probably some fine. So, when a monopoly utility gets to dictate the terms of how you use your property, it’s not an immature over simplification. In AZ the power company also provides the water for the farmers. The board votes are allocated based upon acreage, which is of course dominated by the farmers. What do the farmers want? Cheap water. So they’re incentivized to ensure there are no disruption to their electricity generating capital investments, otherwise water rates would need to go up to cover those fixed costs. So, is that corrupt? Sure seems rigged in favor of those “poor” farmers who own literal square miles of land at $200k/acre here in metropolitan Phoenix. At what point would you consider it corruption?
It's an immature simplification to claim all politicians and the system are corrupt because fees are required.
The fees should be the same regardless of solar tie in or not, as it’s a grid cost (physical cables etc) And then the power companies should charge a price per kWh for power they deliver. Instead they only charge solar customers, causing an artificially high barrier to exit. They can only do this because they have monopoly power.
Because computers are so predictable and rule-driven, programmers tend to overlook that the real world is very much adversarial and unpredictable. The "normal" thing to do here is to simply play with your small solar projects and not pay the fee, because the chance that you'll ever get charged the solar tie-in fee for a solar-powered garden light is basically zero. It's not precisely zero, but it's comparable to things like a drunk driver crashing into your house and killing you - one of those little tiny risks you just have to ignore because dealing with the risk costs more than the expectation cost of the risk.
Consider that they have a finite number of people and it costs more for them to go around inspecting everyone's garden lights than their expected revenue from that, so they won't.
Also, real-world risk and reward are dynamic. When the Deutschlandticket came out in Germany, almost everyone in Berlin bought one, so now they very rarely check tickets on trains - the expected gain is near-zero because almost everyone has a ticket for almost every train now. But if people start exploiting that by riding without a ticket, the gain will go up and after a time lag, they'll notice and start checking tickets more often.
Target, the store, is known to not arrest shoplifters until they exceed the felony threshold, at which time they arrest and prosecute the shoplifters.
If a solar tie in fee is $100/month, and a “customer” is using their garden lights for 1 year, it’s only $1200 to find them and issue a fine (assuming the fine is simply equal to the avoided tie in fees). Probably not worth it for the power company. But… after 10 years, the tie in fees would be $12k - certainly profitable for an intern to do some Google image searches, if they can find just 100 violators, that’s $1.2M. In 10 years, it’s not going to be an intern doing this, it’s going to be some AI agent tasked with optimizing revenue generation, and their costs approach zero.
Failing to fulfil a contract, even assuming they can make such an argument, is not a crime.
So separate the interconnect fee from the energy unit price.
The only way this might end is few rebellious folks with large enough properties will start going totally off grid. It does not look unrealistic tbh but a lot depends on how tariffs and Solar installation costs in US evolve (expectation is for them to be a lot lower but not happening due to installation red tape and other reasons).
If I was in such a situation where I lived in a Sunny enough place and had my property of such a size I would rather trade 95% uptime for being totally off grid and have some sort of emergency system for the 5% when it may not work.
I am actually surprised that the ultra libertarian and independent folks of Southern USA have not yet realised that they can get truly independent by making their own energy and powering their own vehicle
> PG&E wants to charge solar power users $80+/month just for the privilege of connecting to the grid
Sounds low to me. What would the payment be on a multi-day (week?) capacity battery for your power draw if you financed it over it's useful lifetime?
Relatively wealthy homeowners using the grid as a subsidized battery are going to actually have to pay a proper amount for the privilege or the grid simply breaks.
That said, I am all for people being able to disconnect entirely from the grid if they so choose. But this means literally cutting the wires to your home. I don't agree with places that effectively outlaw this.
But if you want to be grid-tied, then you need to be paying for its upkeep and the amount of "idle" power generation on standby 24x7 in case you end up needing it with zero notice due to the sun not shining or your equipment failing. The only thing you should be saving money on is fuel costs, which is a fraction of the total price per kWh.
Backup power is expensive. The grid being so reliable for so long has made everyone forget this fact it seems.
Backup power isn't expensive. Just don't use a battery for it, use a generator a generator. You can get one cheaply for a thousand bucks that should last you 20 years. I would expect the power company to have some better economies of scale.
Why would an ideal world have electricity become so expensive that individuals have to construct their own power stations? I have better things to do with my time. I don’t want a society where we are designing incentives such that individuals to have to build and maintain all their own infrastructure.
An ideal world doesn't look like land owners building moats.
I work in energy/home automation. I'm burnt out.
What's the target market of your business? I'm doing a DIY solar setup, plus a bunch of liberty-respecting automation, and often lament that there aren't better ways to make such things serviceable by contractors (when I'm gone, etc). It feels like every commercial offering I've seen is for extremely rich people's "dream houses", deploying expensive niche-commercial solutions in a very top-down manner (lots of homeruns of narrow-purpose cables to multiple racks in a centralized control room, etc).
> What's the target market of your business?
> It feels like every commercial offering I've seen is for extremely rich people's "dream houses"
You nailed it! I don't want to say much more because I do enjoy my scant little paycheck to build the moat SAAS
We don't live in an ideal world though but in a world run by the incentives of the capital/asset owning class.
> In an ideal world this should incentivise...
> An ideal world...
> We don't live in an ideal world though...
Yes. That was thoroughly established in the original comment and my reply. Have you come to look for an argument? Or to show off how pragmatic you are? What's your point besides "shit sucks?" If that's your point, I'm glad to commiserate. Shit sucks.
>Have you come to look for an argument?
Nope I just gave my opinion, but judging from your spiteful reply it's clearly you looking for an argument but I won't bite.
Man that's some environmentalist centralist government planner thinking: mess up your energy policy so badly that prices rise like crazy and it starts making sense for people to switch to way more expensive ways to convert energy.
Is this supposed to be positive?
Its only more expensive in US, because of the government.
An ideal world the same companies who are heavily benefiting from subsidizing the American people would pay the lion share of this and then some.
Instead, they get to offshore jobs or bring in H1Bs to further their bottom line.
I looked at that, then the conservatives decided to subsidise electricity consumption to great acclaim, and that threw off the ROI and I bought an oil boiler and decided to not bother with rooftop solar as the time for return more than doubled. Thanks Boris, Yu confirmed that the market would be manipulated.
Related:
Big Tech's A.I. Data Centers Are Driving Up Electricity Bills for Everyone
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44905595
The U.S. grid is so weak, the AI race may be over
For what it's worth adjusted for inflation, electricity prices have dropped over the last 30 years. We're now seeing a reversal of that trend. To be seen the magnitude and duration of that trend.
