One of my favorite things here in New York City is how Con Ed gets approval to pass infrastructure upgrade costs directly to consumers, but at the end of the financing period the asset is mysteriously owned by their board of directors, not the public who paid for it.
Public ownership can be extremely detrimental, I think it is even worse than state ownership by a few margins. Especially for setting long term goals required for infrastructure. There are investors for that as well, but they are rare and an exception.
I evade working directly for publicly traded companies like hell or let myself be paid very, very generously. Most often your time will be limited in the first place. Better to be employed as a freelancer in that case.
My local electricity infrastructure provider is a private company, with the twist that all residents within their area are also automatically shareholders.
They operate "for profit", but profits are distributed amongst shareholders in the form of reduced bills, ie last year we didn't get bills for electricity transport for december, and the year before that there were no bills from august through december.
The "for profit" part pays infrastructure upgrades, so some years we pay the normal prices if there is infrastructure work being done, which in the end benefits all shareholders, meaning me (and other users).
Yes, of course it should be. You point out of of theain flaws in our system. Those who actually produce things and pay for them never get any ownership. They remain disadvantaged dispite their contributions.
They are given a de facto monopoly. It’s weird that a private company is building and owning public utilities, but if they’re going to be granted a monopoly, then it’s not unreasonable for that privilege to come at a price.
The problem is, in the last few years NYC and NYS have mandated all kinds of green energy goals. One of the biggest one that is causing a fuck ton of concern and spending is "no more new gas cars after 2035". Well guess what that means! _infrastructure_ that someone has to pay for and the mandates are unfunded by the state. The city and state have also been pushing various schemes to ban decrease natural gas installations as well, resulting in _surprise_ more electric for heating and cooking.
The other problem we have is moronic NIMBY and environmentalist behavior that led to our only nuclear power plant shutting down and a second one never being allowed to go online at all. The entire Long Island region is still on the hook financially to pay for vetoing a previously approved and built nuclear power plant decades ago. This leads to NY to now depend on imported electricity from other states and Canada at increased rates. And it's only going to get more expensive as datacenters eat up cheap electricity from the same sources.
And good luck getting transparency on those asset transfers or executive benefits. It's all buried in regulatory filings that nobody reads except lawyers and lobbyists
Funny how the chef passes his costs on to me, but at the end of the day he owns the restaurant. What Injustice!
If people don't like paying a private entity for a goods or service, the solution is to make it yourself, not complain. Tons of cities, counties, and states do just that
Does the chef's menu and pricing get approved by a state regulator and prevent you from eating anything but that restaurant's food while they operate on land they don't own?
The place that your analogy falls is that electric companies are private companies operating legal electricity monopolies where much of the infrastructure in question is placed on right of ways across public and private land not controlled by the operator.
funny how the largest most modern power utility and grid infrastructur ever built is owned by the citizens who built it, in China, AND they have some realy fancy privatly owned resteraunts.........almost everywhere
Here in NJ a lot of people are complaining about electricity price increases. Upon looking into it, it seems that the reason is mostly a combination of population growth, shutting down old power plants, and not building enough new power plants.
Most people seem to blame price gouging from the electricity companies, but the electricity companies seem to be extremely tightly regulated and don't have much wiggle room with how they set their prices.
Haven't heard much talk about actually solving the problem and building more power plants, so probably we're going to see more articles like this in the future.
>Most people seem to blame price gouging from the electricity companies,
True or false: PSEG's annual profit every year for the last five years at a rate that greatly exceeds inflation while expenses are practically flat.
Their stock symbol is PEG, bee-tee-dubs.
There are very few theories of business and/or economics where profits increase while costs are steady where prices don't increase.
Are they (hold on a sec while I compose myself so I don't type a long string of obscenities) using that money to improve their service and keep rates steady or are they funneling everyone's money into the pockets of their investors and begging the state for free cash to maintain their infrastructure like they're some broke-ass bitches?
> There are very few theories of business and/or economics where profits increase while costs are steady where prices don't increase.
There is a very specific and relevant one: The one in which supply is inelastic. In other words, the one in which it's hard to build new power plants.
When that happens, the cost of operating existing power plants hasn't changed, but demand goes up. In normal economics, demand going up causes the price (and therefore profit) to go up, which in turn attracts more suppliers that increase supply and mitigate the amount the price can increase.
If the supply can't go up then price does. That's econ 101 and it's happening just as it's expected to -- it's simply what happens if you make it hard to increase supply.
Are you referring to PEG stock price or actual profit? Because their profits growth hasn’t really “greatly exceeded” inflation. Here is the last 30 years of profits[1] (you can change it to YoY to see how much their growth over the last 5 years is). They in fact posted a loss in 2021 and under performed 2022. They shot up in 2023 and then down to pre-pandemic levels in 2024.
They are not what I’d call a profitable company. I think their stock is reflecting the AI bubble as plenty of people are speculating on power companies
Yeah public utilities can rarely price gouge. They have to get government approval for their rates.
If "AI Datacenters" are part of the problem the answer is simple, charge them higer rates, high enough to motivate them to build their own generating capacity.
> They have to get government approval for their rates.
We need laws that prevent government employees from directly or indirectly investing in utilities.
The California Public Employees' Retirement System for example directly holds over 6.4 million shares of PG&E, and an additional 52 million shares via intermediaries.
The electric company that sends you a bill handles distribution (power lines within your city) not generation (power plants). Sometimes they are vertically integrated owning both generation and distribution. In de-regulated supplier choice states you can switch your generation provider. You cannot switch your distribution provider as each address only has one power line.
Here in Australia, the government is providing subsidies to households for buying batteries (backed by solar).
After paying $15k (after subsidies) for a 40kWh battery, our battery is filled by roof solar and grid provided renewable energy, when needed, at very cheap rates (6c/kWh). I pay $1 a day for grid connectivity. Our total annual energy bill will be approximately $500 for the foreseeable future.
I'm in NSW - curious on what you got, what subsidy/ies you were able to obtain.
I'd previously looked into this and it sounded like a package was required - PVC + battery - whereas I've already got 10kW inverter + 12kW panels, and basically just want something around that size (40kWh).
Street pricing seemed to be around the $9k installed per 10kWh, so a) your subsidy options sounds spectacular - around 60% discount? - and b) payback for me would probably be around 8 years.
But if I switch vendors (Amber I think is what one of my friends is on) I can engage in something analogous to wholesale market activity, 10m bidding / sales, rapidly decrease the projected lifetime of my battery, but potentially be $-positive even through the winter months.
But all that feels like something the power companies here in AU are going to try to try to undercut / tax.
5 x SigEnergy SigenStor Bat 8.0 (8kWh/battery) + 12kW inverter (Sigenstor EC) on single phase. The SRES battery rebate (https://cer.gov.au/batteries) was ~30%. Total was a bit under $15k. I already have 16.6kW of panels on the roof from 5 years ago.
There are two providers (Globird and Ovo) I have been researching that provide 2-3 free hours of electricity per day between 11-2pm. That + solar would easily fill the batteries, so that power bill might drop even more.
You should get some quotes from battery/solar installers (no doubt you have heard of solarquotes.com.au). Prices have dropped a lot this year.
I have a relative with a 30kWh battery on Amber. They spent AU$10k for it after subsidies.
They don't expect to ever pay for electricity again - instead their biggest problem with Amber is what to do when they are overproducing. They got charged $2.50 the other day when they didn't curtail production and had to dump power into the grid!
This is actually very regressive policy because it only rewards people who 1) own their own home and 2) can afford a significant capital investment. And under current retail rate structures it shifts the burden of maintaining the grid onto those who can't afford to make these investments and who will end up seeing there rates rise unless the cost of grid connectivity is increased.
It's also economically questionable because it's simply much cheaper to build and manage a smaller number of large batteries then thousands of home batteries.
I understand why these schemes are politically attractive; people like to own their own stuff. But there is a very real chance this increases the cost of energy here.
For context:
$0.18/kWh in US vs. $0.32/kWh in France and $0.36/kWh Germany.
The administration is making an attempt to address the issue of every growing demand for more electricity and remove barriers for additional power to come on-line.
"To compete globally, we must expand energy production and reduce energy costs for American families and businesses."
https://www.energy.gov/articles/secretary-wright-acts-unleas...
> The administration is making an attempt to address the issue of every growing demand for more electricity and remove barriers for additional power to come on-line
By cancelling and stalling solar and wind projects while propping up coal of all things? That makes no sense.
Solar and wind projects are not a panacea. They consume minerals and fossil fuels at a rate that the church of climatology never discuss, and actively surpress.
I know they're removing subsidies for solar and wind, but are they going beyond that? Leveling the playing field (and finally admitting that intermittent sources require batteries in order to be compared to true base load alternatives) seems like a rational thing to do.
Some states have vastly higher energy costs, tho, don't they? Bit weird to compare the whole US to selected European countries, which represent completely different energy strategies and subsidy policies, while also being heavily affected by the war in Ukraine.
I'm in another European country. Here it's combined into the final kWh price rather than a separate line item. 7c/kWh for transmission fees.
The grid is owned and managed by a government entity, so the price is set by them with parliament oversight. Last year they had to reduce the price (from 10c/kWh), as they found out they'd been overcharging people for a few years and had a few hundred million surplus of revenue.
And yes they are investing quite a lot to modernise the equipment and put high voltage powelines underground (lots of forests here). My country has a population density comparable to Texas.
