Mildly Infuriating

The electric grid needs a minimum amount of people using it.

There may be some volume related efficiencies (such number of starts/stops) as well as compression of fixed costs that can raise the unit price when volume is reduced.

"In order to continue to make the same profit (or more year over year) we charge more per unit when demand goes down... We also charge more when demand goes up... Suck it peasants"

We took profit for decades from letting our infrastructure decay. Now we still want that same amount of profit, so you have to pay more for us to fix all the problems that should have been fixed with that profit money in the past.

Privately owned publicly enforced monopolies are rife with conflicts of interest. PG&E should be taken over by the state yesterday.

It’s so absurd to me that the Energy Star stickers on appliances at the store say “Estimated based on $.13 per kW/h” and we have to pay around 5x that much.

At what point is it cheaper to disconnect from the grid and just use solar with a back up generator? 50 cents+ per kWh is insane.

Electrical service should have a fixed connection fee.

The reason this happens is because electrical companies have two different kind of costs:

• Those related to obtaining the electrical power from generation companies.

• Those related to maintaining the grid and providing a connection.

In the past, normally what they did was to simply reduce this to a single price, and for that to be per unit of electricity used. That is, the consumer pays $N. That was at least not an entirely unreasonable approximation when people were pulling electricity off the grid.

The thing is, if a user mostly generates power locally, they still want to have that electrical connection and providing that connection still costs money. But now they're also not paying for their share of the grid connectivity -- it's getting offloaded to the people who aren't generating electricity locally.

Hence, the split that many utility companies are shifting to. There's a fixed charge to have a connection to the grid, which covers the cost of grid maintenance. And there's a separate cost per kWh of energy used.

If someone doesn't care about the grid connection -- like, they're confident that they can handle their power needs locally, don't care about having a grid connection, they do have the option to just drop service. But most people want to have the access to draw more power if they aren't generating enough, so they want to retain their grid connection. With the grid connection fee being broken out, they cover their share of the costs.

Now, I've no disagreement that California electricity rates are pretty bonkers. They're some of the highest in the US:

https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/

But the issue isn't having a separate grid connection fee from an electricity used fee.

And public utilities commissions just exist so people can think they have a voice while their meetings are just a big circlejerk.

Municipal power is so the way to go, much like everything else, especially because home town service will be run by home town people that care. You think PG&E or Verizon or Comcast cares about your town? Nope.

My utility company spams me with warnings to reduce consumption to save them money in surge events while also shaming people for being in the top 40th percentile of consumption because they've got all these empty houses not using power to compare to.

I'm all for eating the rich, but I'm still going to point out why exactly this can make sense.

Let's say you have an energy company that owns a solar farm, you're not looking to turn a profit, just provide clean energy to the world: You produce electricity at effectively zero cost.

However, your solar farm needs to be paid down within its lifetime of ≈30 years, which is independent of energy consumption. So you decide to charge a rate that ensures 1/30th of your production costs are paid back each year, so that you can replace the solar farm after 30 years.

This effectively means you are charging a constant rate for access to energy supply, independent of consumption. This again means that the rate per kWh goes up if average consumption goes down.

Individual customers can still save money by reducing consumption relative to the other customers, but nobody saves money if everyone reduces consumption. This makes complete sense when your "marginal cost" (i.e. the cost of producing energy) is negligible compared to the initial investment of building the power plant, and also applies more or less to nuclear, hydropower, and wind power as well.

Given that this is not an ideal organisation though, I wouldn't put it past them to increase the rate such that it more than offsets the decrease in consumption, thereby increasing their profit. In that case: Fuck them.

I just think we should be aware that our current understanding of energy prices as linked to day-to-day consumption (because the primary expense for a thermal power plant is the cost of fuel), will become outdated as we move to clean energy sources. At some point, we should be paying a near-flat rate for "access to power", rather than a rate for each unit of power consumed.

That’s not really what it’s saying.

It’s saying if they sell less power then the cost per unit of power goes up. This is how all businesses work due to economies of scale. If you sell a lot of stuff then you can sell the stuff for less money and still make more money.

If you personally use less power then that won’t increase your price per unit enough to offset the savings you made by using less power.