Electricity Prices Adjusted for Inflation https://share.google/dhmpNiMkGIpXa7bwu
How is the consumption fees moving compared to grid fees? In Sweden, grid fees has increased significant, while consumption fees is actually one of the lowest on a 5 year history.
Grid fees is what pays for grid stability and transmission, which has increased in complexity and demand in direct relation to how much variability that wind and solar create in the grid.
Grid fees are indeed rising faster in many regions as they reflect the true infrastructure costs of managing variable renewable integration, peak demand from data centers, and decades of deferred grid maintenance.
In California our rate in 2019 with PG&E was $0.20/kWh - in 2025 it’s $0.38/kWh. CA keeps giving them the ability to raise prices and under deliver
Just as a comparison, here in Montréal I pay $0.051USD/kWh and we're at 99.2% renewables. Large customers pay even less.
ah, Quebec. So much energy but nobody can buy it!
Ontario can’t..
New England wants it but keeps hitting NIMBYism..
NY wants it but needs new infrastructure
New England desperately needs more power lines and natural gas pipelines. Electric prices have doubled in NE due to rising natural gas prices and power plants being mostly NG. The existing pipelines are fully booked so extra has to come via ship (compressed natural gas). They bid on the global market against other rich buyers like Germany who were scrambling after the war began.
Weird that such obvious solutions not being considered. Quebec probably would have had even been a great pumped storage site powering entire New England and Eastern Canada, but the incentives to think big are not aligned it seems.
In my opinion, the best thing to do would be for Quebec to start being a data center world hub. They have enough energy to power all the world’s data centers, and they would essentially be exporting their energy by way of offseting demand elsewhere.
Probably easier at this point to just run an underwater HVDC cable from Quebec down the US eastern seaboard and let anyone hook up who is willing to pay into the consortium.
Wow that’s half the price of what we pay here in BC.
That's more than double what we pay in the PNW
That's also likely the cost from a few rate hikes ago.
https://www.pge.com/content/dam/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/...
Wow, their "off peak" prices are literally 10x what we pay up here for off-peak.
>Earlier this year, the utility that serves both Thomas and Salvi, Florida Power & Light, applied for a rate increase that would have boosted bills for a typical South Florida resident by about 13% over the next four years.
That is quite a bit less than inflation over the past four years.
Florida rates average 14.98 ¢/kWh and FPL's average rates are 12.12¢/kWh, both below the US average of 17.47 ¢/kWh.
I cut my power bill significantly by moving 70 miles from the ERCOT region to the MISO region. This wasn't the reason for the move, but it was a happy side effect.
MISO/Entergy has some of the cheapest power out of all the US regions [0]. The heavy, fully-amortized coal mix combined with the Mississippi River makes for a hell of a combo. Barges can deliver fuel at a 2-3x lower cost than rail per ton-mile.
[0] https://www.entergytexas.com/wp-content/uploads/eti_rs.pdf
Inflation climbing more than twice as fast as (official) inflation.
Direct link to the source material: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm
TL;DR - For July 2024 to July 2025, the inflation rate for "all items" was 2.7% while the rate for "electricity" was 5.5%.
I’m in south England, cost here is 24.05p/kWh plus standing charge 41.67p/day
A time and location break down of that first price. https://www.octopriceuk.app/tracker
Knowing full well how annoying it may be to ask this question in this thread...wouldn't rising electricity prices generally create upward pressure on the price of Bitcoin due to mining/supply dynamics?
We have been in aggressive, irrational, denial of alternative energy for my entire life but denying something doesn't make it not true. It is beyond obvious that wind, solar and battery technology are, even now, just starting to show their eventual potential and even at their current levels are far better solutions in many if not most cases than fossil fuel based options at industrial energy production (and many other uses too). We are on a hockey puck graph for all of them because they are inevitable and vastly better. The only thing our head in the sand push against these technologies is doing is ensuring that we will be decades behind China and the rest of the world in our ability to provide cheap energy to industry and emerging opportunities. You want manufacturing in the US? Create cheap energy sources. You say 'the sun only shines half the day' then build your factories to take advantage of peak availability. China knows this. They are putting so much solar into their grid that they will clearly get to a point where they have a glut of energy that will only go to one purpose, building amazing things for practically free. Meanwhile the US will keep saying 'See! This stuff doesn't work' as it actively sabotages itself just to prove the point.
A hockey puck graph? So ... circular?
The problem is that in the west green energy became a religion while in China it was just a practical solution when it made sense. They didn't have a problem to build a coal based facility or a sun based facility, depends on the needs and cost. Now that green energy makes more sense, naturally they ustilise more of it. In the west though it was all about doom's day predictions, culture wars and cancelations. So it all became a religion war rather than a mere technical consideration.
Why is that "the problem"? Religions are quite popular and successful in the West
The wealthy conservatives I know have (government-subsidized) solar installed on their second homes and cabins. They install it the second it makes financial sense.
This comment is golden: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39487714
Saving a click:
More people need to realize that utilities are not at all like normal businesses, so to spell it out in more detail for those that don't know:
Normal businesses make more money when they cut costs. Utilities (typically) get to charge a fixed upsell percentage and so they make more money when they increase their costs.
And that’s exactly what the ACA did to health insurance too with its “profit percentage caps”. Your insurer can only make more money if the price of healthcare goes up. And if they are predominantly passing the cost on to you, they pretty much want that to happen.
They got around that rule by buying out pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), hospitals, doctor's offices, and pharmacies. While the health insurance side of UnitedHealthCare is capped at 20% or 15% overhead, they can realize their earnings by marking up the price of drugs through their pharmacy subsidiary OptumRx. They steer customers toward OptumRx by structuring their health insurance to favor that pharmacy.
CVS bought Aetna [health insurance]. CVS also owns CVS Caremark a PBM. If your employer picked Aetna as your health insurance you must fill your meds at a CVS.
That must be great for pharmaceutical companies/doctors/hospitals/pharmacists since they can just arbitrarily increase prices and charge whatever they want and the managed care organization will pay it.
And MCO’s are incentivized to approve all claims, so doctors and patients won’t complain about denied coverage.
Obamacare/ACA has this too. The "Medical Loss Ratio" or "80/20" rule says that 80% of premiums have to be paid as claims. There's no downward pressure on claims payments because they raise rates and take 20% of a bigger number.
Customers switching between managed care organizations (MCOs) is the downward pressure. Theoretically, there are enough customers for multiple MCOs to choose from, although, the large amounts of people locked up in employer and government subsidized plans prevents this in smaller states.
