281–290 of 411 posts
People hate it and there has been a big effort from activists to turn it over to public hands. The local politicians are on board for the most part, but the company is of course fighting tooth and nail.
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…
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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…
https://www.undp.org/energy/africa-minigrids-program
https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2023/02/26/s...
https://www.esmap.org/mini_grids_for_half_a_billion_people_t...
https://www.nrel.gov/reopt/projects/case-study-sub-saharan-a...
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Neoliberalism fails because of what economists call "the theory of the second best". Neoliberalism fundamentally assumes that the best practical system is as close as possible to an ideal free market, but it's not, due to local minima (often ones we've already found!) often being better. The best system is a free market, if possible. But the second best system may not be close to the best system, it may be a local mi…
You're still assuming that free markets will find the global optimum, which is equivalent to asserting P=NP and shrouding it in no true Scotsman.
It seems there are at least two, such as in the case of utilities: best services or best profits for the shareholders. Again in the case of utilities we see time and again that these are mutually exclusive optimums as a privatized utility makes cuts to investment, build out, maintenance, customer service, or other aspects of the business in the goals of increasing profits, to the detriment of the quality of their service.
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Maybe, but it's also clear that rural electrification was a huge error. People should live in clusters of at least a handful of structures where it's practical and affordable to provision electric lines (and telecommunications), or they should be off the grid altogether. What we built in the 20th century was the worst possible thing: mile after mile of transmission and distribution equipment serving dispersed houses…
Who cares about the way things should be when it comes to utilities. There’s no feasible way you’re going to cut power to rural communities and people. Deal with it.
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That's not how the power grid works
How does it work in relation to the person you replied to? Genuinely asking.
I'd guess what happened is this small town generated power and let its people buy it at a reduced rate. GP just didn't get into that level of detail.
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Why are you asking me when their financial statements are available online for you to read? I don’t have some special insider scoop to know whether the numbers listed in the statements are real or fake.
Well to be clear, my question there was more broad than any one company's financial statements. I was asking a general question of the motivation for large corporations to avoid having profits on paper. I asked the question rather than claiming it as a statement because I am less confident in the details and want to raise the issue without presuming that I know exactly what I'm talking about on the topic.
That is assuming you’ve taken the effort to read the filings.
If your lookkng for easy generalizations that applies to all public companies then no it doesn’t exist. You have to put in the effort to read each individual statement.
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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…
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> prices would be reduced by up to 33% (from $0.45 blended rate to $0.30), but PG&E’s profit margins are only 11%. This is addressed right at the beginning of the article. The argument is not that PG&E is skimming off huge profits, rather that it is structurally inefficient: > Distribution: How much to get the power from your local substation to your house over local power lines. In PG&E's rate chart, they charge 20…
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.