Spain invested in green energy and I am paying a shit ton on utility bills.
I feel like the reason is obvious. Maybe it is just me.
Cheaper utilities was never the goal
Us is pathetic. Nothing is planned.
No direction. Every 4 years fuckers change shit.Centrally planned china can run circles around
Yeah, China is great!
All dictatorships are more efficient than democracies, so just give it a little time. Our dictator will catch up. It’s our first try at fascism. Cut us some slack.
Nah. They would be 50-60% cheaper if;
- They required the choice between two different administrators.
- They were ran as non profit (private equity is ruining utilities currently).
Why not nuclear?
You can double check it but I think solar is cheaper now. I was shocked as well, I thought nuclear was the cheapest still.
Lots of US states have legislation that lets you choose your energy provider. People buy from the 100% green energy providers if they wish to pay more, not if they wish to save money.
Source: Several of my friends live in these states; they pay more to buy from 100% green energy providers.
Yeah because companies in the US exploit everything and everyone until they get stopped (which they don’t)
And probably because fossil energy gets subsidised heavily to compete with renewable energy. So on your electricity bill the fossil is cheaper but your taxes are sent there ten times.
Well currently the US is fucked anyway
In the US, a big part of it is that natural gas is a waste product of oil fracking. If you want the oil, you will get a giant gob of natural gas to go with it. The stuff is really, really fucking cheap because of this.
That’s why republicans hate it.
It sounds evil and simplistic, and it is, but these are evil and simplistic people we’re talking about.
“Oh, new innovations in technology can help consumers pay less to power their homes? We can’t have that! It would affect the profits of my friends Oil Baron and Coal Baron.”
Why are utilities privatized?
Our energy provider increased our rates, then reported record breaking profits the next year. :(
(US)
Because as a general rule governments aren’t efficient running services and that’s fine for a while but long term that means infrastructure isn’t properly maintained which leads to service malfunction, which leads to privatization because someone else can do it better and competence appears because someone else things can do it better than the other or to collapse because things don’t work anymore.
Source: I am Spanish, a lot of companies were privatized after the dictatorship because they weren’t efficient and infrastructure was falling apart. Privatizing allowed competence which meant someone had to invest in infrastructure to be better than the other. Problem is now governments are confabulated with some of those companies to create oligopolies. For example my city has it’s own water/trash company (half private half public) so no one is allowed to bid against them; you can imagine how that is going (from paying 35€ every 3 months to paying 65€ in one year), price goes up, no one can’t complain or hire a cheaper one, while with cable and phone companies since Telefonica was privatized other companies popped out and you can have cheaper and better internet/phone/tv.
They should be nonprofits, independent, but strictly non profit
Nah, let’s privatize all the services you need to have a functional home. That way the companies can extract maximum value from the customers.
Brilliant.
So government can spend the investment on schools and hospitals instead. (In the civilised world, obviously not America)
This has little to do with where you’re from. It’s just neoliberal rhetoric. Having a public energy sector would be beneficial in the long run and would reduce what we have to pay for it. Right now the earnings are privatized in most places.
My area privatized the publicly owned electricity provider and since prices started going up they then had to implement rebates to bring bills down a bit. Effectively a roundabout way to move public funds from paying for the actual infrastructure into subsidizing corporate profits instead
Exactly. Privatize the profits and socialize the costs. What a brilliant system. Unfortunately it benefits only a small handful while everyone else picks up the tab.
It’s not rhetoric. It’s economics 101. Opportunity cost.
A mixture of private and public is best.
Edit. A mixture allows more spend on more things. Govts can’t sell infinite debt
Thanks professor. Do you know private debt and state debt are hardly the same? Have you considered the opportunity cost of not having public energy, therefore losing potential “earnings” to private investors? Or are you telling me next that rich people are a necessity as well? Is trickle-down part of this course or do I have to wait for 201?
Not really, I live in a country where green energy keeps going up but so does the electricity prices. You have to believe in Santa if you think the savings ever reach the consumer.
That’s called artificially inflated prices
Merit order used to be a perfectly good and fair system. But renewable tech throws a monkey wrench into that system. Also shifts cost to be less demand dependent.
Maybe Nuclear, given it can actually support the base load power, except they need to fully deregulate it first so Nimbys and lawsuits balloon the cost. It shouldnt cost more nowadays in inflation adjusted terms than France building them in the 70s.
Your talking points are ten years out of date. The cheapest form of baseload power now is batteries plus solar. For seasonal variations? Nuclear is so expensive that it’s far cheaper to just build enough to meet your winter electricity demand and have abundant power the rest of the year.
Fission is a dead end technology that people mostly support now so they can feel a sense of contrarian intellectual superiority. It’s all just vibes at this point.
Do you have an example of a city that runs on renewables with battery storage with no duplicate backup base load generator?
As far as I was aware there were none, as it is non-feasible outside of areas with hydro dams for power storage.
Do you have an example of a city that runs on renewables with battery storage with no duplicate backup base load generator?
Thankfully cities don’t build isolated power grids.
Would also be cheaper if the government owned the energy infrastructure and ran at cost.
How would it be cheaper?
but that’s communism!!!
Ikr? What else is it? A good idea that would benefit people broadly instead of specific people narrowly?
You want elected officials to be competent and follow the will of those whom they represent?
that’s woke nonsense
Pfft caring about anything but myself, what a suckers game.
Empathy? what woke bs is that, as a true Jesus loving Christian I hate my neighbors
Or the quicker way: the government nationalises all power companies, and sold electricity for cheap… Because it’s necessary… For society…
Solar is so cheap now, that some people can just build their own solar and battery setup themselves.
Yes, but at scale it is significantly cheaper to build larger and distribute it. It also means people don’t have to over invest in their own set up just to cover their peak usage. There is also a large amount of up front capital required to build with usually years before you get back what was invested. Its also almost impossible for renters or apartment buildings to do it themselves.
Yes I know all of that, I’m saying that solar is so much cheaper than coal power that even private individuals can buy it, so we shouldn’t be wasting money on new coal plants or gas plants.
Same for nuclear. U.S.-Americans are brainwashed on this topic.
First, they pay with their tax dollars for the subsidies that the private for-profit companies use to build the nuclear reactors. After that, they pay again, because the private company charges them extra on the electricity bill for the electricity generated by the very same nuclear reactor so that they can make even more profit.
It’s so stupid and they’re brainwashed to defend it to the teeth. They also always try to deflect from the fact that renewables are cheaper than nuclear and can be owned by them instead of a for-profit company, by pretending that everyone who opposes nuclear energy must be in favour of coal and gas. It’s mind boggling to watch.
Nuclear energy
That’s incorrect. Nuclear power is one of the more expensive options when you factor in the costs after operation ends, which you should obviously do.
