What we should do is pay a large flat monthly fee for the grid connection, then a lower rate for generation/usage, rather than bundling the delivery costs in. This is how many other utilities (Gas, Water, etc.) are billed, and it makes much more sense. This would also line up better for people with solar panels, as those who choose to leverage a grid connection would lay in line with their utility, or could choose to go off-grid, if they didn't want to pay for the availability of the grid.
When you’re trying to solve public policy problems especially where conservation is concerned the notion of math gets complicated very quickly.
Water is different in that we really only have usage concerns about water, AFAIK there is never any issue with the water pressure drops at peak times (perhaps thanks to water towers). With electricity the concerns are mostly about the peak usage, and not so much the overall usage.
$0.15/kWh seems like enough to begin the dis-incentivizing of usage, and that can certainly be pushed up more.
So you’re asking for a regressive rate in electricity.
If your solution to a public policy issue is “why don’t we just” then you don’t understand the issue. I’m just pointing out externalities that you guys aren’t thinking about when shooting the shit about upcharging low income families and allowing the rich to get richer. You are contributing to the problems we complain about.
Using usage as a proxy for value-received from the grid worked fine when there was a monopoly provider, but with distributed solar being a thing, we have to move off of the model, or we end up with an even more regressive system. As I noted before, we use these systems for water, gas, and other utilities, so we have methods for addressing their natural regressiveness.
Alternately, if you feel (and this is reasonable) that power should be a ubiquitous service provided to everyone, take over the grid, pay for maintenance and development of the grid with tax dollars, and bill only for generation/usage after a reasonable base allocation.
Note: the most recent English document still describes this as "planned", but it has been approved and has gone into effect with the start of 2023.
The difference is though that the state subsidies the "cheaper" rate. When a customer has consumed the subsidized amount of electricity or gas, they pay the full market price.
Also I thought PG&E still had the reverse situation, of people voluntarily paying more for green power.
Also, the companies for infrastructure and that provide the actual energy are separate but the energy supplier charges for the infrastructure provider. The infrastructure provider is semi privatised while the energy supplier is fully privatised.
It kind of works, except that we need like everyone else, to upgrade the power grids to deal with increased consumption and we haven’t invested in that.
That's...not a lot of power. O_o Is it common to get that little amount of power?
I have 200 amps going to my house, but the master breaker on my panel is 160 amps. My car charger alone is 48 amps. When I had an electric stove, that was on a 40 amp breaker.
Only recently, with the introduction of climate goals and ditching gas, houses are getting heavier connections. Electric ovens are typically 16A, although induction cooking stoves are getting 32A or 3phases.
The 22kW car charger is by far the most power hungry device and needs 3x32A.
This is the absolutely worst way to bill. It enourages wasteful use and hits very hard the poorest people who can't afford the flat fee.
I do agree there should be a connection fee, like an Internet connection, that covers fixed costs. Watts cost more than bytes, so a usage fee makes sense too.
Good question! The more power you generate locally, the less you need to transmit along expensive infrastructure, so it is actually in the interest of utilities to utilize and pay for all of the generation capacity they can as close to the consumer as possible. You can't get any closer to the consumer than paying their neighbor to power their house!
This is true, but I don't think the savings on infrastructure scales linearly with the distributed power generated. For example, if you generate 1 MW of distributed power, that reduces the load on wires, transformers and towers across the grid, and may even mean you can eventually use cheaper gear at your next replacement, but it's not going to eliminate the baseline costs (towers, wires, transformer sites, etc.) of serving any particular customer or region.
I work in the industry, and my vision for the future is less about realtime power transmission and more about pooling energy in smaller grid cells, predicting the usage of the pooled energy in the future, and moving energy to the pools which will need more energy sometime in the future at a trickle rate based on predictions. The ideal situation is to reduce energy transfer to zero over time by distributing the energy generation densely amongst the most dense users of the energy. I don't think the industry is ready for such a step-change in thought yet, but someday electricity will be treated more like water than like it is today.
Increasing capacity is really expensive.
It’s cheaper for them to do stuff like buy every customer a more efficient refrigerator or insulate their attic than build a new power plant so they go for schemes like that.
First you pay for the electricity itself, can be from anyone, as on the level of the country in question electricity is entirely fungible.
