231–240 of 411 posts
Yes you can start it, but should we bow to political pressure to put off maintaining infrastructure? No. There's a real cost to maintain this stuff. But a political force doesn't want to raise prices so it gets depayed.
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Economic efficiency comes from accurate pricing. If grid power is artificially expensive in urban areas, people will install solar panels and batteries in situations where it doesn't really make sense. And if grid power is artificially cheap in rural areas, people will not install solar panels and batteries in situations where it makes sense. Thus incorrect pricing leads to inefficient investments. Many economists ev…
Economic efficiency gains from specific power pricing are vastly undermined by the huge positive externalities of having electricity. Solar panel and battery investments reduce your demand for power from the grid, and in many rate cases will reduce your energy bill, but they _won’t_ reduce the costs of maintaining the distribution grid assets connecting you to the grid that need to exist even if you only use them 0.1…
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>> Can the CA govt just impose prohibitive fire prevention liabilities on utility companies, bankrupt them, and scoop up the assets for free I don't think so. Not currently. "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation" That's federal law. Supposedly, that applies to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. All of the sudden, once the Fourteenth Amendment is passed, the Constitut…
It’s not unconstitutional to make utilities liable for fires that their power lines ignite, and it won’t be a taking without just compensation if the actual value of the company drops below zero
That's not the question under consideration.
The question under consideration is if it constitutional for the government to "impose prohibitive fire prevention liabilities on utility companies, bankrupt them, and scoop up the assets for free".
Under my understanding of the law, no you can't do that, due to the takings clause and it's incorporation under the 14th amendment.
I think the law should be different, I don't agree with incorporation doctrine. But I still don't think the government should impose prohibitive fire prevention liabilities on utility companies, bankrupt them, and scoop up the assets for free.
Hopefully that clears everything up for you.
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I've lived in a few dozen cities (most very, very rural) in the US, and The Bay has, by far, the worst electricity out of any of them. We have longer outages as a planned practice than I'd have from ice storms knocking down half the forest or waves partially flooding the town. As an outside observer, the fact that PG&E can lie to the state and request money for maintenance, subsequently sending that money to sharehol…
Californians blame it all on Enron, but that can't be the only reason, right?
I’d guess the problem is more endemic to their political system.
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Possibly due to overregulation. The power company wants to cut corners. The government wants to prevent that. So there is constant lawfare between governments and highly regulated companies, with neither really caring if it leaves the customer out of pocket (since regulators can blame the bills on the company). The company outsmarts the regulators so the regulators carpet bomb them with so much regulation that they h…
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Economic efficiency gains from specific power pricing are vastly undermined by the huge positive externalities of having electricity. Solar panel and battery investments reduce your demand for power from the grid, and in many rate cases will reduce your energy bill, but they _won’t_ reduce the costs of maintaining the distribution grid assets connecting you to the grid that need to exist even if you only use them 0.1…
I've never really understood why undergrounding the grid is so insanely expensive in California. In Finland, installing a 20 kV underground cable costs something like €50/m + VAT, which is $100k/mile.
The issue is generally that American grids have WAY MORE overhead line miles than European grids
There was a thread recently on a subreddit talking about hn threads that get outside the hn circle of competence (nuclear weapons in that case) and this thread is giving me the same vibe. I work in utilities and have worked in multiple countries/continents and all over the US (and lived and worked in CA) for munis, coops, national carriers, giant IOUs etc. If you see something you disagree with here please treat it a…
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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.
I think one problem is that most people confuse private ownership with "the market". Just because a utility company is owned and operated by a private entity does not mean it is influenced by market forces. Utilities fall under a natural or technological monopoly. Due to space constraints it is not desirable or efficient to have multiple companies run pipes, cables, or other infrastructure alongside each other to com…
PG&E should have been liquidated in bankruptcy and the physical assets taken by the state, with regional public utilities created from them.