… Private Equity scammed them for $8 Billion. {{ LOL }}
intercst
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All hail the “JCs”.
/sarcasm
Steve
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I couldn’t read the article because pay wall, so I am guessing the “Electricity prices soared…” refers to wholesale prices, not the retail price that average customers pay.
For the month of July, when it was hot in Texas, the average residential retail price of electricity in the state was 13.83 cents per kwh. Compare this to some other populous southern states and the US overall average…
July 2023, residential price of electricity Texas 13.83 cents/kwh Florida 14.98 California 29.58 US Avg 15.91
Texans payed a lower price than average
Data from here, plus all 50 states, if you are interested.
^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^
Year to date, through July, a similar trend is observed…
Year-to-date, residential price of electricity Texas 14.24 cents/kwh Florida 15.27 California 28.59 US Avg 15.92
Data from here.
Californians pay some of the highest electricity rates in the country. The exceptions being Hawaii and parts of New England. Compared to the first 7 months of 2022, the price in Connecticut, for example, has gone up 30%. In just one year.
- Pete
Here’s a screen print of rates from our electricity supplier National Grid.
It’s the charges that are killing us…
'38Packard
Don’t ratepayers eventually pay all the costs of running a utility company? Maybe the utility took the price spike out of their financial reserves, but rate payers will eventually be asked to replenish those reserves.
intercst
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The standard Eversource rate was $.24. The current rate as of last July is $.1382.
It dropped by roughly 42%.
I locked in at .1299 for three years summer 2023 to summer 2026. I can cancel at any time with no charge.
A utility can ask the public utility commission (or whatever it is called in a particular state) for a rate increase, but those increases are by no means guaranteed. The utility must submit documents and financial analyses, justifying why a particular rate change is necessary. If the commission doesn’t agree, then the rate change can be denied. Or maybe the utility will need to go back and redo the documents and paperwork, to come up with a lesser rate change that the commission can deal with.
Of course, much depends on the politics in a particular state, the relationships between the utility and members of the commission, and plenty of other factors, such as the political power of various customer advocates who will usually argue against rate increases.
- Pete
Utilities are regulated in a combination of two ways: incentivising building infrastructure and incentivising selling power. The trade off is that if utilities make the most money selling power, the power will be cheap but the infrastructure will be fragile, and vice versa. Generally speaking, of course.
Texas is on the far end of the incentivizing power scale. That means power is cheap, but their grid is being held together by paperclips and prayers. The NYT article above was basically about Texas spending money to make the grid more robust, which of course ultimately means higher rates. That’s not necessarily bad
On the other of the spectrum is California, which strongly incentivizes infrastructure, which means power is going to be expensive. Some pro-fossil fuel groups argue that California’s high electricity prices are due to California’s emphasis on renewables. This is a misleading claim. Texas produces far more non-hydro renewable electricity than California and it isn’t close.
The state with the highest percentage of renewable electricity (including hydro) is, wait for it…South Dakota at 83% and residential rates of 13.23 cents/kWh.
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