For whatever reason, it hurts like hell.
Typically charged at L2 chargers at a retail rate of $0.39/kWh (admittedly during dinner peak after work -- off-peak was lower). The 17 kWh battery gave 40 miles of highway driving, for 16.575 cents/mi.
Gas during the same period peaked at $6.749/gal, although I went out of my way to fill up at Costco Gas and saw prices as low as $3.999/gal - weighted average over that three year period was $4.896/gal. The 7 gallon tank gave another 300 miles of highway driving, getting 9.331 cents/mi to 15.748 cents/mi.
At the same gas prices, a comparable gas-only car getting 29.1 MPG would be 13.8-23.2 cents/mi in gas costs.
It was break even though, and the EV driving/re-fueling experiencing is much nicer for local travel, so it still makes sense to go with EV.
Every year, it decreases.
But PGE having to provide power to wilderness areas in genera costs all PG&E customers to bear the cost and it’s a cost that Municipal power companies in CA don’t have and their rates an 1/2 or even more than PG&Es.
"No blackouts or cost increases due to 100 % clean, renewable electricity powering California for parts of 98 days"
> This paper uses data from the world's 5th-largest economy to show no blackouts occurred when wind-water-solar electricity supply exceeded 100 % of demand on California's main grid for a record 98 of 116 days from late winter to early summer, 2024, for an average of 4.84 (and maximum 10.1) hours/day
Here you can see that CA power is more than double the cost of PJM, Southwest, and Midcontinent power. Whenever I look at it, CA is still be burning a huge amount of natural gas, especially overnight.
If that broke the grid then there would be little future in building out wind and solar beyond a small fraction of energy.
The paper demonstrates it's not a problem, so further progress to making all of the grid's energy clean can continue.
Also "peaked at 83.2 % of daily demand on May 25."
Note that demand in 2023 was 533.6 Gwh/day and went down to 529.1.
"between June 2023 and June 2024, nameplate capacities of utility solar, wind, and batteries increased by ∼18%, ∼4%, and 73.3%, respectively"
Cost and details of those capacity increases isn't mentioned but it seems that the average 31.7% increase in capacity only yielded a 5.2pp increase (mostly from the batteries which appear to handle 4 hours of load).
The study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096014812...
source: local news reporter Kevin Truong
Nice...but "up to 10" < 24, and 98 < 116, and "how easy was the first 1/4?" is generally a crap indicator of how easily a job can be finished.
> The state went a record 98 of 116 days providing up to 10 hours
Does the study clarify? "Up to” could mean almost anything, and could be rewritten ”no more than"
I wonder what the study actually found.
We should be seeing historically low rates, but suspiciously the rates have been going up.
I get grid adaptation is a nice expense, but LCOE is LCOE: the leveled cost of energy.
Therr are lots of questions why America's economy had done better (statistically at least) than the rest of the world since covid... To me it is the rise of shale oil. Cheaper energy makes for a better economy.
Oil is a good short term help, but what we really need in America is an alternative energy strategy... A path to less than 10 cent energy from Alt energy.
It's won't happen under the Cheeto, but we are in the long term making ourselves less competitive worldwide not pursuing alt energy aggressively with a boatload of subsides.
Only Municipal power companies like in Sacramento, LA, Palo Alto & Santa Clara to name a few have rates that are 1/3 to 1/2 of PG&E rates. They pay a small grid interconnection fee to the other utilities but beyond that their cost structure is much lower and they don’t have to return dividends to stock holders.
Gas rates have a similar cost structure between municipal and public companies although for some reason there are fewer municipal gas companies at least for smaller cities.