Supreme Court Rules In Favor of Energy Conservation Program (yahoo.com) 84
mdsolar sends news that the U.S. Supreme Court has issued a 6-2 ruling in favor of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's ability to create incentives for conserving energy and reducing demand on the power grid at peak times.
The demand response program pays large electricity customers like retailers, schools and office buildings to reduce energy consumption on hot summer days and other times of peak demand. The reduction in power use means electric utilities don't need to turn on backup power plants, which cost more to run and boost electricity prices. ... The rule won wide praise from environmental groups because it curbed the need for utilities to build expensive and air-polluting power plants. The demand response program saved customers in the mid-Atlantic region nearly $12 billion in 2013, according to PJM Interconnection, which manages the wholesale power supply for all or part of 13 states. ... But the rule has meant millions in lost profits for utilities. Those companies argued that the program impermissibly targets retail customers.
Re:Free market (Score:5, Insightful)
You do need some price regulations on basic industries. If my neighbor has trouble affording enough electricity, water and phone for basic things (necessary heating, clean water to maintain health, ability to apply for and maintain a job) then it can reduce overall economic production and, indirectly, hurt me personally. Increasing baseline well-being for the country, especially when it has relatively little cost, is absolutely good for economic growth...even when it limits utilities' profits. Sorry not sorry.
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There is already location based inequality on real estate, and the system is working great in reducing demand in the high-demand regions. Yes, of course, some things need to be regulated, like requiring water coming out of the tap to be clean, or where monopolies are too easily abused, e.g. with violating net neutrality or with walled-garden apps/services/operating systems/office suites, but requiring energy producers to not turn on the plants they own and have paid for? They do it probably because an energ
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Pure socialism is just more upfront about claiming that your stuff doesn't really belong to you.
Your key point was indirectly at the end. Pure anything is likely to be crap. Models generally make assumptions. If you accept those assumptions, both pure capitalism and pure socialism work great. The real world is more complicated and your likely going to need a blend of a lot of ideas, to make it all work well. You can't make blanket statements that all socialism is bad, since there are some countries with a fair amount of it rating extremely highly on the quality of life scale. You also make the r
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Socialism works about as well as overfertilizing a plant works. ...
Quack quack quack quack quack. Doubleplusgood no-think duckspeak.
Moochers mooch, regardless of the system and they've never run out of money yet.
Myself, it occurred the other day that if I had a guaranteed income I'd be free to invest in some of the schemes I've heard of lately that seemed worthwhile but not so certain that I could afford to up and quit my job in the hopes that it would pay off before I starved for lack of interim income.
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Your argument falls flat on it's face. Your neighbour could be a waste of space good for nothing shithead who chooses to not work and live off the dole.
In fact, it could turn out that if you DON'T provide him free electricity water and phone service, that he would then choose to work on his own, but since these services are provided, he chooses not to work.
In either of these cases the baseline of well-being for the country is worse under these freeloading policies.
Some people make good decisions, some pe
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It helps if you realize that society holds all the cards. Utilities are classed as essential services and society makes the rules. Companies can agree to follow those rules and make some profit at the same time, or they can go do something else. We are going to make the rules benefit us, and any profit we allow is merely an incentive to provide good service.
Unfortunately in some places people forgot that and the utility companies took over, but the reality is that if our democracies work properly we can fix
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The commerce crosses state lines. Seriously, have you read the constitution yet or the court decisions that have come down over the centuries?
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I wonder why they don't already do that?
Because the technology (smart meters) for on-demand pricing is not yet widely available. Even when smart meters are available, many people opt-out of on-demand pricing.
My electric company installed a smart meter at my house last year. Since my wife has an electric car, we immediately opted-in for demand based pricing, and programmed the car to charge at 2am. We also have a smart switch on our AC compressor that will shut if off if power demand is peaking. I figure that we save about $30 / month, and the
Re:Free market dogwhistle (Score:5, Insightful)
And wondered whether it is in people's interest to face electricity tariffs that may vary widely (by a factor of 10 at least, and without warning, like on a stock exchange) between the 15-min time slots in which electric power tends to be bought and sold?
Because that's what would be needed to remove one of the biggest imperfections in the electricity market: fixed consumer tariffs.
Allowing regulatory bodies to incentivise reduced consumption when generation costs go up is actually the simplest, most pragmatic way to remove some of the imperfections from the market. And it *demonstrably* results in quite substantial savings for customers.
Only ... it tends to cost power companies money, which is why they opposed this commonsense measure by legal means, and lost even when they tried to dress up their self-serving objections as "opposition to measures that interfere with the free-market".
Funny how this kind of dogwhistle tactics always brings the more dogmatic "free market" supporters out of the woodwork. Supporters who are clueless about anything to do with the issue at hand (including the market in which the issue arose), but but who are consistently full of empty slogans and over-simplistic arguments.
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Because that's what would be needed to remove one of the biggest imperfections in the electricity market: fixed consumer tariffs.
