I was about to say, the economics of this post don’t really add up. And sadly, we have a living example behind your computer screen.

That doesn’t change the way lemmy works. “Someone said something supportive of the thing we like. So it must be true.” Too bad economics doesn’t work that way.

If you want things to be cheap, you pit fossil fuel against green energy in real competition. Then they are both forced to get as cheap as possible at every layer of their supply chains if they want their respective supply chains to continue. That’s what kills profit and greed because they have to give up short-term greed for a shot at long-term survival. When you give either or both a government crutch, the executives involved try to reap as much cash out of that crutch now while the crutch exists.

Whether you give a crutch to either fossil fuel or green energy, at the end of the day you are giving it to an executive. He’s going to take advantage of it and not give you what you want every time.

Do you guys remember the incentives for rural internet rollout? Now they are paying premium cost for crapy internet, which the government already paid to exist. It doesn’t matter how much you agree with the thing you want money to go to, you aren’t going to get a good outcome.

Water is essential to living.
Electricity is mostly essential.
Why these two utilities are privately owned is beyond me.

If the state of the Scottish energy grid is comparable to mainland Europe, then the prices go up due to increasing cost of infrastructure.

Renewables are a lot cheaper per kWh, but require a substantialy higher up front cost in infrastructure due to their decentralized nature.

Before renewables, the electricity only ever flowed in one direction, from the power plant down to the consumers. A few centralised main powerlines could deliver most of that.

With the increase in renewables that suddenly isn’t true anymore. Smal villages often are net positive, we’ve reached a point where even the medium voltage grid of entire regions is net positiv and the energy has to be transported somewhere else, sometimes even outside the country.

All this requires substantially more powerlines (or at least thicker ones, so still new cables). But more importantly, devices to measure the current load of the grid at all times and modernized equipment that can remotely be operated to respond to variing load.

Not to say that we should stop building renewables. All this infrastructure will be needed eventually eather way, but at least in the short term, investments will be needed regardless.

Public necessaries like energy, water, public transport etc should never have been handed over to companies to begin with in my opinion.

Yeah honestly even if we were at 100% renewables, the price has been set and people are used to it now. No company is going to voluntarily start discounting unless more competition enters the market to start a price war. So far most of the energy “competition” has gone bust.

How do you want them to be for the people and not for corporations if you want them to subsidize an industry? At the end of the day that will be paid to corporations, and you are giving corporations more incentive to get into your congressperson’s office to help them figure out how to divide it up. Why would you want more cash exchanged between them and more face time between them? Bad idea if you want corporations out of politics.

More money for [industry x] literally means the government working for some corporations. Doesn’t matter what industry x is.

In many cities in America, private companies threaten cities demanding that they get paid to expand, or else they’ll leave.

Comcast demanded they get city investments to expand wifi to more of the city and even promised free wifi to public places. And after millions of city dollars given, they said, “nevermind”.

But your not thinking of the poor poor oil execs whom won’t get their return on their bribe invenstment made to their super PAC.

It should be but here we are.

In the end all energy sources will win as energy demands continue to rise.

New datacenters should be heavily regulated for emissions (including sound) and water consumption and should provide their own power as much as possible (renewables and SMRs come to mind).
Except for AI, fuck those.

Producing the energy has become cheaper. Delivering however… and costs for maintaining the grid will only go up after the blackout from last year

They required the choice between two different administrators.

Most US states have this. They mandate you can choose your energy provider.

Call me pessimistic. Companies say they switched from paper bills to digital bills for “the environment”, and none of that trickles down back to the customer.