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Comment by payne92 | Hacker News Reader

> It costs a lot of money to deliver power to rural customers

Utilities (generally) have a universal service obligation.

If someone can cherry-pick just the denser areas with lower distribution costs, of course they could "undercut" the utility with the requirement to serve everyone.

(I'm not saying that PG&E couldn't be better managed. I'm saying that there's a much, much deeper policy issue at stake here.)

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They made the point that this is the plan. Encourage people to live in cities.

The more people that leave the rural areas for the cities makes it less profitable to serve the existing rural folks.

I grew up in the Bay Area, lived in 'rural' Humboldt and Placer counties, and can say I would never move back to the bay no matter how much the technocrats would desire it.

Pretty happy with my ~30k town nowhere near California TBH...

That’s fine that you want to stay put, but GP is suggesting (I think) that others shouldn’t have to subsidize your choice to live in a rural area where power service is (currently) more expensive.

And you should be charged the actual cost of maintaining the costs of that small town too.

Land Value Tax solves this

How so?

It incentivizes greater development of already-developed land (meaning less infrastructure serving more people) rather than acquisition and low-yield development of new (more rural) land.

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