I have my last electricity bill, from France, something that's indexed on the "public price" (so it's possible you get extra discount, but I bet it's representative)
Electricity itself is priced at around 0,14 €/kWh (sparing you the 6th significant digits), so roughly $0,16/kWh at current exchange rates and taxes of of 0,034 €/kWh ($0,039/kWh).
Let's round it to up to $0.17/kWh, which is surprisingly close to your number.
The additional taxes are a "flat" fee of 1,8 €/month (2 $/month),
Then there is the registration itself, with sits at about $15 / month. (I can challenge myself to getting bills where the registration and taxes are bigger than the actual current.)
I'm not sure how I would get a nice number in "€/kWh", though ?
I think the administration's energy density should be extended for all things. Lets take transportation: Can't use federal lands, waterways, airspace or highways unless the airplanes, trains, ships, trucks and cars are powered by the highest energy density (nuclear).
Also, anything that uses airwaves: So, nuclear powered phones, watches, airtags.
This would be the biggest breakthrough for humanity. We have nuclear powered submarines but miniaturization of nuclear stalled since then.
This. Nobody is free, until everybody got a thermonuclear warhead.
I love the way cars explode in Fallout. I mean, random car crashes have historically been the epitome of excitement, 4k war footage made me pretty indifferent towards bloody windshields and burnt out station wagons. I really think, the intensity of an unexpected fission event projecting its authority through my eyelids could make me feel something again.
Nuclear submarines were developed at about the same time as civil nuclear power plants (and you could actually argue they were developed earlier or reached maturity earlier). Nuclear submarine power was a sort of ‘killer app’ for nuclear power, rather than a derivative of civil nuclear power stations.
Most of the things you cite, like phones, cars, airtags, can already be powered just off batteries and the electric grid, so the actual source of the energy is already abstracted away.
A large-scale nuclear plant will be way more efficient than a bunch of mini-plants, so having battery electric cars + nuclear power plants already gives you nuclear powered cars without even having to invent anything new.
We only need to focus on fuel generation (power plants), and the small number of remaining places that don't just take power from the grid (planes, ships, other things that have their own fuel/generator on board).
Looking forward to the DoT getting in on this. Cars have to go! Busses trains and bikes only! No other mode of transit can be funded, not dense enough!
We control nuclear proliferation by making enriched uranium (U235) very, very hard to acquire.
While I'd love to see more nuclear reactors in our society. The "nuclear everything" argument breaks a core tenant of US national security policy, making U235 very hard to get.
Authoritarian rulers favour loyalty over competence, so it makes sense. This means that you will have people in positions who are incompetent and shouldn't be there.
The tearing down what this admin dubs the "green new scam" is hugely responsible for this. De-funding & clawing back great investments towards the future, investments that would both power America and fuel our industrial base, drive huge economic growth.
It's not just bad for energy generetion either! China is also building a huge war chest of IP patents. Its incredibly sad to see this un-forced error, this sabotage of America, this destruction of our leadership. To walk back to a fake Great Again idiocracy obsessed only with doing the opposite of the liberals.
Meanwhile in china they set factories on fire because they are not paying the wages. Chinas graphs are as dubious as the sovjet unions and they have used up the working population that drove these economic miracles.
> This cabinet is one of the most impressive on paper cabinet i've ever seen
How can I be on you side since said this without any source. I had to spend 15 minutes going through each of the cabinet members profile (and the ones in previous presidencies). While there are a few people with good experience in the present cabinet, majority of the members don't seemed to have any experience for the job they where hired for
> This is only for federal lands, which correctly falls under the interior. They have a specific amount of land to give out, they want the energy projects on that land the have the highest impact. This is very Elon thinking to solve the current crisis. Helps solve the energy problem, while getting the most kwh produces per parcel of land given out.
That's clearly complete bullshit because for most places where someone wants to build a solar or wind project the alternative if the solar or wind plant is not approved is not a coal, gas, or nuclear plant. The alternative is no plant.
As far as I can tell, coal is middle of the pack in terms of energy efficiency [0] and less than half of the energy is captured as electricity, which doesn’t seem particularly incredible in relative or absolute terms.
Although comparing fossil fuel efficiency to renewable energy efficiency is a bit odd in one sense because while you’re technically wasting energy with renewables, there will always be more tomorrow, at least on human time scales.
When it comes to energy the efficiency of a generation system is pretty much meaningless metric. Price per kilowatt hour is what rules the roost. Renewables particularly solar have become the cheapest form of electricity in history. This is driving demand for storage which is driving exponential cost reductions in that field as well.
Grid scale renewable + storage installations are now becoming competitive with natural gas. Coal is an obsolete energy source. That people in this administration are trying to weelend at Bernie's this corpse of an industry gives me serious doubts about the praise you lap on them.
Creating and exacerbating a whole host of problems with some idea that an AI-God will then rescue us isn't "impressive" - it's mentally ill. These are the same types of people from the articles about LLM psychosis, except these people are in positions of power so we all get to suffer their delusions. Except for Trump himself who is closer to being the LLM side of the dynamic.
We need all the non-carbon power we can get, and it's a shame to remove existing power sources but as electric power is eminently fungible, that loss can be mitigated with other sources.
Meanwhile, efforts to modernize the US electric grid have been stalled by Red states that are ideologically opposed to renewable power. There's plenty of potential power to be generated that is hamstrung by that resistance (pun intended).
I can't speak to any particular dam closure but there's a lot more to maintaining dams than one might believe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiUOBdEUqjY (Practical Engineering - All Dams Are Temporary)
In an ideal world this should incentivise more people with single family homes and capital to invest in Solar + batteries and even with tariffs I am sure the breakeven time will still be less than 10 years (also after accounting for the fact that utilities will not be paying a lot for your electricity though time of use pricing and batteries may help a bit)
I live in the SF Bay Area. My rates have roughly doubled in about 5-6 years. I'm paying almost $0.50/kWh or more depending on what tier I'm in at the time. PG&E does NOT reward conservation or solar power usage. They say "We aren't make enough money! We need to raise your rates! We need to charge solar users to connect to the grid!" The exact same thing happens with water utility companies, when they first preach water conservation, and then complain they aren't making enough money so they have to raise rates.
PG&E wants to charge solar power users $80+/month just for the privilege of connecting to the grid even if they are fully self-powers through solar, and give new users $0 to return energy back to the grid.
The entire system is a scam, and every politician involved is a corrupt.
From here on out, batteries are where it’s at. Overprovisioning solar helps, but the demand isn’t there and they aren’t going to pay much for it. (More utility-scale batteries would increase demand for solar somewhat, for charging them.)
Meanwhile, California needs to maintain and improve the electrical grid to lower the risk of wildfires, but more solar in the wrong places doesn’t help much with that.
PG&E is passing the cost of wildfire upgrades to customers. I'm not sure if they're hitting risky areas harder than low-risk areas, but my bill makes it look like I'm subsidizing people's cabins.
I'm sitting here in Texas paying apg&e an average rate last month of .141. And I thought that was high because a while back it was .11. And its probably mostly all renewable energy since we have windmills as far as the eye can see all around us and wind that never seems to stop.
You can disconnect from the grid but just like having a lawyer on retainer cost something so does having the power company on retainer.
It's why cloud servers cost so much more than your own on-prem solution, and on-demand offices more than your own.
And if you want an engineer on call it's gonna cost you. If you work in software, think about it, how much would you charge for a job where they could call you anytime and expect you to start work.
The only way this might end is few rebellious folks with large enough properties will start going totally off grid. It does not look unrealistic tbh but a lot depends on how tariffs and Solar installation costs in US evolve (expectation is for them to be a lot lower but not happening due to installation red tape and other reasons).
If I was in such a situation where I lived in a Sunny enough place and had my property of such a size I would rather trade 95% uptime for being totally off grid and have some sort of emergency system for the 5% when it may not work.
I am actually surprised that the ultra libertarian and independent folks of Southern USA have not yet realised that they can get truly independent by making their own energy and powering their own vehicle
> PG&E wants to charge solar power users $80+/month just for the privilege of connecting to the grid
Sounds low to me. What would the payment be on a multi-day (week?) capacity battery for your power draw if you financed it over it's useful lifetime?
Relatively wealthy homeowners using the grid as a subsidized battery are going to actually have to pay a proper amount for the privilege or the grid simply breaks.
That said, I am all for people being able to disconnect entirely from the grid if they so choose. But this means literally cutting the wires to your home. I don't agree with places that effectively outlaw this.
But if you want to be grid-tied, then you need to be paying for its upkeep and the amount of "idle" power generation on standby 24x7 in case you end up needing it with zero notice due to the sun not shining or your equipment failing. The only thing you should be saving money on is fuel costs, which is a fraction of the total price per kWh.
Backup power is expensive. The grid being so reliable for so long has made everyone forget this fact it seems.
Why would an ideal world have electricity become so expensive that individuals have to construct their own power stations? I have better things to do with my time. I don’t want a society where we are designing incentives such that individuals to have to build and maintain all their own infrastructure.
What's the target market of your business? I'm doing a DIY solar setup, plus a bunch of liberty-respecting automation, and often lament that there aren't better ways to make such things serviceable by contractors (when I'm gone, etc). It feels like every commercial offering I've seen is for extremely rich people's "dream houses", deploying expensive niche-commercial solutions in a very top-down manner (lots of homeruns of narrow-purpose cables to multiple racks in a centralized control room, etc).
