Can someone please explain then why we are paying the highest prices in the continental US for retail electricity, at $0.28/kWh, in a state with the highest percentage of renewables in the country?
Also California isn't most expensive, seems pretty much the same as many blue states. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/
>Data for 2016
This lists California at $0.15/kWh. I've never paid even close to that anywhere I've lived.
The current PGE residential rate of $0.28/kWh [0] is about the same as Honolulu, Hawaii, where 100% of electricity is produced from burning natural gas and petroleum.[1]
[0] https://www.pge.com/tariffs/electric.shtml
[1] https://www.hawaiianelectric.com/billing-and-payment/rates-a...
My PG&E's lowest off-peak rate is now 16c, though I'm on a TOU plan and just installed solar, and I have generation through Peninsula Clean Energy so my bill is somewhat more complicated than the charts involved to send Apollo 11 to the moon.
If you mean Silicon Valley Power, the municipal electric utility for Santa Clara, it's now (as of Jan 2017) 11.82c [1] for residential non-TOU for the upper tier.
It's also only for the city of Santa Clara. Palo Alto has a municipal utility, but its rates are higher, and these are exceptions. AFAIK, the vast majority of California is served by a private utility (e.g. PG&E).
[1] http://www.siliconvalleypower.com/home/showdocument?id=6253
Utilities also over installed a lot of generation capacity after the blackouts in the 2000s. We are still footing the bill for all the natural gas plants they built out of fear for future blackouts. Electricity demand has been flat since 2008, and many generators don't get used much (yet rate payers still paid a guaranteed rate of return to the utility to build the plants).
Basically utilities don't really make money on generation, they make money by building infrastructure, financing that with a 20-year bond, and passing it onto the rate payers. So if you make money by building power plants, you're going to build power plants and make the ratepayers pay for it.
Even with solar they charge me $10/month to be hooked into the grid, even though they’re using that same connection to sell my excess premium renewable energy to others.
They credit you the retail rate for electricity not the wholesale rate they buy it at. And the grid acts as your battery, even though you pay the same grid maintenance charges as your neighbors who don't get that benefit.
This is likely a charge to help maintain the grid so you can sell your supply. Consider it the Apple Tax of the power grid, but its not 30%
Some industrial customers have the ability to automatically ramp equipment up and down or schedule maintenance for when they know power prices will be high.
CA having a large amount of intermittent renewable power sources means your grid has to spend more on storage or peaker plants, dirty gas plants that can ramp up and down quickly to match load. You pay for that in a higher bill.
I don't know if you ever look at the pamphlets PG&E send you along with your bill, but it seems every month they're announcing a rate hike, with a meeting about it that's open to the public.
Maybe someone who hasn't yet thrown away one of those pamphlets could quote the supposed reason for one of their rate hikes. They always have some excuse for doing it.
With a price hike of something like 1% to 2% every month or two, it's a wonder we're not paying much, much more.
Not until you tell us where you live, because I'm not going to backtrack by looking up which state has $0.28/kWh electricity. Though without that knowledge, I'm going to guess something something supply and demand.
Where at? Is that wind power or just natural gas?
I think you gave the answer yourself. If you prefer the scientific method, take all the states and the percentage of renewables and do a plot. You will see mostly a line if you do not use the fake numbers (ex: 0.15 often reported for California instead of 0.28)