Can the UK Increase Green Energy with 'Zonal Energy Pricing'? (theguardian.com) 63
To avoid overloading local electric grids, Britain's most productive windfarm "is paid to turn off," reports the Guardian — and across the industry these so-called "constraint payments" amount to billions every year.
"Government officials are hoping to correct the clear inefficiencies in the market by overhauling the market itself." Greg Jackson, the founder of Octopus Energy, told the Guardian: "It's grotesque that energy costs are rising again this winter, whilst we literally pay windfarms these extortionate prices not to generate. Locational pricing would instead mean that local people got cheap power when it's windy. Scotland would have the cheapest power in Europe, instead of among the most expensive, and every region would be cheaper than today. Companies would invest in infrastructure where we need it — not where they get the highest subsidies."
The changes could catalyse an economic osmosis of high energy users — such as datacentres and factories — into areas of the country with low energy prices, creating new job opportunities beyond the south-east. It could also spur the development of new energy projects — particularly rooftop solar — across buildings in urban areas where energy demand is high. This rebalancing of the energy market could save the UK nearly £49bn in accumulated network costs by 2040, according to a study commissioned by the energy regulator from FTI Consulting.
But others fear the changes could come at a deeper cost to Britain's climate goals — and bill payers too. The clean energy companies preparing to spend billions on building new wind and solar farms are concerned that a redrawing of the market boundaries could radically change the economics of new renewable energy projects — which would ultimately raise the costs, which would be passed on to consumers, or see the projects scrapped altogether... With stiff competition in the international markets for investment in clean energy, Renewable UK [the industry's trade group] fears that companies and their investors will simply choose to build new clean energy projects elsewhere.
"The debate has driven deep rifts across the industry," the article concludes, "between modernisers who believe the new price signals would give rise to a new, rational market and those who fear the changes risk unravelling Britain's low-carbon agenda...
"The government is expected to make a decision on how to proceed in the coming months, but the fierce debate between warring factions of the energy industry is likely to continue for far longer."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.
"Government officials are hoping to correct the clear inefficiencies in the market by overhauling the market itself." Greg Jackson, the founder of Octopus Energy, told the Guardian: "It's grotesque that energy costs are rising again this winter, whilst we literally pay windfarms these extortionate prices not to generate. Locational pricing would instead mean that local people got cheap power when it's windy. Scotland would have the cheapest power in Europe, instead of among the most expensive, and every region would be cheaper than today. Companies would invest in infrastructure where we need it — not where they get the highest subsidies."
The changes could catalyse an economic osmosis of high energy users — such as datacentres and factories — into areas of the country with low energy prices, creating new job opportunities beyond the south-east. It could also spur the development of new energy projects — particularly rooftop solar — across buildings in urban areas where energy demand is high. This rebalancing of the energy market could save the UK nearly £49bn in accumulated network costs by 2040, according to a study commissioned by the energy regulator from FTI Consulting.
But others fear the changes could come at a deeper cost to Britain's climate goals — and bill payers too. The clean energy companies preparing to spend billions on building new wind and solar farms are concerned that a redrawing of the market boundaries could radically change the economics of new renewable energy projects — which would ultimately raise the costs, which would be passed on to consumers, or see the projects scrapped altogether... With stiff competition in the international markets for investment in clean energy, Renewable UK [the industry's trade group] fears that companies and their investors will simply choose to build new clean energy projects elsewhere.
"The debate has driven deep rifts across the industry," the article concludes, "between modernisers who believe the new price signals would give rise to a new, rational market and those who fear the changes risk unravelling Britain's low-carbon agenda...
"The government is expected to make a decision on how to proceed in the coming months, but the fierce debate between warring factions of the energy industry is likely to continue for far longer."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.
So, more regressive costs? (Score:1)
I'm sure that when zonal pricing happens, the dudes with the Bitcoin mining data centers are going to not just get the lowest prices, but actually get paid money to not mine during peak times, while the average Joe is going to get socked with a higher power bill.
Just call it another gift to the rich and another tax on the poor under the guise of environmentalism.
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Pretty much the only possible explanation. Doing this for residential consumption is going to screw a whole lot of people for no good reason.
Doing this for feedin, industrial and spot market makes sense. Though the industrial users should probably get a decade or so to adjust.
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With smart grids it also makes sense for private customers.
You fill your washing machine and tell to wait for cheap power.
The smart meter will activate it.
