power cost calculations wrt solar and infrastructure

["Eric Chang" <ericchang@my-deja.com>]

>If you're paying less than 20 cents a kWh, you'll never break even.  

>Yes I know that the price of electricity will most likely go up in the next
>20 years; but if you took the $400 and invested it, your money would also go
>up so it's a moot point.

This argument is suspiciously familiar.  If spot prices are so low, why
sign long term contracts for power?  Just take the $400 million and invest
it.  Your money would also go up so it's a moot point.  You will always
be able to pay for the power later.  :-)  The argument is just too
simplistic.  What if the power will cost you $4 billion when you need it?
Please compute a rate of return.  Before you say that this can never happen,
do a WWW search for $4 billion.

...

>Have prices in CA really gone up that much in a couple years or were folks
>just holding their tongues back then?

They have not gone up that much.  Perhaps 2X.  That is not Bruce's point.
There are a lot of people around here who have much more to lose from
indirect costs.  One of my friends told me that his power bill is now
about $150 per month.  But he estimates that the hit on his portfolio
attributed to the power crisis is about $20000 per month.  Most of it is
due to other reasons, but when you hear him whining about the electric
bill, it is not about the $150 part.  He sounded like such a chicken
little when he first started warning people, but now it sounds scary.

Although this post does not seem very EV related, it does have something
to do with a reliance on or a misplaced hope for a global public
infrastructure.  A centrally managed EV charging architecture will have
some of the same difficulties that we are seeing now.  It is true that
the ICE fuel chain is much more polluting and hard to control, but it
has the advantage of a lot of independence of the parts.  Sometimes,
this independence, or fault tolerance, is worth more than some 
temporary cost savings.



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