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What we need is a fundamental change in electricity billing. The value in a grid connection is in its reliability, availability and demand response (you can de

What we need is a fundamental change in electricity billing. The value in a grid connection is in its reliability, availability and demand response (you can demand anything from 1 Amp to 200 Amps at any time, with no notice). The current usage-only billing model is broken. What we should do is pay a large flat monthly fee for the grid connection, then a lower rate for generation/usage, rather than bundling the delivery costs in. This is how many other utilities (Gas, Water, etc.) are billed, and it makes much more sense. This would also line up better for people with solar panels, as those who choose to leverage a grid connection would lay in line with their utility, or could choose to go off-grid, if they didn't want to pay for the availability of the grid.

jjav 4y ago
> What we should do is pay a large flat monthly fee for the grid connection, then a lower rate for generation/usage, rather than bundling the delivery costs in. This is the absolutely worst way to bill. It enourages wasteful use and hits very hard the poorest people who can't afford the flat fee.
hinkley 4y ago
I think you’re missing a different piece of the puzzle here which is that if I pay $10 for the first gallon of water and next to nothing for the next 500, I have an incentive to use more water and not less. I’ve paid for it anyway. When you’re trying to solve public policy problems especially where conservation is concerned the notion of math gets complicated very quickly.
- secabeen 4y ago
  Perhaps, but if we want to dis-incentivize usage as a political policy, we can just increase the usage charge above from "next to nothing". For power, generation costs in California run from $150/MWh to -$150/MWh: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/prices.aspx https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/prices.aspx $0.15/kWh seems like enough to begin the dis-incentivizing of usage, and that can certainly be pushed up more.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    So we’re going to reduce the hourly rate and charge a base fee, and then increase the hourly rate back to the old value? So you’re asking for a regressive rate in electricity. If your solution to a public policy issue is “why don’t we just” then you don’t understand the issue. I’m just pointing out externalities that you guys aren’t thinking about when shooting the shit about upcharging low income families and allowing the rich to get richer. You are contributing to the problems we complain about.
    - secabeen 4y ago
      Certainly such a model is regressive, but it is in line with the actual costs of service. In my opinion, it's better to have a pricing model that reflects the actual costs of service, then an explicit subsidy to repair the regressivity issue, such as the Consumers Affordable Resource for Energy (CARE) Program in California. Using usage as a proxy for value-received from the grid worked fine when there was a monopoly provider, but with distributed solar being a thing, we have to move off of the model, or we end up with an even more regressive system. As I noted before, we use these systems for water, gas, and other utilities, so we have methods for addressing their natural regressiveness. Alternately, if you feel (and this is reasonable) that power should be a ubiquitous service provided to everyone, take over the grid, pay for maintenance and development of the grid with tax dollars, and bill only for generation/usage after a reasonable base allocation.
- birken 4y ago
  Additionally, the worst strains on the grid are really measured by the peak loads, so if you change billing a way that makes the peak energy less expensive, and therefore disincentivize people to (a) reduce usage at peak times or (b) install solar panels/batteries to mitigate their peak usage, then it actually might make the grid more unreliable. Water is different in that we really only have usage concerns about water, AFAIK there is never any issue with the water pressure drops at peak times (perhaps thanks to water towers). With electricity the concerns are mostly about the peak usage, and not so much the overall usage.
  - secabeen 4y ago
    Yes, that's what you see in the commercial side, where demand charges based on your highest peak usage in a month are common. However, they are un-intuitive and easy to generate big bills for small amounts of power used, so I agree with the general idea that they're not a good idea for residential users.
    - nicoburns 4y ago
      You could institute something like time-of-day-based fees based on average demand for residential users without having the large unexpected bill problem.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    I’m told that Industry gets charged not by how much current they draw but by how much it distorts the grid power waveforms. In fact there are experimental designs out there for power correction facilities that delay the waveforms by for instance 90% of a wavelength (so everything lines up again) and convert the delta to DC to store in batteries. The battery power can be used for their own purposes or to reinject in low voltage situations.
    - UncleEntity 4y ago