Your fridge and freezer can be set to cool a bit deeper.
Your water boiler can be set to heat up a bit, and so on.
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That and getting raided for being a suspect cannabis farm every winter.
Or they could build transmission (Score:2)
I understand undersea cables could even be used.
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They already have distribution lines to France through the Channel Tunnel. https://www.siemens-energy.com... [siemens-energy.com]
Maybe that's not big enough or maybe there isn't enough distribution between Scotland the Chunnel.
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No, it isn't enough. That is why they are building marine links between Scotland and England (it's easier than getting overland permission across the border).
Distribution is great, but it is slow and often the log jam these days. Besides which a localized, zonal model would benefit those people living near the infrastructure. I think that part of the hope is that people would be less likely to object to a wind farm, if it lowered their bills; currently, as the article notes, Scotland has expensive electrici
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I'm not sure exactly how I feel about a proposal like this. Speaking from the perspective of US markets, generators are already compensated "zonally". It's a concept called location marginal price, and the LMP for a wholesale power producer is set largely based on congestion on a segment of the grid. This encourages generation in areas that are more valuable from a congestion perspective (typically closer to population centers, although sometimes just in areas that are low density with underutilized wires)
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We have plenty of those. Most of the wind farms are offshore and we have several interconnectors to France, Norway and other locations.
Could be a step in the right direction. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Could be a step in the right direction. (Score:5, Interesting)
The old cost structure is obsolete. Baseline power at night was cheap because they had to keep the power plants running. Handling power peaks during the day required expensive peaking generators.
Now daytime summer solstice power is exceedingly cheap, overnight power from batteries is somewhat more expensive, but nighttime winter solstice power will cost an arm and a leg because the power companies have to make up for all those days the plant was just sitting there the rest of the year.
https://transmission.bpa.gov/b... [bpa.gov]
Look at the bouncing red line (load). How do you match that to the green line? Green is wind and solar, but wind capacity is 2800 MW, solar is 138 MW, so it's basically wind.
The wintertime load can peak over 11,000 MW, so there is that too. The idea of putting the data centers on interruptible power always elicits screams of outrage however sensible it is to trim electrical load when the renewables quit and batteries go dead.
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Look at the bouncing red line (load). How do you match that to the green line? Green is wind and solar...
There needs to be sinks - including a lot of storage - for excess electricity, that's pretty much it. With that they can overbuild renewables and use storage to cover peaks, and where storage is full either curtailment or some process that can use highly variable excess. I'm hoping my state continues to build solar, wind, batteries, adds some hydro, and uses an existing - but barely used - desalination plant to ensure hydro storage and drought support dams are full when needed.
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> There needs to be sinks - including a lot of storage - for excess electricity, that's pretty much it.
Where do you build it though?
> With that they can overbuild renewables
Besides the sea, where do you build those?
> where storage is full either curtailment or some process that can use highly variable excess
"curtailment", are you thinking of load shedding? Turning off peoples washing machines or at least bumping up the price so nobody in their right mid would let the washing machine continue till
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Interesting, however your data applies to the USA rather than to the UK (as per the article).
The UK has a large number of CCGT power plants which can be spun up quickly to cover any shortfalls from renewables.
I downloaded the data for the UK's total power output for the past year into a spreadsheet and went through the numbers:
When wind is generating 10GW+, CCGT averages 5.82GW
When wind is generating between 5GW and 10GW, CCGT averages 7.15GW
When wind is generating less than 5GW, CCGT averages 10.59GW
https: [templar.co.uk]
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> Now daytime summer solstice power is exceedingly cheap
Not for the consumers, Only the operators. The "summer solstice power" as you call it must be sold to the consumer at the same rate as the most expensive generation option in the UK mix. Currently that is gas/oil. When the last gas plant is decommissioned, without a fundamental change in the pricing system, the cheap wind energy will be sold at the cost of the nuclear energy.
They build wind farms to farm cheap leccy that they sell for an insane p
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Not for the consumers, Only the operators. The "summer solstice power" as you call it must be sold to the consumer at the same rate as the most expensive generation option in the UK mix. Currently that is gas/oil. When the last gas plant is decommissioned, without a fundamental change in the pricing system, the cheap wind energy will be sold at the cost of the nuclear energy.
The solution is simple: just shut down gas, oil, coal, and nuclear. But don't be surprised when your elevator stops at night, or your fridge goes off, or a respirator keeping a loved one alive shuts down.
