Yeah yeah down with capitalism rah rah but if the electric company makes no money, how do they afford infrastructure maintenance?
Ok so we nationalize the electric company. Now taxes pay to keep up the electric grid?
I’m down for all of that, by the way. It’s a great solution. But there is absolutely, indisputably, 100% a problem here, and it’s childish to pretend that if evil corporations would stop being so greedy everything would magically fix itself. It’s completely valid to discuss this issue in terms of problems and solutions.
There’s absolutely a problem with how MIT Tech Review has phrased it. It could’ve been phrase like “modern power generation requires innovate solutions to the gride and large scale grid upgrades.” But no they blamed it has a Solar problem, not a grid problem.
I see headlines all the time such as “The US highways need a 1 Trillion investment in the next decade”. How come they aren’t phrased like “The problem with trucks and cars is that they destroy roads, leading to Trillions of cost to the taxpayer”. They’ve decided that transportation is non-negotiable and it’s needed. But renewable electricity is not?
If evil corporations stopped being greedy everything would literally fix itself, and it would not be magic.
Imagine getting electricity from solar as what it cost to deliver and not having a price set by a market at all.
Imagine if the corporations were not allowed to extract profit from you’d to give it to the shareholders and banks.
There’s an almost uncountable amount of spare money, when you remove ‘profits’ and put it back into the service .
Does the price I pay for electricity not already include the cost to maintain the infrastructure needed to deliver it?
Funny enough, no. Although that’s changing in some places, with electric bills being split into a base fee for everyone hooked up and a variable fee based on usage. Obviously, this pisses off home solar users because they expected to pay nothing.
But most places use the same old model that charges you solely based on usage and was not designed with consumers also being producers.
Home solar aside, significant upgrades to the grid will require higher prices. Introducing large grid-scale solar is a significant upgrade.