California utility to cut power to 27k customers to reduce wildfire risk
reuters.com
reuters.com
Living in the country side is supposed to be expensive, but for the past 40 years or so all of the population centers of America have been subsidizing rural life. My parents live 30 miles inland in Florida and recently wanted their 5 mile dirt road paved, total cost would have been north of $2,000,000... Even if that was split among everyone living there you are looking at $133,000.
Things don't get better once you consider their power lines, at $285,000 per mile you are looking at $95,000 just to run power to their home and all adjacent homes.
Then add in water + sewage, at $25.18 per foot, lets say to all the same houses getting power, that is an additional $86,619.
You also probably want modern internet connectivity (cable, fiber) you are looking at another $10,000 per household.
Assuming there is 5% maintenance per year for all this infrastructure, that is $16,230.95 a year.
Meanwhile in a city, the amount each individual is paying is a tiny fraction, probably less than 0.01%. Sure a urban home is probably more expensive, but given that a rural home should incur a near $400,000 premium, you shouldn't have been able to afford that rural home to begin with.
America stands to save hundreds of billions if we actually force the cost of living in rural areas to be what it is, rather than subsidize it.
People who live in the country side already use wells for water due to the cost of water + sewage, why is it any different for power?
It sounds harsh, but some of these people will just need to adapt their lifestyles.
Whereas, subsidizing rural and semi-rural populations, outside of those engaged in the primary sector, has no such benefit. In fact, they require more and more help as time passes with no benefits in tax receipts at all.
Building entirely new government planned cities on the green field is extremely difficult to get right. You're not just building infrastructure, you're effectively designing a social environment. What if it doesn't attract the right mix of people? What if it collides with democratic and legal rights of neighboring communities?
I don't understand the reticence in engaging in city building activity on a massive scale. That is what happened when America was explored, wasn't it?
More people == more scientists, engineers, lawyers, artists == more universities == more scientific breakthroughs. Eventually colonizing other worlds will become a possibility, and then humanity will expand there too, finally becoming free of Earth.
Urbanization is crucial for environmental sustainability.
I'm not sure you contradict my basic point though. Plop down a centrally-designed city that severely limits cars and I think you'll have a lot of trouble attracting either residents or employers.
My point was that there's at least one resident who would be interested, and I don't think I'm unique in that. Maybe unusual, but there are a lot of people in the US, so maybe high enough in absolute number.
How does that fit in this context?
The fact that farmers get paid little is due to supply vs demand. Agriculture has been optimized to a great level but food transportation is expensive.
They get paid a low amount, because the actual real costs to produce the food is low.
1) The so-called "Farm Bill" provides hundreds of billions of dollars in what is essentially farmer socialism, incredible sums of money to protect farmers livelihoods from the free market. Prices too low? Government will pay you to not grow anything to inflate prices. (This doesn't include Trumps tens of billions in more farmer socialism to help protect them from his trade wars)
2) Welfare in general, generally speaking blue/liberal states and cities pay astronomically more into welfare programs (food stamps, unemployment, social security) than they draw, while red states/conservative states draw astronomically more in benefits from the federal gov than they pay.
So in two hundred-billion-plus ways, the liberal cities subsidize the rural farmers and their farms.
And then we buy our produce from central and south america anyway...
I'm not sure that subsidies are the best government intervention, either. Strategic grain reserves are probably more useful and less distortionary.
Interesting re: Australia. I was mostly looking at the history of the US before the subsidies. There were a few extremely tough times for farmers. And in other countries' history, most revolutions seem to start with a bad year or two for crops.
This is the main thing. The farm subsidy can be considered an exorbitant, market distorting subsidy. But food is too important to the very fabric of society, that it has to be available at reasonable prices at all times.
Less than 10% of people living in rural areas are engaged in agriculture.
It seems like a ridiculous way to spend money, when good education and health facilities can be provided at much less expense near or in dense urban centers.
Don't disagree with the general point that having wilderness areas is good (especially areas that are particularly useful for wildlife and/or recreation) but there's a lot that is not particularly constrained by people living in less populated areas.
I live in a mostly rural county in north-central Colorado. The county maintains ~250 miles of roads of which only 39 miles are paved (the rest of the roads in the county are state and federal highways).
