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Comment by heimatau | Hacker News Reader

What I strongly believe is being overlooked here is not the fact that their 'liability math' has changed but the fact that this is the result of regional utility monopolies.

The entire energy sector are allowed to operate in these terrible ways because they have local governments supporting their terrible business models.

Price of energy hasn't gone down because there is no actual competition. Without these large government subsidies, there'd be little to no action to "be green" Even though Nuclear is the greenest (taken every factor in and equalizing the playing field). But I digress.

PG&E isn't the only problem. Atlanta had a blackout recently. NY had one. This issue isn't isolated. It's central planning at it's worst.

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Competition in utility functions doesn't help. Australia's power network is competitive and massively undercapitalised and operates a very distorted market with a weak regulator.

What blackout are you talking about in Atlanta? I'm from Atlanta and the only one that comes to mind is in 2017 the airport lost power due to an underground fire. But that was specifically the wiring of the airport and not due to utility negligence

When I lived downtown, we regularly had power outages despite being able to see both Georgia Power hq and Southern Company hq from our roof. It wasn't just us. The World of Coca-Cola, the Center for Civil Rights, and the surrounding buildings frequently lost power. Only the Georgia Aquarium and the Inforum/ACA were spared due to their highly redundant backup power generators. I had less power outages in rural Alabama than I did in downtown Atlanta. For whatever reason the power grid was very fragile in that part of town. I've been told it's because Georgia Power didn't actually build a grid but used a cheaper hub and spoke trunk system. No idea if that's correct but it was shameful how poor their service was in the shadow of their headquarters (and the shadow of their parent company).

In Georgia I’ve seen more gasoline outages than electrical outages for over a decade.

Are electric utilities really that bad? For a relatively tiny amount of money, you get the equivalent energy of dozens of slaves on bicycles that react instantly to your needs for 99.9% of your life.

PG&E didn't invent electrical power. They fulfill a role identical to thousands of similar organizations around the world. Apparently, they do a very poor job of it.

And yet when you try deregulating it, you wind up with Enron.

In my opinion, electricity needs to now become a government function. The more people install solar panels and batteries, the less profitable electricity is going to be.

It's a death spiral eventually completely dominated by the fixed costs of keeping the network connected and enough electricity production in reserve rather than the variable costs of baseline consumption.

> The more people install solar panels and batteries, the less profitable electricity is going to be.

There are really two alternatives here. One is that solar+storage never manages to provide cheaper electricity than existing nighttime baseload generation methods. Then the big change is that time of day metering becomes cheaper during the day (when solar generates) and more expensive at night (when baseload generators justify their existence). But that isn't going to destroy the power grid, it's not a fundamental change, it just changes the pricing.

The other alternative is that solar+storage does become cheaper than baseload generation methods even at night. In that case the power grid is destroyed because most people simply stop needing it. It becomes cheaper to over-spec the solar panels on your roof and the batteries (or whatever) in your basement to handle unusual conditions, or suffer not being able to run your air conditioner one or two days out of the year, than to pay the full cost of operating the power grid just to handle those one or two days a year. But in that case there is nothing to privatize/nationalize/whatever because the residential power grid simply ceases to exist.

The CA-Enron fiasco was not “deregulation”, it was “reregulation”. CA said that utilities could not purchase power on the futures market, but had to buy it on the spot market. Enron, by some strange coincidence, always had to take plants off line during peak hours, leading to high spot prices.

There’s nothing deregulated about forbidding futures contracts.

It pretty much is...the marketing folks can't talk with the distribution/transmission folks without SEC liaison...the whole industry is governed by NERC, split up into regional authorities...WEC, ERCOT, MISO, etc...I'm not sure what you mean by "when you try deregulating it..."...Who is deregulating it and where?

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