The problem in California is not generation nor is it reliability. CAISO has the lowest wholesale electricity costs in the nation, by far; under half the cost of Texas. It also hasn't had a blackout since 2020.
The problem is retail side. AKA PG&E, its regulation, governance and forced liabilities.
CAISO claims that and cleantechnica might parrot it, but there are blackouts ALL THE TIME in southern california.
In Palm Springs I was down with brownouts 103 times since I bought a sine wave UPS in December, and multi hour blackouts 4 times. My mother in Riverside, brother in Laguna Beach are similar.
Last week it was 3 times here over the course of three days. It's lived experience for me. Reliability collapsed two years ago
> CAISO has the lowest wholesale electricity costs in the nation, by far
Much lower than that provided by the TVA? Ages ago, I used to live in an area served by the TVA, and its power prices were notably cheaper than anywhere else. I'd heard that this was because a huge chunk of its power was provided by fission plants, but never investigated.
Yes, CAISO wholesale rates are much lower, but California also has the highest retail cost in the continental US, at over 28c/kWh. If any customer in the TVA paid that much for power there'd be riots.
Where does one even find wholesale rates for the various regional providers?
I -a complete ignoramous- spent like ten whole minutes poking around for wholesale rates. I could find documents about rates for several providers (including TVA) from many years back, complaints about rates increasing for many providers (but no actual mention of the new rates) and some governmental site that provided rates for a selected subset of all providers which included CAISO and one in Texas, but not TVA.
You'd think that this would be something that'd be very easy to find on -say- the DoE's website, but apparently you'd be totally wrong.
The problem is retail side. AKA PG&E, its regulation, governance and forced liabilities.
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/05/30/california-lowest-whole...