Outside the few small towns in the county, there's no sewer or municipal water. Everyone has a septic tank and a well on their property that they're responsible for maintaining.
Same with cable/fiber. Unless you live in a town, your options are ~1.5Mbps DSL or ~5Mbps fixed wireless (if you have good line of sight to a base station). Neither the county nor any of the ISPs in the area have any plans to significantly improve services, so I'm really hoping that SpaceX gets Starlink up and running sooner rather than later.
Considering all that, I don't think that your calculated premium of $400,000 per rural home actually applies in most situations.
Keep in mind that the signal booster isn't magic- it's just a relay with a bigger antenna than what your cell phone has. If you're brave enough, pop up onto your roof with your cell phone- if you get at least three bars up there, I'm guessing that the signal booster could do the trick.
I wish that AT&T or Verizon would offer these unlimited style data plans directly. It seems strange to me that something like UbiFi can contract out off of AT&T's network and offer a flat rate plan, but somehow, phone tethering and data-only devices like verizon's jetpack are always limited to 20gb and slow speeds.
Best of luck!
But GP's first sentence was mainly what I was trying to address:
> I am all for utility companies cutting service to rural areas, for cost savings or otherwise.
If my electric and gas providers suddenly decided that I was too expensive to serve and cut me off, I'd be out in the range of $20-30k to install batteries, a generator (since solar might not be adequate in the middle of winter), and to convert my heating from natural gas to propane.
+ Solar + batteries for a home that uses a modest / conservative amount of electricity should be under $50k.
+ Water + septic should be under $25k, assuming you have a well
+ Gas can be installed for well under $10k, you have a large tank in your yard
+ Internet can be done using long range wifi. Takes the whole town to cooperate, but these days everyone wants internet, as long as someone spearheads it you can get an ISP out.
That pretty much just leaves roadways, which you definitely have various qualities of roads that you can build, but I don't see a cheap way around this.
edit: further research has revealed to me that lots of electric appliances can be replaced with gas powered appliances. So if you are primarily depending on gas for things like your refrigerator, you can bring the cost of a solar installation way down.
Recently looked into this. New rural developments have to paid to get power lines run to the corner of their property (in western states, anyway). If your immediate neighbor has power (which they paid to run) this will cost the resident tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the distance. If you don't have an immediate neighbor with power, you're SOL.
> Then add in water + sewage, at $25.18 per foot, lets say to all the same houses getting power, that is an additional $86,619.
Rural areas are predominantly septic tanks and well water. Paid for by residents. The only utility most rural residents get is power.
> You also probably want modern internet connectivity (cable, fiber) you are looking at another $10,000 per household.
Give me a break. This doesn't happen in rural areas. Hel, go 15 mins/miles outside a densely populated area and your internet/cable options drop below third world standards.
> Assuming there is 5% maintenance per year for all this infrastructure, that is $16,230.95 a year.
Considering rural developments pay to have power run to them, this strikes me as a pretty good deal for power companies.
Meanwhile, there is a trade-off here. In densely populated areas you're looking at complex/dense in-ground sewer, gas and electrical lines that likely cost a magnitude more than the rural equivalent. Sure at a certain population density this becomes economical, but many urban areas don't meet this standard. Take SF for example.
For example, a residential well can be drilled for ~$15k in my area. A septic tank large enough for a home would be ~$10k. When the well runs dry or the septic is full it's the resident that pays.
You mention Western states - which ones are you familiar with? In NW Washington, there are counties with functioning fiber co-ops. It's very possible to get fiber to your property in some areas, economically, with functioning latecomers agreements.
I can't say how common it is elsewhere, but you're painting with a VERY broad brush in describing the rural US internet experience.
You can't even get fiber in MOST of Indianapolis proper and there are still many, many, many addresses in Indianapolis on wells/septic, with 2000-era DSL speeds.
OH, and the reason the power lines were so expensive is his neighbor had paid 30k to run the line, which was within 1/4 mile of my dad's place. There was a period of maybe 10 years where any new customers connecting to the line would pay a portion, which would be refunded to the neighbor who originally paid.
I explicitly brought up wells and septic as an example of having to source your own resources, why is it any different for electricity?
