The transmission pylons are a few million dollars a mile, and the undersea cables are even more expensive. And the undersea cables are more difficult to maintain, as is anything in a marine environment. So the cheap SOBs in the utilities typically choose the lower cost towers.
As for the US West Coast, rooftop solar with battery storage is very popular, and VPPs make money for those who have them. But utilities want to keep their customers dependent on the grid, so DERs – distributed energy resources – are something they’re against, politically. It looks like there are going to be a lot of politics involved when it comes to upgrading the grid. What really concerns the utilities is the prospect of customers going off grid, now that solar and battery storage are getting cheaper. Looks like a big fight may occur in the future.
I should add another important point. The future big fight may involve a lot of litigation. Before rooftop solar, customers were almost totally dependent on the utilities for electric power. As a result, they gave the IOUs – investor owned utilities – the right to a monopoly in their territory with the proviso that they be regulated by the state public utilities commission.
Now that their customers can go off grid with rooftop solar, they may try to prevent customers from going off grid. Then the litigation will commence.
This is similar to what AT&T did with the Carterphone decision which took many years of appeals and finally AT&T lost. The area that interests me is what will this do to the utility scale generation and transmission.
PG&E – Pacific Gas & Electric – has already been found responsible for the wildfire in California that burned down the town of Paradise. PG&E have postponed maintenance on their grid and the consequence was a disastrous wildfire.
Will the IOUs fight the customers to stop them from going off grid? We pay a few dollars a month to the utility for the CCAs – community choice aggregators – another “tax” taken from us customers. My electric bill is well below average but I still pay $40 to $50 a month. My neighbors’ bills seem to be over a hundred a month.
If the US does its part in going green, we will all have to replace our natural gas appliances with electric, and drive EVs. The big increase on the grid will not be EVs, it will be the added electric appliances. So our electric bills will be even higher and there will be even more incentive for customers to go off grid to reduce their bill.
I just see a rather bleak future for the electric power customers. Perhaps residents of a municipality or city should form a co-op and take over the electricity distribution. It’s that way in the next-door city of Anaheim. And these have been known to provide services at a lower cost than the IOUs. More on this later.
This above was my own comment at the following link.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/exclusive-early-102059743?cid=134797471
