Big Story Today -- Electricity Demand Surging -- California -- Friday, August 16, 2024

Locator: 48431ELECTRICITY.

Electricity demand surging: great interactive article in The WSJ today. Link here. 

Which immediately takes us to California: link here.

Re-posting:

Electric rates tracked here by the EIA. 

Residential electric rates, cents per kWh, May, 2024, for selected states:

• Massachusetts: 28.70
• New York: 23.60
• Ohio: 16.65
• Minnesota: 15.69
• North Dakota: 13.04
• Florida: 13.63
• Tennessee: 12.46
• Texas: 14.74
• Montana: 13.26
• California: 34.31 (no typo) -- it was 29.80 a year ago -- a 15% increase in price y/y!
  
• Washington State: 12.16 (think hydroelectricity)
• Alaska: 25.02
• Hawaii: 44.14 (and a question whether Hawaiian Electric might go bankrupt)
  

But, cost of electricity is like the US postage stamp: for residential demand, it's not the cost/kWh, it's the amount of electricity actually used per household/month. For US postage stamps, it's not the cost per stamp, it's the overall cost of mailing for non-commercial users. See household demand by state at this link. Average monthly use by household:

• California: 542 kwh 
• almost half that of high use states
  
• (only Hawaii is lower at 531)
  
• Florida: 1,096
• Louisiana: 1,192 (highest)
  
• Minnesota: 776
• North Dakota: 1,041
• Texas: 1,094
  

Coincidentally, this was posted yesterday:

Which takes me to SRE. Ticker:

And pays 3%. And increases dividend regularly. 

ERCOT: link here. Holding, but will be challenging through the rest of the month of August.