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Comment by nullpoint420 | Hacker News Reader

I’m jealous. Where I live in California the off peak rate is $0.32/kWh and peak rates are $0.58/kWh.

Rural area power co-op member here - flat rate 24/7 for residential is .13/kWh. Businesses/farms can get down to .10/kWh if they qualify.

They proposed to update it to .15 so they could trim trees around the lines a little better, but it got denied by the co-op members as unnecessary.

> They proposed to update it to .15 so they could trim trees around the lines a little better, but it got denied by the co-op members as unnecessary.

Pge felt the same way and it did t turn out so well for them. I hope your coop is never found to be at fault for the next record breaking fire…

So the increase was to buy spray equipment to attach to a helicopter. And a helicopter. One of the co-op ex-board members' son recently moved back to the area and had his license. . . It was a shameless cash grab by that family and was rightfully voted down by a wild majority of the co-op members. Every member of the board was replaced within 2 years of them proposing the increase as well.

They currently keep all the lines clear via bucket trucks, and when they spray, they use ATV's and trucks. It takes most of June to spray all the lines, but they get it done easily.

The actual physical infrastructure has been replaced almost entirely in the last 10 years through federal and/or state grants in combination with income from power charges.

Also, these are just fundamentally different entities. PGE is a private entity that operates for a profit. Our power company is a co-op owned and run by its members. If they have any profit at the end of the year (once infrastructure improvements and safety net investments are paid for), the money gets paid directly back to the co-op members. It's a WILDLY different incentive structure.

Not every place is built in a dry forest which traditionally burned regularly but the current infrastructure is built around never burning. The only risk in, say, Michigan, is the power going out at inopportune times.

If that's considered high, I'm just not going to say what it costs in the Caribbean.

At least where I was.

I'm in the Bay Area - Off peak is 0.44 and peak is 0.48

Separately for "clean power", Off peak is 0.13 and peak is 0.17

So that's a combined 0.57 and 0.65

$0.08/kWh here for central Illinois

Taxes and supply charges are what take it from cheap to expensive in Illinois.

Yep, and we have 5 nuke power plants in vicinity

Doesn’t that sort of rate make the payoff for a solar system install just a few years?

Yeah - even with PGE trying their best to screw over solar customers in the last few years, I figure we've at least gotten our money back in ~15 years of owning a ~4KW system. Something like 75 MW generated in that time, assuming the inverter is more-or-less correct. At this point, doesn't make any sense anymore, since they only credit you like $0.1 and charge you $0.6 (I haven't looked too closely at it) - you'd have to generate 5-10x your consumption to mostly offset it.

We bought ours in '10 to offset high AC use in the summer - we were paying $1000-1500 a month for 2-4 months in the summer. The first few years, our "year-end" balance was < $1K (we just paid minimum payments the rest of the year), so I figure we easily saved $2-3K/year in those early years, and after the incentives in those days, we paid ~$14K, so maybe 7 years to pay it off. Our year-end balance was more like $3K the last time, and I think we're still producing 80-90% the same power, but PGE keeps changing the plans around. At this point, I'm interested in upgrading our cells from 300W to 450W, but I'd only do that with a battery system that also stores energy so that we could go more or less entirely off-grid. But probably need a new roof first..

> I’m jealous. Where I live in California the off peak rate is $0.32/kWh and peak rates are $0.58/kWh.

My California rates are .50/63 off/on peak

"Jealous" is not the term I'd use...

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