Hawaii, a remote island in the middle of the pacific, pays less than the 2024 pg&e prices for the bay area. PG&E are the worst.
Having said that, PG&E is the worst. Agreed.
[0] https://www.hawaiianelectric.com/billing-and-payment/rates-a...
I think California's IOUs are selling the most expensive electricity of any major provider in the nation.
One does have to wonder where all the money has gone, and what the supposed regulators at CPUC are allowing to happen.
Even if they were adequately servicing rural areas, that wouldn't be the root cause. If it was, then power would be more expensive in completely rural states than it is in California.
There was a lot of well-documented corruption decades ago (remember when an entire residential block exploded because they used to falsify line maintenance records and move the money into their personal accounts?) I doubt it's improved since then, and I'm pretty sure that's the root cause.
Power lines cause plenty of forest fires in rural states as well. But the money involved is probably very different, and Californians are bilked for higher rates simply because they are richer than someone in Idaho or Wyoming.
PG&E employees were caught skimming the money for line maintenance. At this point, the whole grid is falling apart.
The power poles in our area have over 20 degree bends in them, and are nearly as old as I am. Last year, we had dozens of trees take out the single digit mile line between ourselves and the freeway, and PG&E's availability was barely one nine. It used to make news if our area had a power outage over 12 hours. Now, it doesn't make news if the outage is under a week.
Other states in the US do not have problems like this. (Puerto Rico does, but it's not a state.)
On top of that the California state government has allowed the insurance cartel to form an artificial monopoly, and then funnel new plans into it, where they can charge a large multiple of fair market rates to homeowners (due to their monopoly status, and the fact that they're an association that was formed by the companies that conspired to refuse to cover the house). Of course, they provide terrible customer service and refuse to pay out after natural disasters.
Here's their web site:
As a major infrastructure component electricity is one of those natural monopolies that should be socialized, with long term planning by the community (government agencies) and built by contractors on fixed price for delivering an output contracts - with a reasonable price and insurance for not building it correctly the first time included.
We hav pricy electricity because of our "fixed" grid costs, not because of expensive generation. Utilities usually take a fixed rate of profit from T&D, and are therefore incentivized to overbuild as much as possible, and it's the regulators' job to stop that.
A socialized grid probably would be run much better than the one by PG&E, however legislation to buy them out has usually been extremely poorly timed so that the state, as purchaser, would take the biggest losses instead of the investors who backed the bad management team.