      I was watching this one video where they were talking about how they dropped their electric bill by changing how whatever machine they were demonstrating started up. Instead of off to full on they set it to ramp up slow enough to not push them into the higher peak pricing bracket. Electricity usage was the same overall but the bill was less.
- notJim 4y ago
  Theoretically, you could add a third type of charge related to the externalities associated with your consumption. I'm not sure exactly how the accounting would work, but maybe an escalating fee based on the amount you consume. My utility actually does this with electricity, where the rate goes up after your first 1000 kWh. Obviously this could get more elaborate.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    That’s a fancy way to say carbon tax, which I agree with but also recognize has been turned into a political landmine. Also I thought PG&E still had the reverse situation, of people voluntarily paying more for green power.
  - carschno 4y ago
    This is effectively similar to the "energy price ceiling" that the Netherlands have introduced for this year: https://www.government.nl/topics/energy-crisis/cabinet-plans-price-cap-for-gas-and-electricity https://www.government.nl/topics/energy-crisis/cabinet-plans... Note: the most recent English document still describes this as "planned", but it has been approved and has gone into effect with the start of 2023. The difference is though that the state subsidies the "cheaper" rate. When a customer has consumed the subsidized amount of electricity or gas, they pay the full market price.
spockz 4y ago
In the Netherlands you a fixed price for being connected. The amount varies on the size of the connection. Usually 1 phase 40A is as expensive as 3 phase 25A. Anything above that easily triples in price. Aside from this you have net metering still and you pay for what you consume. No “usage bundle” is included in the connection fee. Also, the companies for infrastructure and that provide the actual energy are separate but the energy supplier charges for the infrastructure provider. The infrastructure provider is semi privatised while the energy supplier is fully privatised. It kind of works, except that we need like everyone else, to upgrade the power grids to deal with increased consumption and we haven’t invested in that.
- Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
  > Usually 1 phase 40A is as expensive as 3 phase 25A. Anything above that easily triples in price. That's...not a lot of power. O_o Is it common to get that little amount of power? I have 200 amps going to my house, but the master breaker on my panel is 160 amps. My car charger alone is 48 amps. When I had an electric stove, that was on a 40 amp breaker.
  - glass3 4y ago
    You have to compare voltage, too.
  - spockz 4y ago
    We run at 230V, although these days with solar panels all over the neighbourhood the voltage is slowly going up to 240. Only recently, with the introduction of climate goals and ditching gas, houses are getting heavier connections. Electric ovens are typically 16A, although induction cooking stoves are getting 32A or 3phases. The 22kW car charger is by far the most power hungry device and needs 3x32A.
Ekaros 4y ago
In Finland system is setup for this. First you pay for the electricity itself, can be from anyone, as on the level of the country in question electricity is entirely fungible. Next is the connection or standing fee. Make sense, eventually you have to pay for the transformer and cabling to your home, even if in some location this is rather high. And final piece is taxes + transfer fee paid by kWh. Again, you have pay for the local grid and charging by use makes some sense. There is two prices that vary per use and one that doesn't. And reasonably so. Maintaining existing lines have a cost.
axus 4y ago
Why do power companies even buy back solar power in the first place? It seems like it's not in their interest to help their customers compete with them. I do agree there should be a connection fee, like an Internet connection, that covers fixed costs. Watts cost more than bytes, so a usage fee makes sense too.
- lanstin 4y ago
  They are a regulated monopoly as they have been granted rights by the public to use rights of way. So what hey can and cannot do is determined by politics not just what they think of.
- UncleEntity 4y ago
  > Why do power companies even buy back solar power in the first place? Increasing capacity is really expensive. It’s cheaper for them to do stuff like buy every customer a more efficient refrigerator or insulate their attic than build a new power plant so they go for schemes like that.
  - eppp 4y ago
    Its cheaper to shave peaks than almost anything. A distribution company can spend a normal month's worth of electricity in a few hours at system peaks. Unfortunately people aren't willing to be warm or cold for a bit at peaks to save the utility money. I don't blame them since they will get almost nothing out of it.
- ok_dad 4y ago
  > Why do power companies even buy back solar power in the first place? It seems like it's not in their interest to help their customers compete with them. Good question! The more power you generate locally, the less you need to transmit along expensive infrastructure, so it is actually in the interest of utilities to utilize and pay for all of the generation capacity they can as close to the consumer as possible. You can't get any closer to the consumer than paying their neighbor to power their house!
  - 4y ago

