My electric utility just arbitrarily added 170 (~50% of the total) bucks to my bill this month, despite me using 11% less electricity.
The whole point of being a utility is to allow the “efficiency” of a monopoly without the ability to gouge the customers. Frankly, I’m looking to see if there is a lawsuit against the utility at this point so I can join on to it.
Also looking into residential solar. Ideally I can just give my electric utility the finger and disconnect my service. Between them and gas, I’m paying about 400 bucks a month, which could get me a nice loan for a solar array, battery backup, and all electric appliances.
Where I used to live, the electric bill doubled after the city council voted to allow the electric company to charge customers for the cost of storm repairs. Nearly $400 a month for us. I knew people who lived there part time and were getting $200 bills for months when they weren’t living there and had no electrical usage. And people had been saying for years that the electric company wasn’t doing enough to prepare for storms.
I see white roofs that can be dark themed to reduce the load on the grid.
Wasn’t there a country with too much solar, causing electricity prices to fall too low?
Do they not have any space left for data-centres?That’s probably true but you only get ⅓ of a day on average of power. Demands are still rising so the other ⅔ of the day prices are higher and likely still averages higher on average for an entire day even if ⅓ of it is so cheap.
You could store surplus energy with batteries, pumped storage hydro power stations, gravity batteries and so on to bridge the gap at night. It’s just a matter of subsidies in the right direction and political will to get there. But currently in impending pre-war times it’s more like in a diesel-punk dystopy.