Well rural residents pay to have power run to them and it's only feasible if they develop next to a property that is already wired for power. This means that you can't go move into the middle of nowhere and expect the power company to come to you. Your rural utility options will be limited to what your neighbors already have and any future expansion of the grid will be incremental and paid for by developers. So the claim that urban residents are incurring unjust costs at the hand of rual residens is largely a fiction.
But yes, considering rural residents have largely sourced their own resources, it is likely only a matter of time before rural residents are going off the grid as well. I've certainly seen this trend in many rural areas and as long as the price of solar/propane continues to go down I expect it to continue. But it won't be due to the supposed undue burden they place on society.
Is it really not clear why electricity is different? You can pump water out of the ground pretty much anywhere using very simple and stable technology. Running and maintaining your own power plant is an order of magnitude more difficult and expensive. That's why it's different.
can you point me to any data behind this claim?
I don't quite understand this...I have always been able to live in the country for cheap. Doesn't matter if I'm moving to a small town in Wyoming or literally being an Oregon Trail traveler. It takes very little to subsist, especially when the efforts are distributed across a family or small village.
As a regulated (natural) monopoly, price is supposed to be determined by the cost. Fixed-costs are a factor of geography (including density), reliability, and safety. While marginal costs are driven primarily by when the electricity is used. Electricity use coincident with system peak is very expensive, driving marginal generation, transmission, and distribution capex. While marginal costs of electricity use coincident with system trough is very inexpensive, and perhaps negative.
I abaolutely am comfortable with my current electrical bill if it means not risking an outage when the temperature is -40 or over 100 degrees F outside. In fact, I may install a backup power generator for the home anyway, but the cost of it running is not trivial and I would be happier never needing it.
The electric grid is designed to be cheap not nessisarily dependable. 27,000 x ~500$ generators = 13.5 million which is likely far less expensive than upgrading the grid.
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/12/keeping-some-of-th...
Living in urban areas where there is no place to grow food - food should be in short supply there.
And while we're at it, oil rich parts of the country need to stop supplying parts of the country where oil is scarce. Do you know expensive and unsafe it is to transport fuel?
We're all in this together, and different areas have different strengths.
You might want to rethink this. The cities wouldn't even notice.
Most cities have quite useful ports and can get food from elsewhere.
Said farmers would now have no domestic market and have pissed off their gateways to the non-domestic market.
In addition, the cities have very little love for the current crop of "farmers" as mostly they are servants of the big agribusinesses.
Not for the same price. Either more money is spent on food or some city dwellers starve / overthrow the government.
Back in the 1936 (rural electrification act) it was electric line or nothing, you were upgrading from candlelight.
And it's $20,000 for a solar + battery system versus rate payers subsidizing (using your numbers) $95,000 for an electric line. It seems a bit weird.
This article lays out a convincing case as to why most of America's cities are financially doomed because of them.
https://grist.org/sprawl/2011-06-22-the-american-suburbs-are...
Hopefully have delivered some chunky UPSes and decent support SLAs to those with medical equipment.
Could see this backfiring if eg people start using lots of generators instead...
I don't think there's a law on the books requiring that everyone have access to electrical service (like there is for, say, USPS service).
Maybe beefy solar setups with battery banks and ability to run off-grid will start becoming the norm there. It is California, after all; it's a great place for solar. Heck, it might easily be cheaper for PG&E to subsidize the installation of these systems vs committing to maintaining all those lines properly in perpetuity.
As far as I'm aware, that's the main point of having a regulated power utility. They have to deliver universal service.
So, more like an organized group of users in the middle of nowhere, but do have rights as a recognized municipality of the state.
This is almost definitely the case. Consider that PG+E just went bankrupt from fire costs. If you split PG+E into two parts, the "safe utility" that served urban areas, and the "risky utility" that served rural areas, the fire costs would almost all go to the "risky utility". If they were allowed to, PG+E would be better off simply dropping every customer more than 60 miles away from San Francisco.
But it just doesn't work that way. PG+E is technically a public company, but the customers they are required to serve and the prices they are allowed to charge are so heavily regulated, it often seems more like it's a complicated extension of the California government.
PG&E is a regulated regional monopoly with a universal service mandate within it's service area that has huge piles of money to throw at political fights to stop having public power retailers take over some of it's service areas, so it can just suck up the cost of dealing with uneconomical rural customers as the cost of the privilege of being allowed to own profitable urban and suburban customers it is willing to fight for.
