Comment by epistasis
1 year ago
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.
Rural customers are the ones serviced by lines close to trees, which are the ones that are sparking forest fires during hot dry summers.
Power lines cause plenty of forest fires in rural states as well. But the money involved is probably very different, and Californians are bilked for higher rates simply because they are richer than someone in Idaho or Wyoming.
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Yes, also with your home hazard insurance
That's also not true. Home insurance in rural areas is insanely expensive, assuming you can get it at all. The insurance companies explicitly refuse to subsidize high-risk houses with low risk premiums. This is why it's also becoming unaffordable / impossible to get flood insurance in parts of Mountain View / East Palo Alto.
On top of that the California state government has allowed the insurance cartel to form an artificial monopoly, and then funnel new plans into it, where they can charge a large multiple of fair market rates to homeowners (due to their monopoly status, and the fact that they're an association that was formed by the companies that conspired to refuse to cover the house). Of course, they provide terrible customer service and refuse to pay out after natural disasters.
Here's their web site:
https://www.cfpnet.com
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.
Transmission would be much less of an issue if source and demand were closer together.