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Cities can cost effectively start their own utilities

kevin.burke.dev

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Re: Cities can cost effectively start their own utilities

#251

Post by simoncion »

locallost wrote: post #247
simoncion wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay $200 per month in electricity costs. I live in a small San Francisco apartment. I have two laptops, two desktop machines (only one of which has a video card in it), two monitors, some ethernet switches and WiFi APs, a fridge, a microwave oven, and two ceiling fans. My heat (for both air and water) is provided by the building's boiler and is included in the rent, rather than the utility bill. My stove and oven b…

I can't see it, even with heating, as it's California. Even at something outrageous like $1 per kwh it's ~1000 kwh per month (I suppose PG&E takes some fixed costs like everyone else in the world). For comparison we're a family of four and just got our final bill for 2024, we were at 1500kwh for the whole year (more or less the same for years now). Even yours is weird. I don't have a desktop computer running but we c…

> [My family of four] were at 1500kwh for the whole year...

Weird. Looking at my past several bills, my monthly usage is fairly constant; ~450kWh per month. So, (if my math is correct) that puts my annual usage at ~5400kWh.

> I can't see it, even with heating, as it's California.

I've no idea where OP is, but there are inland parts of the state that get dangerously hot in the summer. Cooling could be a big concern. Plus, rental housing in the state is often poorly maintained, so all that lovely conditioned air could very well be leaking out all over the damn place.

Re: Cities can cost effectively start their own utilities

#252

Post by KennyBlanken »

eldaisfish wrote: post #226
toomuchtodo wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rural electrification was needed at the time. In many cases, it no longer is (distributed generation, microgrids, etc vs large, distant generators having to transport power to residential load centers). This is very similar to how Africa will leapfrog the legacy model with cheap solar and batteries. In Australia, they have a model of colocating stationary battery storage in neighborhoods to balance buffer solar produ…

this is entirely wrong. There is no world in which rural areas can substitute the power grid with anything you described. It is not possible - in the absolute sense - to match the power grid's reliability and stability with a bunch of local solutions. The cost is another matter but take Canada - the lowest electricity rates in the OECD. The local solution to solve local problem absolutely works, but that is not what…

You..clearly know nothing about power grids, because utilities are deploying batteries precisely because they increase reliability an ease maintenance. And microgrids exist all over the US - a bunch are in Alaska and other very rural areas. Those communities have started adding battery storage systems to account for sudden load changes their generators can't handle, generator failure or maintenance, and so on.

Without them the grid is like a bunch of dominoes where a failure can cascade unless grid operators, or automated systems, react fast enough. Battery systems are like power firewalls; if the main grid goes down, the battery keeps right on chugging.

If circuit protection devices or an equipment failure happens on a main transmission line, the utility has hours to fix it, and meanwhile everyone has power. Ditto for maintenance. Need to replace that big huge switch that feeds part of the county? No problem, just...shut it off. Long as you're done before the battery bank runs out, everything's fine.

Right now you can end up with situations where a power plant will "trip" and go offline, such as when a large amount of load is disconnected due to a transmission line failure or substation failure. The grid frequency goes up if the power plants on the grid can't throttle back fast enough, and instead, to keep the grid from going over-frequency, the plant goes offline entirely.

If a lot of areas are on battery - those systems can be commanded to start charging to stop the plants from speeding up. If the grid goes dead, it's not nearly as big a deal, because the grid operators have more time to do things like sequence the re-connection of all those areas.

I'd imagine that with a bunch of battery systems distributed around a grid, they could potentially be able help black-start a plant if needed.

Battery systems also reduce the need for a transmission line upgrade; when demand is higher than the line's capacity, the battery system steps in. When demand is below the line capacity, the battery system charges.

Re: Cities can cost effectively start their own utilities

#253

Post by philjohn »

econ wrote: post #224
ksec wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In this ideology the sale would be viewed as a success regardless of any practical downsides. In other places on earth, selling public utility requires the company to operate at similar or better level of services previously provided while retaining the cost. And those deals are mostly regulated, penalties when not meeting them. And it used to be, may be in rare cases the people in Government making those deals actu…

I would argue that if something may not fail you can only pretend to privatize. You only privatize the profit during the good times. Our railroads paid a nice 300m in divident every year then corona came, people were told to stay home. You can guess who had to pay for the lack of travelers. The most silly are ISP's. The prices in each country depend on how much people can pay and what you get for it is rng

Privatize the profit, socialise the losses.

The one privatisation I believe the UK got right was British Telecom.