Do you have evidence for this? I assumed going bankrupt is a pretty large piece of evidence against this argument.
With how liability works in California, I'd be really curious to see.
However, even a small state like Rhode Island has plenty of overhead wires, despite being a tenth the size of Denmark.
But surely a rich state like California could dig down wires in areas where it would significant benefits. The benefits are everywhere, obviously, but some areas would gain more benefits than others.
Can a state/country really be considered rich, if it cannot afford to dig down electric wires?
As the saying goes: this suboptimal outcome is a feature, not a bug.
Well, PG+E just went bankrupt, so there aren't any dimes left for shareholders anyway. It's not like they're making a huge margin of profit.
The upshot of this is that every utility in the country would love nothing more than to underground every overhead line in their service area. The reason this doesn’t happen is because public service commissions, who approve capital plans, aren’t willing to saddle customers with the astronomical costs of undergrounding lines (which runs $2-$3M per mile on distribution, depending on rock content of soil).
That might fly in some rich suburb of NYC but try that in Buffalo and the tar and feathers would come out.
So, $4.5 million per customer.
At this point, why be attached to the grid at all?
A renewable setup with storage makes sense at that point.
Building infrastructure well means telling people no. We have a problem with that in the US.
No. You cannot build in the floodplain.
No. You cannot build in the wildland urban interface.
No. You cannot build on a mudslide prone slope.
No. You cannot build in the surge zone.
We just don't do that. Instead we have a system where elect people to give us what we want without paying for the long term consequences. Simply put, we can't fix California, we don't have the money to. People in at risk areas need to be charged for the expense they add to the system, no new customers need added to the system.
If you wonder why the US doesn't build densely, it's because we don't pay for the true cost of our sprawl.
Every time people are forced to make an inefficient decision, the cost is multiplied a thousand fold over time throughout the economy. Money spent burying cables isn’t available to invest elsewhere; a factory goes unbuilt; it doesn’t produce material wealth; it doesn’t hire a young worker into an entry level job; that worker never has a chance to grow and apply their mind to solve new problems; he doesn’t build a new, better factory or tech company one day.
TL;DR Labor rates are above market rates due to the legislative requirements.
See https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/08/31/union-wa... for one point of view on this issue.
It isn't clear to me if these legislative mandates apply to power-line construction though.
https://www.elp.com/articles/powergrid_international/print/v...
http://www.pgecurrents.com/2017/10/31/facts-about-undergroun...
This is part of the trillion dollar sprawl problem we have. We have built a massive amount of infrastructure as cheap as possible, and now we cant afford to built it correctly. People would have never built houses in many places if they had to pay the actual costs.
Something I was reading recently claimed that total operational costs on underground lines also higher in the long run - dielectrics break down, faults are much more expensive etc. Found it counterintuitive, but hard to counter.
The article further talks about people outraged by the amount spent on digging down these cables, as they are generally high voltage cables, and not those that actually reach houses. So I'd imagine regular wires cost less than the above calculation (which includes the 5.7 billion for purchasing the original wires).
[0] In Danish: https://ing.dk/artikel/nyt-opror-stop-milliard-fras-pa-grave...
Edit: A commenter further down noted:
> PG&E has 81,000 miles of distribution lines
So that's 130,357 kilometers. So at the same cost per km as Denmark, 5,312,500 DKK /km, that's 692,521,562,500 DKK or $105,117,847,971.88 USD, ($105.12 billion) USD.
Not considering how many miles of that is actually through mountain ranges and the extra cost of doing highly remote work.
That being said, I do get an impression that more money is lost in bureaucracy/company "fees" in the US than in Denmark.
Because if we catered to every "we're a rich country, why don't we" request across every subject we'd have a government financial situation akin to that of the USSR circa 1988.
Not to mention the fact that burying power lines across rural areas would be exorbitantly expensive. It's one thing to bury power lines in New Jersey. It's another to bury all the power lines in Wisconsin. For what it's worth, the power lines are generally buried in the more dense and rich (must be both, not just one) cites.
Underground lines have their own set of issues, primarily that they have dramatically increased capacitive current. This is manageable, I believe.