Man that's some environmentalist centralist government planner thinking: mess up your energy policy so badly that prices rise like crazy and it starts making sense for people to switch to way more expensive ways to convert energy.
I looked at that, then the conservatives decided to subsidise electricity consumption to great acclaim, and that threw off the ROI and I bought an oil boiler and decided to not bother with rooftop solar as the time for return more than doubled. Thanks Boris, Yu confirmed that the market would be manipulated.
For what it's worth adjusted for inflation, electricity prices have dropped over the last 30 years. We're now seeing a reversal of that trend. To be seen the magnitude and duration of that trend.
How is the consumption fees moving compared to grid fees? In Sweden, grid fees has increased significant, while consumption fees is actually one of the lowest on a 5 year history.
Grid fees is what pays for grid stability and transmission, which has increased in complexity and demand in direct relation to how much variability that wind and solar create in the grid.
Grid fees are indeed rising faster in many regions as they reflect the true infrastructure costs of managing variable renewable integration, peak demand from data centers, and decades of deferred grid maintenance.
>Earlier this year, the utility that serves both Thomas and Salvi, Florida Power & Light, applied for a rate increase that would have boosted bills for a typical South Florida resident by about 13% over the next four years.
That is quite a bit less than inflation over the past four years.
I cut my power bill significantly by moving 70 miles from the ERCOT region to the MISO region. This wasn't the reason for the move, but it was a happy side effect.
MISO/Entergy has some of the cheapest power out of all the US regions [0]. The heavy, fully-amortized coal mix combined with the Mississippi River makes for a hell of a combo. Barges can deliver fuel at a 2-3x lower cost than rail per ton-mile.
We have been in aggressive, irrational, denial of alternative energy for my entire life but denying something doesn't make it not true. It is beyond obvious that wind, solar and battery technology are, even now, just starting to show their eventual potential and even at their current levels are far better solutions in many if not most cases than fossil fuel based options at industrial energy production (and many other uses too). We are on a hockey puck graph for all of them because they are inevitable and vastly better. The only thing our head in the sand push against these technologies is doing is ensuring that we will be decades behind China and the rest of the world in our ability to provide cheap energy to industry and emerging opportunities. You want manufacturing in the US? Create cheap energy sources. You say 'the sun only shines half the day' then build your factories to take advantage of peak availability. China knows this. They are putting so much solar into their grid that they will clearly get to a point where they have a glut of energy that will only go to one purpose, building amazing things for practically free. Meanwhile the US will keep saying 'See! This stuff doesn't work' as it actively sabotages itself just to prove the point.
The problem is that in the west green energy became a religion while in China it was just a practical solution when it made sense. They didn't have a problem to build a coal based facility or a sun based facility, depends on the needs and cost. Now that green energy makes more sense, naturally they ustilise more of it. In the west though it was all about doom's day predictions, culture wars and cancelations. So it all became a religion war rather than a mere technical consideration.
The wealthy conservatives I know have (government-subsidized) solar installed on their second homes and cabins. They install it the second it makes financial sense.
Knowing full well how annoying it may be to ask this question in this thread...wouldn't rising electricity prices generally create upward pressure on the price of Bitcoin due to mining/supply dynamics?
More people need to realize that utilities are not at all like normal businesses, so to spell it out in more detail for those that don't know:
Normal businesses make more money when they cut costs. Utilities (typically) get to charge a fixed upsell percentage and so they make more money when they increase their costs.
And that’s exactly what the ACA did to health insurance too with its “profit percentage caps”. Your insurer can only make more money if the price of healthcare goes up. And if they are predominantly passing the cost on to you, they pretty much want that to happen.
They got around that rule by buying out pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), hospitals, doctor's offices, and pharmacies. While the health insurance side of UnitedHealthCare is capped at 20% or 15% overhead, they can realize their earnings by marking up the price of drugs through their pharmacy subsidiary OptumRx. They steer customers toward OptumRx by structuring their health insurance to favor that pharmacy.
CVS bought Aetna [health insurance]. CVS also owns CVS Caremark a PBM. If your employer picked Aetna as your health insurance you must fill your meds at a CVS.
That must be great for pharmaceutical companies/doctors/hospitals/pharmacists since they can just arbitrarily increase prices and charge whatever they want and the managed care organization will pay it.
And MCO’s are incentivized to approve all claims, so doctors and patients won’t complain about denied coverage.
Obamacare/ACA has this too. The "Medical Loss Ratio" or "80/20" rule says that 80% of premiums have to be paid as claims. There's no downward pressure on claims payments because they raise rates and take 20% of a bigger number.
Customers switching between managed care organizations (MCOs) is the downward pressure. Theoretically, there are enough customers for multiple MCOs to choose from, although, the large amounts of people locked up in employer and government subsidized plans prevents this in smaller states.
UNH can’t charge too much more than Elevance/CVS/Cigna/Humama/Centene/Molina/etc.
That cannot happen with a utility like electricity.
It's good for the price of things to increase when demand increases. We don't want outages instead of price increases, and we don't want costs to increase independent of demand.
An effective price signal is all the more essential for necessities. The problem in my state of Ohio is that the corrupt politicians have been bought off by the utilities that enjoy a state-sanctioned monopoly and alow them to raise rates with abandon.
This is a problem in many countries. A lot of it is attributable to misguided investments in renewables. I have solar, so I'm hardly an opponent, but the grid-scale investments have often been misguided.
Energy is civilization, from muscle power through oxen, water wheels, steam, all the way to nuclear. Cheaper energy raises living standards. The reverse is also true.
i'm curious why? like truly curious. libertarians would probably say "regulations" and anti-capitalists would probably say "capitalism" etc. you would think with solar costs going down that this trend would be different. market dogma would say that the demand went up? thinking out loud, somebody plz ELI5
An Energy Star certified electric range will consume around 200 kWh per year. Even at California-level rates it’d be less than $10 a month to power it.
And induction, which of course is electric as well, would be cheaper still.
The furnace or heat pump is a much larger energy consumer than the stove. Complaining about gas stove bans is just a distraction from the much larger prize of heating fuel demand. People can see and feel their stove. They don't think about their furnace much except when they get their natural gas bill or it stops working. Gas utilities are afraid of a death spiral of people switching to all electric appliances, infrastructure costs being spread over a smaller customer base, which incentivizes more people to switch.
Leaking gas pipelines cause a disproportionately large amount of greenhouse gas emissions. It's much more efficient and environmentally friendly to pipe gas to a combined-cycle gas turbine power station and then move the electric power to people, than to run an electricity grid anyway and also thousands of miles of aging and leaky gas pipelines so that people can burn gas inefficiently in their homes (with most of the heat wasted into the room and out the window/fume-hood).
There is a pending energy affordability crisis. There is no appetite to tell AI data centers no, the only solution is adding increasingly expensive MW to the grid. The cost of those extremely expensive MW will not be picked up by the big tech players alone. We will all subsidize them. We've spent the last 50 years hiding our head in the sand and avoiding infrastructure spending and now that the chickens have come home to roost we will spend the declining years of empire squeezing as much blood out of our peasants as we can.
> I'm beyond ok with this! Let backpressure into the market!
The article brought up some downstream effects such as seniors choosing between paying for power or their meds.
When we approve an outcome without addressing the consequences, we are effectively rubberstamping those consequences. I believe this doesn't serve us well.
Our rates went up but now they are offering free nights. Cost of battery tech has dropped, so now I am powering my house with batteries during the day and charge them at night. The downside is vendors come and go, so the battery you buy today may not be the same offered tomorrow.
I thought we were supposed to be replacing natural gas appliances with electric ones, but it's become ruinously expensive to do so. Not only are they more expensive to operate due to high electricity rates, the panel upgrades for higher power draw are outrageous.
> Not only are they more expensive to operate due to high electricity rates,
Most electric appliances are much cheaper to operate, even in places with expensive electricity like MA and CA. This is especially true for appliances like heat pumps due to their >100% "efficiency", and if you are somewhere with cheap clean electricity (Pacific Northwest) they are a no-brainer.
> the panel upgrades for higher power draw are outrageous.
With smart splitters and some planning, panel upgrades can often be avoided:
Are you familiar with the Flour War? I suggest reading up on the history of that and what happens when you try to let the invisible hand control things considered essential.
We have to ask ourself "what's more important? Energy or the environment?" And as for me, I choose the latter. Some of you may have extraordinary bills but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
The problem is, as my wife says, accounting is a very creative field. Depending on how you calculate it, the cost of renewable energy can vary by a factor of ten. I suppose that if it were profitable, big businesses would have a monopoly on green energy and installed solar panels and batteries instead of offering them to homeowners.
This is great news. If costs climb rapidly, homeowners will switch to solar + battery + ( EV, heat pump water heater, induction stove) and disconnect from grid. Grid disconnects will cause costs to rise even more, a virtuous cycle.
> This is great news. If costs climb rapidly, homeowners will switch to […]
And what about renters (who are, in the US, often the poorer)?
Electricity is an input to industrial and commercial operations, so if companies see their costs rise, they will probably raise prices to maintain margin: this will feed into higher prices everywhere (all goods and services).
> And what about renters (who are, in the US, often the poorer)?
Then the apartment owners have another revenue stream, build a mini-grid and offer electricity cheaper than the grid. They already do many add-on services for additional revenue: garages, trash pickup, etc.
> Electricity is an input to industrial and commercial operations, so if companies see their costs rise, they will probably raise prices to maintain margin: this will feed into higher prices everywhere (all goods and services).
