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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

One-off incidents don't really mean anything in the big picture.

However, I do recall back when there were grid problems in Texas a few years ago someone justifying the high prices California paid as due to their high grid reliability and solid regulatory framework (California pay 2x as much IIRC). I'm too far away to really get into the details but it'd be much more interesting to have a comparison on the reliability of the Californian grid compared to other US states and even countries. When it comes to high availability the diminishing returns to spending set in pretty quick and I get the impression there is a slow return to economic reality happening as voters are forcing governments to start paying attention to energy again, environmentalists or otherwise.

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That claim would be hilarious and also wildly inaccurate, that OP apparently never heard of a PSPS. California’s grid is not particularly resilient or reliable, and certainly not in the 2016-2020 time frame. Also, the regulatory framework is awful and high prices are driven by a mix of 1- regulatory capture and disincentives to utilities saving money, 2- wildfire mitigation costs, 3- NIMBYism and the lack of ability to build anything quickly, and then a hodge podge of CA specific issues.

One of those specific issues is that California electricity prices include what amounts to a redistributive tax, in the form of programs like CARE and FERA - probably about a third of households in the state are eligible for CARE which provides a 30% or more discount on normal prices. While there are low-income discount programs for other states none of them have nearly the reach of the CA programs.

I find it amazing that even with the redistribution subsidy, the resulting electricity is still more expensive than the national average unsubsidized rate. We are just so incredibly good at vaporizing money.

Have been in California for 10+ years and I've never seen anyone describing California's electricity infra as reliable. It shows the same kind of failure that's too familiar to many Americans: a vital service is managed by a corporation that has no incentive for better services, and market forces do not work due to the nature of the service. (If the power at your home in SF goes out all the time, it's not like you can find another provider - the best you can do is move to, say, Nevada, which is not realistic for most people.)

I lived in California until 2018; I think I missed the beginning of the premptive outages during high winds/fire danger, but the grid sections I lived in were much more reliable where I live now, near Seattle with PSE as the utility power supplier. I was also out of CA in the post-Enron rolling blackout era.

The PNW has a more challenging environment with respect to trees pulling down lines than suburban California; I expect two nines of utility power availability here; some years will get three nines. When I was in California, many years had no outages and I don't remember any years where I had less than 99.9% availability. Even when I did eventually decide to get a UPS, it was just because one day there were several brief interruptions.

Obviously, local conditions vary, and I managed to avoid the two recent periods of larger scale grid instability, but at least in my bubble, nobody talked about grid reliability, because it was just there. Plenty of complaints about rates and how long it would take to get service changes.

> someone justifying the high prices California paid as due to their high grid reliability

marketing is marketing

all electricity economics in california is highly manipulated via regulatory capture.

PG&E pays 3-4 cents/kwh wholesale and marks it up 10x because...

it can.

however marketing has "reasons" for this... like "building hte infrastructure for electric vehicles" or "adding reliability that prevents forest fires" or ...

none of that justifies the cost.

seriously, people charging their EVs are paying for the power. Shouldn't this be how PG&E makes money, instead of some exponentially increasing rate table?

it is interesting how people pay reasonable rates in Santa Clara or Palo Alto, which have non-pg&e power companies.

The same substation went up about a decade ago, I'd be pretty cautious about calling problems with PG&E infrastructure "one off".

California's rates were rationalized, in part, because California is taking steps to increase reliability. It's been decades seen we've seen rolling blackouts at the hands of Enron. Long-term plans to increase intra-state transmission capacity are in place and are currently being executed (you're welcome to dig them up on the ISO's site). The weather related preemptive power cuts have been pared back dramatically since their introduction. We're talking hundreds of thousands of people without power for days versus hundreds or thousands for hours.

Let's not forget that the "grid problems" you're referring to cost some ratepayers tens of thousands of dollars because that's the sort of retail electric plan that was legal in Texas.

But also please don't lump all Californians one group. PG&E rate payers are extorted for some of the highest electric rates in the nation (as are SDG&E and most IOU rate payers). Folks with access to municipal power in California pay far less.

A substation outage isn't a grid issue.

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