141–150 of 411 posts
I used to live in a small town in Michigan which had city provided power using a dam. It was inexpensive and highly reliable. But every couple of years the big power company in the state would try and get the city to sell them the utility. After I moved a city council for whatever reason ended up selling. As a result the cost of electricity immediately doubled and power outages occurred regularly due to reduced maint…
I used to live in a small town in Michigan which had city provided power using a dam. It was inexpensive and highly reliable. But every couple of years the big power company in the state would try and get the city to sell them the utility. After I moved a city council for whatever reason ended up selling. As a result the cost of electricity immediately doubled and power outages occurred regularly due to reduced maint…
That's not how the power grid works
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is just the end-stage failures of social democracies. Fund the things now, even if it means selling anything that can generate slight profits in long term. Or provide basic services at reasonable rates. Eventually everything is sold and out sourced, money has been wasted on buying votes and the debt is maxed out. Then the system will fail...
It's the end state of neoliberal policies . That's the ideological tendency that actually has the obsession with markets and strangling government capacity to do anything other than be a spigot for tax dollars. Scandinavian social democracies aren't perfect but they don't suffer from these entirely predictable problems to nearly the same degree.
That said, who is to say the trend isn't reversible some day.
Also let's not forget the selling to private operators does provide benefits, not always, it's not the magic fix we pretend it is.
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The highest price that the city owned electric utility in Alameda, CA charges on the standard rate schedule is $0.29453 / kWh https://www.alamedamp.com/DocumentCenter/View/1268/FY25-Rate... Edit: Oh, this utility runs at a profit and has for decades. The profits have been going into undergrounding transmission lines
Not trying to neg how you phrased it, but I wonder if the whole damn system would be a smidge better if we had strong well-worn widely-used terms to discriminate between profit-taken and surplus-reinvested (and maybe to further discriminate between unrelated r&d, related r&d, and direct performance/capacity/resiliency/etc. investments)
The payout ratio is the percentage of net income actually paid out to equity investors.
For utilities it's around 50% of net income, though it obviously depends
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Is there any evidence for how they’re wasting such a huge amount of money year after year?
Maybe I'm naive here, but isn't any company at a similar scale regularly finding ways to reduce profits on paper? Taxes add up fast when you don't have expenses to write off, and my understanding was that most effective ways to reduce tax liability would also reduce profit margins.
It makes no sense to forego $0.80 in your pocket because you do not want the government to get $0.20.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is just the end-stage failures of social democracies. Fund the things now, even if it means selling anything that can generate slight profits in long term. Or provide basic services at reasonable rates. Eventually everything is sold and out sourced, money has been wasted on buying votes and the debt is maxed out. Then the system will fail...
It's the end state of neoliberal policies . That's the ideological tendency that actually has the obsession with markets and strangling government capacity to do anything other than be a spigot for tax dollars. Scandinavian social democracies aren't perfect but they don't suffer from these entirely predictable problems to nearly the same degree.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is just the end-stage failures of social democracies. Fund the things now, even if it means selling anything that can generate slight profits in long term. Or provide basic services at reasonable rates. Eventually everything is sold and out sourced, money has been wasted on buying votes and the debt is maxed out. Then the system will fail...
It's the end state of neoliberal policies . That's the ideological tendency that actually has the obsession with markets and strangling government capacity to do anything other than be a spigot for tax dollars. Scandinavian social democracies aren't perfect but they don't suffer from these entirely predictable problems to nearly the same degree.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, their argument is sound. It’s just missing the point of utilities. They’re saying that the cost of providing electricity to the cities, where everything is densely located and there are fewer trees and fewer overhead lines needing under grounding is lower so they should charge less to city consumers. They imply that the bulk of the cost is delivering power to the richer consumers further out because there’s a lot…
Cross subsidies like that promote inefficiency. They are one of the main reasons why living in California is so expensive. Utilities should be legally required to serve everyone in their area, but they should also be allowed to charge the real costs for the service. If the government thinks that's unfair to people living in rural areas, it's free to use tax money for explicit subsidies. But the subsidies should only…
“The people” in expensive areas have literally no agency in finding an efficient solution. They don’t have any say about the utilities grid investments. In most parts of the country “these people” are also poorer.
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None of the people in the area to which I referred are undertaking anything productive. Food comes from farms, like always.
Which are in rural areas. Which means the lines have to go there. Which means they pass less rural area to get there. Rural areas aren't just a farm all by itself. Farmers need schools, stores, supplies, workers, you know, rural areas. As well, when we electrified our nations, most people lived on farms. At the start of the 20th, as an example, most Canadians lived in rural areas. The reverse is now true. This conver…
PG&E's absurdly high rates are how they finance the careers of Governor Newsom & his wife, and "donations" to a giant array of other pet project "charities" for politicians & their favored cronies/causes. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/11/11/pge-helpe... https://www.sacbee.com/article251851903.html Why would any of California's uniparty establishment want to refund all that money to random utility custo…
> But over the past two decades, Newsom (D) and his wife have accepted more than $700,000 from the Pacific Gas & Electric $700,000 over 20 years is $35,000 per year (not to mention Newsom wasn’t governor for most of that time) PG&E revenues are $25,000,000,000 per year. Regardless of what you think about the arrangement, it’s not why rates are high. > In neighboring Nevada, the utility serving its major metros NV Ene…