California's electricity rates will shift to a fixed fee based on income

Y'all pay 41¢?! That's insane, the highest priced energy provider where I'm at is 7¢. Does your electricity come with foot massages? If you take the default electric provider you pay 5¢, and 5.5¢ if you want 100% renewables.

i pay roughly the same in NYC

>Simple and fair.

The whole point is to obfuscate prices and subsidies so the ~50th to ~90th percentile income earners (the young, productive work force) don't get uppity.

If the goal was to simply help the poor, then the government simply would have given them cash. But the goal was to "help" them (or at least say you did), but also mitigate the burden from the most influential (older people/richest people).

Remember: PG&E is a for-profit company. The CPUC consists of folks pretty much entirely in bed with PG&E.

I also love California - it's beautiful here, and the people are generally wonderful. But our state government, despite claiming to be blue, is pretty damned conservative across the board. Corporations first, then - if we still have time - the people.

I'd be fine if this was a true fixed fee, that gets increased when infrastructure is gets improved, similar how water is billed.

But I know it won't because ya know corruption and waste.

At first this seemed ludicrous, but there is some rationality in charging net zero customers right? To put it another way: assuming the customer is only using the grid as an emergency backup and as a discharging service - isn’t that still a service? Even if the transmission lines are only taking power from my property, they still need maintenance?

Presumably maintenance costs that would be overcome trivially by my generating a bit of excess power - but still non-zero?

PG&E (dunno about the others) is not a public utility, it is a private company that has been granted a monopoly by the local government. They made 2.2 billion dollars profit in 2023, after going bankrupt in 2019. There is no incentive to reduce prices since there aren't really any competitors.

Every fee increase has to be granted by a regulatory agency (CPUC) which clearly hasn't been doing much regulation, and gives us odd pricing strategies like this one.

One small city (Alameda) in the Bay Area, surrounded by PG&E customers, has its own municipal utility and they pay a third of the cost.

Shouldn't you be grandfathered into the previous deal?

that's a result of PG&E fucking us consumers on the deal.

It is a reduction in per-kwh rates coupled to the introduction of a universal flat fee. You can see in the graph in the article, for PGE and SoCal Edison it shifts the burden from users of more than 515kwh to users of less electricity and for SDGE customers the burden shifts from users of more than 313kwh to users of less. Of course there is also an income-based distortion to soften this for poor people.

This seems kinda nuts, why would we incentivize electricity consumption? I guess there is some infra cost to connect customers to the grid but how can that be worth 8--18% of the cost of the kwh?

They are shifting the charges from all usage based to partially fee based, which forces those who use very little (due to having solar on their home for example) to still have to pay. That's offsetting the reduction in usage rates. And in all cases lower income households get subsidies.

Currently, I pay $10 per month to be connected to grid. Now I will need to pay $24 with zero consumption for majority of the year.

Actually providing electricity consists of two parts. There is the fixed infrastructure of all the transmission lines, transformers, maintenance, and similar, plus the preparedness of generators to provide electricity on demand even when it isn't financially worthwhile. (The latter robustness was behind Texas' problems a few years ago.) Then there is the electricity you actually consume. They were all combined into one per kwh price that was adjusted every year or so by the regulator so the utilities got to cover the costs and get a 5% return on their "investments".

This is now an attempt to bill separately for those fixed costs versus the actual kwh costs. As an example someone with solar and battery completely covering their needs would have been paying $0 (there is more & fine print), despite all that fixed infrastructure being in place to provide all their needs without notice. Similarly homes with solar panels are pumping electricity back into the grid at times now when it is least needed. Commercial solar providers get curtailed and cannot do that. (See "duck curves" for more information.)

People using the least amount of electricity weren't paying much. People using the most electricity were getting solar, and weren't paying much towards that fixed infrastructure. Those in the middle were paying the most. This will in theory move more of the burden onto either side of the middle. Make your own mind up if that is fair.

But it gets worse. Most electricity in the state is provided via PG&E. You'll note they have been in the news over the last decade for various incidents such as exploding gas mains and neglecting maintenance leading to wildfires. That has been very expensive to address and rectify (many billions of dollars). Guess who is ultimately paying for all that? Hint: not the shareholders.

Are you asking for a friend?

What's stopping anyone from doing illegal activities?

This is not eliminating use-based billing. It's adding an income based fee on top of rate decreases. You'll still pay for the electricity at some of the highest rates in the world.

I have solar, and it's mostly (90%) not being utilized and sent back (I overspecced when NEM 3.0 was about to hit).

Prior to this, it made sense to sell it back to PG&E. Now I'm looking for uses to only sell back what it makes sense to sell back. Obviously transitioning gas therms and replacing with electric is underway (for heating/cooking), as well as charging an EV but there will likely still be excess.

So mining bitcoin? But only if I can spin up & down the mining when solar ramps up/down.