> Take a look at California. Their grid is routinely, daily, generating ~84% of its power from renewables [1] (with ~25GW of existing solar PV capacity, ~6GW of wind, and ~6GW of hydro).
> ... Not everywhere is California, but solar and batteries are the cheapest form of generation in 90%+ of the world [5].
... Then why is electricity so expensive there compared to the US average?
It's not. California has the cheapest wholesale electricity prices in the country. It's the only place in the country with a wholesale rate below $100 / MWh, and California is way below $100.
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/05/30/california-lowest-whole...
Retail prices are of course super high in California, but that has nothing to do with generation.
Why is there such a disconnect?
Transmission and distribution costs: i.e. the grid.
California is a massive state, has very rugged terrain, and there's a ton of deferred maintenance on transmission lines that are more than 50 years old, that are at huge risk of causing massive wildfires that destroy entire towns.
This has been terribly mismanaged, because like most places with regulated monopoly utilities, the regulatory body is opaque and not very responsive to the needs of the public.
The utility doesn't make money on electricity generation costs, but it does get to take a fixed rate of profit from grid infrastructure costs. So the obvious game for a for-profit regulated monopoly utility is to jack up the grid costs as high as possible, try to snow the regulators to possible cheaper alternatives, and rake in more money.
I remember one case where PG&E got approval to charge for grid maintenance, spent hundreds of millions, had ~$100M leftover, then declared "oh we did it cheaper than we expected, executive bonuses all around the C-suite with the extra!" And then we had multi-billion dollar wildfires the following year.
Utilities are not normal businesses, they make more money by increasing their input costs. (See also the US healthcare system where incentives are similarly perverse... Insurance company profits are capped at a fixe percentage of health care expenditures, so the route to more profit is to increase health care expenditures.)
Of my decades in California, there's been a single gubernatorial candidate with deep knowledge of the grid and how to fix the regulatory structure, and it's the governor who actually appoints people to the regulatory board of the utilities, so the governor and their appointees have the power to fix this. That gubernatorial candidate was Tom Steyer, and he had/has fantastic plans, but I fear he just lost the primary:
https://www.volts.wtf/p/tom-steyer-wants-to-be-californias
politics. Supply is cheap, but California has a corrupt relationship with the monopoly provider, and lets them get away with bundling all kinds of costs into the distribution charge. fire rebuilding, social projects, decades of infrastructure neglect from previous corruption.
Go and compare the rates from a non-pg&e distributor (eg SMUD in sac) and you'll see, supply is cheap enough and it doesnt have to be this way.
A distribution grid for 40 million people in a high fire risk geography [1]. Renewables drive down supply costs, but not distribution costs (unless you can go off grid, etc). They could also improve costs by nationalizing PG&E (I argue, cutting out shareholder returns and excessive management comp), but that is an argument for another thread [2].
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[2] "Where’s all the f&$#ing money going?" The Waste and Costs of American Utilities - https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/wheres-all-the-f-and-ing-... - May 22nd, 2026