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Comment by txsh | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why Californians put up with this mess from their politicians.

In Texas, one company maintains the infrastructure and a variety of companies compete to provide service to customers. Separating these concerns means cheap, reliable electricity. Power is quickly restored after natural disasters and we don't have brownouts during the summer. Electricity is affordable and we don't pay extra during peak hours.

I pay $0.10/kWh for a plan 100% provided by wind power. When power is in demand, the smart meter my electric company provided for free (with free installation) will adjust my thermostat and give me a credit on my bill (under a program I opted into).

If my state made me pay $0.40/kWh for unreliable energy, I'd be furious.

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If my state made me pay $0.40/kWh for unreliable energy, I'd be furious.

I would be, too! Fortunately, here in Santa Clara, California, we're paying about $0.11/kWh to Silicon Valley Power, as opposed to the $0.23/kWh that PG&E charges residential customers on average. Even that's sure not anything like $0.40/kWh.

I think we've only lost power maybe twice in the eight years I've lived in Santa Clara, so I'm not too concerned about reliability issues. Since I'm in an apartment complex, I don't have the option to switch to Santa Clara's "green power" option for 100% renewable energy sources, although they've recently gone coal-free for all their generation sources.

http://www.siliconvalleypower.com/svp-and-community/about-sv...

California used to be just like you describe.

Then a bunch of criminally negligent politicians, of both political parties, in the pockets of Enron "deregulated" the industry out here without sufficient safeguards and sold off a bunch of power plants in the name of "efficiency and competition".

The current kerfuffle with Calpine is fallout from those actions almost 20 years ago. Since CA doesn't control any power plants directly, anymore, they don't have a lot of negotiating leverage. This is a transient problem because as the article points out, renewables and batteries are wiping out the ability of these producers to exert too much influence as the spot price of electricity gets increasingly controlled by supply rather than demand.

And, to be fair, California hasn't really had any electricity problems since Enron died.

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