Next is the connection or standing fee. Make sense, eventually you have to pay for the transformer and cabling to your home, even if in some location this is rather high.
And final piece is taxes + transfer fee paid by kWh. Again, you have pay for the local grid and charging by use makes some sense.
There is two prices that vary per use and one that doesn't. And reasonably so. Maintaining existing lines have a cost.
1) it increases resilience in disaster scenarios and a lot of high usage scenarios. I especially think back to Puerto Rico getting hit by the Hurricane, or the Texas icestorms or things like that. Having a lot of homes semi-independent of the grid would help people mitigate impacts, because you can rely on neighbors for certain things while the grid is down.
2) BEVs are going to introduce a huge additional burden on the grid. But if we couple it with a lot of home solar installations, it will reduce the impact to the grid and the grid can focus on more industrial tasks like highway supercharging for semis and those big challenges.
3) aside from the solar panels, home solar means a distributed storage for the grid too.
Net metering is flawed, but there's the baby with the bathwater argument. Let's introduce better incentives before chucking the flawed ones that are working, and I don't see that happening.
And it's hard to price the incentives. Home solar panels are going to change a lot with forthcoming perovskites, and home storage is going to drastically change with production Sodium Ion, high density LFP/LFMP in the next few years, and Sulfur beyond that.
What I think is ridiculous is the pricing of home solar+storage versus what the grid buyers get. If home solar programs could have their panels bulk-purchased along with grid solar purchases and then the grid providers have to get them installed to homes, it would swap the grid providers from opposing home solar to being incented to finding people to allow the installation.
I think the real issue is that the pricing is almost completely divorced from the actual cost structure, so the whole rate system is a kludge that gives everyone the wrong incentives.
The "net metering" policy being changed isn't regarding "saving the grid the money by reducing the amount delivered to a customer." If you don't use the power from them, you don't pay for it. But this is about the utility paying the customer the retail rate for excess generation - aka paying retail rate for something that would offset a cost they'd otherwise pay wholesale rate to generate. This is about the current (not the new) system: https://news.energysage.com/net-metering-2-0-in-california-e...
It's not clear to me at all that it makes sense to compel the utility to purchase your excess power at the retail rate, if you're generating more than you can use. It also seems to gives weird incentives to size and spend on your home setup.
(I say “essentially” because there is some tiny loss in the system, but that’s maybe 2%, not 70%.)
This is true for non-solar customers too. It may be more true for solar, but unexpectedly high residential loads happen for all kinds of reasons. (A big one is heat on a very cold day, and that tends to be a correlated load.)
Have the power fee set realtime by a market. The price might go to zero if there is excess generation.
Have the transmission fee capped by a regulator - and charge it for any kilowatt hours that enter the power network.
Allow third parties to arbitrage and offer 'fixed rate' deals, so consumers aren't at the whims of an electricity market with occasional sky high prices.
And lately the fixed rates have been quite variable going from 4 cents to 40 cents. The action by European countries caused some uncertainty. So timing has great effect.
Bill is split into market and (local) grid parts. Many consumers have now moved the market parts to realtime pricing, since fixed-price arbitraging has become so expensive.
No, it doesn't.
I have solar+battery with net metering. I buy from the electric company at ~11.5c/kWh and sell our excess to them at ~2.7c/kWh for a difference of ~4.3x
As the sole entity that you can sell to - short of regulators being involved - they set the rate. And yes, there's already a monthly connection fee.
Unfortunately, billing departments run the world.
https://aurorasolar.com/blog/what-to-know-about-dtes-net-met...
https://www.michigan.gov/mpsc/consumer/electricity/distribut...
Yes, if it helps the implementation of the policy.
Our entire power system lacks proper carbon taxation. So I won't cry over minor things like power companies making a bit less money when the effect is a major avenue to mitigating carbon emissions.
Arguably incenting the grid to switch over from coal/natural gas to wind/solar/storage is more important, but lets try multiple approaches and not stop what is working.
The question is whether specific customers should benefit more than others, when the activity they are doing probably adds costs for the others.
The "supply" value of the electricity being generated is going to vary widely, it's not at all obvious that fixing it at the average cost of supplying residential electricity is going to benefit everyone buying the electricity (which as the volume of electricity involved becomes larger sort of becomes a requirement).