We now have a strongly regulated infrastructure side called OpenReach - the price they can charge for last mile connectivity is limited, and as such we have a load of different ISP's which either compete on tech and service (AAISP, Zen) or cost (PlusNet et al).

And then a proliferation of alternative last mile providers has also occurred - I now have the option of 900/100 FTTP from OpenReach based suppliers, 1130/104 DOCSIS from Virgin Media and 900/900 FTTP from CityFibre based suppliers.

I'm paying £40 a month for the latter.

Re: Cities can cost effectively start their own utilities

#255

Post by philjohn »

darreninthenet wrote: post #239
animal_spirits wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Depends how you do it... in the UK we have the underlying infrastructure government owned and we choose who to buy our electricity and gas from.

For electric and gas that works as it's all just accounting. Energy company A buys futures for has and electricity and it all gets provided via the grid.

For trains it's much harder - yes, there are two providers on the WCML, but they're not equal (one runs faster trains) and as such there's zero real competition.

Re: Cities can cost effectively start their own utilities

#256

Post by JCharante »

UncleEntity wrote: post #89
kelseyfrog wrote: post #84

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 rur…

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.

> 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.

Re: Cities can cost effectively start their own utilities

#257

Post by yonran »

It seems that the bulk of the savings for making an urban municipal utility come from not having to pay for upgrades in fire-prone regions. And the end game is that cities will have their own utilities with lower rates, whereas rural people will be adverse selected to be stuck with PG&E and pay thousands of dollars per month on energy. Wouldn’t it be easier for PG&E themselves to implement this desired rate schedule where urban rates are cheap and rural rates are expensive? It seems odd that the PUC would not allow PG&E to charge extraordinary rates for rural areas today, but they do allow cities to buy up the good parts of PG&E which will inevitably lead to the same outcome in the future.

Re: Cities can cost effectively start their own utilities

#258

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

rmason wrote: post #86

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 always like to put numbers to things. To put some numbers to this, the average residential rates for electricity in modern-day MI is around ~$0.20 per kWh. Louisiana appears to be one of the cheapest states in this regard, averaging around $0.12 per kWh.

As a selfish comparison point, the average residential rate for Finland, an EU country known for its recent nuclear developments (great!), is ~$0.25 per kWh, about 25% higher. France, well known for its pro-nuke approach, seems to average ~$0.28 per kWh, or about 40% higher. Germany, which has... Not done so, is around $0.40 per kWh, or about twice as high. Even Iceland, famed for its "almost free" geothermal power, seems to average $0.16-0.18 kWh for an ordinary residential connection - one must assume aluminum plants, etc can cut much better deals with the geothermal plants, through strategies like close colocation, of course.

These are very important factors to keep in mind, even if the absolute numbers seem small. Expensive electricity makes everything else more expensive as well. It touches every facet of our lives in a way not even food does. And making electricity cheaper probably benefits human welfare en masse in a huge way. It's a shame power management doesn't seem to be very attractive to recent EE grads like myself since it pays much worse and requires much more credentialing to break into compared to, say, WordPress development.

Re: Cities can cost effectively start their own utilities

#259

Post by Qwertious »

UncleEntity wrote: post #96
marssaxman wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a ton of people to be unable to continue living in those areas That sounds like more of a solution than a problem: those places are going to burn, so it's better that people stop living there.

Ironically, if they just let them naturally burn in the first place there wouldn't be even a fraction of damage caused by these modern wildfires.

IIRC it's a funding problem - controlled burns require a ton of manpower to control, and the longer since the last burn, the harder it is to control.

Re: Cities can cost effectively start their own utilities

#260

Post by Gigachad »

nocoiner wrote: post #188
kevinburke wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the author here. The cost savings come from not having people who live in cities pay for undergrounding lines and maintaining power lines in rural areas. Maintaining the city networks is much cheaper. This is why Santa Clara, Palo Alto and Alameda's power companies can deliver power for half of what PG&E can. You can just copy their cost structure.

Cool. Now you’ve just undone 70 years of rural electrification in the United States. Optimizing for factors other than universal service is completely valid, but I’m guessing each of those municipal power systems pre-dated rural electrification and thereby get to somewhat free ride on the system more than anyone would reasonably allow Walnut Creek to do in the year 2025.

Is this a problem though? Utilities will become more expensive for rural properties, but if those people are producing product that people need, they can just slightly bump prices to cover their electricity costs, which the consumers can cover with their new found savings on utilities.

The real benefit is that the people who don't have any reason to actually be rural, say remote software developers, will now have to either cover their costs rather than externalising them, or move to the city.

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