Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Encouraged by the reception of my previous post “Eight Ten-Thousandths Of A Degree Per Gigaton“, which ranged from warm acceptance through amused contempt to outright hostility, I’ve expanded my research to analyze the CO2 emissions of the late great State of California.
In my post linked above, I found that IF the IPCC is correct (which is a big “IF”), for each gigaton (Gt) of avoided CO2 emissions, there is an avoided global warming of 0.0008°C. Please read that post for the detailed calculations.
And utilizing that relationship, here are the past and projected future California CO2 emissions.
Figure 1. California historical and projected emissions, and the avoided warming we MIGHT get from the drop in emissions.
WOW! For all of our sacrifices here in California, for all the money we’ve spent and are projected to spend, we MIGHT cool the world twenty years from now by 0.006°C … be still, my beating heart …
Now, as to how much that has cost and will cost, the numbers are hard to come by. Here are some major costs:
• The California solar mandate is estimated to increase the cost of newly constructed single-family homes by approximately $8,400 each. There are ~ 60,000 new single-family homes built each year in California. That’s about half a billion dollars per year for the next 20 years until 2045, or $10 billion total.
• The “Renewable Mandates” and rooftop solar subsidies have made current California electricity about $0.15 per kWh more expensive than its neighbors. Average since 2004 is about $0.10 per kWh more expensive. California’s annual electricity consumption in 2023 was approximately 287,220,000,000 kWh. That’s a cost of $35 billion per year times 20 years (2025-2045) equals $700 billion, plus $29 billion times 20 years (2004-2024) gives a total of $1.3 TRILLION. And that’s with the totally unrealistic assumption of no increase in either consumption or electricity costs.
But hey, the Governor’s “green” pals are getting rich … however, I digress …
• Since the inception of California’s “Cap And Trade” program, it has generated ~ $5 billion in total revenue. The current cost of said climate indulgences is about $35 per ton. So if say half the upcoming emissions decreases will be due to the Cap and Trade system, that’s another $110 billion.
• The California ban on gas-powered appliances in new single-family homes goes into effect in 2030. It is estimated to increase the price of new homes by ~ $24,000. Sixty thousand new homes per year, times $24,000 per home, times fifteen years 2030-2045 gives a total cost of ~ $22 billion.
That’s a total of about $1.5 TRILLION dollars, and it doesn’t count the cost of other California CO2-related laws and regulations. The increase in electricity demand from electric houses and electric cars alone will be another huge cost. A trillion and a half hard-earned taxpayer dollars … and all of that to MAYBE reduce the temperature in 2045 by six-thousandths of one degree C.
Seriously. 0.006°C.
Meaningless. Unmeasurably small. Lost in the noise.
And please, don’t say that if only everyone did it, everything would be wonderful. At a cost of $1.5 terabucks for a reduction of 0.006°C, it would cost us OVER $250 TRILLION DOLLARS to perhaps maybe possibly reduce the 2045 temperature by one degree … madness.
Hopefully, this lunacy is subsiding, but I fear California will be the last to get the memo …
Best to all,
w.
PS—Most folks have no idea how huge a trillion dollars is.
Suppose we had a trillion dollars and we wasted a million dollars a day on climate starting today. In that case, we’d waste the last million around October 30th of the year 4762AD … surely we have better things on which to spend a million dollars a day for the next 27 centuries. For that amount, we could turn the world into paradise …
PPS—When you comment please quote the exact words you are referring to. Avoids many misunderstandings.
Why does eliminating gas appliances from a new home increase the cost by $24,000? I bought a gas stove several years ago, I think $450 or so. Even if electric is double, that’s not much. My tankless water heater was $800 20+ years ago; again, even allowing for inflation and double for electric wouldn’t be that much. New furnace about the same 20 years ago, I think the price today would be $2000 or so. All I can think of is a heat pump instead of the furnace. No A/C, just a good swamp cooler, which I only use maybe a week a year.
Dang, my tankless heater cost ~$10,000 three or four years ago. Shoulda had it installed back when they were still giving rebates. Then again, it did take them three days to dismantle and remove the huge beast of an oil burning furnace that was originally in place.
Yes, the larger numbers I’ve seen are for retrofits, not for the cost of going electric in a new build. Swamp cooler! Remember that from Edwards AFB days…
This is just some Bosch tankless heater for hot water, not for the entire house. And I didn’t pay their installation fee, which would have doubled the cost. Google says the equivalent now is only $949.
Do you mean just for the kitchen sink?
