Recent rate hikes by the big-three utilities -- PG&E, SCE, and SDG&E -- have made it cheaper to drive a hybrid gas vehicle than to charge an electric one. Now the only people who should be buying EVs are those who get their electricity from municipal utilities or solar panels. Of course sales are down; the total addressable market has shrunk.
In my neighborhood it isn't possible to sign up for wired phone service because there are no available pairs to lease. Most longtime residents had gotten two pairs to do bonded DSL, and the remaining pairs in the ground had been severed over the years with no attempt to repair them.
Maybe the CPUC could demand that the copper infrastructure be replaced with fiber rather than letting service territory go dark. The telcos have been getting great subsidies for a long, long time. We should get something for all that money.
I'm in the US. My phone plan is $15/mo and I get quite-good data rates via 5G almost everywhere. It's fantastic. The FCC rules that created the MVNO ecosystem are a triumph. It's an example where regulation is great. But there are plenty of other examples where regulation is terrible. And in general neither voters nor politicians are any good at telling the difference, nor is there much appetite to ever go back and fix any regulations which turn out to be bad.
My solution is probably similar to many middle-aged suburbanites. I have multiple cars--one is an EV that I use for daily driving, and the other is a gasoline-powered light truck that I use for construction, groundskeeping, and occasional road trips.
I look forward to the infrastructure being there for effortless and convenient long distance EV road trips, but that'll take a bit of time.
The CPUC is appointed by the governor, not elected. Gavin Newsom appointed 3 out of 5 of the current commissioners.
It really only needs to stand off the difference in voltage between the cells in normal operation. You could build in a protection diode to shunt current if the voltage gets excessive.
That sounds pretty annoying, but not devastating. At a guess you'd string them independently and have two dc/dc converters rather than one to handle maximum power point tracking.
The III-V current-matched junctions are pretty slick. Too bad nobody has gotten thin films of those cells to be economical yet.
Pacific Gas & Electric serves most Californians, and they charge electric rates between 3 and 5 times the national average. Their gas rates are only a bit higher than the national average. The spread between gas and electric energy costs is so high in California that it doesn't make economic sense to electrify anything these days. That's in stark contrast with the average American who *should* electrify everything.
Here are PG&E electric rates over time. Most consumers' marginal use would be in the "mid-tier" (solid orange line):
https://zlnp.net/serve/pge_rat...
And here's how a PG&E customer should decide whether to use gas or electric energy for your heating needs vs an average American:
https://zlnp.net/serve/pge_rat...
Did you read the linked article? The arguments there are pretty sensible. They boil down to ensuring that the nuclear regulator (the NRC) has an incentive towards getting nuclear online, updating exposure models to match modern understanding of biology, and standardizing on impact assessments across technologies. None of those reforms is "deregulate nuclear".
Regulation priced nuclear out of the market.
https://rootsofprogress.org/de...
If only California zoning weren't so cursed as to make that the easy option.
Instead I banded together with a bunch of neighbors in the no-Comcast direction to trench and lay fiber. I now have 10 gbps symmetric, but at an install cost of ~$13k. Better than Comcast though.
I don't think you can do that without owning the property though. It's kind of unfortunate.
I had a 5 mile bike commute to Google when I worked for them, and can see their main campus from my house. I can't possibly claim to be rural. Also I laughed at the idea of the California PUC doing anything pro-consumer.
Also Comcast did not allow me to choose the point of termination of their services on my property. I had offered to put the box at a far corner to minimize their side of the run. Nope. It had to terminate on the side of the house.
Comcast told me over the phone that they could service a house I was thinking of buying. I bought it and tried to sign up for service. Turns out they couldn't. Fast forward 18 months and they wanted $210,000 to run a 700 foot line extension.
I simply don't understand - that's a *huge* amount of gap between services. Do these radar altimeters not use band pass filters at all??
What this country needs is a good five dollar plasma weapon.
