left the UK with the highest electricity prices in the developed world
Wha? Fair play if you think the US is not a developed country, but £0.255/kWh is towards the lower end of what electricity costs in California. Hawaii is at or above those rates.
My own electric rate in the middle-north continental US is only a third of the £0.255/kWh rate.
Even so, cross the border into Oregon and their rates are half... CA is literally double the national average price in the US.
CA makes up about 11% of the US population. So, just short of 90% of the country pays half of what they do.
CA is a big place, but simply is not representative of the country as a whole. They are, in fact, an outlier in many metrics.
I wasn't comparing the whole country to the UK, I was comparing California to the UK.
There are more people in California than in a number of developed countries (e.g. Netherlands, Portugal, Taiwan, Singapore). PG&E alone provides electricity to more people (16 million across 5.5 million accounts) than the entire population of New England (15 million). California as a single market is an entirely valid comparison.
Wha? Fair play if you think the US is not a developed country
Neither are good comparisons for what is "normal"... The only thing the comparison does is prove that the UK has high energy prices.
We condescendingly laugh at Texas when their grid shuts down, meanwhile we pay 3x the price and our grid burns down towns and is frequently disabled.
We have a state regulatory commission that sets price controls on electricity, which the price at operational costs +10%. Naturally, the costs to deliver power goes up every single time it is assessed.
California is also home to laws that every new house must have rooftop solar, despite excess solar production, in the midst of a housing crisis.
California is also home to income based electricity rates.
There was even discussion of literally taxing individuals for using the sun to generate their own power.
California is terrible company to keep, and has the worst energy prices
in the US.
meanwhile we pay 3x the price and our grid burns down towns and is
frequently disabled.
Texas continues to struggle mightily with adverse weather — ERCOT was way off in their demand forecasts during the 2022 storms. It came down to sheer luck that they didn't see a repeat of 2021. Let's not forget that Texas is cheaper until it's not. 2021 saw residential power reach $9,000/kWh.
Either way, my point wasn't to start a pissing contest about which is worse, but point out the Hypocrisy of Californian condescension. Surely we can agree California isn't a shining beacon of wise grid management.
In fairness, that is a weak point among several strong ones. All taxes are arbitrary. Eg, taxing the people who are earning an income is a bit crazy, because to earn an income you basically have to put yourself at someone else's beck and call and try to benefit them. Then taxes get added on top of that to make sure the pain really gets rubbed in. If that sort of taxing makes sense, then it also makes about as much sense to tax people for their property being exposed to sunlight; the incentives might be better than an income tax. It is actually part-way to a land tax which seems like a pretty good idea.
The common factor here is common expectation that taxes are applied to profit in the commercial sphere, or barring that, they are use taxes for public infrastructure.
Probably. There is an effect where, like clockwork, people are outraged by any tax that they can't fob off onto someone else. It is an suspicious coincidence how the tax burden sits the most heavily on a group with very few votes. People being outraged doesn't relate to whether a tax is a good idea or not (at least, relative to other taxes).
> The common factor here is common expectation that taxes are applied to profit in the commercial sphere
With the advent of the Chinese getting good at solar we're moving to a world where people have free energy falling on them from the sky. A sun tax would be surprisingly consistent with the idea that people are taxed on their profits. Sun-exposed land is a whisper away from being an active, profit-producing asset. I have no doubt that California could manage to screw it up but in-principle a sun tax sounds like it'd probably be a good idea. I'd rather people be taxed for loafing under the shade of a solar panel than for working their hands to the bone. They aren't that expensive to install.
To me, it seems like serfdom to extract taxes just because it can be done, or to make people work harder. If someone grows potatoes in their back yard and labor, should they have pay for it just so that they have to work harder? Is the purpose of the state to be a torture machine?
But if we're going to go beyond that, which we are, a "sunlight tax" sounds like it'd be roughly equivalent to a land tax (or corporate tax, or what have you), and a land tax is broadly superior to an income tax for any metric I care about. So it sounds good to me. There is an asset (sunlight on land), it doesn't require investment to maintain it. There isn't any complexity to measuring the amount of sun that I can think of. It is reasonable to tax the owner; they are getting free wealth [0] so it doesn't discourage them from doing anything. They owner worse off, but that is the nature of taxes and if we're levying a tax that isn't in principle something that we are too worried about because we can't escape that without a small-government strategy.
> If someone grows potatoes in their back yard and labor, should they have pay for it just so that they have to work harder?