Consumers have a demand for planability, and if they turn on the dishwasher it shouldn't cause a hundred dollar bill, while the next time they can heat their house with electricity and its still a few dollars, this isn't something a consumer wants. They want to stay warm all the time and get their dishes washed all the time. So there is no "imperfection" here, just a special kind of demand. The energy producers either offer tarriffs with fixed prices, or they can offer tariffs with added price variation but
Re:Free market dogwhistle (Score:5, Insightful)
They think the free market is a magic bullet. Any market ever has had some interference somewhere so these nutcases can always fall back and claim a true free market could still theoretically work despite all the empirical evidence against it.
The problem to some is that they only look at profits alone. The "substantial savings to customers" is not a concept they want to accept, as they think customers can reduce costs merely by buying from someone else. The government has a vested interest in reducing energy usage despite the loss in profits to some companies, but free market believers don't like externalities because it screws up their naive models. Almost everybody in America gets only one choice of electricity provider, take it or leave it, there is no free market by its very nature. And those utilities will fight viciously against anything that brings in competition (like municipal utilities).
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It makes the case, but that is hardly an overwhelming counter-argument. Huge numbers of electricity customers, possibly even a majority, cannot avail themselves to this. For instance: renters cannot typically put solar panels on the roof of their landlord's structure; the electrical demand for a large building is much larger than the available renewables can provide. The capital costs of s
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Don't forget that the grid operators and massive energy companies want to limit your ability to make it financially work anyway. They jack the prices up as high as government regulation will allow, which causes increasing numbers of customers to switch to on-premises generation (solar, etc.), and then they whine to the PUC about how the rest of the ratepayers are picking up their bill for still being tied to the grid, even though the guy who just got panels on his roof is paying a PUC-mandated grid-tie fee
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Re:Free market (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the free market does not work. You are a captive buyer of energy utilities, you have not ability to pick and choose who you buy electricity from. The utilities in turn do not charge their customers solely on the amount of electricity used or cost of infrastructure. The utilities when left to their own devices have shown that they will discourage energy conservation as it cuts into their profits.
Re:Free market (Score:5, Informative)
You are a captive buyer of energy utilities, you have not ability to pick and choose who you buy electricity from.
I don't know how its in the USA, but at least in the EU there are multiple markets: the network providers, the plant running companies, and the actual vendor company you buy the energy from. And EU regulation (called REMIT if you want to look it up) requires network providers to be separate from the plant running companies, so big providers don't abuse their advanced position. As customer, you have choice from multiple energy vendors, you are not captive.
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There is some of this in the US but it is very rare. Where it exists it is mostly for customers who want to buy "green" energy. But it has to be supported by the local utilities (possibly due to regulation).
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Some US states have retail energy markets, where they can shop for the energy portion of their bill. The transmission and distribution is through the utility. What is cropping up more and more are companies seeking regulatory bailouts for generation plants even in markets where they receive capacity payments.
I live in NY which has a deregulated market. Out of curiosity I just checked the rates of every ESCO provider and out of 35+ only a handful had better rates than the distribution company for either regular or green energy, variable or long term. I suspected as much because despite being on the NO call registry I regularly get calls from ESCO salespeople which never identify whom they are working for or provide information on pricing or terms, instead they make it sound as they are from the distribution comp
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a) You have 1 set of power lines running into your house. You can't be a customer of some other power grid, and you can't do business with anyone who is not physically or virtually connected.
b) Electrons are fungible. You can't distinguish the product of one provider form another. The output of different suppliers gets all mixed together, but there is no way to sort it back out at the other end.
That in no way meets the conditions of a free market.
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You can only buy from one energy supplier at a time, though. You can't say, "nPower has a great night-time rate so I'll buy electricity from them between the hours of 10pm and 6am, but Scottish Power is cheaper the rest of the time so I'll get the rest from them."
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You say
Because the free market does not work. You are a captive buyer of energy utilities
but that's not a free market. You can't say "free market doesn't work" and use an example that's not a free market to support your argument.
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You can say that a truly free market doesn't work because it is impossible or at least infeasible to achieve. There are fundamental obstacles that prevent a free market from being possible here:
So the closest you can rea
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The places with the lowest rates are usually places where the governments have started nonprofits like TVA to handle energy production.
Do you have a citation for that? I don't agree with nonprofits being *inherently* better. In some cases, they may be, but it really depends on the management.
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Just take a look at TVA rates (which are some of the lowest anywhere in the U.S.) and compare them with rates in states with deregulated power markets (e.g. California). My parents are paying a flat rate of about 8.75 cents per kWh in TN. Here in the Bay Area, the Tier 1 rate (charged on your first trickle of power) is a whopping 18.2 cents per kWh. The top tier is 34.9 cents per kWh. So it costs 2-4 times as much.