UNH can’t charge too much more than Elevance/CVS/Cigna/Humama/Centene/Molina/etc.
That cannot happen with a utility like electricity.
You can’t change insurers without changing jobs. The “private market” doesn’t exist because there’s no way to access the premium your employer pays for you to take it somewhere else, and even if you could you have to wait for open enrollment. No such window exists for cost increases in health plans.
You can go to healthcare.gov and pick the same plans, many millions of people do it and price shop every year.
You can tell your employer you don’t want to pay for the employer subsidized plan, but then you lose access to the employer subsidy and ability to pay premiums with pre tax income.
They are not the same plans. Most employer plans are not available to the individual market. The marketplace plans often have vastly reduced networks, higher premiums, higher deductibles, etc.
Most are, as ACA compliant plans have metal levels that are based on the expected annual costs that the plan covers.
A silver plan an employer subsidizes is similar to a silver plan from healthcare.gov (expect plan to pay 70% and insured to pay 30%).
But that means nothing if you can't find a doctor -- these plans have paltry networks.
They are better than nothing if you qualify for a subsidy, but if you don't and you live in a HCOL area (which the subsidies are not adjusted for) you are pretty much screwed.
They sell the same networks in my experience (west and northeast coast).
The MCOs are not carving out different networks for specific employers. You buy a bronze PPO from United Health directly, or your employer does, it’s going to be all the same providers. If you get gold, then the deductibles/copay will be less.
The networks used to be different when HMOs were in vogue, but if your employer is only giving you an HMO option, you need to find a different employer. PPOs are the only sensible option (except maybe Kaiser on the west coast, but even they sell PPOs, just costs more to see a non Kaiser provider).
This was not my experience on the NY exchange but that was several years ago at this point. So I guess it's possible that things improved.
Paying 25K a year in health insurance premiums instead of 2.5K is not a realistic choice for most people. That employer subsidy is a massive difference.
My employer subsidizes my plan to the tune of 2/3 of the list price. Are you seriously suggesting I should pay 3x as much so I can shop around? This is by law too that they have to offer insurance.
I think that's the idea with deregulated electricity. Where I live (Maryland USA) I can pick who generates my electricity. I have no choice in who delivers it and that is still regulated.
I found that in practice the non-default options do not wind up being any cheaper so after trying it for a few years I switched back to the default option, where the price is not regulated but is set through a prescribed auction process.
I suppose the deregulation might still put downward pressure on prices in theory.
I don’t know why people delete rules on fairness (laws) and then expect things to become more fair.
Electricity transmission at the minimum should be owned wholly by the public to remove profit incentive.
There’s your downward pressure—no incentive to jack up costs.
Until then, providing electricity to people will be a profit generating activity.
> Electricity transmission at the minimum should be owned wholly by the public to remove profit incentive.
My provider is a coop and my rates are lower than the publicly held providers in this region. So you seem to be correct.
The market for customers who freely move is very small, as most get their insurance through their employer. Many large companies self fund their own health insurance offerings and just have third party companies administer it.
Everyone else gets stuck with the awful mess of their employer choosing their insurer, switching not more than once a year.
The point is the managed care market is not structurally similar to a utility company. It is only tax rules that disincentivize people from shopping for managed care.
Whereas multiple utilities are disincentivized due to the cost of moving earth and labor to get you the utility.
Also, I like how the trope is managed care organizations wield unlimited power and make enormous sums of money and have laws that help them benefit over everyone else, but their profit margins and stock returns are abysmal.
The employers switch between providers and administrators and negotiate on behalf of the employees on renewals (tweaking plans, threatening to move.) The employers are incentivized because they pay for some of the premiums and to keep employees happy.
Everyone already knows they’re not normal businesses when the state grants them a monopoly.
It's good for the price of things to increase when demand increases. We don't want outages instead of price increases, and we don't want costs to increase independent of demand.
It's good when you are talking about tulips or ice cream or something. Not necessities like electricity/water/food etc.
An effective price signal is all the more essential for necessities. The problem in my state of Ohio is that the corrupt politicians have been bought off by the utilities that enjoy a state-sanctioned monopoly and alow them to raise rates with abandon.
It's good for all things, except highly regulated monopolies like electricity, trash, and water.
> trash
I have to pay for trash removal in my town and I have a variety of choices. And while I pay the town for water, many people have wells. And I have my own septic system. So, while electricity is mostly regulated, many other utilities are on a house by house basis.
You are lucky to have those options, which I do not.
> It's good for all things, except ...
Humans and absolutes tend to be a pretty bad combo.
It is my experience that no system is good for all things. While some systems trend better than others, they are only good until they are not - and there will always be a 'not'.
Similarly, every 'not' is different. When we get there we're wise to consider it with experience + evidence and a willingness to do what those indicate.
You would prefer the price of electricity be held constant until the day the monopoly rage quits? That day, no one can get power for any price.
I would prefer an knowledgeable, effective and non-corrupted PSC regulate the utility in a manner that keeps the utility viable, so it can serve customers first and shareholders last.
The day the monopoly rage quits, use the government's goon squads to take over the infrastructure.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. I pay more for water because demand is decreasing but the water company's fixed costs continue to grow.
At some point, the system needs to ask: who should pay for all this demand growth? Right now, it sure isn't the ones profiting from it.
The duck curve tells us prices are lower at noon due to tons of new solar, but what about the rate of price change?
Are electricity prices at noon climbing faster, or less fast, than prices at 6pm?
My rates off-peak have increased faster than the on-peak rates, presumably because the on-peak rates were already sky high.
In the last couple years peak has gone from ~0.36 to ~0.56, while off-peak went from ~0.12 to ~0.27.
I'm sure no one on HN is gonna blame AI for it
Remember, the hidden cost for solar is all the capital upgrades on the grid required to manage it.
This is a problem in many countries. A lot of it is attributable to misguided investments in renewables. I have solar, so I'm hardly an opponent, but the grid-scale investments have often been misguided.
Energy is civilization, from muscle power through oxen, water wheels, steam, all the way to nuclear. Cheaper energy raises living standards. The reverse is also true.
No wonder if everyone and their dog is building data centers for “AI”.
We're living In the Green Energy revolution. Solar power and wind power is literally free energy.
Did these guys not get the memo?
The trouble with sarcasm is that it's hard to discern the point you actually wanted to make.
Presuming you had one.
Because of LLMs, right?
That’s the new enemy.
NPR? I thought Trump shut them down.
the price of electricity only goes up, despite what techno optimists tell you: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000072610
i'm curious why? like truly curious. libertarians would probably say "regulations" and anti-capitalists would probably say "capitalism" etc. you would think with solar costs going down that this trend would be different. market dogma would say that the demand went up? thinking out loud, somebody plz ELI5
capitalism.
