Comment by roenxi
1 day ago
How on this good green earth are the Oregon authorities going to work out what is "fair"? Prices are already pretty fair, the more they use the more they pay.
This is just restricting industry because they don't want to build the infrastructure to support it. Which, fair enough. At this point the fight about industrialising vs de-industrialising has been fought out. But exactly why there is this big round of chip sanctions on China when the US doesn't want to build the power plants to use them domestically will quickly become a baffler. China can build coal plants at a rate of 2/week, plus solar panels, nuclear plants and what have you. I bet they're willing to run all these data centres.
Competition is for losers.
I don't see why residents in Oregon would like to compete with big tech dollars for utility services. It is a losing endouver when you are far from the printing presses.
So I guess "fair" is adjusted for access to capital?
A nice idea I've seen is that residential households pay a low amount per kilowatt-hour they consume until they reach some determined minimum "amount of energy this household needs to maintain a basic standard of living", and after that residential users go onto market rate.
Anyone using that energy to make a profit - that is, run a business - pays market rate from the start.
Which is a policy, but the issue there is:
1) The explicit idea there is to push costs onto businesses that are higher than the market equilibrium.
2) That pressures businesses to leave Oregon and less energy infrastructure will be built.
To be fair, I don't think that is a bug - Oregon is probably doing it on purpose. But that isn't fair, it is just anti-industry/anti-business policy. It is entirely possible (probable, even) that on net the people of Oregon will be worse off after they've been given a dose of "fairness" since there is good reason to believe that in the long term more capital investment is better for the residents. They'll be getting a generous amount of welfare, but they'll need it because investment in power production would be down.
Also, if that is the policy there is an interesting debate question of why the "fair" price shouldn't be $0 under the use threshold. Without market signalling it is just picking a random number anyway, may as well pick $0. But that level of welfare might do so much economic damage that people wouldn't stomach it, revealing some problematic aspects to the entire approach.
If the alternative - that people pay an absolute fortune just to make their own houses liveable - comes out worse, seems like a good option to me. The Great God market isn't magically going to make ordinary people's lives better and the USA, despite appearances to the contrary sometimes, isn't meant to be a Dadaist art project in which everyone dedicates their lives to seeing what happens when you let "the market" do anything it likes.
Seems simpler to just use a power law formula to calculate the price for a buyer.
Point of politics: China is highly motivated to build coal plants until 2030 at which point they have agreed not to raise their CO2 emissions afterwards.
Of course that means that they have a perverse incentive to increase them as much as possible and tell then
Their emissions declined for the first time in the 12 months to May 25. Might be a fluke and you might be right, or they might have motivation to decrease them outside of the agreement you mentioned.
Chine built in a legislative and regulatory allowance for coal, before wind, hydro and solar took off, they have also connected to the russian natural gas pipe line network, with a second major line in the works. The final piece to there grid is a large cappacity ultra high voltage trasmission grid running east west that shipps excess solar ,wind+other, electricity accross multiple time zones, and therefore peak demand is met as one long continious wave, rather than spikes. China is putting in coal plants where there is a local demand that is somehow islanded from the main grid....big country, challenging geographical/topographical conditions, and pragmatic development, so coal(there own and others), American LNG, Irainian Oil, russian nat gas,etc, etc, etc.....but the hidden story is that just 10 years ago they were burning ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING for power, and met there develoment goals at the cost of the worlds worst air quality, which they have now been able to dramaticaly change.....all of the above is to suggest that China has not fluked out with "emissions"*
* "emissions" is a catch all word/concept that includes efficiency,all cost's, sustainability, scalability, local air polution, and CO², CO, etc, while serving a political purpose that has been embraced by every single person in China