Even when California is running 100% (or close!) in renewable energy, it’s not hard to get a $200 power bill even for an apartment. Somebody has to pay to maintain all the infrastructure.
I haven't lived in California for decades now, was renewable energy ever promised as a solution to lower electricity bills or only as an environmental imperative?
Depends on how you mean it. Having your own solar panels or solar hot water, definitely. Although I personally think that a grid hookup should have some minimum cost to cover infrastructure at least, and selling electricity back from your home to the grid should be at a wholesale price not your full retail for receiving electricity since that covers technical glitches and incentivizes the grid to carry it.
Utilities going renewable: not realistically, though maybe romantically. It's more about the ecological impact.
Well that's good at least, I was mostly considering the utility use of renewable ls since the GP mentioned power bills when renting
I wasn't impressed with state politicians when I lived in CA, I Das just wondering if they tried to justify investment in renewable as a cheaper solution for consumers. Glad to hear you didn't notice them over promise and instead focused more on the ecological benefits
Whatever the politicians say, you need to look at things realistically. Which is easier for economics and physical reality than politics and sociology, and when you get to foreign relations it's difficult to have the depth in an area to be realistic.
Late answer: we added $20k of solar panels to our roof in SoCal in late 2020.
Get back about $1.8k from the utility every year, instead of $300-600 per month bill.
All else staying the same, the system will be paid off in about 3 years (6 years after installation). FWIW There was a tax rebate of $5500 at the time.
Search for “duck curve.” The problem is lack of cheap storage. A secondary system of mostly gas turbine generation has to ramp up when the sun goes down. As it stands every day at dusk California experiences the equivalent of around 10 nuclear power plants shutting down. (I guess in reality it’s one big fusion power plant going offline…)
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 38.6 ms ] threadI clicked cancel, clicked the archive link, worked fine, clicked the bloomberg link again and it loaded fine with no request.
Did this happen to anyone else?
Seems suspicious.
Utilities going renewable: not realistically, though maybe romantically. It's more about the ecological impact.
I wasn't impressed with state politicians when I lived in CA, I Das just wondering if they tried to justify investment in renewable as a cheaper solution for consumers. Glad to hear you didn't notice them over promise and instead focused more on the ecological benefits
Infrastructure is cheap to maintain in term of amount on your Bill.