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all the problems come back to one thing: governments.
Corruption*
There is a pending energy affordability crisis. There is no appetite to tell AI data centers no, the only solution is adding increasingly expensive MW to the grid. The cost of those extremely expensive MW will not be picked up by the big tech players alone. We will all subsidize them. We've spent the last 50 years hiding our head in the sand and avoiding infrastructure spending and now that the chickens have come home to roost we will spend the declining years of empire squeezing as much blood out of our peasants as we can.
good thing we all got con'd into buying electric stovetops a few years ago :)
An Energy Star certified electric range will consume around 200 kWh per year. Even at California-level rates it’d be less than $10 a month to power it.
And induction, which of course is electric as well, would be cheaper still.
That cheaper natural gas is extracting a price in terms of health for you and your family: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-health-risks-...
The furnace or heat pump is a much larger energy consumer than the stove. Complaining about gas stove bans is just a distraction from the much larger prize of heating fuel demand. People can see and feel their stove. They don't think about their furnace much except when they get their natural gas bill or it stops working. Gas utilities are afraid of a death spiral of people switching to all electric appliances, infrastructure costs being spread over a smaller customer base, which incentivizes more people to switch.
I'm beyond ok with this! Let backpressure into the market! It's the ultimate incentive for promoting energy efficiency.
> I'm beyond ok with this! Let backpressure into the market!
The article brought up some downstream effects such as seniors choosing between paying for power or their meds.
When we approve an outcome without addressing the consequences, we are effectively rubberstamping those consequences. I believe this doesn't serve us well.
They could also move to a place where they don't need 24x7 air conditioning running 10 months a year.
If someone is having to choose between power and medication, how could they get the money to move to this place?? They won't. Most folks aren't really that mobile and being poor makes this more likely.
I'll also note that I live in such a place. Heck, I don't have air conditioning at all. But if I don't have heat in the winter, I'll die. It's cold out. Not many place have the luxury of not needing heating nor cooling - and even when some folks can go without, not all buildings are fit for that purpose. 2 windows on one side of an apartment doesn't make for good ventilation.
> how could they get the money to move to this place
Maybe we give it to them? They're very likely on subsidized income anyway, it's a one time cost and drop in the bucket to move them to someplace more affordable.
Have you ever met a senior? For most people, the world shrinks as they age: it’s harder to learn new routines, figure out how to do things, etc. just popping them out of a place where they have family, services, and routines into an entirely new place is a recipe for disaster.
Well, let them swelter or go without their meds then? If they have so much family and support around, why are they struggling to pay for the AC?
> If they have so much family and support around
I think you're inventing stuff to say. The article said:
"There's a lot of seniors down here that are living
check to check.
They can barely afford prescriptions such as myself,"
Dozens of millions of Americans are poor because they're poor. People work hard with what they have and for some it works out well and for some it doesn't. That's reality.
> Maybe we give it to them?
Established funding sources tend to have long lines of applicants.
Past that, if it's public funds, the rising political force is fiercely opposed to this - mostly for ideological reasons that are disconnected from actual outcomes.
Americans generally pay more for heating than cooling so moving to warmer climates helps on that axis. There might be a sweet spot before you get to the warmest place in the country but it probably still involves air con.
Not that my parents are in this situation, but they’ve lived in the same state for 80 years and the same house for 55. I don’t know if they’d be able to handle a move.
Like San Francisco which is so affordable.
…and who pays the upfront moving costs?
If that's the case, lets see a study on that! How often does this happen?
Our rates went up but now they are offering free nights. Cost of battery tech has dropped, so now I am powering my house with batteries during the day and charge them at night. The downside is vendors come and go, so the battery you buy today may not be the same offered tomorrow.
Good news! The current administration also wants to put an end to the Energy Star program.
Actually, good news. Basically, everything now is marked ES, no discrimination
The standards get more strict all the time. The reason everything has an Energy Star label is because consumers are going to prefer the appliance that meets it.
From the Energy Star website, savings since 2020:
- Electricity: 520 billion kilowatt-hours
- Energy costs: $42 billion
- GHG emissions: 400 million metric tons
> Centralizing a bit of extra up front engineering work
What engineering was centralised? Isn't it just a label?
Sloppy wording on my part. Just that the firms designing equipment could put in the effort to meet efficiency guidelines. To consumers, it is just a label on the product, but I am sure the official testing/validation requirements are some amount of work.
Ah okay. Yes - I agree that each individual firm had to do this work, and should get credit for the progress they've enabled.
But if all of products have this label - what is the point?
That was not the point. I read somewhere that more than 90% of all appliances sold had ES label. Differentiation power of label and program is gone.
I thought we were supposed to be replacing natural gas appliances with electric ones, but it's become ruinously expensive to do so. Not only are they more expensive to operate due to high electricity rates, the panel upgrades for higher power draw are outrageous.
> Not only are they more expensive to operate due to high electricity rates,
Most electric appliances are much cheaper to operate, even in places with expensive electricity like MA and CA. This is especially true for appliances like heat pumps due to their >100% "efficiency", and if you are somewhere with cheap clean electricity (Pacific Northwest) they are a no-brainer.
> the panel upgrades for higher power draw are outrageous.
With smart splitters and some planning, panel upgrades can often be avoided:
https://homes.rewiringamerica.org/articles/electrical-panel/...
I suspect that GP meant "service upgrades" are expensive (e.g. 100A to 200A from the street).
Panel upgrades are just the most visible, but not individually expensive, part.
> I suspect that GP meant "service upgrades" are expensive (e.g. 100A to 200A from the street).
I understood that, but my point is that smart panel and smart circuit splitters upgrades can eliminate the need for a service drop upgrade.
Most electric appliances are much cheaper to operate, even in places with expensive electricity like MA and CA.
I suppose their solution will be to greatly increase the price of gas.
> Nope. I'm in PG&E territory. Electricity is too expensive and natural gas is too cheap.
Yes, the electricity rates in the IOU territories (PGE, SCE, SDGE) are horribly high.
But in publicly owned LADWP or SMUD, the average rate is around $.22/kWh, depending on usage patterns. Not Pacific Northwest cheap, but definitely better than PGE.
Yes, muni power is significantly cheaper. Unfortunately it's in the minority. PG&E is the dominant player in most of California. In the Bay Area only Alameda and Santa Clara (cities) have muni power. PG&E's astroturfed (hi Greg Dewar!) and lobbied hard against it each time it comes up.
