Electricity is one of those things that should be run by the municipality. Their incentive wouldn’t be to maximize shareholder value, but to deliver a basic need reliably and at the lowest cost possible. At the very least, it needs to be run by a Public Benefit Corporation.
The minute you enter private enterprise into it, things go pear-shaped. A municipal power network wouldn’t have problems with solar or distributed neighborhood grids. It just means lower cost for them, so they would encourage it.
They would need to get economies of scale, though. So you can’t have it just be city-wide or county by county. It has to be statewide. That way you can spread out the risk and costs. It also means investing in rural wiring since it’s no longer a matter of ROI.
Same for gas, clean water, sewage, and broadband. This isn’t closet socialism. We currently do this for roads, freeways, state parks, postal service (sorta), and defense.
Here in Sacramento our power is provided by an independent public body run by a democratically elected board. Generally it’s very well-run and people here have virtually no complaints. We get energy with less fossil fuels for about half the price of PG&E. I have no idea why every community does not adopt this model.
We are being raped by PG&E. Now they get $24 just because we are connected to them. PG&E needs to be taken over.
Over the long term, Electricity will go down and gas will go up. You could put your thumb on the scale by directly subsidizing your bill if you get a heat pump. Rooftop solar helps here too
Got off residential gas in Australia a few years ago. Bills are $600/yr for power, were up to $1500 one year for power+gas. At $600/yr a residential battery investment of $7k isn’t worth it for my household. It won’t run the AC because I’ve got a multi-split system for the bedrooms. Had I known I’d’ve gotten individual units for the bedrooms so I could get on on the battery backup system but I’m not cashed up enough to go pulling out a fairly new multi-AC to replace it with a bunch of individuals for the bedrooms so that I can get AC when the summer heat takes out the power.
e: love the downvote.
I have been thinking of getting a battery, not sure how much it costs to get installed though - labour more than equipment. Could significantly reduce bills, but they are not super expensive in the first place.
$7k AUD was for a ~42kw FoxESS battery with a 10kw Inverter. I need another $2-3k of work done on the house power supply first. I’m having a lot of trouble finding a sparky to do the mains upgrade that I need.
I thought that there were heat pump mini splits? Maybe not yet in Australia
Aren’t they unable to do hot water, and pretty loud? Though I would have thought Australia would already have them for AC
There might be. Any of that stuff in Australia is very much “pay a licensed professional” to do the work, so it costs a fortune and companies defend their share in the market rather than embrace new tech.
Here in the US heat pumps are unreasonably expensive too… We already have AC, it’s the same damn thing but backwards! There was a government credit to lower the cost, but I’m guessing that mostly affected the sticker price (since it was X% of the cost up to some maximum I think) so the heat pump company can make more. Adoption is more challenging if a building has older central AC as well, since we use different refrigerants now (much better for environment), but they run at a different pressure, so you need to replace the coils and all refrigerant lines, which is expensive.
In much of California, it’s not the electric energy costs that are high, it’s the delivery/grid fees. Not that it matters as far as the electricity bill goes, but it’s worth noting.
On my recent bill I paid 16¢/kWh for on-peak electric generation and 49¢/kWh for electric delivery. (There’s a small baseline credit for delivery so it’s a little more complicated, but you get the idea.)
So if someone tries to tell you electricity is expensive because CA is a hippie state with lots of solar, I would be a little skeptical.
Yeah, a huge chunk of the California electric bill is paying for houses burned down after sparks from transmission started fires, and paying to power the risk of that happening again
In my location in Australia the cost of usage and cost of grid are separated.
I pay roughly 25c kw/h, and each day about $1 for infrastructure. ie whether I use 50kw or 1kw my cost to connect to the grid is the same.
This is for residential, but I presume it may be different for commercial and industrial connections.
Meanwhile I keep hearing the UK has the most expensive electricity anywhere, sometimes renewables are blamed. I am paying 24p/kWh and my heat pump uses very little energy to run.
Same goes for PHEVs. You face the choice of charging your car or running off gas and California is making it hard to choose to charge.
