Foreign oil and the Prius

You are remembering 20th Century prices. Those are long gone.

 

Just curious, how much has the price gone up and why? The damns are built. Is Cali buying the green energy from out from under you?

 

Hydro is not green. The dams are river killers. Columbia basin salmon are gone. Used to be millions of them a year, an industry then and could be in future worth 100,000 jobs and $5B industry at current prices not to mention a sustainable, healthy food supply for US.

Add to that Bonneville Power Authority, the dams operator, fighting sustainable energy particularly the wind power. BPA has shutdown the wind power, claiming too much electricity (vs. spilling to help salmon) and cutting into their more profitable hydro power sold to CA.

Specific to this thread, 1 gigawatt of wind power that BPA has cut off from the grid could be used as green energy for plug in electric vehicles, reducing US oil use.

 

My vague recollection of three decades ago is of rates between 1 and 2 cents / kwh. Seattle was on the low end, neighbors on the high end. Seattle City's Light's history page reaches back to only 1998, and even then, the first summer block was only 2.3 cents, the second winter block 5.7 cents.

Now, Seattle's basic rate is 4.8 first block, 9.9 second block. Local taxes and surcharges push my marginal rate to 10.7 cents. Puget Sound Energy charges 8.5 first block, 10.3 second block. Snohomish County PUD has a flat rates of 8.5 summer, 8.85 winter. I don't know what additional charges the later agencies impose.

EVs here can forget about first block prices, as nearly all of them will be on the high block of tiered rate structures.

What happened? Our hydro development is essentially finished, demand has long outgrown the old cheap supply. Congresscritters from other regions didn't like subsidizing our energy, so forced the cheap long term federal loan rates to rise to market levels. The region's foray into commercial nuclear power was a financial disaster, leaving only one operating plant in WA, four uncompleted rusting shells, and one plant in OR retired prematurely. The federal dual-use nukes (weapons plants that also sold electricity) have retired. The big Centralia coal plant was considered un-green, so was sold off cheap just before the 'California'-Enron (really full West Coast) power crisis made it valuable. Utilities paid dearly during that crisis, and made bad choices that caused lasting financial consequences. Hydro is no longer considered green here, and remediation costs have escalated. California still considers hydro to be green, and is willing to pay for it. BC Hydro is not a charity, and demands market rates to ship its abundant hydro to the U.S.

I'm sure there is plenty more.

 

The BIGGEST reason why our power prices have gone up was because in the early 2000's or so, maybe late 90's. Puget Power lost the Bonneville Power Administration subsidy which was basically a rebate equaling 25-40% of our power rates.

i remember first tier rates being around 5¼ cents per kw (they are like 8 something now) but we were getting 2 cents refunded thru the BPA which was basically our share of proceeds from sale of hydroelectric power to other states, mostly CA.

well, someone took the BPA to court and determined we were getting to much of the profits because the BPA was a fed project and we were not the feds, so our rebate was literally cut down to nothing.

actually, it is not nothing. once every few months or so, we get a few % back. this month i got $.006875 /kw back.

unfortunately, i do not have it anymore but i did have a power bill from 1994 (tossed it all when i moved last June) where my rate was 6 something per K but the BPA rebate was like 2½ so i was paying under 4 cents /kw after taxes....

yep, those were the good old days. now not all is gloom and doom here. picked up flier from Lacey Fair yesterday and PSE will soon become the 2nd largest wind provider (as long as high water does not shut them down...that is another very long story) in the nation (behind someone in TX no doubt)

 

Yesterday, the mayor and the utility proposed a 28% increase evenly spread over six years.

 

yep, same here. Green power costs more to provide and the Green Power signup has unfortunately not been as strong as PSE had hoped so they are proposing a rate hike as well. i signed up for green power and the difference is only like ½ cent/Kwh so not really a lot more money but it does insure that my power (now how they figure this i do not know) comes from emissionless sources only. iow, wind, solar and hydro.

but they could double the rates and that would only mean that my savings on driving the Leaf would only be half the cost of the Prius instead of 3½ times cheaper