Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cities can cost effectively start their own utilities

kevin.burke.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 411 posts

Re: Cities can cost effectively start their own utilities

#311

Post by anticensor »

darreninthenet wrote: post #277
philjohn wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is the slower train cheaper? If so, isn't that a competitive market choice?

The slow train has more stations to stop at, hence there is not a real choice for rural people.

Re: Cities can cost effectively start their own utilities

#312

Post by bunabhucan »

kevinburke wrote: post #244
bunabhucan wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said in the article "PG&E rejected this offer for being too low" but then proceed to use that as the baseline cost that drives the rest of the estimates, that doesn't make sense. If I offer someone minimum wage to do my job and they refuse, I don't start a spreadsheet to calculate my savings. Boulder CO tried municipalization with Xcel and the gap between the city offer and Xcel position was very large. How do yo…

This is why I adjusted SF’s offer for population and then multiplied it by 50%, then used 400 million as the base for financing. Financing at 4% interest is not the expensive part though. Even if the price was $1 billion it would be 6 cents per kWh. I agree it would be bad if they had to fight in court for a decade! But you have to start somewhere and as I mentioned you might get a good outcome just from threatening…

In Boulders case the goal wasn't to strand rural customers with resiliency costs but to reduce emissions. Xcel moved in that direction enough that Boulder didn't need to municipalize. Owning poles and jiggling electrons would have allowed the city to do things like let homeowners access the 4% muni borrowing rate for solar loans that stay with the property via a tax lien. With the existing structure of public regulator and local monopolies, Xcel can't easily do anything "special" for Boulder without forcing poor rural places to share the costs.

Re: Cities can cost effectively start their own utilities

#313

Post by JasserInicide »

greesil wrote: post #58
brian-armstrong wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PG&E surely knows that if it lets one city do this, then more will follow quickly. It will be left with the least profitable regions and cities that can't afford to/don't have the credit for this transition. That would ultimately leave the remaining customers in an even less affordable position.

Maybe these expensive-to-serve regions need a different model of power generation.

Or living so far from civilization, especially in a state where wildfires have been part of the ecosystem for millions of years.

Re: Cities can cost effectively start their own utilities

#315

Post by bigfudge »

mschuster91 wrote: post #269
zmgsabst wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Enron scandal was 24 years ago, which is a generation ago — almost two. I’d guess the problem is more endemic to their political system.

The thing is, large scandals can have an aftereffect that lasts for decades. Berlin for example had a massive bank collapse in 2001 under the Conservative government that ended up placing the state of Berlin into billions of euros worth of debt and financial risk. The succeeding SD/Left/Green triplet coalitions had to fire-sell off many state-held assets like the water utility (that ended up a disaster on its own [2]…

This sounds like the state of the entire UK

Re: Cities can cost effectively start their own utilities

#316

Post by treis »

rsynnott wrote: post #290
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.

The problem is, if cities don’t pay for that, who will? Just abandoning electricity for rural areas isn’t _really_ an option, but it would likely be uneconomic without the effective subsidy from urban areas.

It probably is an option to go to solar & batteries these days. Especially when the liability from rural power lines is huge due to fires.

Re: Cities can cost effectively start their own utilities

#317

Post by jeffbee »

sgarland wrote: post #310
ty6853 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its hilarious city folks think rural power is subsidized. I recently extended a line about 1000 feet. For this, I paid $13000 -- primary transmission, poles, anchors, electricians, transformers, all at full rates. And it was a required donation, as in the power coop owns everything and it goes on public easement on to the next guy when they extend from mine. When they finished, I worked myself silly digging secondary…

On the flip side, practically everything else about rural areas is subsidized. Most crops have price floors. Dairy is massively subsidized. Rural school districts siphon funding from cities. Much / all of this is arguably necessary for national security viz. food production, but I dislike when people in red states (not saying you’ve done this, just making a tangential point) make comments like, “let’s see how long th…

You guys are talking about a totally different "rural" than I was. Look, food in 2025 comes from gigantic horizontal factories and there is no way to avoid that. A food-producing region of California looks like [1]. An exclave of Libertarian weirdos LARPing as the Unabomber looks like [2]. It is the latter that is problematic in terms of provision of infrastructure.

1: https://www.google.com/maps/@39.4301203,-122.0649005,3a,60y,...

2: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.3962909,-120.5056754,3a,75y,...

Re: Cities can cost effectively start their own utilities

#318

Post by mindslight »

Arrath wrote: post #284
mindslight wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't part of the problem assuming that there is a single global optimum? 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…

Yes, although usually when people are making these arguments they're imagining optimization across different entities and through time (relative to foreseeable events / probabilities). It then becomes much easier to write off conflicting higher-level subjective goals as not being actually valued in some imagined universal sense. The fallacy is rejecting the stickiness of human-made structure, even though that structure is all around us.

Re: Cities can cost effectively start their own utilities

#319

Post by bitmasher9 »

xienze wrote: post #128
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep you literally get half price power if your city does it - https://www.cityofpaloalto.org/files/assets/public/v/5/utili... I’m lucky enough to be in such an area. Note the city takes a bit of the above as profit too. Not that that’s a bad thing but it just goes to show how beneficial it is and how much more you’re paying by not doing it. Every city should do it asap.

Yeah it might be easy for municipal electricity to win on price when the bar is set at $0.42/kWh. Out here our evil private company is charging $0.11/kWh. I have serious doubts any municipality anywhere could deliver power for half that.

I’m not sure where “out here” is, but $0.11/kWh is not the national low for municipal power costs.
Post reply on HN