Not ready for that? You have a few alternatives:
- You could build enough batteries (as in, a LOT) or hydro storage (though that's a challenge, especially in the UK) and watch solar plus storage become far less affordable.
- You could rely on the one energy source that doesn't depend on the weather or time of
Re:Could be a step in the right direction. (Score:4, Insightful)
In the UK it works a bit differently. Overnight tends to be cheapest because it's when there is plenty of wind energy but low demand. Several energy companies offer tariffs where you get a very low overnight rate for that reason, ideal for charging your car or home battery when solar won't cover it.
It's also a good time to run your heat pump. With a reasonably well insulated home you can warm it up at night and just coast through the day on minimal power.
It seems like the issue you have is not enough wind power. Looking on windy.com I can see that right now there is a lot of untapped wind energy right off the Pacific North West coast, in shallow waters (less than 100m depth), but little on-shore.
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In the UK it works a bit differently. Overnight tends to be cheapest because it's when there is plenty of wind energy but low demand. Several energy companies offer tariffs where you get a very low overnight rate for that reason, ideal for charging your car or home battery when solar won't cover it.
It's also a good time to run your heat pump. With a reasonably well insulated home you can warm it up at night and just coast through the day on minimal power.
Thanks for this - it made me realize something really obvious that I had missed. I came here expecting to say something about the need for more and better energy storage - but I was thinking about big, centralized, infrastructure-type solutions.
I've been saying for a long time that we need to curb our extreme reliance on the grid by generating more power at the regional, city, community, and even household levels. Stupidly, I hadn't added storage to that local power solution. Your comment made me realize th
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As it is now a unit of electricity costs the same regardless of how it's produced, so there's no incentive [...]
You seem to misunderstand both how market intermediaries and electricity grids work. Electricity is fungible; by the time the power comes in from the mains, a consumer cannot distinguish how a kilowatt-hour of electricity was produced. If the infrastructure provider keeps records well enough, they could try to have consumers pick the sources of electricity they use, but that makes it really hard to handle an oversubscribed source -- it's not very practical to turn power off or down for a single consumer o
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I dont think you understand how that all will be changed.
Your supplier could simply charge you a half houlry rate, which many already do. As electricity usage is reported in 30 min intevals by smart meter owners, the price can simply be changed.
Currently, this is changed in response to demand. High national demand = high cost. Overnight there is of course very little demand, so costs are much lower.
With a change in the market allowing the cost of each usint to reflect the percentage mix of all sources used
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I don't think you finished reading my comment before you responded. I was answering a guy who thought consumers should choose electricity based on "how it's produced" and "choose an energy supplier that uses renewables". I explained why that doesn't actually make sense, and advocated variable pricing to shift demand to match supply. You responded ... that I don't understand that the plan is to implement variable pricing to shift demand to match supply.
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> For years now whenever I've been changing suppliers the cheapest all claim to be from renewable sources
They still charge you based on the cost of gas, they must do so.
How they make the deal cheaper is with their own discounts. The discount you for having a smart meter for example, thats a biggy. They also count on you NOT ditching and switching after the contract ends, so the money is made up from non smart meter households who are on the standard tarriff and the ones who forgot or cant be bothered t
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As it is now a unit of electricity costs the same regardless of how it's produced, so there's no financial incentive for consumers to choose an energy supplier that uses renewables.
And if there were, the incentive would work the other way: it would strongly encourage buying "non-green" electricity.
Very strongly.
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The cheapest consumer energy providers in the UK are the ones that offer 100% renewable energy, like Octopus. Of course they do sometimes have to pay more to avoid non-renewable sources, but it averages out cheaper than just paying for a mixture.
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> This proposal doesn't directly address that
To allow zonal/local pricing I think it may have to. Thats how I read it.
It also unfortunatley means everyone will have to have a smart meter as well, as without the relativly stable price of oil and gas, renewables will fluctuate hourly and certainly daily.
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Hey, there are all sorts of fetishes.
Keep yours to yourself.
Brilliant Engineering FAIL (Score:1)
Spout Public Policies encouraging GREEN development like wind farms, possibly with legislative support
Private Corps build these HUMONGOUS wind farms that Public Policy wants.
Politicians score GREEN KARMA points with the environmentalists.
Forget to upgrade the electrical transmission grids of our country which forces much of the potential generated power to not be generated.
Our society realizes this wonderful wind farm policy was designed by artful "virtue signalling" politicians and not skilled engineers.