Are you familiar with the Flour War? I suggest reading up on the history of that and what happens when you try to let the invisible hand control things considered essential.
We have to ask ourself "what's more important? Energy or the environment?" And as for me, I choose the latter. Some of you may have extraordinary bills but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
The problem is, as my wife says, accounting is a very creative field. Depending on how you calculate it, the cost of renewable energy can vary by a factor of ten. I suppose that if it were profitable, big businesses would have a monopoly on green energy and installed solar panels and batteries instead of offering them to homeowners.
This is great news. If costs climb rapidly, homeowners will switch to solar + battery + ( EV, heat pump water heater, induction stove) and disconnect from grid. Grid disconnects will cause costs to rise even more, a virtuous cycle.
> This is great news. If costs climb rapidly, homeowners will switch to […]
And what about renters (who are, in the US, often the poorer)?
Electricity is an input to industrial and commercial operations, so if companies see their costs rise, they will probably raise prices to maintain margin: this will feed into higher prices everywhere (all goods and services).
They would be forced to pay even higher energy costs if they had to also compete with all these homes which now relies less on the grid.
> And what about renters (who are, in the US, often the poorer)?
Then the apartment owners have another revenue stream, build a mini-grid and offer electricity cheaper than the grid. They already do many add-on services for additional revenue: garages, trash pickup, etc.
> Electricity is an input to industrial and commercial operations, so if companies see their costs rise, they will probably raise prices to maintain margin: this will feed into higher prices everywhere (all goods and services).
All production will continue to move to China, which has built and continues to build vast amounts of cheap electricity and infrastructure.
Wouldn't it be more efficient to centralize the generation of electricity and take advantage of economies of scale?
Solar generation has little economies of scale: PV arrays scale linearly, unlike turbines and electromechanical generators. Batteries also scale basically linearly; maybe you can have a better deal if you buy a truly massive amount of batteries, but I'm not certain it's so dramatic.
Transmission costs seem to dominate the price structure; I currently pay a generating company about $0.1 / kWh, and pay Con Ed $0.25 / kWh for transmission of that energy. And this is in dense New York City; in suburbia or countryside the transmission lines have to be much longer.
Centralized generation makes sense when the efficiency scales wildly non-linearly with size, like it does with nuclear reactors.
Does solar scale linearly when you have to get onto roofs to install it? And when each roof is available for installation at different times, so only small crews can do it piecemeal?
It certainly complicates things a bit, but the roofs are independent, so several small teams can independently work in parallel. So yes, it's sort of linear.
Building a large solar installation may scale a bit sub-linearly, if you can e.g. order things in bulk at better prices, and have some electric assemblies done at a factory, more efficiently.
Upgrading transmission infrastructure costs a lot of money (and bureaucracy). Especially in Oregon and northern California where the lines probably should be buried to stop risking wildfires. I’m not sure which path is actually more cost effective for solar+battery.
Centralized generation is the riskiest for any economy. The targets to bomb (or local drones) are very well known and super easy to disrupt the entire economy. Solar on every roof is the most resilient and cheapest form of energy.
Centralization leads to economies of lobbying scale, well connected super rich can oil the machinery to suit their purpose, maximize wealth extraction from everyone, resulting in monopolies/oligopolies, laws to remove competition, laws to maximize profit (with pretenses of protecting people).
Warren Buffett does not own utilities out of the goodness of his heart, they are such spigots of money with zero competition.
Return on equity for utilities is relatively low due to capital intensity. They make a lot of money in absolute terms because 5% of a huge revenue figure is billions.
It's not just the generation; it's also the maintenance. If you own your own rooftop panels and a few go out, it's relatively expensive to bring someone out to replace them...if a mechanically and electrically equivalent replacement exists in 5 years. At utility scale, you're always replacing panels, so you have dedicated staff doing it.
Climbing roofs is in the top 10 deadliest jobs in America. It’s cheaper to drive out into a field and work on ground level equipment than to climb a height.
solar panels last 25-40 years. mechanically equivalent means "sits on a roof". electrically equivalent just means "connects to a wire".
Manufacturing defects happen, trees fall, and panels get dusty. They don't merely "sit on a roof." They're anchored, the anchors have spacing and a form factor, and the anchors pierce the roof's waterproofness. They're not electrically equivalent if they output a different voltage range.
Others have replied saying why this may not be the case, but even if it is — you also need to balance efficiency with other values, such as independence and resiliency.
I would gladly trade a bit of efficiency to not be dependent on the grid or on providers who can jack up the price on a whim outside of my control.
You're talking about big capital upgrades that very few people will make in existing homes. I sure won't.
Capital upgrades don't require capital, only monthly installments. US has the most advance financial packaging infrastructure that can package anything into a monthly payment. It will be a straight up comparison between (electricity bill from grid + gas for 2 ICE cars + natural gas bill) vs (solar + 2 EVs + heat pump water heater + induction stove).
Also, most decisions are not financial but emotional (virtue signaling + status seeking + salesman's ability). Most poor people end up taking incredibly bad financial decisions because a salesman is able to sell. In Texas, if you can talk God/football/beer, and are not a complete idiot, you can sell anything.
The people who bought 100K+ Tesla's before 2024 were not going by finance, nor are the people buying Teslas in 2025. A trillion dollar company is born just out of virtue signaling.
And most of the monthly installments for things like solar are basically scams. The more you see the solar salesmen at your door or camped out in the front of Home Depot the scammier they tend to be. But it sounds like you might agree.
I did get induction to replace a propane cooktop recently but that's only because I had to get a new range after a fire and induction probably made more sense than it did a few years back.
Get a loan from your friendly credit union on better terms. It requires having a clue though, and being able to organize contractors, and / or do things yourself.
Sounds exhausting. My electrical bill is about $100/month. Doesn't sound like it's worth a major project to decrease. Your mileage may differ of course.
Mine was north of $500 last month :( It starts looking like a battery + a DIY PV array installation just to power the air conditioning alone would pay for itself in one summer.
Of course, it depends where you live. I don't even have AC and don't have electric heat in the winter. So aside from, possibly, new construction, spending a lot of effort/money on PV/batteries/etc. doesn't make a lot of sense.
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It will be $200 in few years. Could be 0.
It will absolutely not be zero once you consider costs, effort, future obligations, etc. But, by all means, do what makes sense for you.
It can be if you over-provision, but I agree, 0 isn’t the sweet spot, especially if you have bad credit.
That cycle leaves out those who do not have the large amounts of money required to make those capital investments. Indeed, it pushes them farther and farther behind.
