Seen on reddit and other sources:
https://old.reddit.com/r/fresno/comments/1hxqlx7/the_more_i_try_to_save_energy_the_higher_the/
Its already 50c or more per kilowatt hour… https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/residential-electric-rate-plan-pricing.pdf
On top of the “The Electric Home Rate Plan includes a $15-per-month Base Services Charge”… because people were starting to get 100% of their power from solar and it was “unfair”.
“In order to continue to make the same profit (or more year over year) we charge more per unit when demand goes down… We also charge more when demand goes up… Suck it peasants”
It isn’t about profit. Its about paying for the infrastructure. It cost a lot of money to maintain the grid. The supply and demand has to meet exactly or the frequently of the power will get out of wack. (AC is hard)
If they can’t afford to maintain it in a changing world, perhaps we should nationalize the infrastructure that we all depend on.
It doesn’t say that it says most of their costs are fixed and cost of those large fixed costs are more so amortized per head than per kWh which means higher rates for less usage.
Are they a not for profit company? If not, it’s about profit
It is about profit. They don’t want to lose money.
I would be more sympathetic to this if they actually maintained their grid. It’s been shown time and time again that the company doesn’t replace parts that badly need it while paying their c suite enormous bonuses. I have no sympathy for this situation whatsoever
The electric grid needs a minimum amount of people using it.
Exactly why personal solar energy will hit a tipping point as the rates rise drastically as more users use zero to negative energy. Those that cannot afford solar will suffer, but the Environmental impact will probably be reduced.
I don’t think it even has much of a impact from a environmental perspective. It is going to be much better to do it at scale.
Grid attached solar contributes to the overall usage which brings the cost displaced back down. Personal solar is almost always a net positive for the customers, the power company, and the homeowner with the solar. Not to mention the environmental offset that comes with generating your own power.
But what about the shareholders, how does solar help them?
If the shareholders are smart, they’ll buy shares of the solar providers and solar maintenance companies.
But what if the shareholders are stupid, lazy and greedy, without the ability to look more than 3 months into the future?
It’s so absurd to me that the Energy Star stickers on appliances at the store say “Estimated based on $.13 per kW/h” and we have to pay around 5x that much.
Yep. And they are talking about more increases this year.
Some appliances add additional load to the grid which the power company charges extra for. It depends on the type of load the appliance is.
You are talking about the Power Factor of an electrical load, which is tangential to my point. Energy Star ratings do not take into account power factor in their “average annual cost” ratings because almost no residential provider actually charges for that, only industrial customers get hit with those fees.
At what point is it cheaper to disconnect from the grid and just use solar with a back up generator? 50 cents+ per kWh is insane.
You cant legally disconnect a residential residence in CA from the grid unless you get some HEAVY permits. Thats one of the reasons PGE introduced the minimum fee, people with solar. Some people were making a profit pushing electricity into the grid so they make it 0.03c per kwh credit instead of wholesale.
Half the houses over here have solar now when you drive down the street. Im thinking of getting it too.
Interesting, that they’ll buy back energy at a fraction of the cost they’re charging for energy
“interesting” is certainly one word for it
Its hitting a lot of people that were relying on the sale of their solar in order to offset their loans for the systems.
The problem is that the electric grid needs a minimum amount of usage to stay stable. If everyone stopped using it there would be no public electric grid which would be much worse.
And public utilities commissions just exist so people can think they have a voice while their meetings are just a big circlejerk.
Municipal power is so the way to go, much like everything else, especially because home town service will be run by home town people that care. You think PG&E or Verizon or Comcast cares about your town? Nope.
Gee it seems like they could come up with a simple algorithm to protect low income people who are conserving.
Aaaand why aren’t costs going down as usage goes down?
Plenty of costs don’t depend on how much usage there is. If a tree falls and takes out a power line it cosrs the same whether that line was being used at 1% capacity or 100%
True, true. Other costs should track with usage though, like fuel. If they had said “when usage falls, costs don’t fall AS MUCH due to fixed costs” then I would totally get it. The way they phrased it makes it sound like costs going down just isn’t a thing that happens. Maybe that’s me.