"
Transmission infrastructure lags generation (Score:1)
When we left Germany we had a 30kVA solar array on our roof which supplied all of our power needs and delivered surplus to the grid.
When we got to Australia we were told we couldn't install anything more than 6.5kVA on our roof because... bureaucrats. But later we found out that it was just the local grid wasn't up to it - we'd have been fine if we elected to be off-grid, but then we'd still have to pay "grid access" charges even though we weren't connected because... bureaucrats again.
Ok, so maybe the worl
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A grid being overloaded sounds like engineering to me, not bureaucracy.
Maybe, what you need is some sort of zonal pricing so that higher consumers locate near housing producing excess solar.
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Or, rather than politicians agreeing to pay out cash to curb production, they should have agreed to pay _back_ the cost of installing the necessary battery capacity to deal with the cyclical demand/load issue?
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You're trying to supply power that has no use. Why should anyone be forced to buy it. Install your own battery or just don't make so much electricity, nobody wants it.
Or you pay for the upgrade that is only going to benefit you and nobody else.
Just how entitled are you?
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When we left Germany we had a 30kVA solar array on our roof which supplied all of our power needs and delivered surplus to the grid.
At night? When it was 100% overcast?
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Stupid question.
At an overcast night it draws power from the grid.
Or how do you think it feeds in it's excess power into the grid?
By magic?
Until we switch to more heat pumps, we do not need much power at night.
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You wrote, "...we had a 30kVA solar array on our roof which supplied all of our power needs and delivered surplus to the grid".
That clearly implies that you sent excess power to the grid; you did not mention that at some times you still needed to draw energy from the grid.
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I did not wrote that.
The parent wrote that.
you did not mention that at some times you still needed to draw energy from the grid.
Why would he mention a no brainer?
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> it's just meddling bureaucrats
In the UK it is very difficult to be allowed to be off grid.
As your panels are grid connected, they will be isolated during a power cut. Could be the sunniest day of all the year, but if there is no mains power, no power from the panels either.
This is supposed to stop your pales killing linesmen, although a simple isolator is all that’s needed.
Personally I think it's to prevent people disconnecting from the grid entirely. Right now the panels will reduce the bill,
Renewables supplying 15.2% of UK electricity now (Score:4, Informative)
The UK Energy Dashboard is informative. https://www.energydashboard.co... [energydashboard.co.uk] As I write, "renewables" (defined as wind, solar, and hydro) are generating 15.2% of the UK's electricity. And that's after years of building immense windmills and solar farms.
So where is the UK's electricity coming from this typical cold, wet October day? 52.8% from gas. 10.3% from good old reliable nuclear. 10.6% from "imports" (cheating by using foreign electricity generated who knows how). 7.8% from "biomass" (burning wood and suchlike, mostly from forests abroad).
How many more giant windmills and immense solar farms would be needed to generate 100% of the UK's electricity on a day like this? Well, here's the nasty secret: no more. Just force everyone to use 84.8% less electricity. Simples - if you're a politician.
Re:Renewables supplying 15.2% of UK electricity no (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is that the UK has been held back for over a decade by the previous government that banned on-shore wind installations, and made solar farms much more difficult to build too. They sabotaged the off-shore wind auctions too.
We just need more wind, especially off-shore when it's most consistent and achieves a capacity factor of over 50%. The North Sea, especially around Scotland, is a huge untapped resource. A lot of it is fairly shallow too.
So in answer to your question, "as many as we can build as quickly as possible."
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More wind is not the answer as the intermittency and storage problem will never be resolved. Adding more will just lead to an over abundance on sunny and windy days, with a massive deficit on cold and still winter nights.
The UK and most of Western Europe experienced near nil wind from August-November 2021, the output would be the same if you had a thousand turbines or a hundred thousand.
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That isn't true, there was plenty of wind. We just didn't harvest the energy.
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The UK generated about 920 GWd from wind in August~November 2021, about 35% of the total generated over the entire year (~2600 GWd). Those months only cover 33% of the year. Is generating slightly above the daily mean for the year your idea of "near nil"?
Between interconnects, batteries and other generation the intermittency and storage looks solvable. I assume your basis for that assertion makes about as much sense as your claim that having 100x the turbines would make no difference to the power output.
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We know the answer to this. Scotland is 100% renewable electricity.