That doesn't sound like "great news" to me unless you're a serious classist.
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Could the oil companies be funding the AI companies in an attempt to keep fossil fuel demand high and make renewables seem like they are not reducing oil demand? This could be cost effective for the oil companies since they don't have to build the generation infrastructure to power AI. Who are the private investors in AI?
If you do the math the projected electricity demand by data centers for 2030 means that electricity production in the USA would have to double compared to residential use! That is simply impossible using the current grid. Solar farms powering data centers requires less permitting and no grid connection which seems preferable and would allow data centers to be built in remote areas so the noise does not affect homes. Batteries would keep the data centers running at night. If AI demands so much power, let them build the generation capacity themselves.
Also the math for the 2030 projections of the number of computer chips needed for AI are ridiculous, we would need ten new foundries in the US which is just not going to happen. The numbers I'm seeing related to AI ramp-up just make no physical sense.
Electrification of transport and home heating already required a 2-3x increase in electricity supply. If your grid isn't planning for that until AI and still makes no mention of it in future plans then you should be asking questions.
Check out the graph of China's electrification.
https://preview.redd.it/china-is-electrifying-far-faster-tha...
Everyone in the US is not going to buy a new car and a new home heating system within the next five years, but longer term that may be true. EV's can be charged off-peak to level the load without requiring new grid infrastructure. So it would seem utilities should now scrap their current long term plans and plan to build out new grid infrastructure much faster for data centers? Some grid projects take 5-10 years just to get approved. There are still years long backlogs in building new power transformers as well.
The number of fabs required still seems excessive also. So overall the physical plants required for AI's projected trajectory do not seem possible, unless AI gets a lot more energy efficient and chips get much faster. Or those who want data centers build the power infrastructure themselves without competing with other electrifications.
Seems I'm not the only one thinking along these lines:
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/ai-is-power-hungry
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/what-happens-if-ai-hits-a...
Some of the comments there call out the lack of chip fabs and express a similar suspicion that this might be a ploy to increase fossil fuel demand.
One of my favorite things here in New York City is how Con Ed gets approval to pass infrastructure upgrade costs directly to consumers, but at the end of the financing period the asset is mysteriously owned by their board of directors, not the public who paid for it.
Point of information: it's not owned by the directors, it's owned by the investors, the shareholders, just like every other private company.
It's still a weird sanctioned monopoly. More places should get over their fear of public ownership.
Public ownership can be extremely detrimental, I think it is even worse than state ownership by a few margins. Especially for setting long term goals required for infrastructure. There are investors for that as well, but they are rare and an exception.
I evade working directly for publicly traded companies like hell or let myself be paid very, very generously. Most often your time will be limited in the first place. Better to be employed as a freelancer in that case.
My power company has the state guaranteeing a monopoly, effectively sets prices, sets safety standards, approves new construction, requires every home be connected to the grid, etc.
Throwing out the corporate management will probably save money simply because they're pointless middle men. They aren't making the decisions that truly matter.
I'm very confused. Public and state ownership are the exact same thing. Public ownership is not the same thing as being publicly traded.
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If a private company builds infrastructure with their profits, should it be owned by the customers "who paid for it"?
My local electricity infrastructure provider is a private company, with the twist that all residents within their area are also automatically shareholders.
They operate "for profit", but profits are distributed amongst shareholders in the form of reduced bills, ie last year we didn't get bills for electricity transport for december, and the year before that there were no bills from august through december.
The "for profit" part pays infrastructure upgrades, so some years we pay the normal prices if there is infrastructure work being done, which in the end benefits all shareholders, meaning me (and other users).
Do you live in Auckland?
It sounds similar to the system I encountered there. I don’t remember all the details, I was only renting for a year.
It didn’t sound like it was NZ wide.
I live in Texas and I also have this system
Why are we letting private companies own public infrastructure?
Politicians lack the will to push for public utilities. That requires asking voters to go along with the government taking on financing, planning, operations, customer service, and being the bad guys who raise prices. It's easier to point to companies as the bad guys who raised electric rates, likely sparked a wildfire, or are taking so long to fix an outage.
The problem is this is set up as a dichotomy. Either you have privately owned infrastructure (and then a private monopoly), or make the utility company a government entity which then becomes an unaccountable bureaucracy captured by public sector unions etc.
Whereas the better thing to do is have the government own the physical plant (utility poles and conduits etc.) and then hire private contractors -- large numbers of small entities, not small numbers of large entities -- to do all the actual work of operating and maintaining it.
Make each contracted role simple and fungible so that none of them are too big to fail and they're all in competition with each other.
You don't want a public monopoly. You don't want a private monopoly. But who says those are the only options?
In New York, the cheapest utilities by far are public utilities owned by municipal governments. Same in Massachusetts — I saved a fortune dropping some stuff in Holyoke.
Generation is pretty low intensity from an employee standpoint. I know you’re brainwashed to hate unions, but they have little to do with it.
Generation is the thing where you don't even need the government to own the infrastructure. Just don't prevent anyone who wants to from building a power plant and then have the grid buy electricity from whoever supplies it at the lowest price.
It's the transmission and distribution which are the "natural monopoly" -- the government should own the utility poles -- but that's also a thing where there is a non-trivial amount of labor involved for tree trimming and storm damage etc.
Cheapest to the consumer, maybe? What's the actual financial standing of said companies? Plenty of government-owned utilities require lots of propping to cover their losses.
The three I’m familiar with are cash cows. Electricity is regulated and the rates have to be supported by the business model.
The small operators are mostly vertically integrated in a small area, so they can deal with the capital buildouts and aren’t subject to as many swings in commodity cost. They often even own the utility rights of way, generating additional income and avoiding property taxes.
It takes alot of union workers and pensions to make up for the pay of one private CEO.
To add an anecdote my city has a publicly owned electric utility. Most of the surrounding metropolitan area is served by an investor owned utility. My city has noticeably fewer outages than nearby areas. Although that might be because this city has buried utilities and was built later but this trend of fewer outages includes the main drag that was built in the 1800s. The private utility has raised bills much faster than the public utility. Both utilities face the same underlying cost push factors of labor costs, materials, and rising wholesale prices. The private utility announced a record quadrupling of quarterly earnings to 1.2B (year over year).
The public utility employs linemen. They don’t contract out operations.
It's either owned by a private company, or public (owned by municipality or similar).
Government bureaucrats are among the hardest to fire, because they rate their own excellence.
Knowing this, there is probably a way to make things better…
Because our political system is rigged to allow the wealthy to make the rules.
Because public operation of infrastructure has often not gone well. And no matter who owns it, there is a cost of capital.