jjav 4y ago

> What we should do is pay a large flat monthly fee for the grid connection, then a lower rate for generation/usage, rather than bundling the delivery costs in. This is the absolutely worst way to bill. It enourages wasteful use and hits very hard the poorest people who can't afford the flat fee.

hinkley 4y ago

I think you’re missing a different piece of the puzzle here which is that if I pay $10 for the first gallon of water and next to nothing for the next 500, I have an incentive to use more water and not less. I’ve paid for it anyway. When you’re trying to solve public policy problems especially where conservation is concerned the notion of math gets complicated very quickly.

secabeen 4y ago
Perhaps, but if we want to dis-incentivize usage as a political policy, we can just increase the usage charge above from "next to nothing". For power, generation costs in California run from $150/MWh to -$150/MWh: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/prices.aspx https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/prices.aspx $0.15/kWh seems like enough to begin the dis-incentivizing of usage, and that can certainly be pushed up more.
- hinkley 4y ago
  So we’re going to reduce the hourly rate and charge a base fee, and then increase the hourly rate back to the old value? So you’re asking for a regressive rate in electricity. If your solution to a public policy issue is “why don’t we just” then you don’t understand the issue. I’m just pointing out externalities that you guys aren’t thinking about when shooting the shit about upcharging low income families and allowing the rich to get richer. You are contributing to the problems we complain about.
  - secabeen 4y ago
    Certainly such a model is regressive, but it is in line with the actual costs of service. In my opinion, it's better to have a pricing model that reflects the actual costs of service, then an explicit subsidy to repair the regressivity issue, such as the Consumers Affordable Resource for Energy (CARE) Program in California. Using usage as a proxy for value-received from the grid worked fine when there was a monopoly provider, but with distributed solar being a thing, we have to move off of the model, or we end up with an even more regressive system. As I noted before, we use these systems for water, gas, and other utilities, so we have methods for addressing their natural regressiveness. Alternately, if you feel (and this is reasonable) that power should be a ubiquitous service provided to everyone, take over the grid, pay for maintenance and development of the grid with tax dollars, and bill only for generation/usage after a reasonable base allocation.
birken 4y ago
Additionally, the worst strains on the grid are really measured by the peak loads, so if you change billing a way that makes the peak energy less expensive, and therefore disincentivize people to (a) reduce usage at peak times or (b) install solar panels/batteries to mitigate their peak usage, then it actually might make the grid more unreliable. Water is different in that we really only have usage concerns about water, AFAIK there is never any issue with the water pressure drops at peak times (perhaps thanks to water towers). With electricity the concerns are mostly about the peak usage, and not so much the overall usage.
- secabeen 4y ago
  Yes, that's what you see in the commercial side, where demand charges based on your highest peak usage in a month are common. However, they are un-intuitive and easy to generate big bills for small amounts of power used, so I agree with the general idea that they're not a good idea for residential users.
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    You could institute something like time-of-day-based fees based on average demand for residential users without having the large unexpected bill problem.
- hinkley 4y ago
  I’m told that Industry gets charged not by how much current they draw but by how much it distorts the grid power waveforms. In fact there are experimental designs out there for power correction facilities that delay the waveforms by for instance 90% of a wavelength (so everything lines up again) and convert the delta to DC to store in batteries. The battery power can be used for their own purposes or to reinject in low voltage situations.
  - UncleEntity 4y ago
    I was watching this one video where they were talking about how they dropped their electric bill by changing how whatever machine they were demonstrating started up. Instead of off to full on they set it to ramp up slow enough to not push them into the higher peak pricing bracket. Electricity usage was the same overall but the bill was less.
notJim 4y ago
Theoretically, you could add a third type of charge related to the externalities associated with your consumption. I'm not sure exactly how the accounting would work, but maybe an escalating fee based on the amount you consume. My utility actually does this with electricity, where the rate goes up after your first 1000 kWh. Obviously this could get more elaborate.
- hinkley 4y ago
  That’s a fancy way to say carbon tax, which I agree with but also recognize has been turned into a political landmine. Also I thought PG&E still had the reverse situation, of people voluntarily paying more for green power.
- carschno 4y ago
  This is effectively similar to the "energy price ceiling" that the Netherlands have introduced for this year: https://www.government.nl/topics/energy-crisis/cabinet-plans-price-cap-for-gas-and-electricity https://www.government.nl/topics/energy-crisis/cabinet-plans... Note: the most recent English document still describes this as "planned", but it has been approved and has gone into effect with the start of 2023. The difference is though that the state subsidies the "cheaper" rate. When a customer has consumed the subsidized amount of electricity or gas, they pay the full market price.

