Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Podcast

How to Fix Electricity Bills in America

Inside episode 19 of Shift Key.

Solar panel installation.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Have you looked at your power bill — like, really looked at it? If you’re anything like Rob, you pay whatever number appears at the bottom every month and drop it in the recycling. But how everyone’s power bill is calculated — in wonk terms, the “electricity rate design” — turns out to be surprisingly important and could be a big driver of decarbonization.

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse talk about why power bills matter, how Jesse would design electricity rates if he was king of the world, and how to fix rooftop solar in America. This is the finale of our recent series of episodes on rooftop solar and rate design. If you’d like to catch up, you can listen to our previous episodes featuring Sunrun CEO Mary Powell, the University of California, Berkeley’s Severin Borenstein, and Heatmap’s own Emily Pontecorvo.

Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.

Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.

Here is an excerpt from our conversation:

Robinson Meyer: There’s other issues we could talk about electricity rate design, and I want to come back to them in a second. But let’s say you were made Grand Vizier of all public utility commissions across the country. How would you fix this? Like, what do we need to do?

Jesse Jenkins: I think there’s basically two options that we have, here — and this is, you know, a reflection of the fact that there is no one unified electricity market structure in the U.S. We have a bunch of different ways that we do things. And so I’ll just sketch two kind of classic examples of that. There are lots of little gradations in between.

One is a kind of traditional regulated market where you get your power from a regulated or publicly owned utility, like a municipal utility, or a rural utility district, or an investor-owned utility. It’s regulated by the state, and you buy power at whatever the regulated rate is. And so, if that’s the case, we need to get those rates right. And by that I mean: There are multiple things you’re paying for when you’re paying for your bill. You’re paying for the actual energy you’re consuming, and that is a kind of volumetric thing — you know, you should pay more the more you consume, all else equal.

But the interesting feature of electricity pricing is that it varies from hour to hour because of the fact that demand is changing all the time and renewable energy availability is changing all the time. And so the actual marginal cost of generating electricity depends on this intersection of how much you demand and what the available supply is. And if you have a lot of cheap renewables, for example, flooding the grid, that price could be very low. It could even be zero — when you’re curtailing solar or wind, you have excess free power, effectively. And at other times it can be very expensive when you’re running diesel generators or inefficient gas turbines to meet this sort of peak demand requirements. Electricity prices could be several hundred dollars a megawatt-hour.

And so we have a very wide range of pricing and we don’t communicate that at all to people today. And I think we have to restore that, in some way — to let people understand that if you consume more energy during the middle of the day when there’s lots of solar available, even if you don’t have solar on your roof, it’s coming from your neighbor or utility-scale solar farm far away, that’s the cheapest, best time to consume electricity. And if you’re consuming when fossil power plants are producing expensive power, you should think about how to reduce that consumption. So it’s really important that we get that kind of time dynamic rate right for the energy component.

Robinson Meyer: So you would expose people to prices. I mean, that’s kind of your basic answer is that you would expose people to these time-of-day prices even if — and I just want to be clear, here. You’re talking about folks who live in Washington, D.C., who live in New York, who live in Philadelphia, who live in San Francisco, who live in Atlanta …

Jesse Jenkins: All over. Yeah, everywhere.

This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by…

Watershed’s climate data engine helps companies measure and reduce their emissions, turning the data they already have into an audit-ready carbon footprint backed by the latest climate science. Get the sustainability data you need in weeks, not months. Learn more at watershed.com.

As a global leader in PV and ESS solutions, Sungrow invests heavily in research and development, constantly pushing the boundaries of solar and battery inverter technology. Discover why Sungrow is the essential component of the clean energy transition by visiting sungrowpower.com.

Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.

Green

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Climate

AM Briefing: A Forecasting Crisis

On climate chaos, DOE updates, and Walmart’s emissions

We’re Gonna Need a Better Weather Model
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Bosnia’s capital of Sarajevo is blanketed in a layer of toxic smog • Temperatures in Perth, in Western Australia, could hit 106 degrees Fahrenheit this weekend • It is cloudy in Washington, D.C., where lawmakers are scrambling to prevent a government shutdown.

THE TOP FIVE

1. NOAA might have to change its weather models

The weather has gotten so weird that the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is holding internal talks about how to adjust its models to produce more accurate forecasts, the Financial Timesreported. Current models are based on temperature swings observed over one part of the Pacific Ocean that have for years correlated consistently with specific weather phenomena across the globe, but climate change seems to be disrupting that cause and effect pattern, making it harder to predict things like La Niña and El Niño. Many forecasters had expected La Niña to appear by now and help cool things down, but that has yet to happen. “It’s concerning when this region we’ve studied and written all these papers on is not related to all the impacts you’d see with [La Niña],” NOAA’s Michelle L’Heureux told the FT. “That’s when you start going ‘uh-oh’ there may be an issue here we need to resolve.”

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Culture

2024 Was the Year the Climate Movie Grew Up

Whether you agree probably depends on how you define “climate movie” to begin with.

2024 movies.
Heatmap Illustration

Climate change is the greatest story of our time — but our time doesn’t seem to invent many great stories about climate change. Maybe it’s due to the enormity and urgency of the subject matter: Climate is “important,” and therefore conscripted to the humorless realms of journalism and documentary. Or maybe it’s because of a misunderstanding on the part of producers and storytellers, rooted in an outdated belief that climate change still needs to be explained to an audience, when in reality they don’t need convincing. Maybe there’s just not a great way to have a character mention climate change and not have it feel super cringe.

Whatever the reason, between 2016 and 2020, less than 3% of film and TV scripts used climate-related keywords during their runtime, according to an analysis by media researchers at the University of Southern California. (The situation isn’t as bad in literature, where cli-fi has been going strong since at least 2013.) At least on the surface, this on-screen avoidance of climate change continued in 2024. One of the biggest movies of the summer, Twisters, had an extreme weather angle sitting right there, but its director, Lee Isaac Chung, went out of his way to ensure the film didn’t have a climate change “message.”

Keep reading...Show less
Politics

Republicans Will Regret Killing Permitting Reform

They might not be worried now, but Democrats made the same mistake earlier this year.

Permitting reform's tombstone.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Permitting reform is dead in the 118th Congress.

It died earlier this week, although you could be forgiven for missing it. On Tuesday, bipartisan talks among lawmakers fell apart over a bid to rewrite parts of the National Environmental Policy Act. The changes — pushed for by Representative Bruce Westerman, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee — would have made it harder for outside groups to sue to block energy projects under NEPA, a 1970 law that governs the country’s process for environmental decisionmaking.

Keep reading...Show less
Green