The interstate road system in the US is world class. Airports and ports are publicly owned, and seem to function very well in most cases. Education including the infrastructure and buildings is managed incredibly well in many jurisdictions. There are many, many examples of well run public infrastructure. We only notice the failures because 1. they are an easy punching bag 2. they are noteworthy because we expect them not to fail.
It is hardly a maxim that public operation of infrastructure is incompetent, and I would argue that "often" is not the right word.
Many airports and ports are privately owned in the US. Much more infrastructure is privately owned than you might realize, including water systems, sewage, roads, bridges, ports, railway, pipelines etc.
Agreed, and much of that private infrastructure is mismanaged as well.
The point I was making is that public or private management is not a determining factor in the competence of infrastructure management. That is the point from the GP that I was rebutting.
While it's hard to prove in any water tight way, folks who understand infrastructure management will tell you it is a determining factor all things considered (ie, cost included).
US education has been in decline since the 1970s.
This is common mythology but it's a bit more complicated than that if you look at the data. Student performance is highly correlated with their parent's socio-economic status – a trend going back roughly a century in studies – and our educational system includes a wider range of students differing in both SES and, starting around that same time period, mainstreaming of many disabilities which used to get kids excluded.
That means that when you're making comparisons to either the past or other countries now, you want to compare cohort-matched groups. If your area has a bunch of poor brown kids used to leave school for jobs in the 8th grade and are now going all the way through graduation, that looks like the schools are getting worse even though the school's educational practices haven't changed and the problem you really want to solve is poverty or social mobility. This is especially true for international comparisons if you have things like tests where the population in one country going in is highly selective but broader somewhere else – everyone's acting in good faith but you still have distortion due to sampling bias.
The situation is similar: if a kid with dyslexia, ADHD, etc. in the 1960s would have been pushed out but now they're included, if you're looking at the global average it looks like test scores have gone down but if you look at subgroups of the student population you'll see that the top performers are still doing well and what changed was that another group was added.
At my son's school and some of the schools I went to as a kid, the subgroup breakdowns on stats are really stark: the kids from stable, middle-class or better groups do fine but the children of immigrants who are still working on their English skills struggle – and the lesson I've drawn is that we should have more support available for them outside of regular classes because it's such a powerful amplifier for everything else.
This feels like Churchill's democracy quote applies:
"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time"
It has been said that public operation of infrastructure is the worst form of operation of infrastructure except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
It's gone fine. It's always fun to hear about the wonders of privatization where everyone conveniently ignores that the vast majority of private businesses fail miserably. Over 50 percent in five years. Mostly due to mismanagement of money, the thing they are supposed to be better at. The rate is even higher (80-90 percent) if we were to look at small businesses.
They do have better PR though.
https://chatgpt.com/share/68a37b87-6c30-8002-8a9a-76915e2e48...
We are all aware that public projects can fail. However, it does not logically follow that because some public projects fail, that all public projects fail, or even that most fail. Nor does it logically follow that because some private projects succeed, that all private projects will succeed.
Your LLM mentions two examples of failed public airports. Counterpoint: ATL is the worlds busiest airport by a few different metrics, and it is publicly owned and managed. So are most (maybe all?) of the rest of the worlds busiest airports. What does that mean?
By analogy: just because a person doubles down on a misinformed take using an LLM's output as evidence, that everything they think and know is false and misinformed by LLMs is not a foregone conclusion. It would be silly for me to think that someone that uses bad arguments once, or the same bad argument repeatedly in an online thread, is always going to be wrong.
You could do us all a service if you used your chatGPT account to learn about the basics of formal logic and sound arguments instead of spamming this thread with the same response from a machine that you asked for a biased output.
Folks aren't all aware, various folks asked for examples.
ATL was the airport involved in corruption no?
Use formal logic to show a single thing I've said in this thread is illogical. You either cannot read, or don't understand formal logic.
> Because public operation of infrastructure has often not gone well.
Kindly define "not well" compared to privately owned infrastructure.
All over Europe state utilities were privatized over the past 30 years or so. Has it been an improvement? Not really, things just got more complicated and more expensive. Rail especially is a disaster. Upgrading the electric and telecom grid is made more difficult because of all the (supposedly) competing utilities.
https://chatgpt.com/share/68a37b87-6c30-8002-8a9a-76915e2e48...
OK, that didn't really do a comparison. But here are the examples that are considered better run than corporate infrastructure:
Singapore MRT (Mass Rapid Transit)
Fully government-owned and operated through Temasek holdings. Known worldwide for punctuality, efficiency, affordability, and cleanliness. Consistently outperforms privatized systems like the UK railways in reliability and customer satisfaction.
Paris Métro & RATP (France)
State-owned, with fares subsidized for accessibility. High ridership, integration with buses and trams, and affordable tickets outperform privatized systems in cost to the public.
Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (USA)
The largest municipal utility in the U.S. Provides electricity and water at lower rates than surrounding private utilities (like PG&E), and is often more reliable due to public accountability.
Norway’s Energy Sector (Statkraft, state-owned hydropower)
Provides cheap, renewable electricity. Profits flow back to the public treasury instead of shareholders. Norway has among the lowest power costs in Europe.
Germany’s Municipal Waterworks
Almost all publicly owned; provide safe, affordable, and reliable water with strong reinvestment in infrastructure, outperforming privatized systems in the UK (like Thames Water, plagued by leaks and debt).
Singapore Changi Airport
State-owned and consistently ranked as the world’s best airport. Clean, efficient, profitable, and reinvests in expansion. Private-run airports often prioritize concessions and profits over passenger experience.
Dallas–Fort Worth Airport (USA)
A publicly owned joint venture between Dallas and Fort Worth. It is one of the busiest and best-managed airports in the world, consistently profitable and reinvesting in facilities.
ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation)
While not "utilities" per se, ISRO’s infrastructure (satellite launch facilities, tracking networks) is a prime example of state-run infrastructure outperforming expectations at extraordinary low cost.
Has launched satellites at a fraction of the budget of Western private and public space agencies, and even provides launch services internationally.
There are many more such examples. Public ownership tends to work best in natural monopolies (water, power grids, rail systems, airports, healthcare infrastructure), where competition doesn’t function well and the priority is universal service rather than profit.
When you include costs, "better run" takes on a whole new meaning.
But, more simply - no one is suggesting all public ownership is bad, or all private is good. There are situations where governments have just decided they aren't doing a good job running something (all things considered) and that the amount of money they'd get for selling it is a better option all things considered.
You can have competing operators bid for the contract to operate without owning.
