From http://www.pge.com/tariffs/tm2/pdf/ELEC_SCHEDS_E-1.pdf

Total Energy Rates ($ per kWh)
Baseline Usage $0.11531 (R)
101% – 130% of Baseline $0.13109 (R)
131% – 200% of Baseline $0.25974 (I)
201% – 300% of Baseline $0.37866 (I)
Over 300% of Baseline $0.44098 (I)

So the Baseline usage of 11.5 cents/kWh is not too different from everywhere else in the country, but as you see, there is a steeply increasing rate as you use more than the baseline amount of kWh.

Elsewhere on the Pacific Gas and Electric website I have seen maps of the Bay Area and beyond in terms of what the Baseline level is. People closer to the ocean get a low baseline level; the further inland and more you need airconditioning, the greater the baseline allowance.

The impression I have about the baseline level, however, is that a homeowner has to be pretty parsimonious about their use of electricity and sparing with A/C to come in under that amount. As you see, as you exceed the baseline, your marginal rate for electricity skyrockets. Getting to 300% of baseline is not hard to do given most people are not like the Apollo 13 ground crew, trying to count every “ampere-hour on the spacecraft” to get them back alive before the batteries run down.

Think of it. 44 cents a kWh — any of you outside of California pay anything like that?

I think what California has done is that because they don’t want any power plants and they want to get any marginal power (in the economic demand curve sense) from renewables, is that they have priced power in the way they price gasoline in Europe — steeply to induce people to use less of it or build their own solar panels.

What they have done is create an incentive system where you marginal kWh costs 44 cents, which is about the cost to generate electricity from rooftop solar panels, which is what our article writer is finding economic to do.

For my money, I think that rooftop solar panels are a brute force approach to this homeowners problem. There is this new thing where you can paint the roof with heat-reflecting white paint or roofing tiles to cut down on air conditioning. You could purchase a high efficiency air conditioner. You could go with all fluorescent lighting. You could do the Apollo 13 thing of relentlessly tracking where all your electricity is going. All of this could be done for much less than $38,000. And the tiered electric rates are meant to encourage people to do all of this.

But something is goofy with the way they are doing business in California, that through electric utility regulation, they have created the economic incentive for homeowners to put up rooftop solar panels to compete with 44 cents/marginal kWh electricity when no one else in the country is paying those rates.

oth, he also doesn’t account for maintenance and repairs and possible degradation in efficiency over the 15 years, all of which would pull in teh other direction.

I suspect the biggets issue is the one raised by Lee valentine—what is the economic cost of the system, including all subsidies?

Riffing on Shannon Love’s mention of how costal (great pun!) California warps national energy policy debates…

Yes, right, a pun… quite definitely a clever pun and not a careless typo!

Hey, that server farm (or another kind of indoor farm with halide gro-lamps) takes a lot of juice to run. Doesn’t everyone see that?

More seriously, Southern Californians with their huge population and amazing provincialism (they consider California to be L.A. county plus “outlying areas”) screws up California energy and water policies. For example, the legislature just yawns when multi-year droughts strike north of the Tehachapi mountains but when rationing is even contemplated in L.A. or Santa Monica then it requires immediate legislative action and a declaration of emergency by the Governor.

You think this might be one reason for the decline of newspapers.

Things that work great in that mild climate fail miserably in most of the rest of the country. An open cable car is a joy to ride in San Francisco but would be a hellish experience in Texas summer with the temp over 100F, or during a thunderstorm, ice storm or, heck, let’s toss in a hurricane. Ditto for bicycles, small cars and even busses and light rail.

Yet so much of our entertainment and media is based in costal California that we are bombarded with messages that assume that if something works in California, it will work anywhere. Unfortunately, only the converse is true. I saw this effect first hand back in the 90’s when a strong El Nino caused a severe drought California. That same weather pattern caused Austin to experience 26 straight days of rain with severe flooding. Yet our local paper ran syndicated news stories on how to save water featuring interviewees from California!

Incidentally, if you finance $38,000 for 15 years at 6%, it will cost you $320.67/mo. or $3,848/yr. That plus the $1,460.73 for power is $5308/yr or more than he was spending before.