Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption • Hacker News Board

Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

#31

Post by monadINtop » Mon, Mar 24, 2025, 5:22 PM UTC

naasking wrote: post #26

nomercy400 wrote: post #17

Deregulating a basic human need and leaving it to the 'market' to solve this. This sounds a lot like other privatization efforts of the past decades. In my country healthcare, child support, energy, national railway, postal services, public housing, banking and more have all been privatized. I worry about this. Not for now, but for 20 years in the future, where all energy is managed by companies and the government ca…

There is nothing wrong with markets solving basic human needs as long as the incentives are properly aligned.

And in what world is the incentive of cutting costs and price gouging - of necessities no less - aligned with the incentives of the vast majority of mankind who would just like energy, healthcare, housing, public infrastructure, etc. to be as affordable and high quality as possible.

Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

#32

Post by epistasis » Mon, Mar 24, 2025, 5:23 PM UTC

baggy_trough wrote: post #28

epistasis wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for pointing out that ambiguity, I hopefully edited for better clarity! The other problem in California is that most heating is done via natural gas, and though heating needs are fairly low if houses had any sort of insulation, there's basically zero insulation in all homes. Which means that every winter, people experience massive natural gas bills that should be close to zero, making it very problematic to sw…

> there's basically zero insulation in all homes. This is completely false.

Well all I can talk about is the 1970s-era boxes that dominate in the Bay Area, which is the major population center that PG&E serves.

If your experience with these homes is different somehow, let me know. But go to SF, go to the peninsula, and you'll find that most homes barely stop air coming in and out of the house, much less have proper insulation. A blower test for SF homes would shock most people in the modern world.

Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

#33

Post by andrepd » Mon, Mar 24, 2025, 5:25 PM UTC

naasking wrote: post #26

nomercy400 wrote: post #17

Deregulating a basic human need and leaving it to the 'market' to solve this. This sounds a lot like other privatization efforts of the past decades. In my country healthcare, child support, energy, national railway, postal services, public housing, banking and more have all been privatized. I worry about this. Not for now, but for 20 years in the future, where all energy is managed by companies and the government ca…

There is nothing wrong with markets solving basic human needs as long as the incentives are properly aligned.

Yes it does, because it leaves the fulfillment of those necessities to the whims of the market. If suddenly an endeavour is not profitable any more, or is simply less profitable than an alternative, what happens? You have to subsidise it, at great cost, leaving you at the mercy of those privatised concerns.

Neither public services nor private enterprise is a silver bullet to everything.

Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

#34

Post by kccqzy » Mon, Mar 24, 2025, 5:25 PM UTC

nomercy400 wrote: post #17

Deregulating a basic human need and leaving it to the 'market' to solve this. This sounds a lot like other privatization efforts of the past decades. In my country healthcare, child support, energy, national railway, postal services, public housing, banking and more have all been privatized. I worry about this. Not for now, but for 20 years in the future, where all energy is managed by companies and the government ca…

As the article says,

> Deregulated markets, which might be better described as “differently regulated” markets, separate these concerns. Independent power producers (generators) build and sell electricity wholesale to Retail Electric Providers (REPs), who sell to households, while utilities manage the transmission and infrastructure.

On the face of it this makes sense to me. Deregulation doesn't mean there are no regulations at all. It means we split up a monolithic entity into different parts that can each be subject to competitive forces and be regulated differently.

Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

#35

Post by epistasis » Mon, Mar 24, 2025, 5:25 PM UTC

epidemiology wrote: post #22

makotech221 wrote: post #5

Gimme a break. Compare China's centralized economy's solar/wind/nuclear production to the entirety of the west's decentralized, privatized economy. not even close.

China burns more coal than the rest of the world combined.

Despite that I wouldn't be surprised if China ends up reaching 90% carbon-free electricity sooner than the US.

Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

#36

Post by username332211 » Mon, Mar 24, 2025, 5:26 PM UTC

mmanfrin wrote: post #12

CTRL+F 'Enron' 0 results. Don't really trust something advocating for deregulated energy markets to not mention the elephant in the room.

Deregulation is such a funny word. The California deregulation you are referring to, involved the powers that be pushing utility companies to sell their power plants.

The current energy deregulation in the EU involves forcing utilities to trade electricity in a spot market, that treats the on-demand production of conventional power plants and the random and unpredictable production of solar and wind, as if it's completely equivalent. Of course, that's a fairly effective way to promote solar, as it's far more intrusive than conventional renewable mandates.

As far as I can see, "deregulation" means, "we regulate far more aggressively than before, but there's now a market in there where Wall Street types can make money".

Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

#37

Post by kccqzy » Mon, Mar 24, 2025, 5:26 PM UTC

monadINtop wrote: post #31

naasking wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing wrong with markets solving basic human needs as long as the incentives are properly aligned.

And in what world is the incentive of cutting costs and price gouging - of necessities no less - aligned with the incentives of the vast majority of mankind who would just like energy, healthcare, housing, public infrastructure, etc. to be as affordable and high quality as possible.

The incentive of cutting costs directly leads to affordability.

Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

#38

Post by andrepd » Mon, Mar 24, 2025, 5:27 PM UTC

epidemiology wrote: post #22

makotech221 wrote: post #5

Gimme a break. Compare China's centralized economy's solar/wind/nuclear production to the entirety of the west's decentralized, privatized economy. not even close.

China burns more coal than the rest of the world combined.

To manufacture products exported to the west. It's always this argument... You need to look at emissions by country of final destination of the products, not by country of manufacture. In an age where a simple t-shirt is made in Bangladesh with cotton from Afghanistan it's ridiculous to use the latter measure.

Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

#39

Post by HillRat » Mon, Mar 24, 2025, 5:27 PM UTC

buckle8017 wrote: post #16

The Texas grid was deregulated in an era where solar and wind were not price competitive. The price competitive producers were all stable fossil fuels, natural gas and coal. They failed to take into account unreliable low cost producers forcing reliable but marginally more expensive producers out of the market. If solar/wind producers had to guarantee power 24x7 at fixed rates the cost would vastly exceed natural gas…

During "snowmageddon" and similar winter outages fossil fuel shoulder load also broke down, since the dynamic pricing market doesn't pay to keep spinning capacity, and the plants couldn't start up, which is why the cost curves went berserk: the price pressure escalated to try and incentivize production, but the production wasn't to be had. (The JIT nature of Texas LNG logistics also played its part; some gas turbines would have been able to start up, but couldn't get LNG to do so.)

Absent turning the Texas energy market into a more rational design (I was part of the energy market during dereg, these failures were predicted by our energy economists at the time), the state should mandate weatherization for wind generation at a minimum, and look into grid-scale battery requirements as prices fall and technologies mature.

Solar and wind are fantastic opportunistic power generators that work well together and should be a significant part of any grid's energy mix going forward, but the state needs to act like every other power market and pay for spinning fossil fuel capacity for shoulder and peak demand. Picking energy mix winners and losers is just political meddling in what was supposed to be a free market environment.

Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

#40

Post by gosub100 » Mon, Mar 24, 2025, 5:29 PM UTC

nomercy400 wrote: post #17

Deregulating a basic human need and leaving it to the 'market' to solve this. This sounds a lot like other privatization efforts of the past decades. In my country healthcare, child support, energy, national railway, postal services, public housing, banking and more have all been privatized. I worry about this. Not for now, but for 20 years in the future, where all energy is managed by companies and the government ca…

The one to really keep our eye out for is water. Investors are buying up water rights in drought-afflicted western states.