Yup, there is a publicly listed company called "American Water Works" which has many such agreements with local governments for water/sewage infra.
Could you list some examples of where public infra hasn't "gone well"? Because from my own view of things it's the exact opposite, whenever anything became privatized that shouldn't have been (rail, water, electricity, public transportation, healthcare) it inevitably follows the same churn as all the other things getting enshittified continuously.
The national railway in the Netherlands is a great example of this. They've privatized but with gov't subsidies, yet there's less trains, less people getting moved by the remaining trains, ticket prices skyrocketing YoY, worse service, rail workers getting shafted and basically being forced to go on strike in order to improve conditions. They're (NS) a monopoly too and handle something like 95% of all rail traffic within the Netherlands.
I believe the UK is going through a similar issue, where their railways are now privatized and in turn it's lead to increasingly worse service despite there being plenty of competition in the market in the form of many rail companies.
This lolbert fantasy of the "free" market being good for literally everything, including critical public infrastructure is a complete farce.
https://chatgpt.com/share/68a37b87-6c30-8002-8a9a-76915e2e48...
The basic problem with the way you are thinking about it with respect to the national railway is that you don't seem to include cost to the government (ie, the people) to run it. Much infrastructure might appear to be "well run" by the government until you see the massive hole in the their budget. Sometimes the service has to get worse. When the government decides some piece of infrastructure must "pay for itself", they often sell it or hand over management to a private entity as a way to shift blame.
There are many private companies/PE firms etc who are competitively bidding to own these assets. It's not some license to print money, they are low return low risk assets.
Erh... if a public service is publically deficit financed (no debts incurred) and not for profit (lower priced) those are two positives, not negatives as your generated answer seems to suggest.
No, it's not positive. It's just a choice - do you want users of said infrastructure subsidized by non-users or not? Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes no.
The railway system in the Netherlands is not privatized. The structure is publicly owned but operated under a concession model where both state-owned and private companies may run services. There are some regional operators that are private companies, but by far the largest part, NS and Pro-rail, are wholly government owned.
I'm not in favor of privatizing a natural monopoly like railway infrastructure, but in the case of NS I'm not sure privatization would be worse than what we have now: "market friendly" salaries for management, and yearly losses go to the tax payer.
That's my mistaken read of the situation in NL then! I'd edit my comment to point this out but am unable to at this point unfortunately :(
Private vs public is just one factor. The UK's rail services improved hugely post-privatisation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of...
Classic British irony.
Municipal bonds are the cheapest capital available anywhere.
Yup, they are low cost. But not zero. The money is still owed, too. The bondholders are not going to just let the public take the asset back because people have been paying for the service all these years.
Yes, of course it should be. You point out of of theain flaws in our system. Those who actually produce things and pay for them never get any ownership. They remain disadvantaged dispite their contributions.
They pay for the thing they get. They exchanged money for product or service. Anyone can start a company and contribute the money required for that company.
> Anyone can start a company and contribute the money required for that company.
No, anyone can't. That's the point. If the money is siphoned out of the lower class, then they have no capital (or free time) to start a business. They're barely getting by. It's a positive feedback loop in both directions (up and down). Rich get rich, poor get poorer (in general).
If you are upset about 'rich get richer, poor get poorer', you should read up on quantitative easing and how it inflated assets if you're not familiar with the topic yet.
Anyone in the USA can. I've met people who started successful small businesses doing things like landscaping and pest control with basically zero capital or free time. They just went ahead and did it.
If you try hard enough you can always find an excuse for failure.
That is notremotely comparable. :D
If you try hard enough you can always find an excuse for oppression.
If you have a publicly supported monopoly you shouldn't have a private company.
They are given a de facto monopoly. It’s weird that a private company is building and owning public utilities, but if they’re going to be granted a monopoly, then it’s not unreasonable for that privilege to come at a price.
It does come at a price: they have to pay corporation tax.
You mean the one that every corp has to pay, regardless of monopoly status? Or something else?
I mean compared to a public utility.
It’s not paid for “with their profits”, it’s a passthru charge directly onto customers’ monthly bills.
Yes
Yes
Most of these things are really liabilities. You have to maintain these things.
Isn't it mandated that they do that by the state? The gas companies where I live work this way.
And good luck getting transparency on those asset transfers or executive benefits. It's all buried in regulatory filings that nobody reads except lawyers and lobbyists
Funny how the chef passes his costs on to me, but at the end of the day he owns the restaurant. What Injustice!
If people don't like paying a private entity for a goods or service, the solution is to make it yourself, not complain. Tons of cities, counties, and states do just that
Does the chef's menu and pricing get approved by a state regulator and prevent you from eating anything but that restaurant's food while they operate on land they don't own?
The place that your analogy falls is that electric companies are private companies operating legal electricity monopolies where much of the infrastructure in question is placed on right of ways across public and private land not controlled by the operator.
Sounds like you have a problem with the state, not the chef.
I have a problem with the weak analogy, mostly.
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>Does the chef's menu and pricing get approved by a state regulator and prevent you from eating anything but that restaurant's food while they operate on land they don't own?
You're dishonestly compressing a spectrum of regulation down into a binary to advance your point.
There's a spectrum of regulation from black market tamales to the power company. The restaurant is like 45% of the way there. There's a lot of things that they, their landlord, etc, etc, are all but forced to do in certain ways (because of the financial impossibility of proving that any other way is fine) that effectively set cost floors.
I'm sure you're well aware that many states pre-empt county or municipal efforts to develop public utilities like broadband internet or perservice.
funny how the largest most modern power utility and grid infrastructur ever built is owned by the citizens who built it, in China, AND they have some realy fancy privatly owned resteraunts.........almost everywhere
then there are things like the town of Lunenburg having it's own power company https://www.townoflunenburg.ca/electric-utility.html
The problem is, in the last few years NYC and NYS have mandated all kinds of green energy goals. One of the biggest one that is causing a fuck ton of concern and spending is "no more new gas cars after 2035". Well guess what that means! _infrastructure_ that someone has to pay for and the mandates are unfunded by the state. The city and state have also been pushing various schemes to ban decrease natural gas installations as well, resulting in _surprise_ more electric for heating and cooking.
The other problem we have is moronic NIMBY and environmentalist behavior that led to our only nuclear power plant shutting down and a second one never being allowed to go online at all. The entire Long Island region is still on the hook financially to pay for vetoing a previously approved and built nuclear power plant decades ago. This leads to NY to now depend on imported electricity from other states and Canada at increased rates. And it's only going to get more expensive as datacenters eat up cheap electricity from the same sources.