That is how tax systems are broadly set up. I don't think it is reasonable to come from a position that an income tax is ok but that sort of tax isn't. The only reason that specific activity doesn't get taxed is the enforcement is too tricky to implement in practice [1] but there isn't a theoretical reason not to beyond that. If I grow potatoes for you I'd get taxed, so I don't see why me growing potatoes for me would be above taxation. It is the same amount and nature of work.
And, again, California's implementation might be terrible - but just pointing out they are talking about taxing solar generation doesn't seem like a strong point. There is an idea there that makes a lot of sense.
[0] Which is important and what separates this from a typical wealth tax. The annual sunlight is a renewable resource they are getting - a sort of natural rent on the land.
[1] Ie, how does the tax office detect if you have a pirate potato operation, and if they do how is it done cost-effectively so the tax take is higher than the enforcement cost.
In my moral-political framework use taxes are superior to income taxes which are superior to wealth taxes. In my mind, any just theory taxation is based payment to the state for state services provided.
Use taxes are best because there is a clear quid pro quo, it enables consent (via using the service or not), and can be leveed reasonably proportional to use costs.
Income taxes are next, because they can be framed as a use of the public market space and institutions. Again, there there is a clear quid pro quo, and people can choose to work more or less, and pay more or less taxes.
Wealth taxes are worst because there is no quid pro quo or consent. The taxed gets no new exchange for the payment.
I think solar tax is even worse than this, because there is no underlying profit or wealth. Im not making money with solar, just losing money more slowly.
I think this is equivalent to sending a collector through the serfs to collect taxes for breathing the kings air. The kind didnt make the air any more than the state made the sun.
With respect to Georgism, I think it was amoral to begin with, and economically outdated today. Simply put, a significant portion of value today does not arise from the land. The material inputs for some code are trivial, but that code created may be worth more than a thousand acres of farmland. The material inputs to make a billion dollar stock trade are a few watts to send electrons down a wire.
I'm more than happy to agree that a sun tax is like serfs paying tax for breathing the kings air. But any tax is equivalent to a serf breathing the kings air - the state didn't put in anywhere near the level of support that it is taking away. The people who control the army point out that their army can get the taxpayer, nobody else will save them and ergo they must donate money to the cause. When taxes are involved inevitably the people paying the most tax will have moral objections to picking up the heaviest burden and their moral sensibilities will be overruled by suspiciously more moral and less taxed individuals [0].
The people who pay for the spending aren't doing it willingly, or there wouldn't be any need to engage the tax system to make them pay. Pretending that there is some sort of consent or a quid pro quo involved is just that - pretence. If the taxpayers called your morals, in practice, it will be discovered that the governing bodies were bluffing and some other method of extracting money will be found that is then decided to be most moral by people not paying for the spending. And from that frame there is no difference between taxing solar panels or taxing any other form of wealth generation - except that the people with solar panels are already getting a free ride from the sun so it is a less economically distortive burden for the taxman to take a cut.
I suppose to put it in short, we will have to agree to disagree.
[0] Although there would be a really interesting to run an experiment where votes in an election were proportionally weighted by how much tax the voter had paid in the last financial year.
While I do share some of your cynicism about the extractive nature of the state and public, I think is also clear that norms exist and the public does push back. After all, we dont currently have a tax on breathing the air or home use solar generation.
The state and proponents of these measures go to great lengths to justify or obfuscate purely extractive taxes, which again speaks to public moral sentiment. The idea of might makes right with respect to taxation and state power is still transgressive.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
https://www.hawaiianelectric.com/documents/billing_and_payme...
I'm pretty sure SDGE (San Diego) rates are higher than PG&E across the board, but I'm too lazy to look it up since PG&E covers a huge swath of California and is already eyewateringly expensive.
At this rate, wont be long before we have to bring a copy of our w-2 to the super market so that the cashier can figure out the price of groceries.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/09/26/britain-burd...
PG&E's non-residential rates aren't that much cheaper than their residential rates. The rate schedules are comically complex so I can't give you insight into what the differences are, but they're showing average rates of $0.42/kWh (A-1, Commercial), $0.19–$0.32/kWh (E-20, Industrial), $0.20–$0.32/kWh (B-20, Industrial), $0.51/kWh (AG-1A, Agricultural), etc., etc.
As was pointed out by another commenter California and Hawaii are outliers, but then again so is Texas (where the uncapped market rate plans socked people with $9,000/month residential bills). Thing is both Texas and California are huge markets, so while parts of the US are much cheaper, parts of the US that are each larger than the UK are quite a bit more expensive.
Honestly I had no idea how pricey the non-residential plans are and I feel like there are almost certainly incentives that would cut the net cost significantly.