Unregulated growth wherever people want to build isn't going to be an affordable problem, no matter how much money people think California has.
For more detail see articles like: https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/California-s-st...
It isn't clear that PG+E did anything wrong in maintaining power lines. That just isn't how liability works here. There is always some chance that power lines cause a small fire, and recently the costs of a small fire have grown massively, as it has become more common that a small fire expands into a large fire. PG+E is facing rising costs, and they don't really have many ways to lower fire risk that they haven't already taken. They are not legally allowed to stop serving this area. So they are forced into measures like these.
(They also just went bankrupt, so it's not like PG+E investors are making a killing while underserving their customers.)
The best practice is to install substation equipment that prevents enormous current from flowing through a phase-to-ground fault. Petersen coils and similar devices do this, and they appear to be reasonably widespread in Europe.
Heck, suppose PG&E turns off power during high wind events. Do they even have the required equipment to avoid starting a fire if a line fell and is still on the ground after the wind stops when they turn power back on? This type of equipment exists.
A 90% solution would be an excellent start here.
The places that don't burn now are just saving up more fuel for bigger fires in the future. The idyllic mountain cabin surrounded by large pine trees and ladder fuels is lost. Roads with brush up to the lines are death traps. Housing developments in box end canyons are the definition of insanity. Climate change is making large fires more frequent. Sparks from fallen lines have killed hundreds, just wait till we get a deranged but gifted arsonist that understands meteorology.
The first place for an excellent start begins at your home. It's going to take the power company years or decades to retrofit. Push the brush and trees as far back as possible. Start a neighborhood preventative fire group. Demand your city and country cut brush back from roads.
The 99% Invisible podcast did an episode on this [1]. There is strong evidence that even very intense forest-fires won't cause buildings to burn if they take well-known preventative measures.
I don't know how much of the financial damages from the utility companies are owed to homeowners, but it certainly seems like homeowners aren't absolved of responsibility if their house burns when they've ignored preventative measures.
The Laguna fire in 1970 crossed over I8. [1] (Be sure to watch the video at the bottom of the article, it's really interesting.) I know you acknowledge that it probably happened, but the reason is didn't happen more was due to the location of those fires, not characteristics of those fires. Most wildfires don't happen near freeways, so the data will show that fires jump freeways more frequently now. That may be true, but there are also a lot more freeways now. Interstate highways didn't even exist before 1956 and freeways were also rare at that time, so comparing freeway-jumping between then and now isn't really saying much about fire intensity.
Almost all of California's largest fires have had human causes.[3] There is a tendency to blame climate for wildfires increasing, but the real reason is that there are just a lot more people in the state. More structures, more people, more irresponsibility at scale. There is also a lot more misguided policy. For example, bans on cutting trees, reduction of logging activity and various other policies designed to "protect" the environment but fail to acknowledge unintended consequences. (To be clear, I'm not advocating mass logging, but bad policy is definitely contributing to fires.) [4]
> The problem with these recent fires is when you have like sustained 50 mph gusts and 5% humidity
Like the Santa Ana winds? That isn't a new thing.
[1] https://wildfiretoday.com/2015/09/26/the-laguna-fire-45-year... [2] https://www.kcet.org/shows/lost-la/a-brief-history-of-the-sa... [3] https://www.fire.ca.gov/communications/downloads/fact_sheets... [4] https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/08/23/california-fires-gove...
How many days a year can they do this before “measures like these” become stopping serving this area?
PG&E knew that the towers in this area weren't sufficient for the weather conditions and did nothing about it.
By my read, after two consecutive years' of fire lawsuits being judged against PG&E and going bankrupt, someone decided to listen to the engineers and technicians on the ground.
The theory goes that as solar panels and battery prices drop, it will eventually make sense for homeowners to produce their own power, and "defect" from the electrical grid completely. Obviously this isn't a perfect solution: for example, the homeowner is now solely responsible for fixing their own power supply issues, instead of the collective "insurance" the grid operator provides by fixing grid issues for customers.
I think that rural customers in wildfire prone areas provide one of the best use cases for grid defection. The power company can save money in two ways: by not having to maintain relatively long power lines which serve few customers and by reducing their exposure to liability for wildfire damages. It might even be in the utilities interest to subsidize rural customers defection, to focus on more urban customers. Grid defection relies on low-cost solar and batter technology, and I think we will have both in the next decade. This is something that was not even possible in years past: extending the grid to rural areas was a great example of government sponsored economic equity that market forces alone may not have provided.