All production will continue to move to China, which has built and continues to build vast amounts of cheap electricity and infrastructure.
Solar generation has little economies of scale: PV arrays scale linearly, unlike turbines and electromechanical generators. Batteries also scale basically linearly; maybe you can have a better deal if you buy a truly massive amount of batteries, but I'm not certain it's so dramatic.
Transmission costs seem to dominate the price structure; I currently pay a generating company about $0.1 / kWh, and pay Con Ed $0.25 / kWh for transmission of that energy. And this is in dense New York City; in suburbia or countryside the transmission lines have to be much longer.
Centralized generation makes sense when the efficiency scales wildly non-linearly with size, like it does with nuclear reactors.
Upgrading transmission infrastructure costs a lot of money (and bureaucracy). Especially in Oregon and northern California where the lines probably should be buried to stop risking wildfires. I’m not sure which path is actually more cost effective for solar+battery.
Centralized generation is the riskiest for any economy. The targets to bomb (or local drones) are very well known and super easy to disrupt the entire economy. Solar on every roof is the most resilient and cheapest form of energy.
Centralization leads to economies of lobbying scale, well connected super rich can oil the machinery to suit their purpose, maximize wealth extraction from everyone, resulting in monopolies/oligopolies, laws to remove competition, laws to maximize profit (with pretenses of protecting people).
Warren Buffett does not own utilities out of the goodness of his heart, they are such spigots of money with zero competition.
It's not just the generation; it's also the maintenance. If you own your own rooftop panels and a few go out, it's relatively expensive to bring someone out to replace them...if a mechanically and electrically equivalent replacement exists in 5 years. At utility scale, you're always replacing panels, so you have dedicated staff doing it.
Others have replied saying why this may not be the case, but even if it is — you also need to balance efficiency with other values, such as independence and resiliency.
I would gladly trade a bit of efficiency to not be dependent on the grid or on providers who can jack up the price on a whim outside of my control.
Capital upgrades don't require capital, only monthly installments. US has the most advance financial packaging infrastructure that can package anything into a monthly payment. It will be a straight up comparison between (electricity bill from grid + gas for 2 ICE cars + natural gas bill) vs (solar + 2 EVs + heat pump water heater + induction stove).
Also, most decisions are not financial but emotional (virtue signaling + status seeking + salesman's ability). Most poor people end up taking incredibly bad financial decisions because a salesman is able to sell. In Texas, if you can talk God/football/beer, and are not a complete idiot, you can sell anything.
The people who bought 100K+ Tesla's before 2024 were not going by finance, nor are the people buying Teslas in 2025. A trillion dollar company is born just out of virtue signaling.
That cycle leaves out those who do not have the large amounts of money required to make those capital investments. Indeed, it pushes them farther and farther behind.
That doesn't sound like "great news" to me unless you're a serious classist.
Could the oil companies be funding the AI companies in an attempt to keep fossil fuel demand high and make renewables seem like they are not reducing oil demand? This could be cost effective for the oil companies since they don't have to build the generation infrastructure to power AI. Who are the private investors in AI?
If you do the math the projected electricity demand by data centers for 2030 means that electricity production in the USA would have to double compared to residential use! That is simply impossible using the current grid. Solar farms powering data centers requires less permitting and no grid connection which seems preferable and would allow data centers to be built in remote areas so the noise does not affect homes. Batteries would keep the data centers running at night. If AI demands so much power, let them build the generation capacity themselves.
Also the math for the 2030 projections of the number of computer chips needed for AI are ridiculous, we would need ten new foundries in the US which is just not going to happen. The numbers I'm seeing related to AI ramp-up just make no physical sense.
Electrification of transport and home heating already required a 2-3x increase in electricity supply. If your grid isn't planning for that until AI and still makes no mention of it in future plans then you should be asking questions.
Everyone in the US is not going to buy a new car and a new home heating system within the next five years, but longer term that may be true. EV's can be charged off-peak to level the load without requiring new grid infrastructure. So it would seem utilities should now scrap their current long term plans and plan to build out new grid infrastructure much faster for data centers? Some grid projects take 5-10 years just to get approved. There are still years long backlogs in building new power transformers as well.
The number of fabs required still seems excessive also. So overall the physical plants required for AI's projected trajectory do not seem possible, unless AI gets a lot more energy efficient and chips get much faster. Or those who want data centers build the power infrastructure themselves without competing with other electrifications.
One of my favorite things here in New York City is how Con Ed gets approval to pass infrastructure upgrade costs directly to consumers, but at the end of the financing period the asset is mysteriously owned by their board of directors, not the public who paid for it.
Point of information: it's not owned by the directors, it's owned by the investors, the shareholders, just like every other private company.
It's still a weird sanctioned monopoly. More places should get over their fear of public ownership.
Public ownership can be extremely detrimental, I think it is even worse than state ownership by a few margins. Especially for setting long term goals required for infrastructure. There are investors for that as well, but they are rare and an exception.
I evade working directly for publicly traded companies like hell or let myself be paid very, very generously. Most often your time will be limited in the first place. Better to be employed as a freelancer in that case.
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If a private company builds infrastructure with their profits, should it be owned by the customers "who paid for it"?
My local electricity infrastructure provider is a private company, with the twist that all residents within their area are also automatically shareholders.
They operate "for profit", but profits are distributed amongst shareholders in the form of reduced bills, ie last year we didn't get bills for electricity transport for december, and the year before that there were no bills from august through december.
The "for profit" part pays infrastructure upgrades, so some years we pay the normal prices if there is infrastructure work being done, which in the end benefits all shareholders, meaning me (and other users).
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Why are we letting private companies own public infrastructure?
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Yes, of course it should be. You point out of of theain flaws in our system. Those who actually produce things and pay for them never get any ownership. They remain disadvantaged dispite their contributions.
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If you have a publicly supported monopoly you shouldn't have a private company.
They are given a de facto monopoly. It’s weird that a private company is building and owning public utilities, but if they’re going to be granted a monopoly, then it’s not unreasonable for that privilege to come at a price.
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It’s not paid for “with their profits”, it’s a passthru charge directly onto customers’ monthly bills.
Yes
Yes
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Most of these things are really liabilities. You have to maintain these things.
The problem is, in the last few years NYC and NYS have mandated all kinds of green energy goals. One of the biggest one that is causing a fuck ton of concern and spending is "no more new gas cars after 2035". Well guess what that means! _infrastructure_ that someone has to pay for and the mandates are unfunded by the state. The city and state have also been pushing various schemes to ban decrease natural gas installations as well, resulting in _surprise_ more electric for heating and cooking.
The other problem we have is moronic NIMBY and environmentalist behavior that led to our only nuclear power plant shutting down and a second one never being allowed to go online at all. The entire Long Island region is still on the hook financially to pay for vetoing a previously approved and built nuclear power plant decades ago. This leads to NY to now depend on imported electricity from other states and Canada at increased rates. And it's only going to get more expensive as datacenters eat up cheap electricity from the same sources.
Isn't it mandated that they do that by the state? The gas companies where I live work this way.
And good luck getting transparency on those asset transfers or executive benefits. It's all buried in regulatory filings that nobody reads except lawyers and lobbyists
Funny how the chef passes his costs on to me, but at the end of the day he owns the restaurant. What Injustice!
If people don't like paying a private entity for a goods or service, the solution is to make it yourself, not complain. Tons of cities, counties, and states do just that
Does the chef's menu and pricing get approved by a state regulator and prevent you from eating anything but that restaurant's food while they operate on land they don't own?
The place that your analogy falls is that electric companies are private companies operating legal electricity monopolies where much of the infrastructure in question is placed on right of ways across public and private land not controlled by the operator.
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I'm sure you're well aware that many states pre-empt county or municipal efforts to develop public utilities like broadband internet or perservice.
funny how the largest most modern power utility and grid infrastructur ever built is owned by the citizens who built it, in China, AND they have some realy fancy privatly owned resteraunts.........almost everywhere
then there are things like the town of Lunenburg having it's own power company https://www.townoflunenburg.ca/electric-utility.html
Here in NJ a lot of people are complaining about electricity price increases. Upon looking into it, it seems that the reason is mostly a combination of population growth, shutting down old power plants, and not building enough new power plants.
Most people seem to blame price gouging from the electricity companies, but the electricity companies seem to be extremely tightly regulated and don't have much wiggle room with how they set their prices.
Haven't heard much talk about actually solving the problem and building more power plants, so probably we're going to see more articles like this in the future.
>Most people seem to blame price gouging from the electricity companies,
True or false: PSEG's annual profit every year for the last five years at a rate that greatly exceeds inflation while expenses are practically flat.
Their stock symbol is PEG, bee-tee-dubs.
There are very few theories of business and/or economics where profits increase while costs are steady where prices don't increase.
Are they (hold on a sec while I compose myself so I don't type a long string of obscenities) using that money to improve their service and keep rates steady or are they funneling everyone's money into the pockets of their investors and begging the state for free cash to maintain their infrastructure like they're some broke-ass bitches?
https://www.alphaquery.com/stock/PEG/fundamentals/annual/pro... does not look like the profit margin has increased over the past 5 years.
Also their stock underperformed the S&P 500 over the past 5 years.
I'm not really a finance guy so probably I'm looking at it wrong, but that seems like some pretty bad price gouging.
