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My electricity costs 34 cent per Kw/h and I can’t afford solar panels or a renovation to air to water heating while the government insists we shouldn’t use oil / coal anymore nor logs or turf to heat our homes

edit: I live in Ireland

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That's 7x the cost that I pay in the Pacific NW. Where are you?

I am going to assume based on the fact that the article is about Ireland, and Ireland uses the euro, the commenter is in Ireland

Also the mention of turf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%B3rd_na_M%C3%B3na

That makes it worse! A euro is worth about 10% more than a dollar.

Ireland has a lot of oil in their power mix from what I'm seeing, so that makes a bit of sense.

Maybe the high power cost is why they're deploying ~600GWh of new wind capacity per year for the last 15 years. Because at those rates the wholesale prices should be able to subsidize a lot of loans.

We don't measure capacity in GWh, we measure it in GW. And if Ireland had 600GW of wind, their entire island would be surrounded by a forest of windmills. Also, Ireland lacks any energy storage so none of that wind can be used for baseload, only variable load.

> We don't measure capacity in GWh

I cannot even express how much hatred I have for bad charts, and getting tricked by one anyway when I go in already expecting it to be lying to me is incandescently indescribable.

On Wikipedia there's a very progressive-looking chart that is measuring in TWh/year and going up up up. And as you say,

>Ireland lacks any energy storage so none of that wind can be used for baseload

You always measure baseload in GW or if you're fancy, TW.

So what that chart is really saying is that Wind is adding on average about 70 KW of capacity per year, when amortized over 24 hours. Which is probably on the order of an additional .3GW of capacity per year when the sun is shining and bupkis the rest of the time.

Although given how overcast that region is, maybe measuring solar in TWh/year is a bit excusable, and then they end up measuring everything else that way?

Ireland doesn't use oil for generation these days; the last oil plant closed a while back. We use a lot of _gas_, which is under a lot of price pressure at the moment.

Paying 50 cents here in California. Running the electric oven costs literal dollars. However, this isnt new. Im hoping the data centers bring more attention to our state run cartel and push it over a tipping point.

18 cents here in New Mexico. You must be getting premium government services for paying all of that in California.

California utility prices are a function of income.

https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/industries-and-topics/electrical-ene...

Only the fixed portion is. So about $20 of my $400-800 monthly electric bill is income-based.

Not really. There is a standard rate and then the companies are required by the state to offer an opt in low income tier.

There was a push a year or two back to make it fully income based, where you would have to give the power company your w2 to determine your rate, but it was rejected (for now)

I'm in the PNW and I pay 11c/kWh (well, I would, if I didn't have solar). Seattle is 13c, King County averages 16c. Where are you paying 5c/kWh? That's exceptionally cheap.

Near Vancouver.

Guessing Vancouver WA (just north of Portland OR) not BC (Canada). For those not familiar with the area.

correct

Seattle is nearer 14c (13.75) and likely to increase over the next decade (because of nonsense like[1]).

[1]: This alone will increase costs by something like 4c/kWh from these 70 year old dams: https://www.king5.com/article/news/investigations/skagit-riv...

Seattle now has variable rate. I pull most of my power at night, when it's 8c/kWh.

Nice. I had heard they were planning this, but last time I looked into it, they hadn't rolled it out yet. You have some kind of home battery?

Honestly my biggest draw is charging my car, so I scheduled that. I do have a 3kWh LFP battery I have as an emergency supply, and since it's in my office anyway I charge my laptop off it, and schedule the wall plug it's on. I scheduled the AC to move the house temp up or down at night. On especially hot or cold days I'm sure I'll use it more at other times. :)

Doesn’t picking the variable rate plan mean your day time costs are priced higher? It does where I am. It’s 10c/kWh on the regular plan but on variable it’s 14c during the day and 7c off hours.

Yes. 13.4c flat rate; 16.1c peak, 8.1c trough on the variable rate plan (Seattle).

https://www.seattle.gov/city-light/residential-services/bill...

And the time periods are: https://www.seattle.gov/images/Departments/CityLight/Residen...

So you're paying a marginally higher rate almost all day on variable-rate, but substantially higher 5-9pm. The math pencils if you have a home battery you can use to load-shift, or perhaps drive an EV a lot.

(Also: this structure is clearly designed around summer cooling load, but peak load is actually winter heating. I don't know what SCL is thinking.)

When do you think winter energy is at peak load?

~6am.

The morning and evening peak loads are about the same. But in the morning, hydro generation is higher, because the Skagit dams hold back water overnight and spin up for morning peak. Evening peak is when there isn't that excess generation available.

Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't PG&E charge one rate for the first ?? kwh and then more for the rest? Perhaps OP made a mistake of using the base rate (which you will blow past if you have too many computers or AC)

They do and how they do the price tranches has changed a lot in the last 5 years. It used to be 4 tranches, 10, 20, 30 and 40. It was very hard to get into the 20 tranch for a single home (maybe if you were bitcoin mining or something). Now the tranches are multiple times higher and its easier to get into the higher tranches. Look on PG&E's website for the specifics.

A thread in which yet another American learns how ludicrously cheap the cost of living is in USA despite the constant neverending moaning.

My power is USD$0.271/kWh and I'm nowhere near Ireland.

You pay $0.05/kWh? That’s insanely low and I though I had it good at $0.1/kWh.

It's crazy that people have to eat the long payback time to switch to renewable, while these wildly profitable (maybe?) data centers can just drink excessively from the grid or switch on natural gas turbines, and skip the lead times/upfront costs.

If they're so productive, make them eat the cost and lead time so we can all have a cheap, functional electricity grid. It would be so easy to mandate no new data centres unless they can procure their own renewable sources of electricity.

For people outside of Ireland: these rates are not the norm. They are usually around 20-22. Can go down 17 if on special plans, or even 12 if you have an electric car.

Actually as of July 1st it is now 38 cents. This is very much the norm

https://www.electricireland.ie/residential/news/detail/elect...

At 34 cents per kwh how can you afford to not get solar?

Being poor is expensive.

I mean, if you own a house (you cant put solar on the roof of something you don't own), you probably do have access to loans. Houses make great collerateral.

Not neccesarily saying it makes economic sense to get a loan to install solar, just that homeowners usually aren't the poor class that saying usually applies to.

How many people do you know who own a house? Not a mortgage, own.

The housing market is such that a lot of people are overextended, and the mortgage market encourages people to change their definition of 'enough' house which makes it worse again.

The fact that I don't have solar on my roof is substantially my own fault. I moved in a year after a subsidy ended and it contributed to my procrastination. But then my power grid is comparatively cheap and comparatively renewable, which also contributes.

But I know a lot of people who know a lot of people who can't even stay on top of keeping their expected house repairs up. And that's also an investment in energy and your time and having construction people in your personal space for 2x as long as they estimated it would take.

The Sam Vimes theory of socioeconomic unfairness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

What kind of question is that? Without knowing anything about the person's geography or local cost of solar, how can you make such a bold assessment of affordability? I live in New Zealand where the capital cost of solar is very expensive and the climate is OK-not-great for solar generation. Even at 30c/kwh the payback (without batteries) is still 15 to 20 years. Not an obvious choice, especially as the capital cost is still declining.

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