Now granted, not all power production is equal, but even t
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In addition, how heavily are the electricity providers taxed in each setting? I believe the TVA doesn't pay corporate taxes, as it's a non-profit. For-profit companies have incentives
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They got a lot of initial funding to build the first facilities... almost a century ago. Since then, it has been an autonomous organization to the best of my understanding. After 83 y
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Let me correct that. Tennessee does have what they call an excise tax for businesses, which is what California calls a franchise tax. My bad. They have no personal income tax. So their nonprofit status saves them a few percent.
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About 80 years ago, sure, but that's still a pretty big gift, and one that would let them spend more a) initially on setting up the grid and b) spend more on upgrades over time, as they don't have to pay loans back. The original money isn't relevant to rates now, but it may be relevant in how it shaped the grid's formation.
Those are all pretty good points. I do think CA's infrastructure would be harder to maintain still - they certainly don't have ice storms, but as you said, there are earthquakes. It may a
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This "Free Market" we have in Europe have to some extent changed the map so now the fixed costs are higher while the usage cost is lower than how it was some decades ago. Of course the change isn't consistent and may vary by country.
Maintaining the electrical grid and improving it is a continuous work. Customer satisfaction is important, and adaptation to new technology likewise to stay competitive.
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Be wary of that word Republican, it may not mean the same thing everywhere. Here it's an anti-monarchy movement.
More analysis (Score:2)
Not bad for us, but those guys... (Score:3)
Ever noticed that when these companies want to protected their interests they say something along the lines of how badly it will hurt someone else:
Press: So Mr PR guy, what is your companies reaction to having this highly profitable but damaging line of business made illegal?
PR guy: Oh we are fine with losing billions in revenue, we've always known it was an unfair monopoly. What we are concerned about is that this will cause millions of cute puppies to die. We don't understand why the government is so intent on killing millions of cute puppies.
They should have argued it was a "Taking". (Score:1)
But the rule has meant millions in lost profits for utilities. Those companies argued that the program impermissibly targets retail customers.
They should have argued that it was a "taking" and the government had to reimburse them for their losses.
The tail end of the Fifth Amendment reads:
and the Supremes have already ruled that new laws and regulations, and changes to existing ones, that suck part of the value out of propert
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I'm sure the energy industry lawyers who argued the case before the Supreme Court will make sure to check Slashdot comments in the future so they don't miss such an obvious winning ploy.
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Oh bullshit. The government needs to reduce energy usage. The utilities are insistent on the idea of profits-uber-alles. All the government is doing here is encouraging customers to save power, it is no different from a private citizen trying to form a boycott. Saying that this is a "taking of value" implies that the utilities deserve these profits, which they do not. If it is a taking then even a simple advertisement campaign to discourage excessive and unnecessary power usage would be a taking.
The go
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The government is not fascist. But maybe it should be if it's the only way to ....
And that's how it all gets started.
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I reject that notion. Every hour and a half, enough sunlight hits Earth to supply our power needs for an entire year. Humanity's energy usage is noise.
The government doesn't even need to reduce peak energy usage. The utilities do. The fact that the government is having to force the utilities to encourage conservation to prevent blackouts during peak use tells me that the free market has completely and totally failed. As you said, the corporations
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Careful, your sense of entitlement is showing.
In no fucking way is some company entitled to future revenues, which is what you are saying. And in no way should that be enshrined in some kind of half assed legal precedent.
Go ahead, set that precedent. And then watch the parade of companies into the Federal courthouse every single time that a local, state, or federal legislative body changes any law ever. After all, that regulation saying I can't dump toxic waste into the river sucked the value out of that
Alito's recusal (Score:2)
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Well that's because the 'free market' has a different definition for the billion dollar club than it does for you and me. NV Energy loves the 'free market' when it means they have a few million captive customers that can't get out from under their thumb due to changes in the market coming from external forces (un-elected government commissioners arbitrarily changing rules, including for pre-existing solar installations), and they love the 'free market' when it means they can spend ratepayer revenue to lobb
Partially agree (Score:2)
I have to at least partially agree with that argument - Why the hell can't I cash in this, since my home demand curve almost exactly reverses the grid demand curve?
Outstanding (Score:2)
One of the reasons schools aren't year round here is because AC is quite expensive to run during the Summer months when it's 105f outside :|
So to save money, they shut off the AC during those months. They save all sorts of $ on electricity, but the heat coupled with the humidity makes a perfect breeding ground for mold.
Is why the school smells so lovely when it starts back up. The cleaning staff has barely had time to bleach everything and wipe it down before everyone comes back.
Want to see some serious s
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Decoupling solves the incentive problem (Score:3)
There's a concept called "decoupling" - where a utility's profit is not based on the amount of power sold, but on other factors. (Say, reliability, low cost, customer satisfaction, etc). Many utilities do this, via their local regulating body of government.
With that in place, the utility doesn't care how much (or little) power you use - at least on a profit level. If the government offers a bonus to the utility for successfully implementing "green" power or a Demand Response system, then there's a lot of incentive for the utility to make that happen.
This isn't rocket surgery. Utilities are just like any other company. So many people have already decided that utilities are evil that they can't see how a small change to the rules can be good for everyone.