Are you ready for Electricity and Natural Gas to increase too? (Seattle: home, utilities)

[rkcarguy]

Originally Posted by StealthRabbit

Guess you haven't lived where I live in WA.

The acid rain from an upwind coal power plant has eaten our concrete slabs, car finishes, and roofing material. For over 30 yrs... (finally abandoned in 2020)
https://www.columbiariverkeeper.org/...eets-its-match

Give me a nuke. (which is upwind too).

I've witnessed this, friends/relatives from that area having fairly new vehicles with the paint looking like they've sat in death valley for 20 years. Also, my work provided some platforms for some coal fired stacks and I was shocked that the old ones were so corroded and were new in 2012. I've no problems with coal going away, lets convert coal plants to NG though in the interim, instead of sending everyone back to the stone-age while simultaneously mandating electric everything.

[WestGuest]

Of course gas rates will increase- natural gas has gone as high as 8 this year and is now 6. If you use Rkcargy as a source of anything intelligent .. LOL


Demand is up -there are 50,000 new jobs in energy in Texas for the 1st 7 months alone. Drillers make their cap budget in Nov for the next year and prices were cheap then. I own an interest in a pipeline and now finally more wells are connecting. The supply will sort of catch up.

[509]

Your electric rates are going up significantly and soon due to clueless politicians up and down the west coast.

Here is an article from 2001 about California making a run at BPA electricity twenty years ago. At that point we shut down the aluminum plants to send power to urban areas, including California. Don't think California has forgotten that it is FEDERAL electricity that make rates cheap in western Washington. They are going to want MORE of that electricity soon.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-...169-story.html

The EV mandates, coupled with building of Industrial Wind and Solar areas will increase rates a LOT. Most of the northwest will end up with electric prices of 25 cents a kilowatt hour similar to California in less than a decade.

The Corporate Industrial Wind and Solar areas get to sell electricity at about triple than market rates and mandatory purchase by BPA. This has forced the PUD's in eastern Washington to lose a significant amount of revenue every spring.

They are quickly shifting to producing totally green hydrogen instead selling electricity to western Washington utilities.

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-r...g-Station.html

This facility will be producing hydrogen in July of 2023.

Since county residents are getting electricity BELOW the cost of production, the PUD's are making great efforts to conserve electricity by offering incentives to local residents to save electricity to enable them to sell at higher prices to non-county areas.

Chelan County PUD will even pay you to replace your outdoor lights so you don't waste energy lighting up the night sky wasting electricity.

https://www.chelanpud.org/conservati...rcial/lighting

Now if we can just get our new "urban refugees" to shut off their porch lights at night!!!

It is a perfect storm coming for electricity prices in western Washington and Oregon and California.

[rantiquity]

Considering haven't access to natural gas on the peninsula and two I have solar panels so I will not see any increase or lack of power in the near or in future.
My average cost daily during Dec was $1.72. This is an increase from July of $1.38.

[rantiquity]

Oregon has announced along with California and Washington they have mandated EV by 2035

[509]

Originally Posted by rantiquity

Oregon has announced along with California and Washington they have mandated EV by 2035

My guess is that the mandates will be eliminated by 2032 or so....but only after electricity prices AND fossil fuel prices skyrocket. By that time, the damage will be done.

It is starting now, as fossil fuel companies slow down exploring for oil and gas plus put off maintenance for refineries. If your going out of business by government edict, your not going to invest in the future.

I have owned a solar home for 25 years.

It cost me 12,000 every five years just to replace the batteries!! The electronics have been running for those 25 years, but they don't run forever!! Solar is very expensive. The cheap electrician is $100 an hour.

[rkcarguy]

I've mathmatically deduced that Washington State isn't going to be financially viable for all except the wealthy in the coming years. There are so many new taxes mandates and expenses being shoved down our throats along with being in the top 5% most expensive places to live, it just doesn't pencil. I really only have a few thousand $'s of disposable income left now each year with the effects of our costs of living hitting every aspect of life.($20-$25/hour for grocery store staff = higher prices added to already terrible inflation. $500 this year for long term care insurance the state forced on us also took a good chunk of that.
Most businesses are not flourishing either, facing much of the same along with very expensive or total lack of workers.

[Hemlock140]

Originally Posted by rkcarguy

I've mathmatically deduced that Washington State isn't going to be financially viable for all except the wealthy in the coming years. There are so many new taxes mandates and expenses being shoved down our throats along with being in the top 5% most expensive places to live, it just doesn't pencil. I really only have a few thousand $'s of disposable income left now each year with the effects of our costs of living hitting every aspect of life.($20-$25/hour for grocery store staff = higher prices added to already terrible inflation. $500 this year for long term care insurance the state forced on us also took a good chunk of that.
Most businesses are not flourishing either, facing much of the same along with very expensive or total lack of workers.

