The problem in California is not generation nor is it reliability. CAISO has the lowest wholesale electricity costs in the nation, by far; under half the cost of Texas. It also hasn't had a blackout since 2020.

The problem is retail side. AKA PG&E, its regulation, governance and forced liabilities.

https://cleantechnica.com/2026/05/30/california-lowest-whole...

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Xorakios 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

CAISO claims that and cleantechnica might parrot it, but there are blackouts ALL THE TIME in southern california.

In Palm Springs I was down with brownouts 103 times since I bought a sine wave UPS in December, and multi hour blackouts 4 times. My mother in Riverside, brother in Laguna Beach are similar.

Last week it was 3 times here over the course of three days. It's lived experience for me. Reliability collapsed two years ago

	▲	bryanlarsen 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And none of those made the national news, which would have happened if the blackout was due to grid generation problems. Your problem is local grid distribution. Local distribution has lots of single points of failure, unlike the state grid.

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simoncion 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> CAISO has the lowest wholesale electricity costs in the nation, by far

Much lower than that provided by the TVA? Ages ago, I used to live in an area served by the TVA, and its power prices were notably cheaper than anywhere else. I'd heard that this was because a huge chunk of its power was provided by fission plants, but never investigated.

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stonogo 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, CAISO wholesale rates are much lower, but California also has the highest retail cost in the continental US, at over 28c/kWh. If any customer in the TVA paid that much for power there'd be riots.

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simoncion 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Where does one even find wholesale rates for the various regional providers?

I -a complete ignoramous- spent like ten whole minutes poking around for wholesale rates. I could find documents about rates for several providers (including TVA) from many years back, complaints about rates increasing for many providers (but no actual mention of the new rates) and some governmental site that provided rates for a selected subset of all providers which included CAISO and one in Texas, but not TVA.

You'd think that this would be something that'd be very easy to find on -say- the DoE's website, but apparently you'd be totally wrong.

	▲	stonogo 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		EIA doesn't carry TVA data because the TVA doesn't participate in open-market sales or report data to FERC. Wholesale power is auctioned in I(or R)SOs; TVA just sets rates directly during negotiations with power companies.