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.
Neither California or Hawaii are good metrics to compare against. California is a mess of self inflicted high costs, and Hawaii is too small to have any industry and too far away from anything for cheap transporting of goods.
My own electric rate in the middle-north continental US is only a third of the £0.255/kWh rate.
No, they're both perfect. The comment I was responding to put forth the idea that the UK is an outlier when it's not far off from the cost in big chunks of the US. What's going on in California is no more self-inflicted than the UK choosing to ditch coal or choosing to be heavily reliant on Russian gas.
California is terrible company to keep, and has the worst energy prices in the US.
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.
> There was even discussion of literally taxing individuals for using the sun to generate their own power.
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.
I think it is one of the strongest points, but am pretty strongly against the stronger embodiments of land tax. I think most people would find the sun tax outrageous, and put it in a similar category to taxing people for the work they dont do, or for the air they breathe.
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.
> I think most people would find the sun tax outrageous...
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.
California is terrible company to keep, and has the worst energy prices
in the US.
Which is exactly what makes the comparison apt.
meanwhile we pay 3x the price and our grid burns down towns and is
frequently disabled.
Yeah, no. This week saw PSPS alerts for maybe a few hundred people in the Bay Area for 1? 2? days. That's a massive improvement over whole counties being down for a week.
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.
I would add that California struggles mightily with adverse weather too. In our case it is wind and lightning, which is different from Texas. The 2019 California PSPSs were over 3 million people at a time, and some people went without power for many days. California hasn't experienced statewide subzero temperatures, so Im not convinced our grid would preform any better under similarly extreme circumstances.
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.
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
California and Hawaii are both extreme outliers in the US, and aside from gasoline prices in California, both are on the extreme end of outliers in comparing to Europe on most metrics as well.
Neither are good comparisons for what is "normal"... The only thing the comparison does is prove that the UK has high energy prices.
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.
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.
My own electric rate in the middle-north continental US is only a third of the £0.255/kWh rate.