No, they should vary depending on the grid connection type. Someone with a three-phase max 100A per phase connection should pay more than someone with a single-phase max 50A per phase connection.
If you’re running a 50kW kiln (or more realistically 4 x 12kW) in your back yard then your annual use may not be that high but the grid needs to handle larger demand spikes. Paying per kWh alone doesn’t adjust for the relevant infrastructure.
I'm not sure that either of those are solid assumptions,but worth some thought.
It's very rare a residential house has a 50kW kiln, so those kinds of spikey loads basically balance out over a subdivision.
Although interestingly, an unintended side-effect of aggressive time-of-use pricing is the entire subdivision has programmed their air conditioners or EV chargers to turn back on right at 9pm when peak pricing ends. That kind of unintended mass-coordination DOES create sometimes-problematic high demand spikes.
There are two alternatives here. One is that your spiky demand doesn't correlate with others, in which case it's irrelevant because although 50kW is a lot for one house it's really not a big deal for the power grid. The other is that it does correlate with other spiky demand, at which point you charge everyone a higher price per kWh at those times.
You could model things with individual per customer rates per minute, but charging based on connection sizes is a lot simpler.
If the goal is simply to gouge customers, independent of use or cost, you might as well charge by height.
The grid itself needs to be paid for as does electricity production. A random neighborhood that wants a huge number of Christmas lights isn’t an issue from the production side, but it can be a real issue in terms of distribution without using enough kWh to pay for that infrastructure.
Someone with smaller service won't be able to create as much variability in load as someone with a much more beefy hookup.
I think we are in dangerous waters when we are are basing public policy on "ability" to have impact opposed to "actual impact. I think it is a genuinely interesting question if and how much this variability contributes to the grid capacity requirements.
You can basically think of individual variability as noise on an analog signal. Does single user variability average out, and if so, on what scale?
How does this variability compare to other amplitude changes, like aggregate or seasonal daily use patterns?
I think it is entirely possible that this noise could be negligible at most scales, but obviously dont have the data.
However, someone with the actual data could easily do an ANOVA evaluation, and see what the actual numbers are.
You could have some unusually heavy usage during off-peak hours and that doesn't require any additional grid infrastructure because there is already plenty of capacity during off-peak hours. Whereas if you want to use the same amount of power during peak hours, that would require more grid capacity, but in general the way to handle that is by charging a higher price per kWh during peak hours, giving everyone the incentive to use less then (and charging them appropriately if they don't/can't).
Total demand for power increases linearly with the number of users. Percent variability of demand decreases with the number of users and approaches a limit of zero.
If we are talking with sizing power infrastructure, capacity required increases with the number of users, but safety factor required decreases with the number of users.
At the margin, infrastructure cost scales with per capita power usage, not with individual variability. The variability cancels out.
That's a pretty big difference in available power for the same price. (5.8~43.5 kW)
The installation cost should vary based on what the house wants access to, and the ongoing cost should be the same as every household. A standing charge for the cost of the infrastructure existing is ridiculous when that same infrastructure is what the power company relies on to deliver their chargeable commodity. It's effectively double dipping - how is it any different from ISPs charging for access and then charging for data on top?
Not to say utility companies don't make obscene profits instead of reinvesting much of that into the infrastructure.
Regarding the ISP, its really the same argument. If I want 2GB/s on a neighbourhood line that supports a max avg service size of 1GB/s then they would be forced to upgrade their lines to service me. Granted, unlike power grids they're liable to just not do that and let service quality degrade and quote the "Up to X Gbps" clause