[wyattk]

With all due respect, but it seems apparent that you are not familiar with how electric distribution utilities work, especially in a deregulated state like California, how CAISO and its market mechanisms work, or how CPUC works.

If you are a reader that is not well-versed in how the grid works, please disregard the parent's comment.

I work in this space. I view this noisemaking as harmful to the public as they likely do not fully understand how the electricity delivery system (the grid) works, and this only serves to infuriate them and increase distrust.

[djrogers]

With no actual details to back up your rather rude accusations against the GP, I'm not sure how useful this mini-rant really is... Care to lay some education on us instead of just hand-waving in a smarter-than-you manner?

[jorgen123]

To be honest, the GP's post itself reads like a rant and actually does not back up any of its claims. So while I agree that this post did not add value, neither did the GP.

Funny thing with utilities. They are a sort of commons, yet always regarded as evil until proven innocent.

[mr_toad]

Most utilities are effectively monopolies. Evil comes with the territory.

[jorgen123]

And yet, how many utility poles and wires do you want in front of your house? I don't think we really want anything other than a monopoly doing our distribution.

It would be much better for the perception if there were a clean split in the business of the utilities where the distribution monopoly does just distribution and nothing else. But I'm not sure if that would actually solve any real problems.

[digitalzombie]

They're regulated no?

I'm a bit confuse here. I thought utilities are regulated what is the reasoning for them being evil?

Yeah they're natural monopolies but they also regulated. I get that Enron mess California over but they got caught. What shady things that the electric companies in California are doing?

[FractalLP]

The post above yours is actually correct. I didn't read it as rude either although maybe a little dismissive. If you work in this space, you quickly realize just how complex everything is as the electric grid is the largest most complex machine on planet earth. The legal, economic, regulatory, and engineering aspects of it go pretty deep.

Utilities typically own generation plants as well as the high voltage transmission lines that transport electricity to consumers which then have their voltage lowered (think of a transformer as a device that lowers pressure) before going over smaller distribution lines into your house. Long ago, competition was fierce, so utilities went to the government and asked to be regulated. This caused forced consolidation and they began to effectively serve as monopolies and make a modest return on investment each year. In those days demand was fairly easy to forecast. The utility would make sure they always had enough generation online plus some extra to cover any emergencies like a unit tripping offline. The grid worked like this for decades and costs were fairly cheap. If the utility needed to build a new nuclear plant (example) they would have to go to the state commission and get them to approve raising the rates. Now, although rates were fairly cheap, there was a push to deregulate things. In theory, markets are less efficient in some ways, but more in others such as incentivizing new and more efficient technology. Remember the regulated utility doesn't make any more money by doing research and risking new technology.

With deregulation, we moved to the RTO/ISO model where lots of utilities band together and work with an RTO/ISO. The RTO/ISO chooses which units run via optimization. It wants to find a way to serve all the customers in the region, plus provide backup power, and do it very cheaply. Remember how the utility has to keep extra units online in case one trips? By banding together into what is known as a "pool" you can save lots of money as far fewer units need to be online as backup. The RTO/ISO does this as well. It also knows the cost of each unit and chooses the cheapest ones. This is slowly forcing more costly fossil fuels to retire as they simply aren't as economical. This causes an issue as even though wind/solar is awesome, it isn't as reliable as a massive coal plant with months of fuel waiting to be used. Making sure there are no blackouts is VERY important to grid operators. The industry is scrambling to address these issues as fast as possible, but it is a tough issue. Deregulation is a weird word as utilities are still regulated, but there are now market forces coupled into it as well helping push progress forwards. I hope that helps a bit!

[Animats]

I used to aim people at "PJM 101"[1], which is PJM's tutorial on how the power grid really works. But they put it behind a login for a while. I asked them why. Now, it's out from behind the login.

But now it's in Adobe Captivate, which is apparently what Adobe has convinced some former Flash users to use. Doesn't work in Firefox and tries to get me to install Chrome. Useful info, though. Explains clearly what a power grid does every day.

[1] http://pjm.com/Globals/Training/Courses/ol-pjm-101.aspx