For the whole house. It replaced a tank heater which went kaput. Memory sez it’s rated at 8 gpm for a 60°F rise. Bosche Aquastar 250 SX.
If I were building my own house, I’d use that one water heater for all bathtubs or hot tubs, and individual small units at each sink. Inheriting the old tank hot water plumbing means it takes about 45 seconds for hot water to reach the taps.
ETA: I see the confusion. My “entire house” meant only for hot water taps, not for room heating, since I don’t know how any single tankless water heater could run $10,000.
Thanks. We went whole hog. Got rid of electric HW heater. We have hot water radiator heat (old house) which originally was oil furnace. Also had electric stove. Put in tankless gas for hot water and radiator and replaced electric stove with gas. Expensive initially, but dropped our monthly electric and oil bills tremendously.
From a new build, eliminating gas appliances has also eliminated the meter and piping. You’ve probably had to upgrade the electrical system a little, but that is not really much of an expense. You’ve certainly paid your construction electrician a bit more, and your plumber and foundation builder a bit less.
And there is good old-fashioned, wasteful, cheap-to-buy but expensive to operate electrical resistance heat to replace the furnace, if you don’t want A/C you don’t need a heat pump.
But there is operating cost to consider. By eliminating clean natural gas burned safely in your home, you’ve more than tripled your electricity use, at a great multiple of cost per unit of heat. That extra electricity is generated, not in your back yard, by burning even more natural gas than if you’d burned it in your house.
With the gas, in the mix of electrical generation fuel sources is a little bit of PV solar and wind, some amount of hydroelectric (in Southern California it comes from Arizona and Nevada) for all of which you’ve paid premium prices. There’s a little bit of coal and some nuclear, like the natural gas, three or four times as much of it, just not in your back yard.
You’ve also paid for an inefficient delivery system, the magical and storied Grid, by paying the utility for the privilege of writing off transmission losses. Its all in the bill.
I can’t vouch for Willis’ cost figure, I haven’t looked at his data or sources. I expect it might be a little low.
Thanks, dk_, well explained.
As to the cost figures, it’s a question with no hard edges. So many regulations are CO2-driven, and their dollar cost is unclear.
Through bitter experience, I’ve learned to make a lowball estimate of the costs so it is defensible when questioned. Better to underpromise and overdeliver.
Best to you and yours,
w.
Cheers, Willis,
I forgot to say that it was another great piece.
Cheers to you and your family. Hope that you’re getting a bit of the rain.
-d
Last year I replaced a 25 year old gas water storage heater with a a larger heat pump system. The new unit averages a little better than 10 times the energy efficiency of the old gas heater on metered energy. Our electricity grid is powered by lignite so a very low cost energy source – much lower cost than gas.
I live at 37S with present daily temperatures from high teens to low 30s Centigrade. The heat pump consumes less than 1kWh per day for our 2 person household under these conditions. It runs off rooftop solar so the large tank is an energy storage unit. When it was installed in late winter it consumed between 1.5kWh to 2.4kWh each day depending on ambient temperature and usage.
The Heat Pump has a COP of 4 and I verified that it achieved that on the day it was installed in late winter to do the initial heating taking 270 litres of water from 12C to 56C. No gas appliance can get all the combustion heat into the water. Also, it is not as easy to insulate a gas heater with in-built combustion as it is a simple pressure vessel with external heat pump.
The gas heater burnt $3/day in gas in winter and $2/day in summer. Current retail cost of gas is AUD51.48/GJ. The heat pump has not cost anything to operate since I set the run time to start at 11am and end at 4pm to align with sunshine. (I forgo the 5c/kWh FIT)
In our woke State of Victoria we are subsidised to get off gas because there was an exploration ban on gas. Our daily gas connection fee is $1.13 so that will end when the gas heater is replaced with heat pump and the gas cooktop is replaced with induction later this month.
The gas network in Melbourne is ageing so one government incentive to reduce domestic and commercial connections is to lower system repair costs and risk of explosion.
The economics to get off gas would be marginal for households without subsidies but it is attractive with the subsidies. And the performance of the heat pump is outstanding in our conditions. Most days it runs for just over an hour now and a bit over 2 hours in winter. Time will tell if it is durable. It also mates well with rooftop solar and the large tank is a low cost energy storage unit.
I was thinking of Southern California. Thanks for your insight into the Australian urban economics.
I was very impressed by the use of solar hot water for domestic use in Australia in my too short work visit there nearly 25 years ago. I would like to have more of that in the States.
