prices as prices aren't lies, they just don't have any immediate relation to costs
How should net metering affect your electric bill?
81–90 of 332 posts
Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?
#82In Sweden there are 2 separate charges, one for infrastructure and one for consumption. The infrastructure bill scales with how big your breakers/fuses (English) are while consumption scales with how many KWh you've used. You often have a different infra provider and power provider. For someone living in a condo/apt the infra cost is usually higher than consumption while in houses where heating often is powered by so…
Yes, this model is common in other utilities in the US (both by water and gas bills are structured this way), with a large meter fee and a consumption charge in line with the resource cost.
Electricity could certainly be charged this way (and should), but it would be a huge change in how electricity is billed here, and the PUC would rather just make changes to just the net-metering system rather than open the can of worms of a full rate re-write.
Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?
#83One of the most common "lies" is price windowing where you charge multiple prices for something that costs you the same. Like when Intel used to sell a 486SX at a lower price because the math co-processor was deactivated on the same chip as the more expensive 486 DX. This pricing "lie" allowed Intel to get more total revenue and sell more total units because they could charge more and less at the same time. Airline ticket prices also work like this sometimes.
Why I put "lie" in quotes is that prices always reflect more than cost. They also reflect the utility to the purchaser. Some people are always willing to pay more or less. Beyond cost, price also reflects utility. It's true the price of electricity is manipulated to shape behavior, but its also true that 200 kW hours is twice as useful as 100kW hours and the purchaser may be willing to pay twice as much for it.
Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?
#84> If a house on average generates as much as it uses, the electric bill will be zero. (In practice there’s a minimum monthly fee, but it’s pretty low.) This was the case in the last house I lived in. The solar panels generated enough power that there was never an electric bill other than the $12 fee to be hooked into the grid. And this was in cloudy, rainy Oregon. I did think about this scenario. If everyone had pane…
If everyone had panels, the kWh price for daytime usage would be $0 or close to zero. Everybody would still pay almost fully for nighttime usage, while daytime usage and production would not have any impact on the bill. Either the fixed part of the bill or the nighttime price would grow as needed to cover the actual cost of the grid and the cost of energy on cloudy days.
Either way, the new pricing would stimulate the installation of solar-powered batteries, to arbitrage between expensive nighttime consumption and cheap selling of surplus production in the morning.
On cloudy days the grid would have to supply almost-free energy at noon, but then would also make more money at night because households batteries wouldn't have enough charge. I'm not sure if this is true in the summer, when even on a cloudy day there might be enough sunlight to charge the battery, but the actual balance would guide the utility company on how much to increase the fixed part of the bill vs the nighttime price.
I am not usually a fan of the efficient market hypothesis, but here it seems to work albeit with some serious simplifications.
Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?
#85> If a house on average generates as much as it uses, the electric bill will be zero. (In practice there’s a minimum monthly fee, but it’s pretty low.) This was the case in the last house I lived in. The solar panels generated enough power that there was never an electric bill other than the $12 fee to be hooked into the grid. And this was in cloudy, rainy Oregon. I did think about this scenario. If everyone had pane…
> The solar panels generated enough power that there was never an electric bill other than the $12 fee to be hooked into the grid. And this was in cloudy, rainy Oregon.
Yeah, this is it in a nutshell. You were only being charged $12/month for a grid connection, when a grid connection was clearly worth much much more than that. The usual cost of a full off-grid system can clear $100k if it's sized to cover HVAC.
Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?
#86In Sweden there are 2 separate charges, one for infrastructure and one for consumption. The infrastructure bill scales with how big your breakers/fuses (English) are while consumption scales with how many KWh you've used. You often have a different infra provider and power provider. For someone living in a condo/apt the infra cost is usually higher than consumption while in houses where heating often is powered by so…
Yeah, similarly in the UK we have a 'standing charge' (£/day) in addition to the 'unit charge' (£/kWh) - same provider though.
And I can't see why it wouldn't tie up with the reality of the costs. (Competitive downward pressure, and no silly anti-competitive cap as there is on variable £/kWh pricing.) From memory mine's about £6-7pcm.
Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?
#87In Sweden there are 2 separate charges, one for infrastructure and one for consumption. The infrastructure bill scales with how big your breakers/fuses (English) are while consumption scales with how many KWh you've used. You often have a different infra provider and power provider. For someone living in a condo/apt the infra cost is usually higher than consumption while in houses where heating often is powered by so…
Had to look up `district heating` ... that's a not a common thing in the US.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating
Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?
#88If some states weren't captured by utility monopolies, then solar users would be legally allowed to disconnect from the power grid, potentially solving the first issue. It's amazing to me that this is illegal anywhere.
I mean - if you aren't using any power - the base charge is usually less than $10/m. This doesn't seem like an absurd amount of money to have power when your system inevitably goes down for a time. Additionally - if you want to sell your house - you're going to lose a fortune taking it off the grid. It wouldn't qualify for most financing. It's not worth saving $10/m for almost any rational/economic person.
> This doesn't seem like an absurd amount of money to have power when your system inevitably goes down for a time.
It's an incredibly low amount of money to have 24x7x365 reliable power. The alternative (off-grid systems) cost tens-to-hundreds of thousands of dollars. $10/m is nothing, and is arguably too low. The solution should be to charge all customers a higher fixed monthly charge for grid access and distribution, and then charge less for the power consumed.
Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?
#89One of the most common "lies" is price windowing where you charge multiple prices for something that costs you the same. Like when Intel used to sell a 486SX at a lower price because the math co-processor was deactivated on the same chip as the more expensive 486 DX. This pricing "lie" allowed Intel to get more total revenue and sell more total units because they could charge more and less at the same time. Airline t…
> because the math co-processor was deactivated on the same chip
I don't know if this is true of your specific example but modern CPUs SKUs that are differentiated by core count do the same thing except they disable those extra cores because they are faulty but will disable a working core to make a quota.
Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?
#90In Sweden there are 2 separate charges, one for infrastructure and one for consumption. The infrastructure bill scales with how big your breakers/fuses (English) are while consumption scales with how many KWh you've used. You often have a different infra provider and power provider. For someone living in a condo/apt the infra cost is usually higher than consumption while in houses where heating often is powered by so…
Had to look up `district heating` ... that's a not a common thing in the US.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating
It's a thing in the US. If you're ever walking around Manhattan and see steam coming out of a traffic cone, that's the side effect of district heating (groundwater hitting the very hot steam pipes and vaporizing).