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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

#391

Post by DrillShopper »

mschuster91 wrote: post #386
DrillShopper wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nukes not having a future in Germany is completely down to the Green Party and their pathological obsession with killing nuclear power. They organized and succeeded. Where was the opposition? Is the entire German environmental movement beholden to the Green Party?

Germans never really liked nuclear power from the start, all NPPs drew massive local opposition that was by far not just the back-then new Green Party.

Is the term for NIMBY in German the same as it is in English?

Re: Cities can cost effectively start their own utilities

#392

Post by phonon »

jncfhnb wrote: post #190
jltsiren wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why do you need to be connected to the grid .1% of the time? A 12kW solar roof system with two Powerwalls costs less than $75k, with costs continuing to trend downwards, and large government subsidies on top of that. Amortized over 20 years it's reasonable, and much safer for fire prone areas. You can have a backup generator as well if you want to be totally confident.

Re: Cities can cost effectively start their own utilities

#393

Post by econ »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #339
econ wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> I would argue that if something may not fail you can only pretend to privatize. You only privatize the profit during the good times. You can straightforwardly privatize things that can't be allowed to fail. Power generation is a decent example: If you have a hundred independent generating companies that all sell into a live auction market, they have to compete with each other which keeps prices down and the market…

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

I didn't get to bid in an auction. Providers bid until they had enough then the price was fixed based on the most expensive source.

We also designated a windy chunk of government land next to my city to private wind energy. Besides land it needed a bit of subsidee to spin them up.

Big turbines happened that provide enough power to run the city.

Not that the city didn't have the money to do it themselves. Its dwellers could also easily afford it. That's just not how things work around here.

Mysterious actors blew up some pipeline some place in the north and the highest bit went up dramatically.

It didn't fail, people just couldn't pay their bills anymore.

The market was very good at increasing profit when demand was larger than supply.

One could imagine worse circumstances with a larger effect.

Re: Cities can cost effectively start their own utilities

#394

Post by xp84 »

screye wrote: post #304
rsynnott wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Story of America. There's a reason only this continent has excessive sprawl. Ideally, rural areas pay up. Good forcing functions for change. Maybe people move closer together (similar to European villages) or they become energy-independent (solar panels). If that's politically untenable, then I'd like to see the cost reflected as a city2rural subsidy. Cities get enough hate in the US. I'd like explicit recognition of…

I could not agree more. Hiding true costs of our choices in other things breaks the ability of the market to signal what is an economic choice.

Re: Cities can cost effectively start their own utilities

#395

Post by lukegb »

philjohn wrote: post #255
darreninthenet wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Open access rail operators are not permitted to compete with franchisees (on the same routes/proposition) - there's a test that is applied before granting a license to ensure that the services will be "not primarily abstractive" - that is, that the operator will generate new revenue rather than simply taking away from the franchisee.

Re: Cities can cost effectively start their own utilities

#396

Post by account42 »

ksec wrote: post #192
tmnvix wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps I'm too cynical, but somehow I doubt that those with decision making power that were in favour of selling at the time regret much. Our modern political economy is almost entirely focused on ensuring that everything that can be sold to private entities (read, the market) is. In this ideology the sale would be viewed as a success regardless of any practical downsides.

>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…

Where are those mythical other places?

Re: Cities can cost effectively start their own utilities

#397

Post by simoncion »

rsynnott wrote: post #294
simoncion wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [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. P…

> 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. That’s really quite a lot if you don’t have electric heating and cooling. It’d be worth trying to figure out where it’s going.

This is probably a long shot, but do you have any recommendations for power draw monitors that plug into a US outlet and report power draw either over plain old serial port, or USB?

Every couple of years I look around a bit for something suitable, but have been unable to find anything that fits the bill, looks like it's not totally garbage, and isn't priced in the neighborhood of lab-grade measurement equipment.

Re: Cities can cost effectively start their own utilities

#398

Post by nasmorn »

taneq wrote: post #373
hansvm wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You guys are getting full days without power? That’s disappointing. I’m in Australia and since moving a decade ago to a suburb with underground power, I think we’ve had maybe three or four outages that lasted long enough to notice, and all were fixed within a few hours.

I frequently visit a farm in Austria on the very end of a rural transmission line that can be cut during storms by tree fall almost every year. I don’t think they have ever been without power for a full day. In Vienna if average something like 8min a year

Re: Cities can cost effectively start their own utilities

#399

Post by ahmeneeroe-v2 »

coryrc wrote: post #70
ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>a system that doesn't appropriately price and apportion risk will always be under pressure Very well stated, I am stealing this. Also in agreement with rural resource types vs rich rural. Again I think it is more complex than just apportioning power costs. CA effectively has a state policy of not maintaining its forest/rural land (ditto feds and their land). My parents live adjacent to national forest and have fire…

The forests are supposed to burn. They mitigate by building fireproof homes and leaving when the fire comes. Or just not living there.

Yes, small frequent burns which are allowed to consume the dry biomass. This does not describe the current fire management process in the western US

Re: Cities can cost effectively start their own utilities

#400

Post by AnthonyMouse »

econ wrote: post #393
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would argue that if something may not fail you can only pretend to privatize. You only privatize the profit during the good times. You can straightforwardly privatize things that can't be allowed to fail. Power generation is a decent example: If you have a hundred independent generating companies that all sell into a live auction market, they have to compete with each other which keeps prices down and the market…

Damned if you do, damned if you don't. I didn't get to bid in an auction. Providers bid until they had enough then the price was fixed based on the most expensive source. We also designated a windy chunk of government land next to my city to private wind energy. Besides land it needed a bit of subsidee to spin them up. Big turbines happened that provide enough power to run the city. Not that the city didn't have the…

> The market was very good at increasing profit when demand was larger than supply.

That's what it's supposed to do. Then in the absence of regulatory barriers to entry, new suppliers enter the market to capture those profits, until the profits aren't so big anymore because there are more suppliers.

One of the things that messes people up here is that they want consistency but don't want to pay for it. You have a competitive market which is providing low prices until there is a supply disruption. Then prices are temporarily high. If you wanted to you could have bought insurance or futures etc. so that you would always pay a consistent price, but then you'd be paying a higher price than the market on the days when supply is good so that you could pay a lower price when supply is low. People then complain about that too, but those are your options; if you pick the "don't buy insurance" one then you're exposed to events, but you should be the one who gets to choose.

And maybe if you're poor you don't want the insurance, what you want is to have the lower price most of the time and cut back your usage when the price is high. But either way, that should be something you get to decide instead of something somebody decides for you.

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