https://practical.engineering/blog/2024/11/14/which-power-plant-does-my-electricity-come-from
In June of 2000, the power shut off across much of the San Francisco Bay area. There simply wasn't enough electricity to meet demands, so more than a million customers were disconnected in California's largest load shed event since World War II. It was just one of the many rolling blackouts that hit the state in the early 2000s. Known as the Western Energy Crisis, the shortages resulted in blackouts, soaring electricity prices, and ultimately around 40 billion dollars in economic losses. But this time, the major cause of the issues had nothing to do with engineering. There were some outages and a lack of capacity from hydroelectric plants due to drought, but the primary cause of the disaster was economic. Power brokers (mainly Enron) were manipulating the newly de-regulated market for bulk electricity, forcing prices to skyrocket. Utilities were having to buy electricity at crazy prices, but there was a cap on how much they could charge their customers for the power. One utility, PG&E, lost so much money, it had to file for bankruptcy. And Southern California Edison almost met the same fate.
Most of us pay an electric bill every month. It's usually full of cryptic line items that have no meaning to us. The grid is not only mechanically and electrically complicated; it's financially complicated, too. We don't really participate in all that complexity - we just pay our bill at the end of every month. But it does affect us in big ways, so I think it's important at least to understand the basics, especially because, if you're like me, it's really interesting stuff. I'm an engineer, I'm not an economist or finance expert. But, at least in the US, if you really want to understand how the power grid works, you can't just focus on the volts and watts. You have to look at the dollars too. I'm Grady, and this is Practical Engineering.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday November 27, @07:57AM (3 children)
I'd never seen a US power bill before and had no idea what "cryptic line items" are, since bills here have two entries, one a fixed daily charge and one a variable charge based on power consumed (occasionally a third line if you're feeding back power from solar). There's also a pile of web sites including one government-run one where you can compare your power bill with various other providers to see which one is best for you. For others who are puzzled by this here's a multi-page guide on how to decode a US power bill [enelnorthamerica.com]. Here's a 38-page government document [energy.gov] on the same thing.
It's no wonder people would have trouble with these bills.
(Score: 4, Informative) by owl on Wednesday November 27, @06:49PM (2 children)
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 27, @07:21PM (1 child)
Somewhat different in NY State, all the lines below are from my bill that came yesterday. Each line (except the first one) also includes a kwh amount and dollar/kwh rate (carried out to 5+ decimal places) which are multiplied for the cost of that line item.
Electricity Delivery Charges
Basic service charge [fixed]
Delivery charge
Transition charge
Revenue decoupling mech
SBC charge - Oct [looked this up, funds "clean" energy]
SBC charge - Nov
Electricity Supply Charges
Supply charge
Merchant function charge - Oct
Merchant function charge - Nov
Electricity Taxes and Surcharges
Taxes on delivery charges
County sales tax
In my case, we didn't use all that many kwh (small household) and the Delivery Charges (first section) were nearly 2/3 of the total, Supply was about 1/3 the total, Taxes were about 6%.
With fixed basic service charge (being connected to the grid), low volume users get hit. This total bill works out to $0.20/kwh. In the summer with higher consumption (AC use), the cost/kwh is lower.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday November 28, @05:15AM
This explains the background for a talk I was at many years ago by someone from a multinational company who did power billing in different countries, one of which was the US. He mentioned that US billing was either two or three orders of magnitude more complex (memory bit rot, one of the two) than any other country they operated in. That was the introduction for the talk, the main part of it was the exotic techniques they had to employ to be able to run things in such an exceptional environment. One of them that I remember was only using a small group of tracks on the disks (spinning rust back then) in order to minimise seek times, another was them discovering all sorts of limits to then-new and very expensive solid-state storage that even the vendors weren't aware of (typically related to cacheing or maybe wear, it ran at the claimed levels for X hours/days and then dropped to a fraction of that). Another was buying up six months worth of production of a large vendor's hardware in order to deal with the workload only to find out that they were second in line behind a US govt customer who had already bought six months worth of production ahead of them.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by krishnoid on Wednesday November 27, @09:27AM
His YouTube channel [youtube.com] is like nerd crack, and reviewers find his book [practical.engineering] very enjoyable too.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 27, @12:30PM
Nice site, specially nice because there is a transcript, saving the boring time of watching the video...
My electric utility publishes yearly summaries of the sources of the power they purchased. These come out a couple of years late, but better late than never(?)
For 2022 see https://www.nyseg.com/w/environmental-disclosure [nyseg.com] Unfortunately the table is an image, so can't post the data here, but the big players are:
Natural Gas 55%
Nuclear 24%
Hydroelectric 10%
Coal, Solid Waste, Solar 3% each (9% total)
Wind 1%
I don't think there are any coal power plants left in NY State, so that must be purchased from a power plant in another state.