Doesn't California pay way more for energy than other states? Not sure it makes sense to look at what they're doing and call it the future. It would be nice if it were free but the cost is something like double neighboring states.
California is not a good model for almost anything these days, just look at the high speed rail project. Cost of living is worsening for the middle and lower classes who are emigrating to other states. The government is corrupt and inefficient, spending vast sums on homelessness while achieving effectively nothing. Progressives can't blame anyone but themselves since California is a one party state with no real opposition.
https://thundersaidenergy.com/downloads/california-electrici...
Calling SONGS-2 or 3 functional is a stretch given their steam generator problems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting
A more laymans' terms comic that explains it with some FAQ built in: https://www.chickennation.com/voting/
It won't instantly change the world, but it will allow people to vote their true conscience vs. strategic voting, and allows smaller parties a chance at real power.
Seattle voted the two progressives on city council out (and Sawant retired) some time ago, homelessness has gone nowhere but worse since then. Like clockwork, we're adding another ~1000 street homeless/year.
As it turns out, the opposite-of-progressives don't have a solution for it either. Which isn't surprising, since they've held most of the council seats and the mayor's office for decades, it's just that now they don't have a progressive boogieman to blame for their failures. Meanwhile, Broadway and Pike and Denny and Pine look worse than they ever have, and so do the streets surrounding them.
It's almost like homelessness is an emergent property of a housing shortage.
The slate's politics seems to be pro-out-of-state-business/landlord/police, anti-density, anti-pedestrian, anti-homeless NIMBYism. Politically positioned as the common-sense solution to the insane progressive politics that have been ruining the city.
The metrics aren't exactly on their side. SPD continues to be an incredible combination of overpaid, unaccountable, incapable of hiring, useless, and actively dangerous to the public, the homeless numbers keep growing, rents and cost of living are rising, and the council is doing everything it can to stonewall the state's efforts to solving the housing crisis in the city.
> Why do you think things are so bad in the PNW compared to other places, if not the governance?
It might have something to do with the hundreds of thousands of highly paid people moving into an area which didn't build enough housing units to support them, thus displacing tens of thousands of people out of the margins and onto the street.
It probably didn't have as much to do with (a loud) minority of progressives that were on the council as we've been told.
I've only got a child's grasp of free market economics (and of musical chairs), but this seems to be the most predictable outcome of that sort of thing. When the number of people in an area exceeds the number of beds, some of those people will eventually be sleeping in tents.
Seattle has five-year waiting lists[1] for low-income housing, and practically no housing options for someone who is actually broke and homeless, even if they don't have an addiction.
It has some shelters, but shelters aren't housing. A shelter is a place you can (sometimes) sleep, it's not a place you can live in. And it doesn't have 9,000 empty shelter beds, to house all the street homeless, either.
You know where has abundant housing? NYC. A city with 10 times the population, but half the street homeless. Because the rest are housed. (A foreign concept to this city.)
But sure, I guess you like seeing thousands of street homeless all day, every day.[1] Because that's what you'd get, even if they were all sheltered (which Seattle won't do, either).
P.S. It damn well is the public's responsibility when public policies create the housing crisis.
[1] Which certainly put you in opposition to the expressed preferences of this entire city.
Or even, like, talked about enacting?
Last time I checked, 11 states received the majority of their electricity from renewable sources, and 10/11 had cheaper rates than the national average, with California being the exception.
1: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-storage/texas-wi...
> In Texas, many batteries today are actually increasing carbon-dioxide emissions, according to one analysis. That’s because operators focus on maximizing revenue and sometimes charge with coal or gas power.
Sounds like they're still using using environmental externalities to subsidize their costs.
Regardless, the results are the same. Batteries are the future.
It's also reasonable to assume internalizing externalities can drive efficiency improvements everywhere. Would batteries by as efficient and available for installation in TX if CA hadn't subsidized them for a decade prior?
There’s a massive housing crisis in CA. Getting people out of it reduces demand which is the only solution if you persistently cannot or will not solve supply.
The Texas energy grid is actually greening rapidly. Although everyone deploying solar in Texas should also deploy a local battery. If you don’t you can’t run your solar when the grid is down.
One needs to specify if this means "cheaper than a new construction fossil fuel plant" or "cheaper than operating an existing fossil fuel plant". Whether a CO2 tax is involved should also be specified. Things will really take off when existing plants can no longer compete (particularly in places like the US where overall demand is growing slowly, if at all). Of course, this will depress the price of the fuel (natural gas is in the doldrums in the US) which will delay things.
Gas is very good for those consistent other times. Batteries are not. Batteries are better for the excess demand during those off times. they offset the backup peaker gas plants as mentioned in the article.
All of which to say the batteries can eat away at the margins of gas plants, but it is incrementally less cost effective to replace each one.
If you operate in an environment where you can supply renewables outside of solar time in quantities high enough to not need the gas, the gas plants will become a lot less useful. Hydro power is the king here. If you don’t have that gas is still probably pretty important.
It might get to the point where a lot of these gas plants are less profitable because they expected to be more relevant and will not be able to justify their fixed costs. But shutting down those plants is probably more expensive to society than just subsidizing them to stay open.
So it’s complicated. The energy and battery side of the inflation reduction act has been HUGE though. Society doesn’t really get how much of an important investment the Biden admin has done here
The problem is that Western elites are corrupt and incompetent. They foolishly outsourced their manufacturing to a rival nation, which is now the rising superpower. Germany shut down its nuclear reactors and spent hundreds of billions on solar, while their manufacturing sector implodes from high electricity prices.
Corporate elites are increasingly extractive as exemplified by rising wealth gap, housing / healthcare / education costs, enshittification of internet platforms, etc. Any narrative which justifies price increases is gleefully propagated by the media hegemons. Climate change is used to markup prices on everything so consumers can feel self-righteous paying through the nose. Yet none of this will make a difference. China, India, and Africa will continue burning the cheapest fuels available to support their development.
Other parts of California pay pretty normal rates.
I think a lot of folks there have solar. And by 2026 they say they will have 50% of electricity sourced via sustainable means.
Sounds like an amazing opportunity to make bank trading energy off-hours (as modeled by TX). Guess what technology enables exactly this!
You can of course charge them however you like, but I have a feeling Santa Clara's purported 3x price fluctuations are not due entirely to natural gas.
[1] https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/home/showpublisheddocumen...