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Seen on reddit and other sources:
https://old.reddit.com/r/fresno/comments/1hxqlx7/the_more_i_try_to_save_energy_the_higher_the/
Its already 50c or more per kilowatt hour... https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/residential-electric-rate-plan-pricing.pdf
On top of the "The Electric Home Rate Plan includes a $15-per-month Base Services Charge"... because people were starting to get 100% of their power from solar and it was "unfair".
Privately owned publicly enforced monopolies are rife with conflicts of interest. PG&E should be taken over by the state yesterday.
There are public utilities in the US. And yes, they offer better service and lower costs than the competing private utilities.
I didn’t know about the benefits until I moved somewhere served by them. I think we would have more of them if people could see the benefits, but unfortunately the utilities you have access to are limited by where you live.
Very yesterday.
It’s ridiculous that due to some old unique contract the city of San Mateo? Mountain View? (I forget) which is right in the heart of PG$E turf gets to set their own rates and they are less than a quarter of the price, for the same electricity from the same generators and wires. PG$E is such a horrible scam.
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.
And then eventually we'll stop fixing it for that amount of money, pocket the difference and go "tough, pay more" if you want it fixed again.
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.
At least in Illinois, there is no option to go off grid. You're legally required to maintain a grid connection even if you are generating all power locally.
This is roughly what we have in the UK.
For electricity, the standing charge is 61.6p/day, then 23.3p/kWh.
And gas is 29.6p/day, then 6.1p/kWh.
(The numbers vary, and you can choose to lock rates for the duration of a contract).
There has been some discussion of it in recent years (after it doubled, thanks Putin).
Whether it is fair for people using less energy...But in reality, everyone has similar 100 or 60A connections to the grid.
There are tarrifs for very low users, where the standing charge is combined with the first kWh.
Once I'm off the gas boiler, and on a heat pump, I may get my gas disconnected to save the standing charge.
On a tangent, as you may be interested, we now have the option of flexible electricity pricing that tracks the wholesale rates for the day. Usually, it's cheaper, sometimes even negative. Link.
However, this week there has been a lot of expensive energy, so it's been butting up against the £1/kWh limit!
You do have to be careful here, because some localities actually require a grid connection to maintain a certificate of occupancy. Title 24 changed in recent years (here in CA), but you may still end up fighting your municipality and the POCO.
There's certainly some reasonability to that. However, if the person decides to terminate service, maintaining the grid doesn't become any cheaper for the power company. The lines are already installed, the connections made, and the company will continue to upkeep your connection all the way up to your home, even if it is terminated locally. They'll do that just in case you or future homeowners no longer generate power and wish to continue service, and your neighbors will likely still be using it anyway. So by that same reasoning, maintaining a just-in-case service connection that you don't typically need because you generate your own power also doesn't result in increased maintenance costs to the power company. So there is also an argument to be made that that cost shouldn't be pushed to them, but to the power drawers that the power company actually wants to serve anyway, the ones motivating them to build more grid in the first place.
The way we do it in New York city is that the power bill has two columns. Delivery charges to pay for the lines and maintenance, and supply charges for the power generation. Both are per kW, like 3cents delivery plus 15cents supply. Plus a couple of fees and sales tax.
"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"
It isn't about profit. Its about paying for the infrastructure. It cost a lot of money to maintain the grid. The supply and demand has to meet exactly or the frequently of the power will get out of wack. (AC is hard)
If they can't afford to maintain it in a changing world, perhaps we should nationalize the infrastructure that we all depend on.
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 example breaks down with electricity sources with a fuel cost. But it makes more sense as the grid moves to more energy sources without fuel.
But also, if energy supply is higher than demand on a large grid, they can decrease investments into new solar plants so they fall below the replacement rate from facilities aging out. In your example there's only one solar farm, but in reality there's many being built on a grid at any time.
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.
It’s not how all businesses work. Many businesses lower prices when there is a surplus. Consider filling up at the gas station for example.
It’s ridiculous that energy prices would go up when they are spending less on natural gas, coal, or whatever they are using to create the power.
Honestly crap like this is just going to encourage those that can afford it to install solar panels and backup batteries to load up on cheap electricity. Then the power company is really going to throw a hissy.
The power generation facility itself still has massive overhead costs regardless of how much fuel they are using at any given time.
i think the title has the "you" meant in the "you all" sense, if the customers as a whole save energy, the price per unit goes up.
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.
Yep. And they are talking about more increases this year.
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 thought energy in the U.S. was laughably cheap, but those prices are surprisingly expensive compared to my feel-good-all-hydro-and-wind plan at 0,35€/kWh
My UK rates are about £0.26/kWh for the day rate, £0.07/kWh for the night rate which is when things like car charging is done. Excess solar generation makes me £0.15/kWh I send back to the grid although not much of that going on in the winter ;-)
We also pay a daily standing charge for the grid connection.
That’s California though, where everything is expensive. In the east coast I paid around $0.20 this summer which includes peak hours. Although it has steadily gone up in the last few years. It used to be $0.12-$0.14.
They are outrageously expensive compared to my hydro Quebec rate of USD $0.05/kWh, or even my previous rate in Ontario of (varying by the the time of day) USD $0.06-0.12/kWh.
96% of Quebec electricity is generated by hydro power, which of course doesn't require any fuel. The other thing, though, is that power generation and transmission is done through a public corporation, not a private one. The profits go into general government revenue.
California has historically high electricity rates.
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.
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.
You cant legally disconnect a residential residence in CA from the grid unless you get some HEAVY permits. Thats one of the reasons PGE introduced the minimum fee, people with solar. Some people were making a profit pushing electricity into the grid so they make it 0.03c per kwh credit instead of wholesale.
Half the houses over here have solar now when you drive down the street. Im thinking of getting it too.
Interesting, that they'll buy back energy at a fraction of the cost they're charging for energy