And, as the article suggests, it is not just about building more wind farms. It is also grid upgrades, more batteries and potentially zonal pricing so that demand fits supply as well as vice versa.
We lack long term seasonable storage; this is the one unanswered technology. It is just infrastructure now. That's going to cost lots. But then keeping fossil fuels flowing is hardly cheap.
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The only people I've known who have ever claimed that Scotland is 100% renewable were some deluded members of the SNP.
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Most of it comes from France, which is majority nuclear-generated--with some coming from the Netherlands
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That link isn't quite so informative, because it only shows instantaneous values and two days of history. Today has a higher share of gas use than any day in the last nine months, so you're painting a picture that's worse than the reality. As I write, the graph for two days ago is showing 67.2% from renewables (using your definition) at the start of the day, and two days ago was also a typical cold, wet October day. (Because I don't want to argue in bad faith, I'll point out that two days ago was pretty typ
The only solution (Score:2)
The only solution to these endless arguments is to make the supply parameters standard. So, you want to supply power, it must be dispatchable, and you must commit to certain levels of planned and unplanned downtime. All bidders must supply to the same standard. Technology they use up to them.
Then, you want to use wind and batteries, fine. You want to use gas, fine. None of that matters. Just bid to supply a defined supply at a specified price.
Right now, and particularly in the UK, the problem is suppl
Re:The only solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Offshore wind externalizes the costs of intermittency to the grid, but gas externalizes the costs of pollution.
If we're going to try and eliminate negative externalities, we should also require that power generators factor in the cost of removing any pollution they generate (e.g., CO2) and then see what the market dictate what technology works best.
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Just bid to supply a defined supply at a specified price
like the market they already have?
Coutnry needs to split up (Score:1)
A small country like Denmark has 2 price zones, Norway has 5, Sweden 4 zones.
Then we have all the 3rd world countries (From an energy perspective) like Germany, UK etc.
France is a bit special, as they built the powerplants wisely near where energy is needed.
Sweden denied Germany a new cable before they fix their problem with 1 price zone. As it is now, Germany buys lots of electricity in Denmark, Sweden etc that ends in the north of the country - but it is needed in the south. So they cause increased prices
Wait, did I just read: (Score:2)
> "It's grotesque that energy costs are rising again this winter, whilst we literally pay windfarms these extortionate prices not to generate."
Did I just read that having been published verbatim in the Guardian of all places?
That mantra is usually associated and attributed to climate deniers. Never thought I'd see that printed in the Guardian.
> Locational pricing would instead mean that local people got cheap power when it's windy.
I've been saying that for a while now. I think it would help eliminat
It is all broken. (Score:2)
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> it also must have a lot of fossil fuel plants incapable of dynamic frequency response
No need, they are being demolished and obsoleted. The only ones currently running are CCGT and a small number of biomass plants. All the coal plants and non CCGT (AFAIK) are gone.
The CCGT are next on the list, I'm sure a few will be kept about for a few decades as a "just in case" kind of thing but with the current plans they have no future.
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Not the answer (Score:2)
It's hopeless - stupidity wins (Score:3)
Wind and solar cannot be generated reliably. You can't economically store electricity in batteries or pumped hydro or molten salt or unicorn dust. You can't always economically build long transmission lines to places that will have different wind and solar. That leaves one option. Instead of matching supply to demand, use price to match demand to supply. If all the wind farms are generating electricity at the same time let the price fall to -$0.02/kwh. The wind farms will stop producing. However the wind farms and solar will still produce at anything over zero and we can predict ahead of time when the price will be high and when it will be low. So pass the cost on to the final user. Industry will time their usage to when it is low and consumers can be even more responsive.
*I did a pilot project with 100,000 homes in Oklahoma (a southern US state, near Texas). We gave people two electric bills and let them pay the cheaper of the two. The first was the typical $0.25 for of peak, $0.45 for on peak billing. The second was free at night, $0.12 to $0.20 most of the time but $0.79 when the price was high. For those prices people charge their car at night, they do laundry at night. We provided devices that pre cool their homes and turn off the AC at 4:30pm. Devices that turn off the pool pump. The median savings for people who took advantage of it was $50. The savings for Oklahoma Gas and Electric were going to be significantly more than that.
Stupidity sank the entire thing. We only saved money for rich people with AC and pools. I'm sure you can read the upvoted comments and see other reasons why the stupid won't let us do this.
$50/month per consumer, plus 2 billion for OG& (Score:2)