I submit, that by the watt or joule, delivered to a home by a utility, centrally generated electrical power is more expensive in operation and expends more carbon dioxide than does natural gas efficiently burned on premises.
The economics change a bit if the fuel (CG, butane, propane) is delivered in or to a tank, but I’m pretty sure that in most places in the Anglosphere it is still cheaper and cleaner than electricity over the grid. I wish that I had access to data about remote ranches/stations in Australia for comparison to suburban areas. I think that my claim would be borne out for your country, as it seems so far to be in mine.
That was my impression until I installed the heat pump hot water.
Our daily gas consumption dropped from 40MJ to 1.8MJ (now just for the gas cooktop). So 10.5kWh in gas saved by installing the heat pump. The present power consumption on the heat pump is around 1kWh – it is often less than 1kWh this summer. All coming from rooftop solar without battery but grid connected. The 270l tank is the battery.
If the electricity was supplied from the old lignite stations that are probably getting around 35% efficiency, there would be say 3kWh of coal burnt. So it is a substantial energy saving over burning the gas. Carbon intensity would be a tad worse overall using the lignite fuel. But if you were worried about carbon intensity then rooftop solar/battery will always beat battery firmed wind in a grid.
At the present time we are using around 1kWh to heat the water used in a shower. Two people is 2 showers per day.so 2kWh in actual energy – clothes and dishwashing are trivial by comparison. The gas hotwater consumed 4 to 6kWh per day when we were away from the house until I got into the practice of shutting it down when leaving. So heat loss was a significant component in its energy consumption,
The gas hot water I replaced was still operating well after 25 years. I will not be concerned with replacement if the heat pump matches that.
Rick,
Just to swap notes, my Dad and my 2 brothers built a rooftop solar hot water system back in 1955, when I was 14. This was in tropical Townsville, Queensland at 19 degrees south latitude. The plans came free from CSIRO, designed for a family our size.
The economics are now hard to model. We had to build an outdoor room by the back door because the existing roof was too weak.
After a year of operation we had to add a big garbage can wrapped in surplus RAAF wool greatcoats, going free at the post-war time, because the family of 5 kept running out of hot water from shower time. The can was for a mains electricity immersion heater. Imagine if we 3 brothers had been daughters or whatever with long hair.
The heat collection was 3 panels, each a metre square, copper plate with braised copper tubing painted matte black under double glass.
Query is, why did a biggish solar water heater fail to deliver the goods in Townsville, noted as a hot town? That experience was my first exposure to the joys of alternative energy and its dismal performance seems to have affected my later stance on green stuff. Geoff S
My sister-in-law lives in Brisbane. Her daughter lives in the house beside her and has three almost adult sons. They have a modern direct solar water heater that runs for 6 months of the year without gas support. The reason they know this is that the gas was not turned on for the first 6 months of occupancy. Unknown to them until the showers were getting a tad cold..
There are a few smart features on the modern systems that improve heat collection and reduce heat loss that I doubt would be achieved with a home built unit.
This link goes to the firm that is doing my ducted gas heater replacement:
https://www.ledcom.com.au/hot-water/
They are doing heat pump hot water for less than I paid last year. They told me the subsidies have been increased.
“If the electricity was supplied from the old lignite stations that are probably getting around 35% efficiency, there would be say 3kWh of coal burnt“.
Thanks, Rick, for your detailed figures and careful cost calculations.
Can I add one more figure for consideration.
We have possibly 1,000 years of lignite coal reserves here in Victoria, Australia – based on current usage.
My wife and I examined installing an electric range/oven in our house about 5 years ago. First, the developer had not run a 240VAC line to the oven location. C’ching. Second, our house was built by the developer to meet a price point, which didn’t include wiring it for an electric oven. The most recent estimate to upgrade the electric service was $10,000. Just for the oven. We never got around to finding out what the electric company was going to charge to upgrade the last mile.
Now, if we also switched our hot water heater and the HVAC to all electric, the $10,000 wouldn’t go up by much. But retrofitting a home that was built with gas appliances to all-electric isn’t as cheap as just swapping out the equipment.
And a new-build with all-electric v gas would incur the same sort of costs to upgrade the electric service de novo, so $24,000 isn’t very far off at all.
Good data. I was thinking more of a new build in suburbia, and am not at all surprised at a retrofit might cost even more.
This is important to the Palisades and other neighborhoods in the L.A. area. Where there was gas infrastructure prior to the fire, there will need to be much of that equipment replaced along with California’s waiver for the residents to be able to rebuild using natural gas.
