Utilities use money gathered from their captive customers to lobby against the clean-energy transition. I talk with a utility watchdog about the rules that allow utilities to get away with this and how to change them.
Having trouble keeping up with your output David, barely finished school buses yesterday, now I'm two behind!
You must be working like a one-armed paper-hanger, but how 'bout sparing five minutes for a manual post to Mastodon? Explain (I assume) that your Twitter->Mastodon app died, but you do (one hopes) plan to come back? Your prolific posting schedule was quite the draw. Not on Twitter, only joined Mastodon to see what the fuss was, and wondering about staying - if my favourite journalists are sticking with Muskville.
Could challenging in court the use of ratepayer money to lobby against ratepayers best interests become a Trojan horse for the Supreme Court to stealth strike down collective bargaining gains? There’s an affinity with the dues issue that periodically crops up
I agree about the problem but disagree somewhat about the solution. We need thinkers like Rob Harmon (of MEETS fame) to help develop a way to incentivize behaviors we want/need rather than punishing utilities for acting in their own self-interest.
You seemed surprised that utilities were fighting against both ends of the spectrum, trying to prevent decentralized production and regional transmission, but they know the current system and any change is going to cost them. It becomes a fairly easy task to approach a regulator or legislator and say "we're going to make a sizable contribution to you or your campaign and all we want you to do is nothing."
Maybe the solution is to swallow a bitter pill and pay the utilities to do these things. I know, I know it seems awful to pay the evil utilities to do something they should be doing for the benefit of their ratepayers, but we will spend far more trying to swim against the current on this and it will waste time we don't have.
I'm also convinced we've distorted NEPA and ESA and other well-intentioned environmental regulations to a disgusting degree. They served their purpose and need to be re-written for the modern era. I blame these laws, or at least our misuse of them, for the housing shortage and retarding the deployment of renewables. This is coming from someone who spent the last 20+ years writing EISs and BAs, and permitting infrastructure projects.
You guys didn’t even mention PG&E’s “dual-fuel” structural incentive to continue using CO2 polluting gas fueled power plants so its “Gas” division can sell fuel to its “Electric” division. If that isn’t corrupt, sociopathic self-dealing, pray tell what is?
PG&E is telling proposed commercial property developments appropriately zoned near the Sonoma County Airport, they’ll have to take a number, get in line, & wait 2 years for a new utility connection. They’re also telling remote rural property owners they should get generators & build their own microgrids. So, PG&E has basically adopted the Xfinity cable internet business model. They’re busy under-grounding their at-risk power lines & repairing their dilapidated distribution system. Monopolies are just inherently corrupt…..period. But, instead of getting angry, maybe it’s better to get even.
France has incentivized & mandated solar parking lot canopies, with integrated stationary battery storage & V2G chargers on ALL EXISTING large parking lots, WITHIN 5 YEARS! And State Senator Josh Becker has recently proposed similar legislation in California. In my town, you’ll find a large parking lot or two within a mile of anywhere, except up in the luxury hillside neighborhood. Is this “Instant Micro Grid” legislation? Inquiring minds want to know.
A question. In my country, electricity businesses are divided into generators (who own generation assets), distributors (who operate transmission and distribution networks) and retailers (who interface with the final customer). Is there any such division in the US? Do "utilities" do all of the above?
There is every solution in North America. The Canadian and US electrical grid is pretty united, and our customs are similarly all-over-the-place. Both are also federal, so that the states/province has more to say about the utility(s) inside their borders than the national level does.
There are government-owned utilities, and government-run utilities, and entirely private utilities that are various degrees of monopoly and regulation. When I say "government", I include both city governments, and state. (And, technically, federal utilities, when you remember that Ft.Bragg is 200 square miles and has the population of a city - also some Naval and Air bases have their own electrical, for tens of thousands of people and housing.)
David remains the only guy I know to have interviewed a person who'd found a use for "blockchain": to run an entirely decentralized market for selling power, storage, distribution services, because there is no central authority, and nobody would trust almost any company or government that put itself forward as neutral.
Indeed, coming to David with this question is the Right Guy, because he started off impressing the hell out of us at Vox.com, where he'd write 6000-word articles on how the levels of handoff from high to low voltage worked.
Indeed, David Roberts at Vox is heavy competition for your attention with Volts David Roberts, because so much of his old writing is still relevant. (Let's call them Fossil David Roberts and Renewed David Roberts.)
This insanity has value: when I did some looking into "cyberwar" and the spectre of hackers shutting down all power across Canada, it was clearly impossible: they'd need to be expert in nine kinds of generation, three kinds of distribution
There are generation-only and distribution-only companies, and their are vertical stack companies that do everything.
Having trouble keeping up with your output David, barely finished school buses yesterday, now I'm two behind!
