Not only are the costs spread over decades, the extra sales of electricity (replacing fuel sales) cover the cost of the upgrade, while lowering the per unit cost of electricity.
They mention this in the article so there's no real excuse other than clickbaiting.
Which was transparent BS.
So here we are again, likely going to get more out of proportion increases due to things that were promised to not be needed.
That didn't pan out for various reasons.
I agree that some of the discussion was before the BS was apparent, but a lot of it was well after it was obviously not how this was going to work.
Still possible (if in a setup with good insolation!) to provision your own home solar setup and charge off that - and high income folks, it would likely pay off pretty quickly due to the current insane rates - but then that’s why the utility companies seem dead set on trying to stop it too.
Now they pay wholesale prices when buying it back (often zero or even negative during peak insolation) and charge retail when selling it - any by retail I mean ‘crazy high usage based numbers which make no sense’.
I know a bunch of folks which installed solar themselves to cover their AC costs because the utility still charges crazy high rates during peak insolation - even while they are having to load shed - and their electric bill dropped to almost nothing afterwards. They didn’t even need batteries.
Which is also when they're overproducing solar and having to shed load.
But hey, no sense looking for logic here.
Near as I can tell, the CPUC is in on it for many reasons. Some, like PG&E being paying the tab on their numerous past misdeeds without formally declaring bankruptcy/putting the state on the hook.
But also if for no other reason than it's the only way the various green mandates can actually be hit, since costs to actually deliver a kwh when needed are far, far higher and require much larger capital outlays than the public would be willing to accept if it was obvious to them.
It's frog boiling/gaslighting the public - 'oh it won't cost anything extra - it'll probably save us money!', 'oh, we might need to add some restrictions', 'oh it won't cost that much more really, it will be worth it', 'oh, you've already paid for most of it, it will just be a bit extra', 'oh, yeah it is a bit expensive but what are you going to do about it', etc.
For some reason it seems to work REALLY well in California.
You're fighting a losing battle living in California if you're going to complain about spending ~$0.03 per day to have electric cars...
I left California awhile ago.
My current (peak) electrical rates are less than $.15/kwh, and i’m not far from the border though.
Up here in Seattle we pay 10-13 cents? But I probably wouldn’t notice much if we paid 50 cents.
Search seems to be prioritizing more recent articles, so harder to find references, but there are plenty out there. I remember reading dozens of articles at the time which all insisted that costs would stay the same or go down, and we didn't need to make more generation capacity because EV use would never be a meaningful portion of electrical demand.
"In addition, by including new rate structures in the pilot programs, California may be able to shift load in ways that defers expensive new generation or transmissions assets. This remains to be seen, but could result in lower rates overall." [https://www.csis.org/analysis/utility-involvement-electric-v...]
Here is the California Legislative bill passed on the topic in 2022 - and the focus is on building more chargers. [https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...]
Here is also the mandate to increase more charging infrastructure too, and assess effectiveness. [https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/reports/electric-vehi...]
By 2022, they were trying to get folks to switch to grid controlled charging [https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/ev-charging/new-califor...] which is a bit crazy for the end consumer, and could even be a large scale safety issue. Essentially centralized rationing.
In 2023 is when supply/demand issues got so obvious that people started to call BS [https://calmatters.org/environment/2023/01/california-electr...].
Notably, around then is also when the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant decommissioning got canned (despite it being past it's design life, with known and expensive to remediate radiation leaks).
Seattle doesn't need AC, but a lot of housing does have electric baseboard heating. Those folks would definitely notice if electricity ~quadrupled in cost!
You appear to be using this new research as proof of the opposite, and calling out previous times the exact same claim was made.
Did costs drop for AC, despite load being during peak insolation? Or unit kwh costs overall? Because it just keeps going up, faster than inflation.
The 'we'll only charge during high supply/low demand' times is fantasy, near as I can tell.
I just never heard that argument, if it was common, or was it a Californian thing?
Grid controlled charging is common in Europe where electricity rates are higher (well, outside of Norway who has plenty of cheap hydro). Americans have always seemed to take their car freedoms for granted (cheap gas! free parking! cheap electricity!). Having lived in Europe for a couple of years and then in Asia, it boggles my mind how many free things we get over here.
Diablo Canyon has a warm water problem (that kills fish when the warm water is put back into the ocean), not a radiation problem.
> Seattle doesn't need AC, but a lot of housing does have electric baseboard heating. Those folks would definitely notice if electricity ~quadrupled in cost!
We are basically Norway: we have lots of hydro and a relatively mild climate. Heat pumps are pretty efficient.
Diablo Canyon has been leaking tritium. [https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1116/ML11166A174.pdf]
And numerous fault lines were discovered in and around the plant after construction that lead to serious concerns of structural failures and radiation leaks in the event of earthquakes. The most recent was found in 2008.
Water temp hasn’t been the issue, and I have no idea where you got that from.
or
https://www.hcn.org/articles/nuclear-energy-the-divide-over-...
Seems less paywalled.
> Each day, Diablo Canyon sucks up about 2.5 billion gallons of ocean water to generate steam and cool the reactors, before spitting it — 20 degrees warmer — back into the Pacific. The water intake kills thousands of fish each year and sometimes other sea animals. The warm water discharges are also changing the marine ecosystem in Diablo Cove, driving out the bull kelp and having a detrimental effect on abalone.
Regulators explicitly mentioned the issues I raised when discussing shutting it down, and even the environmentalists were saying their concerns were due to radiation/meltdown.
Also, the state wanted to only run the plant at half power in favor of renewables, because reasons, making it lose money like crazy.
Here is a contemporary article from when the shutdown was approved originally.
[https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/End-of-an-atomic-era...]
I’m sure some folks are worried about the hot water discharge - but that has been going on for forever now, and the situation isn’t getting any worse. Someone will always find some reason to complain.
Average rate when I was in the Bay Area was > $.55/kwh.
> Li and Jenn came up with a range of anywhere between $6 billion and $20 billion