Comment by dalyons
1 year ago
Hawaii, a remote island in the middle of the pacific, pays less than the 2024 pg&e prices for the bay area. PG&E are the worst.
1 year ago
Hawaii, a remote island in the middle of the pacific, pays less than the 2024 pg&e prices for the bay area. PG&E are the worst.
Oahu's average residential electricity costs $0.43/kWh[0]. My last PG&E bill shows an average cost of $0.35/kWh. Still outrageous considering the national average is less than half that, but I think your numbers are off.
Having said that, PG&E is the worst. Agreed.
[0] https://www.hawaiianelectric.com/billing-and-payment/rates-a...
What plan are you on? You likely are looking at old rates, they jumped almost 20% Jan 1st. See https://www.pge.com/content/dam/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/...
PG&E is higher: https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHED...
I think California's IOUs are selling the most expensive electricity of any major provider in the nation.
And this is before PG&E gets around to all their deferred maintenance on lines that are likely to start deadly wildfires.
One does have to wonder where all the money has gone, and what the supposed regulators at CPUC are allowing to happen.
So, we're subsidizing rural lifestyles with our Bay Area power bills?
Nope. Rural customers are not the issue. I can confirm they don't maintain rural lines, and they charge 5 figures for 2-3 hours of labor in rural areas, just like in the city.
Even if they were adequately servicing rural areas, that wouldn't be the root cause. If it was, then power would be more expensive in completely rural states than it is in California.
There was a lot of well-documented corruption decades ago (remember when an entire residential block exploded because they used to falsify line maintenance records and move the money into their personal accounts?) I doubt it's improved since then, and I'm pretty sure that's the root cause.
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Yes, also with your home hazard insurance
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my place in Tahoe is in California but the power comes from the Nevada grid. It costs 14c, so 3x (!!!) less. It’s pretty rural and tree dense :)
Not building Gen 4 nuclear plants conveniently close to major cities and industrial centers along the coastline where they can sink the off the coast a bit...
As a major infrastructure component electricity is one of those natural monopolies that should be socialized, with long term planning by the community (government agencies) and built by contractors on fixed price for delivering an output contracts - with a reasonable price and insurance for not building it correctly the first time included.
The cost of generation is a tiny fraction of the cost of the transmission and distribution grid in California.
We hav pricy electricity because of our "fixed" grid costs, not because of expensive generation. Utilities usually take a fixed rate of profit from T&D, and are therefore incentivized to overbuild as much as possible, and it's the regulators' job to stop that.
A socialized grid probably would be run much better than the one by PG&E, however legislation to buy them out has usually been extremely poorly timed so that the state, as purchaser, would take the biggest losses instead of the investors who backed the bad management team.
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In the SF Bay area, electricity prices are so high with PGE, it's more cost effective to burn gasoline in my Gen1 Chevy Volt if the price of gas is below $4.50 a gallon.
I thought it couldn't get worse and then I saw my parents' San Diego electricity bills. It seems like whatever CA is doing/has done is really screwing its residents.
Granting a private company a monopoly on critical infrastructure is working out great for them eh
yeah that libertarian state government has really let the state run wild.
That doesn't seem right. Looked up the rates for San Mateo and San Francisco county rates[1] and they're both under $0.400/kWh. On the other hand my parents in San Diego are paying over $0.450/kWh with rates scheduled to go even higher in 2024.
[1] https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/RateComparison
Those numbers are way out of date. See https://www.pge.com/content/dam/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/... for the latest
Why is power so expensive in San Diego? Wiki tells me that most of San Diego is served by a separate utility (compared to SF bay area): San Diego Gas & Electric.
I don't know why, but both power and gasoline are even more expensive in San Diego than in the Bay Area or Los Angeles. My hunch is that SD is weirdly isolated from imports and hasn't kept up with very recent growth.