Too bad that low cost is invisible for the consumers. California has one of the most, if not the most, expensive electricity in spite of years of investment in renewables.
Why is that a problem? Most people take multiples of that time just to pay off their mortgage. Maybe if you are house flipping, but even then this tends to increase their value.
That said, it does make sense if you do plan to stay for 10+ years I think. As new houses get built, hopefully with requirements for solar, the housing stock will eventually all be upgraded to include some form of solar generation. I would expect the price to further come down and the majority of homes in the 1st world to have residential solar of some form within the next 30 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_on_investment
Payback period is.
Privatizing the electric grid would make electricity cheaper, they said.
It's the uptime that adds costs.
Even closer than the hydro dam there's a waste incinerator plant 3km from my home. Even if the hydro wasn't 100% reliable which of course it isn't (the channel is drained occasionally for maintenance), they can burn trash at any time to make up the difference. On some days there's a funny smell in the air.
It's greed that adds to these costs.
Sure something something more reliable, but don't come here and say the cash they skim isn't a strong motivation in this equation.
At least a lot of the hydro is owned by local municipalities and counties, so most of it goes back into the local communities. But not all.
Beneficial side effects are incentivizing power efficiency, since capital-intensive efforts like insulating your house and installing a heat exchanger are only profitable if electricity prices are high.
Another dramatically undersold benefit is that Norwegian municipalities are effectively well-paid pumped storage operators when continental European power prices are low or negative, which effectively reduces the effective "synthetic" power bill taxation, while retaining its income to the municipalities.
Authorities and publicly owned power companies have really screwed the pooch on explaining these benefits to the public.
Given these benefits, retaining ownership of the hydropower companies in the hands of the public is super important. If they're sold to private owners, it's basically tantamount to allowing private owners to purchase tax collection rights. And honestly, screw that.
But things are getting sold off, which is a worrying trend.
I would have less of a problem with it if the incomes from these power stations were owned by the municipalities. But the municipal governments have demonstrated time and time again that they really suck at negotiating. So what happens is that private investors, often foreign, negotiate a very cheap lease where wind turbines are built on public land. All profits, except a small yearly lease to the municipality, are returned to the investors.
There should be people in the current conservative government that understand enough about market forces to step in and ensure that profitable wind power projects are actually built by the municipalities, but looks like they're asleep at the wheel. Or maybe there's some special interest groups that have managed to sneak in and stop that kind of measure. This is an area where ideology ends up being the enemy of the public.
> Given these benefits, retaining ownership of the hydropower companies in the hands of the public is super important
It's almost unfathomable to me that anyone can disagree with this, yet I'm pretty sure the status quo won't last for much longer.
I'm tempted to use some very strong words for describing those that are working to this end, but I guess it could all boil down to ideological blindness and short sighted greed.
Granted, these are mass produced homes built in the 50s-80s for the most part before home construction got more strict about insulation and energy used to be a lot cheaper.
The cost of electricity, then, is based on some fixed costs of infrastructure: we still haven't figured out how to make more electrons go down less metal wire than in the past. Any savings will result in lack of maintenance, aka: fires.
Some municipalities have improved a lot on that issue. See Santa Clara, Silicon Valley Power. Prices are most lower than PG&E.
"Deregulated" is something of a misnomer here. They removed restrictions on prices and collusion, but did not remove the state-enforced monopolies that different electric providers have in different areas of the state. So they combined the worst aspects of deregulation with the worst aspects of regulation.
AIUI, long term contracts were seen as opaque, whereas spot pricing wasn’t.
The 'carriage' fee, ie the fee used to transport the electricity will grow quite a lot as the entity in charge of that finds reason to charge that much more and gov. will find reasons to tax.
There's the cost of electricity - but also distributors and government in that equation.
If the cost of making parts for the Google Phone were $1, and there were only 1 type of phone in the US and everyone had to have one ... would Google drop the price of the phone? Probably not. They would capture more surpluses.
This will be the same everywhere.
If electricity were purchased at 'independent stations' etc it would be another story entirely. As energy got cheaper, power usage would increase, and efficiency of households would go down.