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> There are very few theories of business and/or economics where profits increase while costs are steady where prices don't increase.
There is a very specific and relevant one: The one in which supply is inelastic. In other words, the one in which it's hard to build new power plants.
When that happens, the cost of operating existing power plants hasn't changed, but demand goes up. In normal economics, demand going up causes the price (and therefore profit) to go up, which in turn attracts more suppliers that increase supply and mitigate the amount the price can increase.
If the supply can't go up then price does. That's econ 101 and it's happening just as it's expected to -- it's simply what happens if you make it hard to increase supply.
Are you referring to PEG stock price or actual profit? Because their profits growth hasn’t really “greatly exceeded” inflation. Here is the last 30 years of profits[1] (you can change it to YoY to see how much their growth over the last 5 years is). They in fact posted a loss in 2021 and under performed 2022. They shot up in 2023 and then down to pre-pandemic levels in 2024.
They are not what I’d call a profitable company. I think their stock is reflecting the AI bubble as plenty of people are speculating on power companies
[1] https://www.roic.ai/quote/PEG/financials
2nd one, the investors. barely exceeding inflation is barely making a profit.
Yeah public utilities can rarely price gouge. They have to get government approval for their rates.
If "AI Datacenters" are part of the problem the answer is simple, charge them higer rates, high enough to motivate them to build their own generating capacity.
> They have to get government approval for their rates.
We need laws that prevent government employees from directly or indirectly investing in utilities.
The California Public Employees' Retirement System for example directly holds over 6.4 million shares of PG&E, and an additional 52 million shares via intermediaries.
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> but the electricity companies seem to be extremely tightly regulated and don't have much wiggle room with how they set their prices.
Sure they do; the wiggle room is referred to as profit
I wonder who could built and operate these plants...
The electric company that sends you a bill handles distribution (power lines within your city) not generation (power plants). Sometimes they are vertically integrated owning both generation and distribution. In de-regulated supplier choice states you can switch your generation provider. You cannot switch your distribution provider as each address only has one power line.
Definitely not the government, given how wasteful and inefficient they are.
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"US utilities plot big rise in electricity rates as data centre demand booms", 90 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41421627
Here in Australia, the government is providing subsidies to households for buying batteries (backed by solar).
After paying $15k (after subsidies) for a 40kWh battery, our battery is filled by roof solar and grid provided renewable energy, when needed, at very cheap rates (6c/kWh). I pay $1 a day for grid connectivity. Our total annual energy bill will be approximately $500 for the foreseeable future.
I'm in NSW - curious on what you got, what subsidy/ies you were able to obtain.
I'd previously looked into this and it sounded like a package was required - PVC + battery - whereas I've already got 10kW inverter + 12kW panels, and basically just want something around that size (40kWh).
Street pricing seemed to be around the $9k installed per 10kWh, so a) your subsidy options sounds spectacular - around 60% discount? - and b) payback for me would probably be around 8 years.
But if I switch vendors (Amber I think is what one of my friends is on) I can engage in something analogous to wholesale market activity, 10m bidding / sales, rapidly decrease the projected lifetime of my battery, but potentially be $-positive even through the winter months.
But all that feels like something the power companies here in AU are going to try to try to undercut / tax.
5 x SigEnergy SigenStor Bat 8.0 (8kWh/battery) + 12kW inverter (Sigenstor EC) on single phase. The SRES battery rebate (https://cer.gov.au/batteries) was ~30%. Total was a bit under $15k. I already have 16.6kW of panels on the roof from 5 years ago.
There are two providers (Globird and Ovo) I have been researching that provide 2-3 free hours of electricity per day between 11-2pm. That + solar would easily fill the batteries, so that power bill might drop even more.
You should get some quotes from battery/solar installers (no doubt you have heard of solarquotes.com.au). Prices have dropped a lot this year.
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I have a relative with a 30kWh battery on Amber. They spent AU$10k for it after subsidies.
They don't expect to ever pay for electricity again - instead their biggest problem with Amber is what to do when they are overproducing. They got charged $2.50 the other day when they didn't curtail production and had to dump power into the grid!
15Kwh Lifepo4 48V 300Ah is less than $2k USD. You are overpaying a lot for installation.
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This is actually very regressive policy because it only rewards people who 1) own their own home and 2) can afford a significant capital investment. And under current retail rate structures it shifts the burden of maintaining the grid onto those who can't afford to make these investments and who will end up seeing there rates rise unless the cost of grid connectivity is increased.
It's also economically questionable because it's simply much cheaper to build and manage a smaller number of large batteries then thousands of home batteries.
I understand why these schemes are politically attractive; people like to own their own stuff. But there is a very real chance this increases the cost of energy here.
I'm curious how you see this potentially increasing the cost of energy? Why can't we do both large systems and small distributed systems?
I see the following benefits:
1. Stabilises the grid
2. Smooths peak demands. Check the Price and Demand graph here: https://www.aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-...
3. Increases supply -> energy prices decrease?
4. Accelerated move away from coal generation and towards renewables.
5. Job creation (solar and storage installation)
Drawbacks:
1. Renters, lower income houses and apartment dwellers don't have access the subsidies
2. Exposure to dodgy installers and systems just like we saw with the Australia solar scheme.
That would be cool if I could afford to own a house.
A great example of what's possible when policy actually aligns with long-term sustainability goals
How does the cheap rates work? You get subsidised grid rates because of the batteries?
In Australia it's common to have Time of Usage (ToU) billing.
Figures depend on provider and plan, but sometimes cheap (as per parent's 6c / kWh), but during the midday to 6pm range it may be up to 60c.
So, grid rates aren't subsidised, but having a storage medium means you can arbitrage power quite easily.
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For context: $0.18/kWh in US vs. $0.32/kWh in France and $0.36/kWh Germany. The administration is making an attempt to address the issue of every growing demand for more electricity and remove barriers for additional power to come on-line. "To compete globally, we must expand energy production and reduce energy costs for American families and businesses." https://www.energy.gov/articles/secretary-wright-acts-unleas...
> The administration is making an attempt to address the issue of every growing demand for more electricity and remove barriers for additional power to come on-line
By cancelling and stalling solar and wind projects while propping up coal of all things? That makes no sense.
Look at the biggest products of the areas around Washington DC. You'll find coal, more coal, and "things we found while mining coal"
Solar and wind projects are not a panacea. They consume minerals and fossil fuels at a rate that the church of climatology never discuss, and actively surpress.
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I know they're removing subsidies for solar and wind, but are they going beyond that? Leveling the playing field (and finally admitting that intermittent sources require batteries in order to be compared to true base load alternatives) seems like a rational thing to do.
Some states have vastly higher energy costs, tho, don't they? Bit weird to compare the whole US to selected European countries, which represent completely different energy strategies and subsidy policies, while also being heavily affected by the war in Ukraine.
Yeah, new england for example has high energy costs because of 1) a lack of local energy sources and 2) reluctance to build new gas pipelines.
> selected European countries
The two largest in the EU by population (20% and 15%) and GDP (24% and 16%).
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It's $0.11 kWh here and we have plenty of renewables and a growing population. OTOH I have city owned utilities and not a public company.
For comparisons sake the average is $0.076/kWh in China and $0.074/kWh in India.
I pay $0.0825/kWh in the Southern US.
Here in California I'm paying close to 0.60/kwh. Throw a rock across the border to Nevada and I'm paying 0.10/kwh
>For context: $0.18/kWh in US vs. $0.32/kWh in France and $0.36/kWh Germany.
That's as may be, but my electricity bill is 1/3 for kwhs of electrcity, and 2/3 for "delivering" said power.
As such, it seems like France and Germany may have an advantage there, no?
I'm in another European country. Here it's combined into the final kWh price rather than a separate line item. 7c/kWh for transmission fees.
The grid is owned and managed by a government entity, so the price is set by them with parliament oversight. Last year they had to reduce the price (from 10c/kWh), as they found out they'd been overcharging people for a few years and had a few hundred million surplus of revenue.
And yes they are investing quite a lot to modernise the equipment and put high voltage powelines underground (lots of forests here). My country has a population density comparable to Texas.
I have my last electricity bill, from France, something that's indexed on the "public price" (so it's possible you get extra discount, but I bet it's representative)
Electricity itself is priced at around 0,14 €/kWh (sparing you the 6th significant digits), so roughly $0,16/kWh at current exchange rates and taxes of of 0,034 €/kWh ($0,039/kWh).
Let's round it to up to $0.17/kWh, which is surprisingly close to your number.
The additional taxes are a "flat" fee of 1,8 €/month (2 $/month),
Then there is the registration itself, with sits at about $15 / month. (I can challenge myself to getting bills where the registration and taxes are bigger than the actual current.)
I'm not sure how I would get a nice number in "€/kWh", though ?
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It’s the same for me in Texas, delivery is easily 2/3 of my bill and fluctuates wildly. It’s not part of my quoted rate either, just tacked on.
0.16€/kWh in a western European country. 0.60$/kWh in California.
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I think the administration's energy density should be extended for all things. Lets take transportation: Can't use federal lands, waterways, airspace or highways unless the airplanes, trains, ships, trucks and cars are powered by the highest energy density (nuclear).
Also, anything that uses airwaves: So, nuclear powered phones, watches, airtags.
This would be the biggest breakthrough for humanity. We have nuclear powered submarines but miniaturization of nuclear stalled since then.
This. Nobody is free, until everybody got a thermonuclear warhead.
