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Comment by Bilal_io | Hacker News Reader

That's how it is for electricity in Texas. You pay a delivery charge, and then usage charge, both based on kw/h.

But that's the problem! The cost of the grid is the same whether it delivers you 100kWh or 10,000kWh. The delivery charge should be a fixed monthly charge, based on the size of your meter, not scaled to the number of kWh you consume.

That's not true at all, as people use more electricity, aggregate usage gets higher and the grid eventually needs beefier interconnections, beefier transformers... The delivery charge would actually be fairer based on peak usage, as it has more relevance to the sizing of the grid.

> That's not true at all, as people use more electricity, aggregate usage gets higher and the grid eventually needs beefier interconnections, beefier transformers...

To a degree, but not in a linear fashion to the amount of power delivered, and certainly not on a unit-power delivery basis.

>The delivery charge would actually be fairer based on peak usage, as it has more relevance to the sizing of the grid.

Very true, and also very common in commercial power billing, usually called a "demand charge" where you pay a specific tariff based of that peak of usage. Unfortunately, it can create really spikey and hard to manage bills, so I accept the argument that it's not appropriate for residential use. Thus, a flat charge on your meter size. On many commercial bills, the demand charge can exceed 75% of the total bill!

Even demand charges often do a bad job of matching utility costs. If I run a church and my peak demand is consistently reached at 11 AM on Sunday morning, guess what, I'm way overpaying relative to my cost to the utility.

The problem with high meter charges (or charging based on panel amperage/etc.) is that it doesn't do a good job matching utility costs either. Let's say I have a 2-story house and split it into a duplex. I add a second panel on the top floor and live on the bottom. Did my second panel double costs for the utility? Absolutely not. If I build a carriage house in my backyard with a 200 amp panel, does it cost the same to the utility as if I put a 200 amp panel on my new house in my far-off exurb? Absolutely not.

That's not to get into the distributional effects of these kinds of changes. Any kind of base-rate increase will absolutely hammer the poor in order to save lots for suburb mcmansions. This may be economically more efficient, but good luck selling it.

If you'd want the transmission charges to match the cost to the utility you should have a base charge consisting of basically the cost to the utility of maintaining your customer relationship after the initial hookup cost, and another part to match the utility O&M cost of the grid distributed over all the customers. Then on top of that a time-varying per-kWh charge for the electricity transferred. This would probably in most cases be pretty cheap, except when the grid (either the utility grid as a whole or the local part that you're connected to) starts to become overloaded; in that case scarcity pricing would apply which would presumably be very high. This would incite customers to reduce usage during scarcity, or give the utility funds to invest in grid expansion.

Similarly for the energy price, that should match the wholesale price. Though see the $10k bills some people on a wholesale price plan got during last year's Texas freeze for why such an idea might not be so popular in practice, theoretically beautiful as it may be.

It encourages you to use more electricity though, which is not good.

Encourages you in what way? Your bill is still higher the more energy you consume, just increasing more slowly than if the rates were higher.

Many believe (and I’m inclined to agree) that encouraging a switch from locally burned fossil fuels to electricity is better even if that electricity is currently* generated partially from fossil fuel. The theory is the electric plants could more easily become cleaner than if millions of home need to have their heating equipment upgraded.

The problem where I am is that natural gas is so cheap (though less than previously) that it’s hard to make electric heating competitive.

* no pun intended

It encourages you in the sense that the marginal cost of turning your heat up to 75 in the winter instead of 70 is much lower, or that buying a 4000 sq. ft. house will not come with as big an increase on your monthly costs as it does now.

The current system in PG&E territory encourages me to prefer gas to electricity everywhere I'm able to make the choice. That's surely worse.

Only if it means you’d prefer resistive heaters to heat pumps. In home gas is more efficient than a resistance heater.

False; the heat pump is still more expensive. You need COP of >=4 with baseline rates, and it only gets worse from there (the baselines are tiny, and TOU is also bad). Heat pump water heaters only barely scratch 4 under ideal conditions, so you'll generally do worse with a HPWH than with a condensing gas one. Arithmetic is about the same for home heating systems.

Basically around here (PG&E) you should only electrify if you can also get your electrons from not-the-grid.

There are ways around that though; you could give a small rebate on the meter fee for low-use customers, to encourage conservation. (My water bill is that way, the full meter charge is around $50/month, but if you use less than 700 Cubic-feet of water a month, the meter fee drops to $30/mo.) Is a little less pure than just charging a fair rate, but seems a reasonable hybrid approach.

You also pay for power you don't even use, from other power providers, in the case of extreme crisis, it seems. I've never lived there but from the outside Texas's power situation seems broken at best.

That's accurate. We're in constant fear of losing power whenever there is a freeze warning (we're on that today and tomorrow at least), rain or heat. That's all thanks to the greedy for-profit system enabled by "conservative" politicians.

That's not really accurate. I've lost power 4 times total in 30 years here. Usually big Texas thunderstorms, never heat.

The 100 year winter freeze I lost power for two days, that was the longest ever.

Haven't lost power since then, didn't lose power for a couple years before that.

We have the cheapest rates because of the way distribution and providers are setup.

The problem with big user bills were SV companies like Griddy tricking people into buying variable rate electricity, something we made illegal since then.

That's great that your power has been mostly reliable, but it is not the case for a lot of the people here.