I think it’s more like this: Say maintenance of a grid costs $1 million/year, power generation costs another $1 million/year and people use 10 million kWh/yr at 20¢ per. Everything is balanced. Then half the people cut their usage in half. Grid maintenance still costs $1 million/year, generation dropped to $750,000, but revenue dropped to $1.5 million. They have to raise the price 16% to go back to paying for maintenance. You’re still saving money if you dropped your usage more than 16%, but those that didn’t pay the difference.
Since you generally have to be fairly well-off to afford the massive upfront labor costs involved with solar, its adoption has disproportionately raised the living expenses of the lower class.
The alternative is a base services charge, where everyone pays a flat percentage of the grid maintenance costs and then his or her usage is on top of that. No idea why it’s taking this long for PG&E to adopt that model, but adding charges for solar is a big improvement in equity.
Yeah I’ve got it, some costs are fixed.
Fuel is not the biggest cost especially in areas with renewable sources. The machinery that keeps the grid going is very complex and expensive. There are needs to be redundancy and flexibility build it which costs even more.
Prices aren’t going down because the costs aren’t going down. The infrastructure costs about the same either way.
Fuel cost should go down with usage though. And if usage goes down, doesn’t that mean the grid is better equipped to handle it well, and should experience fewer problems as a result?
Some costs should go down. Others are fixed, I agree.
Most of the costs aren’t going down. The expensive part isn’t the fuel (in the us at least)
There may be some volume related efficiencies (such number of starts/stops) as well as compression of fixed costs that can raise the unit price when volume is reduced.
Privately owned publicly enforced monopolies are rife with conflicts of interest. PG&E should be taken over by the state yesterday.
It’s ridiculous that due to some old unique contract the city of San Mateo? Mountain View? (I forget) which is right in the heart of PG$E turf gets to set their own rates and they are less than a quarter of the price, for the same electricity from the same generators and wires. PG$E is such a horrible scam.
Which is worse, PG&E or SDG&E? Thankfully my house is all electric and solar powered so I get a refund from SDG&E every quarter for the excess energy I’m producing, so I don’t have much experience with them.
There are public utilities in the US. And yes, they offer better service and lower costs than the competing private utilities.
I didn’t know about the benefits until I moved somewhere served by them. I think we would have more of them if people could see the benefits, but unfortunately the utilities you have access to are limited by where you live.
Very yesterday.
We took profit for decades from letting our infrastructure decay. Now we still want that same amount of profit, so you have to pay more for us to fix all the problems that should have been fixed with that profit money in the past.
The other issue is the impact renewable energy has on the grid. Most renewables are either on or off instead of having a spinning generator. Rotation of a physical generator adds a lot of stability and makes it easier to sync the phase of the power. With things like solar panels you need to have a station to sync the phases which adds more things to worry about.
That is only an issue in very small grids that are entirely renewables in one location. And the impact of AI on the grid has been much more problematic than any renewable sources because it’s localized and its is sudden spikes in usage whereas spikes in generation can be mitigated with battery and capacitor tech. Spikes at the usage side need to either be mitigated by the user or the grid has to implement mitigation at just those locations which is more difficult to plan for.
if solar was incentivized to have batteries, power factor correction, and (if the power companies can shut off the connection at the house during service to prevent backfeding) use frequency correcting inverters.
And then eventually we’ll stop fixing it for that amount of money, pocket the difference and go “tough, pay more” if you want it fixed again.
Electrical service should have a fixed connection fee.
The reason this happens is because electrical companies have two different kind of costs:
-
Those related to obtaining the electrical power from generation companies.
-
Those related to maintaining the grid and providing a connection.
In the past, normally what they did was to simply reduce this to a single price, and for that to be per unit of electricity used. That is, the consumer pays $N. That was at least not an entirely unreasonable approximation when people were pulling electricity off the grid.
The thing is, if a user mostly generates power locally, they still want to have that electrical connection and providing that connection still costs money. But now they’re also not paying for their share of the grid connectivity – it’s getting offloaded to the people who aren’t generating electricity locally.
Hence, the split that many utility companies are shifting to. There’s a fixed charge to have a connection to the grid, which covers the cost of grid maintenance. And there’s a separate cost per kWh of energy used.
