After looking at my utility bill, less than half of the cost is electricity and natgas; the rest is delivery charges -- that is, paying to maintain the power grid itself. Assuming the utility is breaking that down more or less honestly, reducing the cost of electricity here probably wouldn't decrease my utility bill as dramatically as one might guess. (And I live in California, where electricity prices are notoriously high.)
What doesn't make sense to me is why this delivery charge keeps going up? Is it just PG&E throwing a fit about having to modernize its lines so they don't cause fires anymore?
Ah, the good old pass-the-buck-to-my-future-self strategy that is leaving the US with trillions in infra repair bills to be paid by my (millennial) generation and younger.
Everything in California is explained by boomers voting themselves out of paying taxes. In this case the regulator never let them raise prices for maintenance so it's all coming due now.
(PG&E is basically nationalized already, they don't make their own decisions here.)
> Assuming the utility is breaking that down more or less honestly
That's a bit of an odd one, as the amount of electricity you consume has little direct effect on maintenance costs. Now, it might be in some sense "fair" to charge heavier consumers more, and there's a second order effect whereby if total demand exceeds some threshold, the grid must be upgraded to cope, but if that "delivery fee" scales with your consumption then you're definitely looking at some "creative" accounting.
I have had around 13 power outages this week. I live right in the middle of Silicon Valley. Most of the charges from PG&E are indeed the grid charges, the rest is supposedly a mandatory green energy. This is depressing.
Fellow SV resident (does Cupertino count?) and my eyes water when I look at my energy bill. Then I lose power for two days and learn that people REALLY dislike PG&E. And I thought National Grid was bad.
Let's put all our power lines up in the air, they said. It'll be fine, they said.
While other countries have stable and reliable power in the face of hurricanes and ice storms, our power is routinely knocked out by cars, trees, and basically any act of nature.
I love how expensive everything is for how behind we are from the entire rest of the world. Too bad the expenses keep me trapped and poor, unable to do anything about it—even just move to any other country.
I'm guessing much of that delivery cost is due to the additional energy transmission and storage infrastructure needed to incorporate intermittent energy from solar/wind.
Mind you, this could change if we get an economical way to generate hydrocarbon fuels from renewable electricity, so I'm certainly not pessimistic about solar/wind's long term prospects.
With articles like "Save North Dakota Oil and Gas!" I'm sceptical of that study.
Wind and solar were 30% of Great Britain's electricity last year. The National Grid is a private company, so their costs are clear, 3% of the average bill.
