I feel like the reason is obvious. Maybe it is just me.
Cheaper utilities was never the goal
Why not nuclear?
You can double check it but I think solar is cheaper now. I was shocked as well, I thought nuclear was the cheapest still.
Most expensive way of heating water
Lots of US states have legislation that lets you choose your energy provider. People buy from the 100% green energy providers if they wish to pay more, not if they wish to save money.
Source: Several of my friends live in these states; they pay more to buy from 100% green energy providers.
Yeah because companies in the US exploit everything and everyone until they get stopped (which they don’t)
And probably because fossil energy gets subsidised heavily to compete with renewable energy. So on your electricity bill the fossil is cheaper but your taxes are sent there ten times.
Well currently the US is fucked anyway
In the US, a big part of it is that natural gas is a waste product of oil fracking. If you want the oil, you will get a giant gob of natural gas to go with it. The stuff is really, really fucking cheap because of this.
Nah. They would be 50-60% cheaper if;
- They required the choice between two different administrators.
- They were ran as non profit (private equity is ruining utilities currently).
Not really, I live in a country where green energy keeps going up but so does the electricity prices. You have to believe in Santa if you think the savings ever reach the consumer.
That’s called artificially inflated prices
Merit order used to be a perfectly good and fair system. But renewable tech throws a monkey wrench into that system. Also shifts cost to be less demand dependent.
Of course it’s artificial, but knowing that doesn’t change the reality for the people who have to pay the bills.
Competition and choice lowers prices. Government “investment” usually raise prices.
Correct. The system is supposed to encourage investment in efficient energy production so that it can sell energy at the level of the most expensive energy that is brought to market. Resources for the Future explains it like this:
The capacity market auction works as follows: generators set their bid price at an amount equal to the cost of keeping their plant available to operate if needed. Similar to the energy market, these bids are arranged from lowest to highest. Once the bids reach the required quantity that all the retailers collectively must acquire to meet expected peak demand plus a reserve margin, the market “clears”, or supply meets demand. At this point, generators that “cleared” the market, or were chosen to provide capacity, all receive the same clearing price which is determined by the bid price of the last generator used to meet demand.
Us is pathetic. Nothing is planned.
No direction. Every 4 years fuckers change shit.Centrally planned china can run circles around
Yeah, China is great!
All dictatorships are more efficient than democracies, so just give it a little time. Our dictator will catch up. It’s our first try at fascism. Cut us some slack.
I’ve heard a lot of definitions of fascism, but the one that makes the most sense, that explains the most is this:
Fascism is what they call it when an empire takes the murderous and dehumanizing policies it uses on it’s periphery - it colonies invasions territories “frontiers” - and begins using them on the citizens of the “homeland” or imperial core.
Germany had concentration camps in its African colonies well before they started ghettoizing Jewish people. The United States has had “fascist” policies all my life and all your life. Those dehumanizing and murderous actions have just been turned outward. But your means always become your ends.
If you want to know the future of this country, look at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Look at the black-sites and the special rendition treaties. The water tables poisoned by depleted uranium ammunition. The families lost to drone strikes as so-called “collateral”. We have always been fascist. Those of us who just happen to live here, no different from the German citizens who simply didn’t know and did not ask too many questions.
Not necessarily
However, this misses the point. We need to modernize our aging infrastructure as it is on its last leg. It honestly doesn’t matter what drives it as long as it gets done.
That’s why republicans hate it.
It sounds evil and simplistic, and it is, but these are evil and simplistic people we’re talking about.
“Oh, new innovations in technology can help consumers pay less to power their homes? We can’t have that! It would affect the profits of my friends Oil Baron and Coal Baron.”
Yes but how would the fascists get kickbacks and bribes then? That’s a big chunk of their income. Won’t someone think of the oligarchy???
Would also be cheaper if the government owned the energy infrastructure and ran at cost.
but that’s communism!!!
China does subsidize their electricity, and are self declared communists. It seems like if it goes to corporations it would be more of a Corporatocracy however.
Ikr? What else is it? A good idea that would benefit people broadly instead of specific people narrowly?
