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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
California has a big — and growing — glut of power, an investigation by the Los Angeles Times has found. The state's power plants are on track to be able to produce at least 21% more electricity than it needs by 2020, based on official estimates. And that doesn't even count the soaring production of electricity by rooftop solar panels that has added to the surplus.
[...] This translates into a staggering bill. Although California uses 2.6% less electricity annually from the power grid now than in 2008, residential and business customers together pay $6.8 billion more for power than they did then. The added cost to customers will total many billions of dollars over the next two decades, because regulators have approved higher rates for years to come so utilities can recoup the expense of building and maintaining the new plants, transmission lines and related equipment, even if their power isn't needed.
How this came about is a tale of what critics call misguided and inept decision-making by state utility regulators, who have ignored repeated warnings going back a decade about a looming power glut.
[...] California utilities are "constantly crying wolf that we're always short of power and have all this need," said Bill Powers, a San Diego-based engineer and consumer advocate who has filed repeated objections with regulators to try to stop the approval of new plants. They are needlessly trying to attain a level of reliability that is a worst-case "act of God standard," he said.
Even with the growing glut of electricity, consumer critics have found that it is difficult to block the [Public Utilities Commission] (PUC) from approving new ones.
In 2010, regulators considered a request by [Pacific Gas and Electric Co.] (PG&E) to build a $1.15-billion power plant in Contra Costa County east of San Francisco, over objections that there wasn't sufficient demand for its power. One skeptic was PUC commissioner Dian Grueneich. She warned that the plant wasn't needed and its construction would lead to higher electricity rates for consumers — on top of the 28% increase the PUC had allowed for PG&E over the previous five years.
[...] Recent efforts to get courts to block several other PUC-approved plants have failed, however, so the projects are moving forward.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 09 2017, @11:50PM
Infrastructure. You really can't overbuild infrastructure.
I can think of a few examples. There are "bridges to nowhere". Everybody [wikipedia.org] has them. Sometimes they actually are bridges that physically don't connect anything or never were complete enough to use. Other times, it's merely that the value of the bridge is far lower than its cost.
Second, there's the example of the International Space Station that was several times as expensive as it needed to be because it was supporting both the Space Shuttle and the Russian space program for a couple of decades each.
Having said that, a mere 20% more electricity is not that big a deal. It sounds more like fallout from the 2000-2001 electricity crisis, when purchasing wholesale lots of electricity were allowed in order to stabilize the price of electricity. Someone no doubt has managed to lock in a bunch of contracts at a higher price. Maybe it's time to deregulate the electricity industry again, but this time like Pennsylvania did it.