[kevinburke]

I'm the author here. The cost savings come from not having people who live in cities pay for undergrounding lines and maintaining power lines in rural areas. Maintaining the city networks is much cheaper.

This is why Santa Clara, Palo Alto and Alameda's power companies can deliver power for half of what PG&E can. You can just copy their cost structure.

[bunabhucan]

You said in the article "PG&E rejected this offer for being too low" but then proceed to use that as the baseline cost that drives the rest of the estimates, that doesn't make sense. If I offer someone minimum wage to do my job and they refuse, I don't start a spreadsheet to calculate my savings.

Boulder CO tried municipalization with Xcel and the gap between the city offer and Xcel position was very large. How do your figures look if you double the price and/or add in a decade tail of having to pay 25% of billing to PG&E?

The small munis you mention are in the same position as PG&E with respect to owning decades old poles and conductors with decades of life remaining. The incumbent has all the cards in this negotiation. An existing muni can do it cheaper for the obvious reasons you stated - legacy network, all the customers are close together. Buying the most profitable bits of the PG&E network at a price they would agree to would not be profitable.

[kevinburke]

This is why I adjusted SF’s offer for population and then multiplied it by 50%, then used 400 million as the base for financing.

Financing at 4% interest is not the expensive part though. Even if the price was $1 billion it would be 6 cents per kWh.

I agree it would be bad if they had to fight in court for a decade! But you have to start somewhere and as I mentioned you might get a good outcome just from threatening to do it. My hope is the CPUC would force them to accept some offer.

[rsynnott]

The problem is, if cities don’t pay for that, who will? Just abandoning electricity for rural areas isn’t _really_ an option, but it would likely be uneconomic without the effective subsidy from urban areas.

[screye]

Story of America. There's a reason only this continent has excessive sprawl.

Ideally, rural areas pay up. Good forcing functions for change. Maybe people move closer together (similar to European villages) or they become energy-independent (solar panels).

If that's politically untenable, then I'd like to see the cost reflected as a city2rural subsidy. Cities get enough hate in the US. I'd like explicit recognition of their generosity.

[treis]

It probably is an option to go to solar & batteries these days. Especially when the liability from rural power lines is huge due to fires.

[maxerickson]

The area I live in has utilities that service the small town population centers and a utility that services most of the outlying rural area. The rural operator is expensive, but not unaffordable.

Density including the towns is about 3.2 people per square km.

[nocoiner]

Cool. Now you’ve just undone 70 years of rural electrification in the United States.

Optimizing for factors other than universal service is completely valid, but I’m guessing each of those municipal power systems pre-dated rural electrification and thereby get to somewhat free ride on the system more than anyone would reasonably allow Walnut Creek to do in the year 2025.

[kevinburke]

Not just rural areas but places like Orinda and the Berkeley Hills where I will pay to underground lines at massive expense.

There is also a huge moral hazard problem where we make it cheaper than it should be to live in fire zones by subsidizing electricity and insurance. So people build a lot of houses in fire territory that burn down.

In the meantime we make it more expensive to live in the safe places. We should stop doing that

[Gigachad]

Is this a problem though? Utilities will become more expensive for rural properties, but if those people are producing product that people need, they can just slightly bump prices to cover their electricity costs, which the consumers can cover with their new found savings on utilities.

The real benefit is that the people who don't have any reason to actually be rural, say remote software developers, will now have to either cover their costs rather than externalising them, or move to the city.

[msandford]

It's probably more efficient for society to subsidize micro grids using solar and wind and batteries for rural electrification than to bury all the power lines that it'll take.

A $100 million project to bury the lines to 1000 houses is $100k per house which just ain't worth it. Not saying this is a real number but it could easily be if it's costing $0.20/kWh to do distribution.

[toomuchtodo]

Rural electrification was needed at the time. In many cases, it no longer is (distributed generation, microgrids, etc vs large, distant generators having to transport power to residential load centers).

This is very similar to how Africa will leapfrog the legacy model with cheap solar and batteries.

In Australia, they have a model of colocating stationary battery storage in neighborhoods to balance buffer solar production locally for time shifting purposes (vs shipping that power far only to bring it back in the evening).