Hacker News Reader

Comment by thfuran | Hacker News Reader

Will it? I’m not sure how the utilities structure their prices wrt the actual cost, but they definitely separate the baseline connection cost from usage on bills (at least in the US), so they may not be killed by people using very little power as long as the connection fee actually covers things.

View on HN

The hardest possible demand to meet is random, reasonal, and spikey demand spread diffusely over a large area. Which is more or less homes.

Conversely the easiest possible demand to meet is localized constant and high demand. Basically AI datacenters or industrial users. These guys are basically paying for the grid and residential have it as a subsidy.

The supermajority of the price of electricity is fixed costs related to installing and maintaining capacity. The marginal problem of increasing generation or utilization is cheap. I believe it's like under 20% even for gas power where you have to buy gas. For grid solar it would be even crazier because marginally its basically free they really don't care how much you use it even goes negative but the fixed costs are everything.

So what causes a lot of social problems is when wealthy people get their own private solar because the whole current pricing structure revolves around wealthy people using a lot of electricity and paying down the connection costs for poor people. If they have solar the poor people are fronting the maintainence cost which destabilizes everything.

Without load balancing, AI datacenters are very swingy (which is bad).

Unfortunately the connection fee does not cover all fixed cost. For a long time the model has been fairly "progressive" in this regard. Some of the fixed costs of the grid have been paid for by amortization over the per Kw cost, which had the effect of charging people who used more a larger chunk of these fixed costs. Now with the option to provide your own power if you have upfront capital for solar can build as big of a system as they want. As other comments in the thread have mentioned, net-metering is largely functioned as a subsidy to give money to people who are already doing fine financially. I want green energy, and I think that decentralization has definite benefits, but it's pretty hard to argue against maintaining the grid to allow re-balancing and covering supply shortfalls in specific areas. Here is a video discussing this problem - https://youtu.be/C4cNnVK412U?si=ZzZhoApFW3khqrdq&t=720

What you could do is bill per energy in e.g. 15 minute chunks, and separately bill for transformer/line capacity by e.g. the peak usage in any such chunk over the contract period, like they do in Germany for atypical load profile industrial users since decades ago.

Net metering is overall just entirely stupid as a concept; measure inbound and outbound flow separately if you can't just measure the 15 minute chunks; bill grid fees on the energy price on inbound and only pay energy price on outbound. Or even bill grid fees on outbound up to one of many available large substations, and thus handle the issue of demand across large distances making buildout of solar in a convenient but far away place not being disincentivized vs. more-demand-local buildout.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com