I love the way cars explode in Fallout. I mean, random car crashes have historically been the epitome of excitement, 4k war footage made me pretty indifferent towards bloody windshields and burnt out station wagons. I really think, the intensity of an unexpected fission event projecting its authority through my eyelids could make me feel something again.
Nuclear submarines were developed at about the same time as civil nuclear power plants (and you could actually argue they were developed earlier or reached maturity earlier). Nuclear submarine power was a sort of ‘killer app’ for nuclear power, rather than a derivative of civil nuclear power stations.
Most of the things you cite, like phones, cars, airtags, can already be powered just off batteries and the electric grid, so the actual source of the energy is already abstracted away.
A large-scale nuclear plant will be way more efficient than a bunch of mini-plants, so having battery electric cars + nuclear power plants already gives you nuclear powered cars without even having to invent anything new.
We only need to focus on fuel generation (power plants), and the small number of remaining places that don't just take power from the grid (planes, ships, other things that have their own fuel/generator on board).
Looking forward to the DoT getting in on this. Cars have to go! Busses trains and bikes only! No other mode of transit can be funded, not dense enough!
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We control nuclear proliferation by making enriched uranium (U235) very, very hard to acquire.
While I'd love to see more nuclear reactors in our society. The "nuclear everything" argument breaks a core tenant of US national security policy, making U235 very hard to get.
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I don’t relish the idea of a distracted driver sending text messages while driving a nuclear car.
I bet the crew on the submarines is much more focused on what they are doing…
Authoritarian rulers favour loyalty over competence, so it makes sense. This means that you will have people in positions who are incompetent and shouldn't be there.
Very sad. The Trump's party should not be called MAGA but MALR, Make America Like Russia. They are doing mighty good progress in that direction.
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The tearing down what this admin dubs the "green new scam" is hugely responsible for this. De-funding & clawing back great investments towards the future, investments that would both power America and fuel our industrial base, drive huge economic growth.
It's not just bad for energy generetion either! China is also building a huge war chest of IP patents. Its incredibly sad to see this un-forced error, this sabotage of America, this destruction of our leadership. To walk back to a fake Great Again idiocracy obsessed only with doing the opposite of the liberals.
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Meanwhile in china they set factories on fire because they are not paying the wages. Chinas graphs are as dubious as the sovjet unions and they have used up the working population that drove these economic miracles.
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If you want to remove all regulations, you too can have impressive growth.
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> This cabinet is one of the most impressive on paper cabinet i've ever seen
How can I be on you side since said this without any source. I had to spend 15 minutes going through each of the cabinet members profile (and the ones in previous presidencies). While there are a few people with good experience in the present cabinet, majority of the members don't seemed to have any experience for the job they where hired for
> This is only for federal lands, which correctly falls under the interior. They have a specific amount of land to give out, they want the energy projects on that land the have the highest impact. This is very Elon thinking to solve the current crisis. Helps solve the energy problem, while getting the most kwh produces per parcel of land given out.
That's clearly complete bullshit because for most places where someone wants to build a solar or wind project the alternative if the solar or wind plant is not approved is not a coal, gas, or nuclear plant. The alternative is no plant.
As far as I can tell, coal is middle of the pack in terms of energy efficiency [0] and less than half of the energy is captured as electricity, which doesn’t seem particularly incredible in relative or absolute terms.
Although comparing fossil fuel efficiency to renewable energy efficiency is a bit odd in one sense because while you’re technically wasting energy with renewables, there will always be more tomorrow, at least on human time scales.
[0]: https://www.pcienergysolutions.com/2023/04/17/power-plant-ef...
When it comes to energy the efficiency of a generation system is pretty much meaningless metric. Price per kilowatt hour is what rules the roost. Renewables particularly solar have become the cheapest form of electricity in history. This is driving demand for storage which is driving exponential cost reductions in that field as well.
Grid scale renewable + storage installations are now becoming competitive with natural gas. Coal is an obsolete energy source. That people in this administration are trying to weelend at Bernie's this corpse of an industry gives me serious doubts about the praise you lap on them.
Creating and exacerbating a whole host of problems with some idea that an AI-God will then rescue us isn't "impressive" - it's mentally ill. These are the same types of people from the articles about LLM psychosis, except these people are in positions of power so we all get to suffer their delusions. Except for Trump himself who is closer to being the LLM side of the dynamic.
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Meanwhile California is shutting down dams and nuclear plants.
The last shutdown of a reactor in CA was 2013 -- https://www.eia.gov/nuclear/reactors/shutdown/ Diablo Canyon got a reprieve and has 5 more years to go.
Dam removals have multiple factors behind them, from pure economics (cheaper to remove than repair) to environmental -- restoring fisheries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dam_removals_in_Califo...
We need all the non-carbon power we can get, and it's a shame to remove existing power sources but as electric power is eminently fungible, that loss can be mitigated with other sources.
Meanwhile, efforts to modernize the US electric grid have been stalled by Red states that are ideologically opposed to renewable power. There's plenty of potential power to be generated that is hamstrung by that resistance (pun intended).
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I can't speak to any particular dam closure but there's a lot more to maintaining dams than one might believe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiUOBdEUqjY (Practical Engineering - All Dams Are Temporary)
In an ideal world this should incentivise more people with single family homes and capital to invest in Solar + batteries and even with tariffs I am sure the breakeven time will still be less than 10 years (also after accounting for the fact that utilities will not be paying a lot for your electricity though time of use pricing and batteries may help a bit)
I live in the SF Bay Area. My rates have roughly doubled in about 5-6 years. I'm paying almost $0.50/kWh or more depending on what tier I'm in at the time. PG&E does NOT reward conservation or solar power usage. They say "We aren't make enough money! We need to raise your rates! We need to charge solar users to connect to the grid!" The exact same thing happens with water utility companies, when they first preach water conservation, and then complain they aren't making enough money so they have to raise rates.
PG&E wants to charge solar power users $80+/month just for the privilege of connecting to the grid even if they are fully self-powers through solar, and give new users $0 to return energy back to the grid.
The entire system is a scam, and every politician involved is a corrupt.
> PG&E wants to charge solar power users $80+/month just for the privilege of connecting to the grid even if they are fully self-powers through solar
If you're "fully self-powered through solar" just disconnect from the grid.
If you're using the grid as a battery where you feed power into it at 4PM and draw power from it at 4AM, that costs money.
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This is because California has so much solar that it can’t use it all during the day:
https://www.gridstatus.io/charts/curtailment?iso=caiso
From here on out, batteries are where it’s at. Overprovisioning solar helps, but the demand isn’t there and they aren’t going to pay much for it. (More utility-scale batteries would increase demand for solar somewhat, for charging them.)
Meanwhile, California needs to maintain and improve the electrical grid to lower the risk of wildfires, but more solar in the wrong places doesn’t help much with that.
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PG&E is passing the cost of wildfire upgrades to customers. I'm not sure if they're hitting risky areas harder than low-risk areas, but my bill makes it look like I'm subsidizing people's cabins.
I'm sitting here in Texas paying apg&e an average rate last month of .141. And I thought that was high because a while back it was .11. And its probably mostly all renewable energy since we have windmills as far as the eye can see all around us and wind that never seems to stop.
You can disconnect from the grid but just like having a lawyer on retainer cost something so does having the power company on retainer.
It's why cloud servers cost so much more than your own on-prem solution, and on-demand offices more than your own.
And if you want an engineer on call it's gonna cost you. If you work in software, think about it, how much would you charge for a job where they could call you anytime and expect you to start work.
You want to connect to a grid then you need to pay a certain percentage for upkeep regardless of the amount of electricity you use.
"The entire system is a scam, and every politician involved is a corrupt."
What an immature over simplification that means nothing. none of the examples you provided are an example of corruption
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The only way this might end is few rebellious folks with large enough properties will start going totally off grid. It does not look unrealistic tbh but a lot depends on how tariffs and Solar installation costs in US evolve (expectation is for them to be a lot lower but not happening due to installation red tape and other reasons).
If I was in such a situation where I lived in a Sunny enough place and had my property of such a size I would rather trade 95% uptime for being totally off grid and have some sort of emergency system for the 5% when it may not work.
I am actually surprised that the ultra libertarian and independent folks of Southern USA have not yet realised that they can get truly independent by making their own energy and powering their own vehicle
> PG&E wants to charge solar power users $80+/month just for the privilege of connecting to the grid
Sounds low to me. What would the payment be on a multi-day (week?) capacity battery for your power draw if you financed it over it's useful lifetime?
Relatively wealthy homeowners using the grid as a subsidized battery are going to actually have to pay a proper amount for the privilege or the grid simply breaks.
That said, I am all for people being able to disconnect entirely from the grid if they so choose. But this means literally cutting the wires to your home. I don't agree with places that effectively outlaw this.
But if you want to be grid-tied, then you need to be paying for its upkeep and the amount of "idle" power generation on standby 24x7 in case you end up needing it with zero notice due to the sun not shining or your equipment failing. The only thing you should be saving money on is fuel costs, which is a fraction of the total price per kWh.
Backup power is expensive. The grid being so reliable for so long has made everyone forget this fact it seems.
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Why would an ideal world have electricity become so expensive that individuals have to construct their own power stations? I have better things to do with my time. I don’t want a society where we are designing incentives such that individuals to have to build and maintain all their own infrastructure.
An ideal world doesn't look like land owners building moats.
I work in energy/home automation. I'm burnt out.
