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Comment by blindriver | Hacker News Reader

California's strategy for electricity is non-existent. We have been perpetually at peak electricity use since 25+ years since I came here. Meanwhile electricity use from EVs has soared, and we don't have enough electricity for everything. AND we attempted to shut down nuclear power plants but that appears to be on hold for now.

Plus, I'm paying over $0.50/kWh when I hit Tier 3, which I hit after 2 charges of my EV. Everything is untenable. There is no strategy at all. It's just a mess of ideology and dogma but no science or logic, it's infuriating!

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> AND we attempted to shut down nuclear power plants but that appears to be on hold for now.

California has had a grand total of four nuclear power plant, three are decommissioned, the fourth has is scheduled to have its two reactors be decommissioned in 2029 and 2030.

The “on hold” description for the 5-year extension (the schedule used to be 2024/2025) is inaccurate: it was contingent on replacements being identified and operational, those have been identified but were delayed by factors including a temporary tariff on relevant components, but are expected to be operational well before the 2029 date.

What's the rooftop solar situation where you're at? I live in Oregon and maybe a fifth of the houses in my neighborhood have rooftop solar. A friend of mine in California mentioned that their rooftop solar setup fully covered all their usage and had them selling about 30% of their power generation back to the grid. Seems like an obvious win in California.

Reminder that pg&e is a for-profit monopoly. Reminder that this is the dumbest way of organizing an energy company imaginable. I literally can't think of anything so stupid. You know they make profit. They steal about 16 billion a year. Think about how much infra improvement we could do with 16 billion.

We could nationalize those assholes today.

Well, holy smokes, I thought electricity was cheap in the US.

For most of us it is cheap. I don't know what is going on in California, but they are not typical.

It could have been, but ideologues won’t stop talking about wind turbines vs fossil fuels. Over 30% of California’s grid comes from renewable resources, which seems great, but appears to have come at a cost.

California is not typical and their situation is largely self-inflicted. In many other parts of the US it is still very cheap.

It's highly regional. Per kWh, Connecticut pays twice as much as New Jersey, on average. Boston pays three times what Arizona pays. The government updates price tables monthly:

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

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