alt Hacker NewsCPUC exists. CAISO exists. The consumer experience is still bad. What this means is that there is not enough generation. This is not a matter of whether PG&E is "privately" or "publicly" owned, because nearly all large utilities are already a weird mixture of both. Public ownership might have different incentives, but not sufficiently different to allow rates to be lowered substantially (unless it were a case of overt and massive subsidies, which would require state legislation and possibly rewriting the charters of CPUC and CAISO). The only way to lower rates is to add cheaper generation; and the way to make generation cheapest, and to bring it on line quickest, is to locate it near demand.
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This is just very straightforwardly incorrect. Last month I paid Ava Energy $26 for electric energy generation, and PG&E $99 for delivery. Cutting the generation cost to $0 would only reduce my bill by 20%. Ava Energy says that 70% of the power I used came from solar located within my city, so it's already located quite close to demand.
> What this means is that there is not enough generation
We should generate more, but one of the major issues is how much wildfire prevention PG&E has to do, which then gets passed on to their customers. I am huge into supply side abundance, but that isnt the only driver here for costs.
> CPUC exists. CAISO exists. The consumer experience is still bad. What this means is that there is not enough generation
The existence of CPUC and CAISO says nothing of their efficacy. Jumping all the way past any question of their efficacy is egregious.
PGE charged me more for the same electric usage than SVP.
There is definitely greed on PGEs part.
As others have mentioned, Silicon Valley Power charges about half of PGE, and SF actually already has a power provider for businesses via Hetch Hetchy. It’s probably true that overall they might be a generation shortage but it doesn’t have to be true on a local scale. Plus PGE also needs to pay a lot of money for all the fires they started…which of course just goes back to the rate payers.
Also, too: the primary reason to worry about inadequate generation is not cost, but reliability.
My electricity bill is roughly 1/3rd 'CleanPowerSF Electric Generation Charges' vs 2/3rds 'Current PG&E Electric Delivery Charges'. The big problem is that PG&E covers most of rural California so its urban customers have to cover the high costs of compensation and prevention from delivering to fire prone rural areas.