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Comment by sillystuff | Hacker News Reader

California was the leader in deregulation of their electric utilities. AB1890 was passed in 1996 deregulating California's electricity sector.

The '90s deregulation directly led to an 800% increase in wholesale electricity prices in 2000, and rolling blackouts for customers of investor owned utilities like SDGE (San Diego) and PGE (Central/Northern California). The government owned utilities, like LADWP (serving the Los Angeles area) did not need to resort to rolling blackouts (zero blackouts), and currently have much lower rates* while being fully sustained by the rate payers (not having the parasitic "investors" demanding greater profits allows for proper long-term planning and significantly lower prices for the rate payers).

* Average $0.26/kWh LADWP. Average $0.45/kWh PGE

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Wait Im confused, if PG&E is deregulated then how come the legislature can pass a law to require income-based billing? What exactly do you mean by deregulated?

The wholesale electrical energy markets in California are deregulated.

As a consumer, you might buy retail electrical energy, transmission and distribution from an investor owned utility like PG&E, which is regulated by the California Public Utilities Commission.

An appropriate analogy for this would be where wholesale beef markets were "deregulated", but the state government put in a program that allowed approximately half the state's population to get vouchers for a 35% discount on beef, driving up the price for everyone else (the CARE program). And the state government mandated grocers and restaurants buy certified organic regenerative beef for at least 50% of the beef they sell (the renewable requirement).

You are leaving out some very important things:

- Price stability itself has a value for electricity consumers. Insulating consumers from the price variations that come from the inherent variability in supply and demand is a major "feature" of retail electric service. While one could provide their own stability with enough personal batteries and generators, practically that's only really possible for the wealthy.

- Lack of regulation around planning, upkeep, maintenance, and backup planning results in short-term profit maximization among generators (and cost minimization among consumers who enjoy very low electric rates in the short term) leads to situations like the catastrophic Texas outages of 2021. Now that Texas has legislated price-caps (which is direct economic regulation) [1], typical rates will rise.

1. https://www.texastribune.org/2023/05/22/texas-electricity-po...

That isn't a "price-cap" on electricity, it's a limit to what is essentially a tax routed through electricity bills and given to utility companies, to the tune of about $30 per person per year. The intent of the tax is to improve the grid, although its efficacy is under question, as the article mentions.

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