California and L.A. officials’ acknowledgement of the need to back off of standards and restrictions has been unenthusiastic at best. This doesn’t bode well for the residents or rebuilding in general.
“Most folks have no idea how huge a trillion dollars is.”
How much is a trillion?
A US $100 bill is 0.0043″ thick.
A million dollar stack of $100 bills is 43″ tall.
A trillion dollar stack of $100 bills is 68 miles.
another way of counting the trillions – the US national debt is around $36 trillion, There are said to be 3 trillion trees in the world. Hang a $10 bill on each tree, and you have our national debt.
At the moment the interest alone on the national debt is over a trillion dollars a year. If you thought buying away from fossil fuels over 20 years in California for $1.5T was bad value then paying $1T every year for exactly nothing must be terrible.
Absolutely true, which is why DOGE is a blessing.
w.
Hopefully, DOGE will expose the huge level of corruption and waste. Given the initial results with USAID I am optimistic.
Not just USAID, AUSAID is no different. The available very sweet funding is split between a few leeches (corporations) who decide between themselves who gets what but certainly to ensure no pesky little independent gets a nod. The government bureaucrats are just the middle men brokering the deals. the value for money concept was swept out by their great virtue.
It will make gov’t program administrators aware that their programs need to show a cost/benefit ratio. There is probably not much actual corruption on a %ge basis, but a lot of “if-it’s-not-spent-this-year-we-won’t-get-it-next-year” resulting in bad decisions.
Wouldn’t it be more cost effective to hang one of the bureaucrats that doesn’ t want to commute to work from each tree? By their fingernails, of course; violence is sooo deplorable, after all!
“A trillion dollar stack of $100 bills is 68 miles.”
Or 678 miles, even.
What’s another zero? A trillion here, a trillion there.
You could teach arithmetic to IPCC.
I could, Sparta … but I’d have better luck teaching arithmetic to my cat …
w.
True, or my pet goldfish.
About $3000 per person is a good way to visualize it, or 4 x per household….
A significant chunk of that “avoided” CO2 production comes from businesses and people moving out of state to get away from the lunacy.
There’re also people who have found that buying from out of state is cheaper than local.
True, Mark, driving heavy industry out of the state is guaranteed to reduce CO2.
And it’s costly, lost income and wages.
w.
That’s how Wokeachusetts now claims to be the most energy efficient state as there is little if any heavy industry left. It pretty much started the industrial revolution in North America- with cloth, shoes, electronics, furniture and many others. Now it has hospitals, universities, genetic engineering and other high tech- and of course the biggest employer of all is the state government. Lots of opportunities for people with advanced degrees but not much for everyone else. So they head to the sunbelt. And the cost of living goes way up.
At the rate that they are going, Mexico is going to have an illegal alien problem from California.
We get it. So do the alarmists. And if their objective was reducing temperature wise words might have some effect. But it isn’t. So they won’t.
According to the IEA, China’s CO2 emissions increased by approximately 565 million tons in 2023, representing a yearly gain of around 4.7% compared to the previous year, reaching a total of 12.6 Gigatons (Gt) of CO2 emissions.
China thanks Cali for saving the world, but we see your 7.4 Gt savings from 2004 to 2045 compaired to our 0.565 Gt yearly increase which will use all your savings in 13 years. Think you need to do better.
Speaking of wasting money in CA, how’s their high-speed rail project going?
It is going nowhere, both figuratively and literally.
Both directions….
Well, as your previous post explained, math is hard.
Your California results are easily explained by the fact that in the 2024 NAEP assessment, only 35% of California students performed at grade level math standards. Means 2/3 didn’t.
That’s mostly due to students being uninterested in learning.
Disagree. Both Willis and I are products of the CA education system from a time when competence was demanded. CA used to have GREAT schools.
The students became uninterested, because the education department shenanigans turned their minds into the off position, their minds just wilted like a flower.
When every math problem ends with, “Now, how can you reduce CO2” might have something to do with it.
The mind boggles at the stupidity. My brother, an engineer by training, is fully convinced of the need to eliminate fossil fuels (!). And they do their part by driving a plug in hybrid and not using paper towel and tinfoil in the kitchen and “living simply”. The simple life involves properties in 2 countries (for summer and winter) and much flying (2-5 flights/year).
Can’t use the tinfoil in the kitchen. Have to save it for the hats.
I remember when Tim foil was really tin and you used to wash and reuse it.