You must be working like a one-armed paper-hanger, but how 'bout sparing five minutes for a manual post to Mastodon? Explain (I assume) that your Twitter->Mastodon app died, but you do (one hopes) plan to come back? Your prolific posting schedule was quite the draw. Not on Twitter, only joined Mastodon to see what the fuss was, and wondering about staying - if my favourite journalists are sticking with Muskville.
Could challenging in court the use of ratepayer money to lobby against ratepayers best interests become a Trojan horse for the Supreme Court to stealth strike down collective bargaining gains? There’s an affinity with the dues issue that periodically crops up
I agree about the problem but disagree somewhat about the solution. We need thinkers like Rob Harmon (of MEETS fame) to help develop a way to incentivize behaviors we want/need rather than punishing utilities for acting in their own self-interest.
You seemed surprised that utilities were fighting against both ends of the spectrum, trying to prevent decentralized production and regional transmission, but they know the current system and any change is going to cost them. It becomes a fairly easy task to approach a regulator or legislator and say "we're going to make a sizable contribution to you or your campaign and all we want you to do is nothing."
Maybe the solution is to swallow a bitter pill and pay the utilities to do these things. I know, I know it seems awful to pay the evil utilities to do something they should be doing for the benefit of their ratepayers, but we will spend far more trying to swim against the current on this and it will waste time we don't have.
I'm also convinced we've distorted NEPA and ESA and other well-intentioned environmental regulations to a disgusting degree. They served their purpose and need to be re-written for the modern era. I blame these laws, or at least our misuse of them, for the housing shortage and retarding the deployment of renewables. This is coming from someone who spent the last 20+ years writing EISs and BAs, and permitting infrastructure projects.
PURPA ended the monopoly electric utility, but we failed to tell them that. Maybe we should tell them now.
@David Roberts
How can I contact you privately (I don’t use the Twitter)?
You guys didn’t even mention PG&E’s “dual-fuel” structural incentive to continue using CO2 polluting gas fueled power plants so its “Gas” division can sell fuel to its “Electric” division. If that isn’t corrupt, sociopathic self-dealing, pray tell what is?
PG&E is telling proposed commercial property developments appropriately zoned near the Sonoma County Airport, they’ll have to take a number, get in line, & wait 2 years for a new utility connection. They’re also telling remote rural property owners they should get generators & build their own microgrids. So, PG&E has basically adopted the Xfinity cable internet business model. They’re busy under-grounding their at-risk power lines & repairing their dilapidated distribution system. Monopolies are just inherently corrupt…..period. But, instead of getting angry, maybe it’s better to get even.
France has incentivized & mandated solar parking lot canopies, with integrated stationary battery storage & V2G chargers on ALL EXISTING large parking lots, WITHIN 5 YEARS! And State Senator Josh Becker has recently proposed similar legislation in California. In my town, you’ll find a large parking lot or two within a mile of anywhere, except up in the luxury hillside neighborhood. Is this “Instant Micro Grid” legislation? Inquiring minds want to know.
A question. In my country, electricity businesses are divided into generators (who own generation assets), distributors (who operate transmission and distribution networks) and retailers (who interface with the final customer). Is there any such division in the US? Do "utilities" do all of the above?
There is every solution in North America. The Canadian and US electrical grid is pretty united, and our customs are similarly all-over-the-place. Both are also federal, so that the states/province has more to say about the utility(s) inside their borders than the national level does.
There are government-owned utilities, and government-run utilities, and entirely private utilities that are various degrees of monopoly and regulation. When I say "government", I include both city governments, and state. (And, technically, federal utilities, when you remember that Ft.Bragg is 200 square miles and has the population of a city - also some Naval and Air bases have their own electrical, for tens of thousands of people and housing.)
David remains the only guy I know to have interviewed a person who'd found a use for "blockchain": to run an entirely decentralized market for selling power, storage, distribution services, because there is no central authority, and nobody would trust almost any company or government that put itself forward as neutral.
Indeed, coming to David with this question is the Right Guy, because he started off impressing the hell out of us at Vox.com, where he'd write 6000-word articles on how the levels of handoff from high to low voltage worked.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/11/30/17868620/renewable-energy-power-grid-architecture
Here's one on the "future utility" touching on all your fragmentation questions:
https://www.vox.com/2015/9/11/9306247/utilities-21st-century
Indeed, David Roberts at Vox is heavy competition for your attention with Volts David Roberts, because so much of his old writing is still relevant. (Let's call them Fossil David Roberts and Renewed David Roberts.)
https://www.vox.com/authors/david-roberts/archives
This insanity has value: when I did some looking into "cyberwar" and the spectre of hackers shutting down all power across Canada, it was clearly impossible: they'd need to be expert in nine kinds of generation, three kinds of distribution
There are generation-only and distribution-only companies, and their are vertical stack companies that do everything.