If someone doesn’t care about the grid connection – like, they’re confident that they can handle their power needs locally, don’t care about having a grid connection, they do have the option to just drop service. But most people want to have the access to draw more power if they aren’t generating enough, so they want to retain their grid connection. With the grid connection fee being broken out, they cover their share of the costs.
Now, I’ve no disagreement that California electricity rates are pretty bonkers. They’re some of the highest in the US:
https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/
But the issue isn’t having a separate grid connection fee from an electricity used fee.
At least in Illinois, there is no option to go off grid. You’re legally required to maintain a grid connection even if you are generating all power locally.
This is roughly what we have in the UK.
For electricity, the standing charge is 61.6p/day, then 23.3p/kWh.
And gas is 29.6p/day, then 6.1p/kWh. (The numbers vary, and you can choose to lock rates for the duration of a contract).There has been some discussion of it in recent years (after it doubled, thanks Putin).
Whether it is fair for people using less energy…But in reality, everyone has similar 100 or 60A connections to the grid.
There are tarrifs for very low users, where the standing charge is combined with the first kWh.Once I’m off the gas boiler, and on a heat pump, I may get my gas disconnected to save the standing charge.
On a tangent, as you may be interested, we now have the option of flexible electricity pricing that tracks the wholesale rates for the day. Usually, it’s cheaper, sometimes even negative. Link.
However, this week there has been a lot of expensive energy, so it’s been butting up against the £1/kWh limit!70с/kWh is insane lolol
You do have to be careful here, because some localities actually require a grid connection to maintain a certificate of occupancy. Title 24 changed in recent years (here in CA), but you may still end up fighting your municipality and the POCO.
There’s certainly some reasonability to that. However, if the person decides to terminate service, maintaining the grid doesn’t become any cheaper for the power company. The lines are already installed, the connections made, and the company will continue to upkeep your connection all the way up to your home, even if it is terminated locally. They’ll do that just in case you or future homeowners no longer generate power and wish to continue service, and your neighbors will likely still be using it anyway. So by that same reasoning, maintaining a just-in-case service connection that you don’t typically need because you generate your own power also doesn’t result in increased maintenance costs to the power company. So there is also an argument to be made that that cost shouldn’t be pushed to them, but to the power drawers that the power company actually wants to serve anyway, the ones motivating them to build more grid in the first place.
Well, I suppose they could just take out the stretch of power line between me and my neighbors who use their service and cut down those maintenance costs altogether!
This isn’t like a driveway, it’s more like a road. It’s used by more people than the people whose property it’s in front of. And where I live, the property owner is considered to be the owner of the lines that extend from the grid to the home, so guess who already pays the maintenance costs on that?
The way we do it in New York city is that the power bill has two columns. Delivery charges to pay for the lines and maintenance, and supply charges for the power generation. Both are per kW, like 3cents delivery plus 15cents supply. Plus a couple of fees and sales tax.
Are you saying that someone who uses 10kWh of grid power per month should pay the same “connection fee” as someone who uses 990kWh per month?
Assuming they have the same type of connection, yeah, why wouldn’t they?
Simplified scenario.
-
The cost for the grid provider to maintain a transformer is $1000.
-
A transformer can serve 20 low-use households, or 2 high-use households.
-
Both the low-use and the high-use households have the same, 200A service to their homes. Either can use up to 200A. In practice, neither actually does. The only difference between a low-use and a high-use household is in how much they actually use.
-
A neighborhood has 20 low-use households (1 transformer).
-
That same neighborhood as 10 high-use households (5 transformers).
-
This neighborhood of 30 houses has $6000 in maintenance costs.
Here are the two options we are talking about:
-
Fixed rate. Each household in this neighborhood pays a fixed, $200 “connection fee” to cover these costs.
-
Consumption-based. Each of the 20 low-use household pays $50 ($1000 total, for the 1 transformer they share) and each high-use household pays $500 ($5000 total, for the 5 transformers they share).
With Option 1, each of the low-use households is paying 4 times the maintenance costs that they actually incur, and each heavy-use household is paying only 40% of the maintenance costs they incur.
With Option 2, both low- and high-use households pay their actual maintenance costs.
Which option makes more sense?
Fixed fees only make sense for covering administrative costs, which scale per user. Grid maintenance costs scale based (primarily) on total consumption. Fixing maintenance fees forces low-use households to subsidize high-use households.