I remember washing and re-using (storing it away for future) some of the aluminum foil … it was just last week.
Tell him he shouldn’t live in a wood home with wood furniture- best to leave the trees growing to sequester carbon- that’s the new mantra here in Wokeachusetts. /s
Aluminum being the 4th most common element in Earth’s crust, its critical to preserve the remaining resources.
The only sure fire way to cut emissions is to get rid of the people.
Momma nature will keep on emitting, people or not.
Momma Nature has sequestered most of carbon in lime deposits on geological scale, and will continue to do so until life as we know it will die from carbon starvation.
Yeah, that will be the real climate crisis: Not enough CO2 in the air.
Ah huh! If there are no people who will be the alarmista?
The 1960s Population Bomb is the manual for that.
But the whole exercise is virtue signaling, the equivalent of indulgences and buying holy relics.
Damn atheists… Oh, wait.
At least the holy relics don’t consume the nation 😀
Where does all the energy come from to build this green tech? COAL.
ChatGpt estimates that it will take 215 years to reach the point where green energy is self sustaining without the need for fossil fuels.
Which only shows the severe limitations of ChatGPT.
Now, any doubts about its intelligence, if anybody still had them, are gone.
Ask it if the sustainable green energy was population limiting, or was the population limited to make sure the green energy would succeed; And was it’s answer based on free market/free will, or was it based on regulatory & government edict?
So ChatGPT knows of new technology that the rest of us are unaware of?
New battery technology is the only way green energy will ever become self-sustaining. Assuming Chat is talking about only windmills and solar and is not talking about nuclear.
You can’t put a price tag on virtue signaling but if you did California wins. Truth is, no one cares about AGW in CA as much as they care about their electricity prices and availability.
“as much as they care about their electricity prices”
It would be interesting to know who knows and who cares. I suspect many people do not pay an electric bill, or do so indirectly. Search up: Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program [ LIHEAP ]
“LIHEAP is a federally funded program aimed at assisting low-income households that pay a high portion of their income to meet their energy needs.”
I assume there are other means. Where I live (WA State), I give a small amount to something called “Helping Hands”. My electric provider tacks this onto bills when we volunteer an amount. The Utility passes the combined amount on to Helping Hands and that group selects and distributes the money. I do not see anything about electricity on that web site, but they do numerous things that sound good. 🤔
Supposedly, so did USAID.
The LIHEAP program here in Wokeachusetts this year is offering only about half of last year.
Another entertaining and informative post from Willis. To quote Orwell, “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” There are a lot of highly educated idiots making policy.
Hopefully, these 2 articles portend the looming doom of big wind and big solar – along with all the other nonsense that goes along with climate change hysteria.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/02/01/ivanpah-solar-plant-the-flaming-failure-thats-finally-being-put-out-of-our-misery/
and
https://robertbryce.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=substack_profile
The insanity can’t end soon enough and it hopefully ends before there is some catastrophic grid failure that actually kills people.
“Entertaining and informative” … I love the description. It neatly encapsulates my goal for my writing. Science should be fun.
Regards,
w.
“To quote Orwell, “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”
Learned people in the past have something in common: They are always questioning the intelligence of their fellow human beings. With good reason.
Nothing has changed.
Gabbing Nuisance measures success based on the amount of taxpayer money spent.
He does a stellar job spending the money but rarely if ever actually accomplishes anything.
He’s spent billions on the poverty crisis, the homelessness crisis, the climate crisis, the education crisis and more but his accomplishments amount to the cube root of diddly squat.
Willis–thanks for the very informative contributions you make to WUWT.
Question–did you include the CO2 emitted by cargo ships who are unloading at California refineries, which is necessitated by the elimination of oil extraction from California reserves? I believe that there was a post some time ago that calculated that the bunker fuel burning generated a substantial portion of the CO2 that is credited to the California CO2 budget, but I don’t think CARB captures it in their calculations.
Thanks, cotpacker. I never considered that. We burn the same amount of oil, but since we now have to import it, the actual CO2 levels go UP … and no, I don’t think that’s included in the numbers I used.
w.
Story Tip
New EPA Chief Lee Zeldin Targets Anti-Trump Bureaucrats, Vows to Fill Key Roles – Climate Change Dispatch
Things are looking up! 🙂
I wonder if they have decided to shut down the EPA yet? Trump shut down the USAID, and they are now looking hard at the Education Department, which is also probably going to be shut down, or at least severely reduced, and the EPA is next on the list.