Two things that would help aid the transition: (1) Holding grid operators liable for wildfire risk (or at least part of it) and (2) forcing rural customers to pay a greater price for their power, reflective of the greater cost to provide it. I know (2) won't be popular but I think it does align some economic incentives correctly. I would also advocate implementing price increases only when solar+battery is very close to grid parity, so customers actually have a reasonable choice.
I think it already makes sense in California (given the amount of sun we get).
A Tesla solar install of 8 kW solar production + 2 PowerWalls (27 kWh capacity) has a loan payment of $188/month, which is probably lower than what your cost would be from the utility company for an equivalent "level of service".
The only tricky part is to figure out the answers to "what size panels + storage do I need so that, given elements (weather mostly), the probability of my storage being depleted any point during the day is less than X%".
Solar companies probably already know the answer to this given the data they already have, but the other part of the equation is changes to the owner's consumption (buying an EV? new child on the way? changing your range/dryer/heaters from gas to electric? etc)
That's the real pain point (it can be mitigated with a generator, but that gets complicated), which leads to a certain amount of oversizing, and as a consequence, waste (since you can't feed it back to the grid).
Also the occasional failure in your own infrastructure could lead to blackouts that could be more frequent than if you were tied to the grid (Mean Time To Repair is higher with your own infrastructure for obvious reasons), although I have to admit that the grid hasn't been very good in that respect. A solar system is generally maintenance free, but failures do happen.
Still, I think it's worth it (that's why I took the plunge a few years ago).
Going to propane also helps with the overbuilding, because that's more or less pay-as-you-go instead of having to build a finite supply all at once.
I think there is an unrealized business model out there where a company builds, installs, and then maintains (incl. emergency fixes) solar+battery installs for a monthly fee, just like what you pay to the electric utility today. Such a business would hopefully achieve some cost savings by buying parts in bulk and be able to quickly fix issues by using similar system designs. It would be a bit like the electric utility, but they wouldn't own any grid or power plants.
A PowerWall has a 10 year lifespan, where they guarantee that batteries will have 70% capacity or better during that time. I take this to mean you'll need to size for a 30% capacity drop, and plan for battery replacement in 10 years.
Does your loan factor in installation costs, which can be significant?
Since the goal is to reduce the chance of fire, what would the probability of starting a fire be with thousands of powerwalls installed all over the place be in comparison?
What do you mean by that? The amount you can draw from the power walls?
This page has a chart with specs that cover this: https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/tesla-powerwall-2/
I think each powerwall can draw 5 kW continuous and 7 kW peak.
> A PowerWall has a 10 year lifespan, where they guarantee that batteries will have 70% capacity or better during that time. I take this to mean you'll need to size for a 30% capacity drop, and plan for battery replacement in 10 years.
Well, it has a 10 year warranty, not life span. Yes, for sure there will be some degradation with time (although for my car, a Model S, I'm surprised that after close to 5 years and 25K miles I barely "lost" 1% of range). It depends on how you draw and charge.
> Does your loan factor in installation costs, which can be significant?
I believe it does, and also includes the rebates/credits. But you can answer those questions yourself by going to their website and doing a "pretend order" - that'll give you a bunch of knobs to play with and see the various options between buy cash vs loan.
> Since the goal is to reduce the chance of fire, what would the probability of starting a fire be with thousands of powerwalls installed all over the place be in comparison?
Well, the goal isn't just to reduce the chance of fire: it's also to offer availability at reasonable cost.
Some will also like the "independence" aspect of it, like "stick it to the man" - but that isn't particularly important to me.
But back to your probability question, I frankly have no idea. I imagine we'll learn it from deployments, like we are learning about "spontaneous fires" that have been happening with electrical cars.
It's certainly a tradeoff, but one of the interesting things about this technology is that a hot environment is generally the time when you can produce good energy with the panels, which you can use to cool the infrastructure that needs cooling (batteries for example).
That being said, there is no 100% safe system. We're dealing with Kilowatts of power moving across a bunch of lines, so we have to be humble and realize we can't control everything to a zero risk environment.