I feel like I’m in the fucking twilight zone here. The community does not seem to comprehend what they are demanding.
-
No, they’re arguing that the price of power should be split:
- A fee for grid maintenance (equal for all)
- A fee per unit of consumed power (scales linearly with consumption)
This makes sense, because regardless of you much power someone uses, the costs associated with maintaining the infrastructure that allows them to draw any power at all remain the same. This also happens to be the model used in Norway, so it’s not an untested concept.
Another option, relevant when the cost of building the power plant is large and the cost of energy production is negligible, is that everyone connected to the grid pays a near-flat fee in total, which is distributed among consumers depending on how much power they use. I’ve never heard of that option being used before.
Assuming both of those people use exactly the same infrastructure (which they do), yes.
The person with the higher usage will still pay more in total because the connection fee is just a base price, you’re still paying per kWh (which is forwarded to the companies running the power stations)
Ok, so, you’re in a neighborhood. You and 100 neighbors are each using 10kWh. 1000kWh total.
Now a heavy industrial user comes in adjacent to your neighborhood. They are going to need 990,000kWh. The distribution infrastructure is going to need to be upgraded to meet the new need. It is going to need to be upgrade a lot. Those upgrades are going to be extraordinarily expensive to meet the extraordinary needs of that new user.
Should you and your 100 neighbors each have their recurring connection fee jacked up next month and that charge made equal to the 101st “neighbor”?
Of course not. That’s just absurd.
The whole “local generation” issue you were raising is a red herring.
Wow. Talk about moving the goal posts. You’re not even taking about the same thing anymore.
If you just wanna bitch about something, uh, then go in with your bad self. Or something. But rather than even attempt a rebuttal to any of the points raised in this thread, you’ve literally completely changed the scenario being discussed.
Like, why even bother replying? Your whole tirade doesn’t even make sense in the context of the thread…
I used exaggerated examples to clearly demonstrate the nature of the problem, not to quantify it.
The problem is still present even within the neighborhood. Residential consumers rarely draw more than 1/10th of their rated service. Crypto-bro comes into the neighborhood and his miners continuously max out his service.
The power company normally installs and maintains a single service transformer per block; but he alone uses as much power as the rest of the block combined. They have to install and maintain a second transformer just for him, but they spread those extra costs among the entire block.
Why is it reasonable for the power company to demand you subsidize his electrical connection than for him to pay for what he is using?
I love when folks introduce hypotheticals, then pile on hypotheticals and nonsensicals, and believe they’ve championed their cleverness.
I propose a new term: feather man. For when even a straw man looks like a steel man compared to your argument.
B-B-But what if you fell into a volcano before you could make that proposal?
What then, featherman?
Checkmate!
The “connection fee” would probably be flat by service size. Most homes have 200A connections so that would be one flat rate for everyone with a 200A ingress. If a business uses 400A, they’d get a different price but all 400A would be the same.
Get it now? That has nothing to do with amount used, but rather the size of your “pipe”
Cryptominer maxes out the same connection that you rarely draw 1/10th of. Why are you subsidizing cryptobro?
I’m not. They would be paying for their usage, I would be paying for my usage. Hence the flat fee for connection plus the cost of usage. It works the same way with sewer and gas (at least where I’m at) everyone pays a flat connection fee based on max size available to you and then you pay for your usage.
My state separates generation from distribution. I literally have a hundred options for generation. I pay a generator to put power on the grid.
I only have one option for distribution. I pay that distributor to convey power (ostensibly) from my generator to my house.
The generator is not the only one with consumption-based costs. The distributor/grid provider also has costs that vary depending on how much power they are moving. They need to upgrade transformers and substations and install additional transmission lines as demand increases. Those have associated costs.
I could understand a flat fee for administrative costs: the power company does have certain per-user costs. But grid maintenance is not one of them: grid maintenance costs depend almost entirely on the total amount of power being moved, not the number of users served. Those maintenance costs are already rolled into consumption. Making them a fixed cost just forces low-use households to subsidize high-use households.
An industrial facility to the scale you are refering to will likely have its own electrical substation. Either maintained by the facility itself or contracted out to the power supplier.
-