The radical Democrats are howling their displeasure with the reductions in government. Conservatives are rejoicing.
There were several studies that estimated the CO2 wildfire production in 2018. Each compared the CO2 production of 2018 wildfires with the claimed CA CO2 reduction since 2000. The smallest estimate was more than twice the claimed reductions, the largest was more that 2.5 times. CA doesn’t count that CO2 but it subtracts from the reductions none the less. Of course there have also been significant wildfires since 2018.
This wildfire CO2 is in the atmosphere for the same length of time as a similar automobile, or any other emissions, so of course there has probably been zero emission reduction so far in California. Even if there were no wildfires, Other countries are increasing emissions faster than CA is reducing them, so regardless of the CA $ cost, there is in reality no reduction is whatever temperature increase can be produced by CO2.
Maybe we can get USAID to pay for nut zero?
No more, because it is no more.
Please have a more sophisticated title than “California Blows It Again”. That’s low class.
Two important points missed:
(1) Our planet does not benefit from less CO2 emissions, even if CO2 emissions could be cut for free?
(2) California would benefit from spending a lot more money on forest management, to reduce the acres burned each year. Forest fires account for roughly 15% to 30% of annual CO2 emissions. 30% in a bad year like 2020, And 2025 could be another 30% year. Reduce acres burned and you reduce CA CO2 emissions as a side effect of fewer acres burned each year.
The $24,000 for gas appliances makes is a high estimate, Gas appliances cost a little more than electric. The biggest expense would be electric heat or a heat pump. Then yo have the cost of electrical upgrades. Retrofitting a home to switch from gas to electric appliances can cost anywhere from $2,000 to $10,000 depending on the size of the home, the number of appliances needing replacement, and whether electrical panel upgrades are required, with the biggest cost often coming from replacing the gas furnace with an electric heat pump system.
heat pump for a 2,000 square foot single-family home typically costs between $5,000 and $15,000 including installation, depending on the brand, efficiency rating, local climate, and complexity of the installation process; with most homeowners seeing a cost around $8,000 – $12,000 for a standard air-source heat pump system.
Baseboard electric heating for a 2000 square foot home would cost about $6000
If you have an old home with 100 amp electric service and a slab foudation, converting from gas to electric would be a nightmare.
Richard,
Our most recent fires weren’t forest fires, they were wildfires. But your point on cleaning out all the dead materiel (fuel) is well taken,
Yes, upgrading a home with a mere 100 A service (our is 125 A) is a nightmare. Not seeing the real necessity, we didn’t do it.
Our 100 to 200 amp “upgrade” included a mandatory pigtailing of all aluminum-wired outlets and switches. This was expensive but I embraced it willingly because the new Alumicon connectors used appear to be a more reliable technology than the older twist-on purple wire nuts that I’ve been using. A work crew did the whole job in a few days including the new panel for around 10 K. The “nightmare” part of the upgrade was the new mandatory breakers, so called multi-function breakers, designed to trip at ground fault or arc fault interruptions. Five times the cost of regular breakers they were also five times the trouble – we were going out to reset breakers daily. We got a few new dedicated circuits out of this and some clean looking switch and plug covers, but we had to revert to regular breakers on the problematic circuits. Newer isn’t better, but you can’t tell that to Colorado environmentalists, who introduced the new codes.
Californians pay more than twice what Coloradans pay for electricity per kWh. It would be great to see state government there rescind some of the renewable mandates and redirect funds to the building of more fire-resistant homes and less fire-prone forests, grass- and shrublands.
I don’t think this figure accounts for the reduction in electricity bill for the home itself. It costs to add the solar but reduces the cost of subsequent bills.
But it seems plausible it reflects the overall cost of transitioning every home to having solar generation included.
There will be even more costs involved in making the grid reliable.
TTTM,
We don’t have rooftop solar, yet we are paying for the penetration of solar and wind energy into our grid.
Yes, that’s how subsidies work and they’re everywhere.
Very nice Willis. This is really important.
“PS—Most folks have no idea how huge a trillion dollars is.”
A trillion dollars here & a trillion dollars there; soon we’ll be talking real money !!!
So if I stop paying taxes, it will only short the government 0.000005% of the budget, so it doest really matter if I pay them.
traf, it seems you missed this part:
Best regards,
w.
By all means, stop paying your taxes. Send the IRS a nasty letter instead of a tax return.
I feel for the people of California. As a Coloradoan, I wish you well. But let’s face it you better Leadership
“Coloradan” is the correct term. I hate autocorrect.