What we can do, however, is measure, learn, and get it safer iteration after iteration.
Sorry - misspelled 'loan'.
Thanks for the link!
And the holdout might need really reliable electricity for medical devices or similar.
I wonder what "fair" mechanism could be employed to handle things optimally?
As for medical devices and whatnot: the grid is already not 100% reliable. The replacement would need to be of comparable reliability, but I don't think the threshold is 100% reliable. If you've got medical devices critical to your continued existence, you need more redundancy than either the grid or solar+battery.
I don't see is a particularly fair model for stuff like this. Just a bunch of bad or worse options. Honestly I think once cost parity is achieved, a lot of these questions will evaporate.
As an aside, all hardware stores in Chico were out of generators; we had to go to Red Bluff to pick one up. Should've done it sooner, proactively but I'm having to care for a disabled family member.
Many of the people I know who bought generators have been eyeballing battery storage very heavily. If the situation is so bad that you need your generator more than a week, you probably need to leave and go somewhere else anyway. And batteries are nearing the point where they can do what you need.
Things don't get better once you consider their power lines, at $285,000 per mile you are looking at $95,000 just to run power to their home and all adjacent homes.
Then add in water + sewage, at $25.18 per foot, lets say to all the same houses getting power, that is an additional $86,619.
You also probably want modern internet connectivity (cable, fiber) you are looking at another $10,000 per household.
Assuming there is 5% maintenance per year for all this infrastructure, that is $16,230.95 a year.
Meanwhile in a city, the amount each individual is paying is a tiny fraction, probably less than 0.01%. Sure a urban home is probably more expensive, but given that a rural home should incur a near $400,000 premium, you shouldn't have been able to afford that rural home to begin with.
America stands to save hundreds of billions if we actually force the cost of living in rural areas to be what it is, rather than subsidize it.
Double posting?
So less government involvement in things? I assure you people in rural areas would gladly accept a higher cost of living if it meant getting the city people to butt out.
Unfortunately "we gonna tell the city people to fuck off" won't get many campaign donations since it aligns with approximately nobody's economic interest.
It may be the case that the utility is providing service in areas it would not choose to serve today, given the fire risk.
I got a friend in Florida and we were talking about solar a few years ago. Apparently in Florida if you set up your house for solar and make enough and store it to power everything... You are still legally required to pay the utility company to be hooked up or the county can condemn your house and kick you out. Sure you might end up using zero kilowatt hours, but still, all these other fees tacked on. Also required to get permission and inspection by that same power company too. So the sunshine state isn't friendly to solar, so ironic. I love Florida otherwise though, a bunch of nice places and things to do there.
I've been watching some full-time RV and digital nomad YouTubers on and off... Really makes me feel like minimalist and enough solar to be self-sufficient in an RV would be a great lifestyle. If you want to move you just have to put your things away, bring in the awning, slides, jacks then turn the key and go! I figured if I did it I'd try to stay in an area for a week or two though as I think moving every day would be annoying since I'd probably go for a bigger rig more home feeling. Probably private RV parks, national parks, state parks. Some cities and counties also have RV parks to try and attract tourists to their area. so mostly paid options, but then national forests and out west tons of BLM land to boondock on for free, however, some of these agencies do have some paid areas too.
Plus I kinda feel like you don't even own your house truly. Some places are so picky you even need a permit to install a doorbell. Then HOAs are even more of a pain, I heard in some if your mailbox paint is chipping the HOA can fine you and even take away your house at some point. At least with RVs, they are considered vehicles instead so the local building code guy has no power unless you are parked someone that disallows RVs. Then I remember hearing about an HOA who was harassing a veteran for flying the American Flag.
If you decide to full-time RV since you no longer own a house or rent an apartment you can choose to be a resident in any state friendly to nomads, such as domiciling in South Dakota or Texas which each has their own list of pros and cons. Some people are even forced to change their residence anyways as their former state won't let them use a mail forwarder. Was reading someone who formerly lived in Michigan changed their license and reg online to a mail forwarder located in the state as they wanted to still be residents there, and got a nasty letter with like only 10 days to correct their address or face suspension of their license and registration. I guess in a way RV people are considered homeless even if you have a half a million dollar RV that costs more than the house it's parked in front of. I think states do this also to try to discriminate against homeless people's voting rights too.
