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Comment by kelseyfrog | Hacker News Reader

Of course it's cost effective for cities to start their own utilities, the economies of scale work in favor of urban and suburban electrification and maintenance.

What isn't effective is electrification and maintenance of low density regions although power monopolies like PG&E are required to provide service. The urban and suburban customers are effectively subsidizing the cost of transmission and maintenance for rural customers.

PG&E doesn't want their most profitable customer base[cities] to have public utilities because if enough do, their company becomes unprofitable and implodes.

This is exactly the reason we should do it.

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Suburbia is subsidizing nothing. They are a drain on the urban core of every single city. There is not enough density in a suburban land area to even reclaim the taxes required to build the infrastructure to get there. And we stupidly continue to build new suburban development for new tax bases that don’t even reclaim the cost of building them. Then there’s no money to maintain them.

Urban development subsidizes everything.

Go watch some Strong Towns.

Fuck suburbs, unless they were built around a streetcar.

I hate suburbs as much as the next person, but let's be realistic. Just because I hate them doesn't mean they aren't subsidizing rural power transmission - that would be letting emotions get in the way of rationalism.

they might be subsidized less than the rural areas, but they're still subsidized by the urban core.

> electrification and maintenance of low density regions although power monopolies like PG&E are required to provide service.

> PG&E doesn't want their most profitable customer base[cities] to have public utilities because if enough do, their company becomes unprofitable and implodes.

If the state forces PG&E to electrify expensive areas at the expense of higher costs in cities, their objections are reasonable.

If California forced a private company to electrify rural areas as part of the deal and then tried to change the rules to have the government take over the cheap areas, there would be easy lawsuits on the table.

Sure, PG&E implodes but then who manages Diablo Canyon and who delivers electricity to the unprofitable rural areas?

I left California last century but seem to recall the PUC(?) has a pretty tight reign on what PG&E does and doesn't do.

Unfortunately rural inhabitants have been free riding on a grostesquely distorted market for decades. It may be hard for them to swallow the idea that they will have to pay market rates for transmission and maintenance, but they should also be the first to agree that despite this, it's ultimately a more fair order han getting what essentially amounts to a handout today.

The flip side of this is that more and more homes are being built in fire zones in large part because we subsidize development in fire zones. It's a bad problem because of bad incentives. We should incentivize urban living

> Sure, PG&E implodes but then who manages Diablo Canyon and who delivers electricity to the unprofitable rural areas?

Hopefully no one manages them and that forces residents to move out and stop being a drain on society.

I assume the same should apply to, say, USPS, and the residents of Alaska and Hawaii should stop being leeches who can get letters delivered to them below cost?

If you prioritize ideological consistency over pragmatics, sure. I don't; I just want a fair system for electrical services.

This is where distributed renewable sources can apply. Supplying a remote home with solar and storage is probably cheaper than running a distribution line to it.

I don't disagree. However, there is a positive feedback cycle lurking that can spin out of control faster than a behemoth corporation or government can react to.

The underlying problem is that utilities are set up assuming their capital investments pay out over an extended period, but the technology is now changing over shorter timescales. The electric power industry is changing at a rate that it hasn't seen for over a century.

if your needs are fairly basic, sure. As soon as you add modernity, solar and storage for every house/region is cost-prohibitive.

The average residential electricity rate in CA is $0.34/kWh. In these problematic locations, I'd expect the cost to be even more than this. Ground mount PV would be suitable here, so there would not be great problems with scaling. I think a PV + battery system should be competitive regardless of "modernity", whatever it was you meant by that.

To put numbers on it: for a 12 kW system in Chico, CA (a location at ~40 degrees N I chose arbitrarily) the NREL calculator at https://pvwatts.nrel.gov/pvwatts.php gives annual generation of 18500 kWh (40 degree inclination). For a lifespan of 20 years at $0.34/kWh this is $125800 worth of electricity. A 12 kW + 16 kWh LFP battery system costs something like $36K (+ installation and financing).

while your general point is valid, the problem with simulations and estimates is that they have some severe caveats.

The most significant is that modernity comes with immense demands on reliability and capacity. The solar estimates are based on averages. There will absolutely be times when your solar and battery system runs out of power. What then? What if you decide to buy an EV? Can you depend solely on solar?

You cannot replace the grid, no matter what the simulations tell you. The whole reason the electricity grid was created in the first place was to solve problems of local resource constraints.

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