What's the target market of your business? I'm doing a DIY solar setup, plus a bunch of liberty-respecting automation, and often lament that there aren't better ways to make such things serviceable by contractors (when I'm gone, etc). It feels like every commercial offering I've seen is for extremely rich people's "dream houses", deploying expensive niche-commercial solutions in a very top-down manner (lots of homeruns of narrow-purpose cables to multiple racks in a centralized control room, etc).
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We don't live in an ideal world though but in a world run by the incentives of the capital/asset owning class.
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Man that's some environmentalist centralist government planner thinking: mess up your energy policy so badly that prices rise like crazy and it starts making sense for people to switch to way more expensive ways to convert energy.
Is this supposed to be positive?
Its only more expensive in US, because of the government.
An ideal world the same companies who are heavily benefiting from subsidizing the American people would pay the lion share of this and then some.
Instead, they get to offshore jobs or bring in H1Bs to further their bottom line.
I looked at that, then the conservatives decided to subsidise electricity consumption to great acclaim, and that threw off the ROI and I bought an oil boiler and decided to not bother with rooftop solar as the time for return more than doubled. Thanks Boris, Yu confirmed that the market would be manipulated.
Related:
Big Tech's A.I. Data Centers Are Driving Up Electricity Bills for Everyone
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44910562
For what it's worth adjusted for inflation, electricity prices have dropped over the last 30 years. We're now seeing a reversal of that trend. To be seen the magnitude and duration of that trend.
Electricity Prices Adjusted for Inflation https://share.google/dhmpNiMkGIpXa7bwu
How is the consumption fees moving compared to grid fees? In Sweden, grid fees has increased significant, while consumption fees is actually one of the lowest on a 5 year history.
Grid fees is what pays for grid stability and transmission, which has increased in complexity and demand in direct relation to how much variability that wind and solar create in the grid.
Grid fees are indeed rising faster in many regions as they reflect the true infrastructure costs of managing variable renewable integration, peak demand from data centers, and decades of deferred grid maintenance.
In California our rate in 2019 with PG&E was $0.20/kWh - in 2025 it’s $0.38/kWh. CA keeps giving them the ability to raise prices and under deliver
Just as a comparison, here in Montréal I pay $0.051USD/kWh and we're at 99.2% renewables. Large customers pay even less.
ah, Quebec. So much energy but nobody can buy it!
Ontario can’t..
New England wants it but keeps hitting NIMBYism..
NY wants it but needs new infrastructure
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Wow that’s half the price of what we pay here in BC.
That's more than double what we pay in the PNW
That's also likely the cost from a few rate hikes ago.
https://www.pge.com/content/dam/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/...
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>Earlier this year, the utility that serves both Thomas and Salvi, Florida Power & Light, applied for a rate increase that would have boosted bills for a typical South Florida resident by about 13% over the next four years.
That is quite a bit less than inflation over the past four years.
Florida rates average 14.98 ¢/kWh and FPL's average rates are 12.12¢/kWh, both below the US average of 17.47 ¢/kWh.
I cut my power bill significantly by moving 70 miles from the ERCOT region to the MISO region. This wasn't the reason for the move, but it was a happy side effect.
MISO/Entergy has some of the cheapest power out of all the US regions [0]. The heavy, fully-amortized coal mix combined with the Mississippi River makes for a hell of a combo. Barges can deliver fuel at a 2-3x lower cost than rail per ton-mile.
[0] https://www.entergytexas.com/wp-content/uploads/eti_rs.pdf
Inflation climbing more than twice as fast as (official) inflation.
Direct link to the source material: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm
TL;DR - For July 2024 to July 2025, the inflation rate for "all items" was 2.7% while the rate for "electricity" was 5.5%.
I’m in south England, cost here is 24.05p/kWh plus standing charge 41.67p/day
A time and location break down of that first price. https://www.octopriceuk.app/tracker
We have been in aggressive, irrational, denial of alternative energy for my entire life but denying something doesn't make it not true. It is beyond obvious that wind, solar and battery technology are, even now, just starting to show their eventual potential and even at their current levels are far better solutions in many if not most cases than fossil fuel based options at industrial energy production (and many other uses too). We are on a hockey puck graph for all of them because they are inevitable and vastly better. The only thing our head in the sand push against these technologies is doing is ensuring that we will be decades behind China and the rest of the world in our ability to provide cheap energy to industry and emerging opportunities. You want manufacturing in the US? Create cheap energy sources. You say 'the sun only shines half the day' then build your factories to take advantage of peak availability. China knows this. They are putting so much solar into their grid that they will clearly get to a point where they have a glut of energy that will only go to one purpose, building amazing things for practically free. Meanwhile the US will keep saying 'See! This stuff doesn't work' as it actively sabotages itself just to prove the point.
A hockey puck graph? So ... circular?
The problem is that in the west green energy became a religion while in China it was just a practical solution when it made sense. They didn't have a problem to build a coal based facility or a sun based facility, depends on the needs and cost. Now that green energy makes more sense, naturally they ustilise more of it. In the west though it was all about doom's day predictions, culture wars and cancelations. So it all became a religion war rather than a mere technical consideration.
Why is that "the problem"? Religions are quite popular and successful in the West
The wealthy conservatives I know have (government-subsidized) solar installed on their second homes and cabins. They install it the second it makes financial sense.
Knowing full well how annoying it may be to ask this question in this thread...wouldn't rising electricity prices generally create upward pressure on the price of Bitcoin due to mining/supply dynamics?
This comment is golden: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39487714
Saving a click:
More people need to realize that utilities are not at all like normal businesses, so to spell it out in more detail for those that don't know:
Normal businesses make more money when they cut costs. Utilities (typically) get to charge a fixed upsell percentage and so they make more money when they increase their costs.
And that’s exactly what the ACA did to health insurance too with its “profit percentage caps”. Your insurer can only make more money if the price of healthcare goes up. And if they are predominantly passing the cost on to you, they pretty much want that to happen.
They got around that rule by buying out pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), hospitals, doctor's offices, and pharmacies. While the health insurance side of UnitedHealthCare is capped at 20% or 15% overhead, they can realize their earnings by marking up the price of drugs through their pharmacy subsidiary OptumRx. They steer customers toward OptumRx by structuring their health insurance to favor that pharmacy.
CVS bought Aetna [health insurance]. CVS also owns CVS Caremark a PBM. If your employer picked Aetna as your health insurance you must fill your meds at a CVS.
That must be great for pharmaceutical companies/doctors/hospitals/pharmacists since they can just arbitrarily increase prices and charge whatever they want and the managed care organization will pay it.
And MCO’s are incentivized to approve all claims, so doctors and patients won’t complain about denied coverage.
Obamacare/ACA has this too. The "Medical Loss Ratio" or "80/20" rule says that 80% of premiums have to be paid as claims. There's no downward pressure on claims payments because they raise rates and take 20% of a bigger number.
Customers switching between managed care organizations (MCOs) is the downward pressure. Theoretically, there are enough customers for multiple MCOs to choose from, although, the large amounts of people locked up in employer and government subsidized plans prevents this in smaller states.
UNH can’t charge too much more than Elevance/CVS/Cigna/Humama/Centene/Molina/etc.
That cannot happen with a utility like electricity.
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Everyone already knows they’re not normal businesses when the state grants them a monopoly.
It's good for the price of things to increase when demand increases. We don't want outages instead of price increases, and we don't want costs to increase independent of demand.
It's good when you are talking about tulips or ice cream or something. Not necessities like electricity/water/food etc.
An effective price signal is all the more essential for necessities. The problem in my state of Ohio is that the corrupt politicians have been bought off by the utilities that enjoy a state-sanctioned monopoly and alow them to raise rates with abandon.
It's good for all things, except highly regulated monopolies like electricity, trash, and water.
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Damned if you do, damned if you don't. I pay more for water because demand is decreasing but the water company's fixed costs continue to grow.
The duck curve tells us prices are lower at noon due to tons of new solar, but what about the rate of price change?
Are electricity prices at noon climbing faster, or less fast, than prices at 6pm?
My rates off-peak have increased faster than the on-peak rates, presumably because the on-peak rates were already sky high.
In the last couple years peak has gone from ~0.36 to ~0.56, while off-peak went from ~0.12 to ~0.27.
At some point, the system needs to ask: who should pay for all this demand growth? Right now, it sure isn't the ones profiting from it.
I'm sure no one on HN is gonna blame AI for it
Remember, the hidden cost for solar is all the capital upgrades on the grid required to manage it.
This is a problem in many countries. A lot of it is attributable to misguided investments in renewables. I have solar, so I'm hardly an opponent, but the grid-scale investments have often been misguided.
Energy is civilization, from muscle power through oxen, water wheels, steam, all the way to nuclear. Cheaper energy raises living standards. The reverse is also true.
No wonder if everyone and their dog is building data centers for “AI”.
We're living In the Green Energy revolution. Solar power and wind power is literally free energy.
Did these guys not get the memo?
The trouble with sarcasm is that it's hard to discern the point you actually wanted to make.
Presuming you had one.
Because of LLMs, right?
That’s the new enemy.
NPR? I thought Trump shut them down.
the price of electricity only goes up, despite what techno optimists tell you: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000072610
i'm curious why? like truly curious. libertarians would probably say "regulations" and anti-capitalists would probably say "capitalism" etc. you would think with solar costs going down that this trend would be different. market dogma would say that the demand went up? thinking out loud, somebody plz ELI5
capitalism.