So forced to change their domicile to another more friendlier state or use a relative address. But I guess if Michigan doesn't want full-time RVers to call them home, oh well as they can lose out on those resident income taxes since they no longer had a job in MI but being a resident still means all income is still taxable there even if they worked in no income tax Texas for a seasonal job they'd still owe back to MI even if they haven't been there in over a year as they still claimed MI as their domicile. At least with South Dakota, you can spend only 1 night there at a hotel, rent a mailbox and be considered a resident. Then can register your car and RV without bringing it with you if you flew there on a short notice as given little choice. SD even allows you to register by mail too unlike some states that require you to physically bring it with you to be inspected. if SD was like that then you'd have to pretty much drive straight to SD before that 10 days was up, hoping you still have time left by time you even got the notice. So if you had to change things on short notice, South Dakota is a perfect state if your former home state you lived your entire life in decides to make you a refugee.
So I guess living in an RV would work out if you made enough money remotely or retired... Probably someone who lives in a big city with a 2,000 a month apartment would save a bunch possibly. However, while it has it's pros, there's also cons and challenges too like the whole where do you live on paper.
I know people are into van life too, but I don't think I'd be comfortable in a small space, plus people try to just park and sleep wherever for free. Some are successful, some get woken up by the police at 3 AM in the morning. So wouldn't want that stress, rather have an actual RV, and a separate car to explore away from it. For example people with a Class A motorhome tow a car behind such as a Jeep - what people call a "toad" in the RV community. If you went with a travel trailer or fifth wheel, unhook and leave that at camp and drive your SUV, van or pickup around.
As you don't want to try and take the big RV to go shopping or checking out local attractions. Get the RV set up and don't move it until your reservation is up. Be a nice lifestyle! I'm not too happy with where I am now, and I feel like there's so much to do and explore around both the US itself and the world even that staying in the same area all your life from birth to death just sounds sad and is depressing.
Reading things like this just reminds me of how little control people have. Forced to have only 1 utility for power, for water, maybe 1 or 2 phones, tv and internet providers. Well, some areas 1 cable company, phone company offers fiber-based TV in some areas but of course, there's always around 2 satellite options... but then again some cities and HOAs try to prevent people from using satellite even though that violates the FCC's Over-the-Air Reception Devices "OTARD" rule. Some don't like how they look I guess, some try to limit the number of dishes, etc. I was randomly searching and found there's a bunch of cities that still have ordinances banning satellite TV completely... I guess due to giving the local cable company a monopoly as they profit from the franchise fees. Probably would win in court though due to the federal law depending on specifics as some restrictions are allowed to be regulated by the locals narrowly written such as not allowing changes to historical houses or drilling holes into the roof of an apartment building would be a no no as you don't own it, etc type of restrictions but still a hassle. You risk getting a misdemeanor criminal record because you didn't like the local cable company. I find satellite TV annoying when the weather is bad, but otherwise, I feel it's a better choice. Like the boxes, UI feels so much faster. As far as I know, Dish makes their own software and hardware, while the cable company just buys an off the shelf box and installs premade Java-based OS called OpenCable.
I guess RV you are limiting yourself to satellite tv, and mobile internet plans - which is a whole topic in the RV community itself. Certain providers people recommend, with cell boosters, wifi boosters and repeaters and creating your own internal wifi network yourself... So you can have all your devices connect to your own router and then point it towards a cell modem or repeat the RV's park Wifi. Useful too if you have like a TV, game console, and other devices... Can change the internet connection source without reconnecting them all to that new source individually.
Then some people bought a house in a rural area with their own septic system or well. Then when the city or county starts providing water and sewer you are forced to connect to their system instead of being self-sufficient using the existing systems you've already paid for and are maintaining.
Both will show you how the Water & Power's corrupt officials used aqueducts being artificially shut down, and then magically repaired at their convenient timing, to control price of land for their personal riches.
Also, that cost is paid by city, yes, because this initial work is what enable news cities to eventually came into existence, offloading the first city superpopulation problems. It is not done out of altruism, like limited mind people like to boast when defending such short sighted measures.
The social impact is about the cost of doing it properly or not. Not doing it in a way that causes fires, that is something else.