spockz 4y ago

In the Netherlands you a fixed price for being connected. The amount varies on the size of the connection. Usually 1 phase 40A is as expensive as 3 phase 25A. Anything above that easily triples in price. Aside from this you have net metering still and you pay for what you consume. No “usage bundle” is included in the connection fee. Also, the companies for infrastructure and that provide the actual energy are separate but the energy supplier charges for the infrastructure provider. The infrastructure provider is semi privatised while the energy supplier is fully privatised. It kind of works, except that we need like everyone else, to upgrade the power grids to deal with increased consumption and we haven’t invested in that.

Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
> Usually 1 phase 40A is as expensive as 3 phase 25A. Anything above that easily triples in price. That's...not a lot of power. O_o Is it common to get that little amount of power? I have 200 amps going to my house, but the master breaker on my panel is 160 amps. My car charger alone is 48 amps. When I had an electric stove, that was on a 40 amp breaker.
- glass3 4y ago
  You have to compare voltage, too.
- spockz 4y ago
  We run at 230V, although these days with solar panels all over the neighbourhood the voltage is slowly going up to 240. Only recently, with the introduction of climate goals and ditching gas, houses are getting heavier connections. Electric ovens are typically 16A, although induction cooking stoves are getting 32A or 3phases. The 22kW car charger is by far the most power hungry device and needs 3x32A.

Ekaros 4y ago

In Finland system is setup for this. First you pay for the electricity itself, can be from anyone, as on the level of the country in question electricity is entirely fungible. Next is the connection or standing fee. Make sense, eventually you have to pay for the transformer and cabling to your home, even if in some location this is rather high. And final piece is taxes + transfer fee paid by kWh. Again, you have pay for the local grid and charging by use makes some sense. There is two prices that vary per use and one that doesn't. And reasonably so. Maintaining existing lines have a cost.

axus 4y ago

Why do power companies even buy back solar power in the first place? It seems like it's not in their interest to help their customers compete with them. I do agree there should be a connection fee, like an Internet connection, that covers fixed costs. Watts cost more than bytes, so a usage fee makes sense too.

lanstin 4y ago
They are a regulated monopoly as they have been granted rights by the public to use rights of way. So what hey can and cannot do is determined by politics not just what they think of.
UncleEntity 4y ago
> Why do power companies even buy back solar power in the first place? Increasing capacity is really expensive. It’s cheaper for them to do stuff like buy every customer a more efficient refrigerator or insulate their attic than build a new power plant so they go for schemes like that.
- eppp 4y ago
  Its cheaper to shave peaks than almost anything. A distribution company can spend a normal month's worth of electricity in a few hours at system peaks. Unfortunately people aren't willing to be warm or cold for a bit at peaks to save the utility money. I don't blame them since they will get almost nothing out of it.
ok_dad 4y ago
> Why do power companies even buy back solar power in the first place? It seems like it's not in their interest to help their customers compete with them. Good question! The more power you generate locally, the less you need to transmit along expensive infrastructure, so it is actually in the interest of utilities to utilize and pay for all of the generation capacity they can as close to the consumer as possible. You can't get any closer to the consumer than paying their neighbor to power their house!
- 4y ago