In my family alone, my brother and his wife lost power at the apartment they had then for 3 days during the ~2014 winter storm, during which our apartment lost power for around a day. My parents lost their power for all 4 days of the storm last year, and had to travel 15 miles or so to my brothers house after their inside temperature dropped below freezing on day 3. They just let us know their power is out again this afternoon. My wife and I are lucky enough to have since purchased a house close to some critical infrastructure so we've rarely lost power comparatively, but we still lose power several times throughout each summer during heat waves.

I also want to reiterate: this happened in 2011, again in 2014, again in 2021, and again in 2022. The storm in 2021 was objectively the worst of the bunch, but 2011 was similar. It is _not_ a 100 year freeze. It is happening more regularly, and our government has ignored recommendations to better prepare for it going on over a decade now.

EDIT: Just to round this out, a federal report was provided in the wake of the last "100 year" storm that occurred in 2011[1]. In it, there are several dozen recommendations, many of which were at least in part the cause of the 2021 outages as well.

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[1]: https://www.ferc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-04/08-16-11-re...

Just replying to other anecdotes with my own.

And I disagree with your assessment of our weather and government.

This is one of those cases where annecdotes of power loss have a much higher informative value than annecdotes of stability. The former tell you there is a bad situation wheras the later just add a little bit of context about the severity.

It's not, that's your rationalization to make your anecdote more important.

I am not denying your experience, but I was talking about my own. I lost power for over 3 hours just 2 nights ago. And since the horrible experience we had in February 2021 we (me and everyone I know) have been living in fear it might happen again.

A quick look at Centerpoint's own outage tracker[1] shows outages everywhere in different parts of Texas.

1. https://gis.centerpointenergy.com/outagetracker/?WT.ac=OC_Im...

I don't see why "fear" is necessary. Power has never been a constant. When I was a kid we had a box of candles under the sink and warm blankets stacked in the garage, and some emergency food/water to last a week. Now that I'm an adult, I still have the same. I don't understand this trust and expectation of flawless infrastructure, where "fear" would come into play. Inconvenience, sure. You should be able to easily remove the fear aspect, with minimal preparation.

"fear" is necessary because I was stuck at an apartment for 3 days and nowhere to go with no heat and no water when the weather outside was -17 degrees.

As my comment suggested, you could change that fear to inconvenience with minimal preparation: put some water jugs, canned/packaged food, and blankets+cheap snow outfit in your closet, and throw in a little campground propane burner for a nice warm meal. -17 outdoors is a warm ski day indoors. If you've known anyone that lives in a cold part of the country, having some preparation is an extremely common practice.

Or fix the damn infrastructure. Other states and other countries get worse cold waves and others get worse heat waves and they don't lose power. Stop putting the blame on people.

> Campground You realize most people love in apartments right? Most apartments don't have fireplaces.

> You realize most people love in apartments right? Most apartments don't have fireplaces.

No, I mean the little burners you put on top of portable propane tanks, that are usually used for BBQ's or while camping. Searching "campground propane burner" in Amazon shows several hundred results of what I'm talking about. They don't require a campground to operate.

> Or fix the damn infrastructure.

You and your fear exists in the reality that is right now, which includes bad infrastructure, that will almost certainly take years to fix. If you desire to not live in fear, for the next few years, you can easily do it with minimal, extremely common in places where it's cold, preparation. If you desire to continue living in short term fear, when it's so easy to mitigate that fear, then well I guess you do you.

Thank you for the advise. I will invest in one of those burners.

They are great to have around in this situation. Just be careful with ventilation always and don't leave untended. Not suitable as a heater.

You have to be careful using these burners in in-building enclosed spaces---they can produce carbon monoxide. They are really designed for open air use.

Good advice for folks stuck in a place where corruption makes basic utility service unreliable, but doing a bunch of extra work to make getting through those times when you are without power a little less painful is no replacement for solving the problem. If I were in that situation I'd just move. There are plenty of states in the US that do not regularly have problems providing power, heat, and water to the folks who pay for them.

> a bunch of extra work

I'm having trouble believing that having a bit of extra food and water available is considered some large burden. It's universally suggested by all entities that deal with emergencies: https://www.fema.gov/pdf/library/f&web.pdf

> If I were in that situation I'd just move.

It's great that you have the freedom and resources to move around the country so easily, but I think that's a fairly rare privilege.

> is no replacement for solving the problem

I don't think I suggested it was. But it's not feasible that the problem will be solved in the next few weeks. For those next few weeks, fear and risk can be minimized with some "extra work".

That would actually do something to address the risk, removing their ability to complain.

Because in the pursuit of efficiency, we are less resilient.

I maintain a old inefficient boiler for my home. It has a pilot light and stays lit as long as there is service.

It costs me about $250-400 more annually vs an efficient boiler.

In CA it's the same these days with the advent of community choice aggregators (CCA) [1].

If a CCA is available in your area, and you choose to use it, you pay the main utility for transmission/distribution, but the CCA for energy, both on per kWh basis. It all gets aggregated on the same (confusing) bill. Because they control the energy sourcing, CCAs can offer things like 100% carbon-free or 100% renewable plans. Some even subsidize batteries to add to homes in exchange for a portion of the stored energy capacity.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Choice_Aggregation

The way electricity market in Texas works in general looks very similar to EU countries.

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