Energy

SDG&E adopts residential Time of Use pricing – only 30 years late!

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This picture looks exciting, doesn’t it? But the vertical axis is not to scale. In fact the price changes are so small that they are barely visible. See the next figure. For 7 months a year, my prices will vary by only $.02/kWh over a week!

https://www.sdge.com/sites/default/files/TOU_summer.jpg

Source: When you use energy matters | San Diego Gas & Electric

Our local utility, San Diego Gas & Electric, just sent us a notice that we will be switching to Time of Use (TOU) pricing. I have no objections, BUT:

  1. TOU was innovative in the 1980s. But for any house with a smart meter, which we all have now, it has been dominated by real-time related pricing for at least 20 years.
  2. The price differentials are negligible – 1 cent per kwh, or about 3 percent! In the winter almost nobody will adjust their usage, or even keep track of it.  At least differences in the summer are substantially larger – as much as 30¢ per kwh.

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Tesla is tiny – so why is it worth $35 billion?

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It’s still hard for me to understand Tesla’s market cap, currently $35B ($35,000,000,000). Sales of 11K units/quarter are still smaller than tiny (for an auto company). Of course if it achieves a 50% annual growth trajectory for 5 years, that would justify a huge value – but I have not read anything saying that they are able to scale manucturing at that rate. (Admission: I used to consistently say that Apple was over-valued. And I was consistently wrong.)

“Tesla said in a filing Thursday that it delivered 11,507 vehicles during the April-through-June period, a 52 percent increase compared with the same quarter a year ago.”

I also did not realize that Musk was not a founder of the company.  (1) Breakthrough Strategy and Innovation.