You want elected officials to be competent and follow the will of those whom they represent?
that’s woke nonsense
Pfft caring about anything but myself, what a suckers game.
Empathy? what woke bs is that, as a true Jesus loving Christian I hate my neighbors
Maybe Nuclear, given it can actually support the base load power, except they need to fully deregulate it first so Nimbys and lawsuits balloon the cost. It shouldnt cost more nowadays in inflation adjusted terms than France building them in the 70s.
Your talking points are ten years out of date. The cheapest form of baseload power now is batteries plus solar. For seasonal variations? Nuclear is so expensive that it’s far cheaper to just build enough to meet your winter electricity demand and have abundant power the rest of the year.
Fission is a dead end technology that people mostly support now so they can feel a sense of contrarian intellectual superiority. It’s all just vibes at this point.
Do you have an example of a city that runs on renewables with battery storage with no duplicate backup base load generator?
As far as I was aware there were none, as it is non-feasible outside of areas with hydro dams for power storage.
Do you have an example of a city that runs on renewables with battery storage with no duplicate backup base load generator?
Thankfully cities don’t build isolated power grids.
Why are utilities privatized?
Our energy provider increased our rates, then reported record breaking profits the next year. :(
(US)
They should be nonprofits, independent, but strictly non profit
Nah, let’s privatize all the services you need to have a functional home. That way the companies can extract maximum value from the customers.
Brilliant.
better yet, let’s put them on the stock market so they obligated to squeeze their “customers”
Won’t anyone think of the shareholders!?
For real though, I had a job where the management team tried to motivate us by setting “shareholder expectations” or some such nonsense. Obviously this didn’t work. Also the company was small enough that pretty much everyone working there personally knew all the shareholders… Because they also ran the business. They were the managers.
The balls it must take to be a shareholder, and to be known as a shareholder then talk about shareholder expectations like those are for a different set of people that isn’t just you… Gotta be massive…
oof ya, unless they are doing profit sharing they can fuck right off with that
And those who are/want to go off grid:
Straight to jail.
That’s so typical.
Source: also US
So government can spend the investment on schools and hospitals instead. (In the civilised world, obviously not America)
This has little to do with where you’re from. It’s just neoliberal rhetoric. Having a public energy sector would be beneficial in the long run and would reduce what we have to pay for it. Right now the earnings are privatized in most places.
My area privatized the publicly owned electricity provider and since prices started going up they then had to implement rebates to bring bills down a bit. Effectively a roundabout way to move public funds from paying for the actual infrastructure into subsidizing corporate profits instead
Exactly. Privatize the profits and socialize the costs. What a brilliant system. Unfortunately it benefits only a small handful while everyone else picks up the tab.
Having a public energy sector would be beneficial in the long run and would reduce what we have to pay for it.
A well-run public energy sector, certainly. Idk what we’d end up with given the most recent rotation of people in charge.
The state does have an incentive to keep consumer costs low in a way the private sector does not. But state officials also traditionally do a bad job of maintaining and expanding utilities to match consumer demand.
The end result tends to be low end user prices at the expense of reliable distribution and surplus volume.
It’s not rhetoric. It’s economics 101. Opportunity cost.
A mixture of private and public is best.
Edit. A mixture allows more spend on more things. Govts can’t sell infinite debt
Thanks professor. Do you know private debt and state debt are hardly the same? Have you considered the opportunity cost of not having public energy, therefore losing potential “earnings” to private investors? Or are you telling me next that rich people are a necessity as well? Is trickle-down part of this course or do I have to wait for 201?
What a lot of shite you write. Where does the state debt come from genius?
What opportunity?
Opportunity cost. If you spend money on one thing, it means you can’t spend it on something else
Of course. So providing profits to utility “owners” is money stolen from the people that could be more productively used literally anywhere else.
The UK is spending billions on green energy and has the highest electricity prices in the world.
Yep. Meanwhile the US has some of the cheapest and is mainly Natural Gas.
Green energy can’t be scarce, therefore cheap. Solar, wind, water, never happen. They can always slow the generators, can’t slow the sun.
You need a place to store that energy, a way to convert it so it’s usable, transfer it to where it is needed. Etc.
