• batmaniam@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    It can depend, also this little snippet doesn’t say if it’s energy or delivery. Some utilities really like expanding delivery because the projects are revenue, and they don’t make much, if any, on the delivery. But in some cases those delivery expansion projects have a long payback time, so they avoid them until they’re critical, and also lose if after building the demand they were serving goes down.

    It also varies a ton by state (Texas being the most extreme example). As well as, someone noted below, how the energy purchase goes. In my state there’s an independent not for profit that is not the utility, and not the energy producer, that just coordinates purchase of power from the broader region (across multiple states). They’ll mix whats coming into the grid in the state going “call Ohio and buy XXYY megawatts for ZZ hrs from that coal fire joint”. The control room is cool as hell. They seem pretty ethically clean, but purchasing that power is a bidding process (like, real time), and your bid has to be competitive.