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good thing we all got con'd into buying electric stovetops a few years ago :)
An Energy Star certified electric range will consume around 200 kWh per year. Even at California-level rates it’d be less than $10 a month to power it.
And induction, which of course is electric as well, would be cheaper still.
That cheaper natural gas is extracting a price in terms of health for you and your family: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-health-risks-...
The furnace or heat pump is a much larger energy consumer than the stove. Complaining about gas stove bans is just a distraction from the much larger prize of heating fuel demand. People can see and feel their stove. They don't think about their furnace much except when they get their natural gas bill or it stops working. Gas utilities are afraid of a death spiral of people switching to all electric appliances, infrastructure costs being spread over a smaller customer base, which incentivizes more people to switch.
Leaking gas pipelines cause a disproportionately large amount of greenhouse gas emissions. It's much more efficient and environmentally friendly to pipe gas to a combined-cycle gas turbine power station and then move the electric power to people, than to run an electricity grid anyway and also thousands of miles of aging and leaky gas pipelines so that people can burn gas inefficiently in their homes (with most of the heat wasted into the room and out the window/fume-hood).
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all the problems come back to one thing: governments.
Corruption*
There is a pending energy affordability crisis. There is no appetite to tell AI data centers no, the only solution is adding increasingly expensive MW to the grid. The cost of those extremely expensive MW will not be picked up by the big tech players alone. We will all subsidize them. We've spent the last 50 years hiding our head in the sand and avoiding infrastructure spending and now that the chickens have come home to roost we will spend the declining years of empire squeezing as much blood out of our peasants as we can.
I'm beyond ok with this! Let backpressure into the market! It's the ultimate incentive for promoting energy efficiency.
> I'm beyond ok with this! Let backpressure into the market!
The article brought up some downstream effects such as seniors choosing between paying for power or their meds.
When we approve an outcome without addressing the consequences, we are effectively rubberstamping those consequences. I believe this doesn't serve us well.
They could also move to a place where they don't need 24x7 air conditioning running 10 months a year.
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If that's the case, lets see a study on that! How often does this happen?
Our rates went up but now they are offering free nights. Cost of battery tech has dropped, so now I am powering my house with batteries during the day and charge them at night. The downside is vendors come and go, so the battery you buy today may not be the same offered tomorrow.
Good news! The current administration also wants to put an end to the Energy Star program.
Actually, good news. Basically, everything now is marked ES, no discrimination
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I thought we were supposed to be replacing natural gas appliances with electric ones, but it's become ruinously expensive to do so. Not only are they more expensive to operate due to high electricity rates, the panel upgrades for higher power draw are outrageous.
> Not only are they more expensive to operate due to high electricity rates,
Most electric appliances are much cheaper to operate, even in places with expensive electricity like MA and CA. This is especially true for appliances like heat pumps due to their >100% "efficiency", and if you are somewhere with cheap clean electricity (Pacific Northwest) they are a no-brainer.
> the panel upgrades for higher power draw are outrageous.
With smart splitters and some planning, panel upgrades can often be avoided:
https://homes.rewiringamerica.org/articles/electrical-panel/...
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Are you familiar with the Flour War? I suggest reading up on the history of that and what happens when you try to let the invisible hand control things considered essential.
We have to ask ourself "what's more important? Energy or the environment?" And as for me, I choose the latter. Some of you may have extraordinary bills but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.
The problem is, as my wife says, accounting is a very creative field. Depending on how you calculate it, the cost of renewable energy can vary by a factor of ten. I suppose that if it were profitable, big businesses would have a monopoly on green energy and installed solar panels and batteries instead of offering them to homeowners.
This is great news. If costs climb rapidly, homeowners will switch to solar + battery + ( EV, heat pump water heater, induction stove) and disconnect from grid. Grid disconnects will cause costs to rise even more, a virtuous cycle.
> This is great news. If costs climb rapidly, homeowners will switch to […]
And what about renters (who are, in the US, often the poorer)?
Electricity is an input to industrial and commercial operations, so if companies see their costs rise, they will probably raise prices to maintain margin: this will feed into higher prices everywhere (all goods and services).
They would be forced to pay even higher energy costs if they had to also compete with all these homes which now relies less on the grid.
> And what about renters (who are, in the US, often the poorer)?
Then the apartment owners have another revenue stream, build a mini-grid and offer electricity cheaper than the grid. They already do many add-on services for additional revenue: garages, trash pickup, etc.
> Electricity is an input to industrial and commercial operations, so if companies see their costs rise, they will probably raise prices to maintain margin: this will feed into higher prices everywhere (all goods and services).
All production will continue to move to China, which has built and continues to build vast amounts of cheap electricity and infrastructure.
Wouldn't it be more efficient to centralize the generation of electricity and take advantage of economies of scale?
Solar generation has little economies of scale: PV arrays scale linearly, unlike turbines and electromechanical generators. Batteries also scale basically linearly; maybe you can have a better deal if you buy a truly massive amount of batteries, but I'm not certain it's so dramatic.
Transmission costs seem to dominate the price structure; I currently pay a generating company about $0.1 / kWh, and pay Con Ed $0.25 / kWh for transmission of that energy. And this is in dense New York City; in suburbia or countryside the transmission lines have to be much longer.
Centralized generation makes sense when the efficiency scales wildly non-linearly with size, like it does with nuclear reactors.
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Upgrading transmission infrastructure costs a lot of money (and bureaucracy). Especially in Oregon and northern California where the lines probably should be buried to stop risking wildfires. I’m not sure which path is actually more cost effective for solar+battery.
Centralized generation is the riskiest for any economy. The targets to bomb (or local drones) are very well known and super easy to disrupt the entire economy. Solar on every roof is the most resilient and cheapest form of energy.
Centralization leads to economies of lobbying scale, well connected super rich can oil the machinery to suit their purpose, maximize wealth extraction from everyone, resulting in monopolies/oligopolies, laws to remove competition, laws to maximize profit (with pretenses of protecting people).
Warren Buffett does not own utilities out of the goodness of his heart, they are such spigots of money with zero competition.
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It's not just the generation; it's also the maintenance. If you own your own rooftop panels and a few go out, it's relatively expensive to bring someone out to replace them...if a mechanically and electrically equivalent replacement exists in 5 years. At utility scale, you're always replacing panels, so you have dedicated staff doing it.
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Others have replied saying why this may not be the case, but even if it is — you also need to balance efficiency with other values, such as independence and resiliency.
I would gladly trade a bit of efficiency to not be dependent on the grid or on providers who can jack up the price on a whim outside of my control.
You're talking about big capital upgrades that very few people will make in existing homes. I sure won't.
Capital upgrades don't require capital, only monthly installments. US has the most advance financial packaging infrastructure that can package anything into a monthly payment. It will be a straight up comparison between (electricity bill from grid + gas for 2 ICE cars + natural gas bill) vs (solar + 2 EVs + heat pump water heater + induction stove).
Also, most decisions are not financial but emotional (virtue signaling + status seeking + salesman's ability). Most poor people end up taking incredibly bad financial decisions because a salesman is able to sell. In Texas, if you can talk God/football/beer, and are not a complete idiot, you can sell anything.
The people who bought 100K+ Tesla's before 2024 were not going by finance, nor are the people buying Teslas in 2025. A trillion dollar company is born just out of virtue signaling.
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That cycle leaves out those who do not have the large amounts of money required to make those capital investments. Indeed, it pushes them farther and farther behind.
That doesn't sound like "great news" to me unless you're a serious classist.
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Could the oil companies be funding the AI companies in an attempt to keep fossil fuel demand high and make renewables seem like they are not reducing oil demand? This could be cost effective for the oil companies since they don't have to build the generation infrastructure to power AI. Who are the private investors in AI?
If you do the math the projected electricity demand by data centers for 2030 means that electricity production in the USA would have to double compared to residential use! That is simply impossible using the current grid. Solar farms powering data centers requires less permitting and no grid connection which seems preferable and would allow data centers to be built in remote areas so the noise does not affect homes. Batteries would keep the data centers running at night. If AI demands so much power, let them build the generation capacity themselves.
Also the math for the 2030 projections of the number of computer chips needed for AI are ridiculous, we would need ten new foundries in the US which is just not going to happen. The numbers I'm seeing related to AI ramp-up just make no physical sense.
Electrification of transport and home heating already required a 2-3x increase in electricity supply. If your grid isn't planning for that until AI and still makes no mention of it in future plans then you should be asking questions.
Check out the graph of China's electrification.
https://preview.redd.it/china-is-electrifying-far-faster-tha...
Everyone in the US is not going to buy a new car and a new home heating system within the next five years, but longer term that may be true. EV's can be charged off-peak to level the load without requiring new grid infrastructure. So it would seem utilities should now scrap their current long term plans and plan to build out new grid infrastructure much faster for data centers? Some grid projects take 5-10 years just to get approved. There are still years long backlogs in building new power transformers as well.
The number of fabs required still seems excessive also. So overall the physical plants required for AI's projected trajectory do not seem possible, unless AI gets a lot more energy efficient and chips get much faster. Or those who want data centers build the power infrastructure themselves without competing with other electrifications.
Seems I'm not the only one thinking along these lines:
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/ai-is-power-hungry
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/what-happens-if-ai-hits-a...
Some of the comments there call out the lack of chip fabs and express a similar suspicion that this might be a ploy to increase fossil fuel demand.