Probably for the central western (Puget Sound) counties, but there are still some affordable cities. As long as the major employers don't move out to places like Moses Lake, Yakima and Montesano to drive up the prices.

Moses Lake Median Home $354k Rent $1,191
Yakima Median Home $349k Rent $953
Montesano Median Home $359 Rent $1,200

[509]

Originally Posted by Hemlock140

Probably for the central western (Puget Sound) counties, but there are still some affordable cities. As long as the major employers don't move out to places like Moses Lake, Yakima and Montesano to drive up the prices.

Moses Lake Median Home $354k Rent $1,191
Yakima Median Home $349k Rent $953
Montesano Median Home $359 Rent $1,200

Don't know where Montesano is....never heard of it.

Yakima...well, what can you say about Yakima. The racism of western Washington to brown people is expressed in Yakima. I don't know if Yakima can overcome the hatred of state government and their policies. I really don't understand why western Washington politicians hate Yakima. For a metro area, it is pretty amazing how often they are "overlooked" by the state of Washington.

BUT Moses Lake........

Leading agricultural county in Washington state, BUT it is the 7th county in manufacturing with a bullet!!!

Not to mention information technology. Even MicroSoft has employees in Grant County today, after having NO EMPLOYEES for decades east of the Cascades. P\

https://www.grantedc.com/demographic...est-employers/

Local Manufacturing Companies
Chemical manufacturers
Akzo Nobel Pulp and Performance Chemicals – Sodium Chlorate
Chemi-Con Materials – Electrolytic Aluminum Foil
General Dynamics – Chemicals/Propellant
Inflation Systems (Takata) – Automotive Airbag Propellant and Components
Moses Lake Industries (Tama Chemicals) – Chemicals for Semiconductor Wafer Fabrication
REC Silicon – Polysilicon and Silane Gas


Steel and Iron
D & L Foundry – Ironwork
Ephrata Machinery – Fabrication
Far West Steel – Steel Fabrication
LaserFab – Metal Fabrication
Moses Lake Steel – Steel Products
Specialty Welding – Fabrication
Other Manufacturing
Automated Ag – Agricultural Equipment
Columbia Basin Machine – Industrial Machine Services
El Dorado Stone – Architectural Stone Veneer
Genie Industries – Aerial Work Platforms
Norco – Air Separation
SGL Automotive Carbon Fibers – Carbon Fiber

In ten years, Grant County (Quincy, Ephrata, and Moses Lake) will have a much larger population than the Wenatchee Valley, but more importantly it will be a major manufacturing hub in the state of Washington.

I first drove through Grant County in 1973. I was stunned at its "undiscovered" economic resources. Lots of that has to do with western Washington focus of state government. Even Boeing when they moved to South Carolina and threw Moses Lake into the evaluation criteria....and went hmmmm. Both their union relationship meant they wanted out of Washington state.

BUT when BMW did a search on the "greenest" spot on the planet to put a carbon fiber manufacturing plant....it was Grant County.

https://www.sglcarbon.com/en/markets...s/automotive/#

Grant County is not cheap at the north end....the agricultural lands around Mattawa and Othello will probably lag behind the rest of the county.

[Ruth4Truth]

Originally Posted by rkcarguy

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news...7a3af3c17322e0
Double-digit increases are coming to Puget Sound Energy customers' bills each month in 2023, as the utility grapples with high energy prices, green energy mandates and aging infrastructure.

OK, so what this says, is that the famously low rates in WA or western WA all these decades/generations, were not sustainable. System maintenance and upgrading were not factored into the rate structure. This is the same issue facing California's PG&E, a privately-owned utility company. So the unusually low rates in WA were had at a cost to future generations.

PG&E OTOH has no excuse, since they've been charging high rates all along. Now that they've been required to put some of their equipment underground, like in "modern, developed" countries, as a result of lawsuits after their equipment burned down several towns, they have no $$ to do that with. In both cases though, it's the current and future ratepayers who'll have to pay.

There sure aren't going to be any federal funds to help out with that, after several administrations have starved the federal budget to provide tax cuts for people who don't need them. And it's not just the West Coast that needs help upgrading their electricity infrastructure; we keep hearing about rickety, antiquated systems on the E Coast, too, that are vulnerable during storms.