[oil pan 4]

Originally Posted by JSH

Renewables are cheaper - they aren't free. Adding capacity still costs money - renewables are just cheaper than building a new nuclear, coal, or natural gas plant. California added almost 2 million people in that 6 year time frame as well.



Well lets start off with what I wrote not what you read.


$3.50 a week NOT $3 a month. That is about 1/2 a beer a week for a cleaner electrical grid. You can pick your own frivolous expense to use as a benchmark. However you don't care about clean air or CO2 so you aren't willing to pay a penny more for something you don't value. That is what makes the real difference in how differently we see a $0.03 per kWh increase for electricity.

As to the average person in the US - they are wasteful. Just like with gasoline we center our lifestyle around wasting energy and then complain if the price goes up. In the USA we use 2x the electricity per person as someone in Germany or France. 3x the average Brit. (I'm sure the European forum members get a good laugh at the people here complaining about energy prices when we piss away so much energy)

My wife and I live in a 1000 sq ft house that is all electric except for the hot water heater and average 6211 kWh a year. That includes the 3 years we had the Spark EV and did some but not all charging at home.

Now that we have the Bolt and installed a Level 2 charger we do more EV driving and more home charging. Last month was 1400 miles, 218 kWh charging at home, 311 kWh consumed by the car so about 2/3rd of our charging was at home. Even if I was paying for every kWh that would be $46.65 at $0.15 per kWh. When a 30 mpg gas car would have consumed 46.7 GALLONS of $5 a gallon gas that would cost $233 it seems petty to complain about paying $46.65 instead of $40.43 to drive those 1400 miles.

1/2 of people said they wouldn'the pay even $1 more per month to fix global warming. $70% said they would refuse pay $10 per month.
Renewables aren't cheaper it's been proven.
When looking at the sticker price only they appear cheaper.
But when the power grid has to be beefed up to allow for a region of the power grid that happens to be in high production to send power to a region that is seeing little to no renewable production all while keeping fossil fuel power at the ready to take over isn't cheaper.