PG&E Rates Could Drastically Change Based on Your Income
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PG&E Rates Could Drastically Change Based on Your Income
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Re: PG&E Rates Could Drastically Change Based on Your Income
#2Is PG&E electricity super cheap already or something? I pay 2x-3x the top tier they are talking about in FL for electricity.
Re: PG&E Rates Could Drastically Change Based on Your Income
#3So rich people who can afford their accountant fees to hide their income, like with taxes, will pay almost nothing for energy, while the essentially broke person will pay more.
Re: PG&E Rates Could Drastically Change Based on Your Income
#4Is PG&E electricity super cheap already or something? I pay 2x-3x the top tier they are talking about in FL for electricity.
.47c a kWh. Highest outside of Hawaii, third or fourth highest in the world.
You're not paying that in Florida.
Re: PG&E Rates Could Drastically Change Based on Your Income
#5So rich people who can afford their accountant fees to hide their income, like with taxes, will pay almost nothing for energy, while the essentially broke person will pay more.
The “rich people who can afford accountants” in this case are going to be middle income families, and I’m not even talking about household income of more than 100k. Only the bottom 30% will see savings, which you’ll realize is not a big threshold.
Re: PG&E Rates Could Drastically Change Based on Your Income
#6While I understand the desire to have a progressive pricing scheme to offset some of the criticism around solar subsidies being "subsidies for the rich", I think this would be a terrible precedent as far as invasion of privacy. I think it is cynical overreach. There is absolutely no reason that the utility company should gain access to household income data of their entire market.
If the CA government thinks we should have this kind of pricing or means-based support of the utilities, I think they should design it into the income tax code and provide subsidies to the utility from collected tax revenue.
An alternative might be to extend current CARE, FERA, and Medical Baseline Allowance programs to extend discounts or payment assistance for households in need. But I think these programs may also be flawed in that they endanger the privacy of those needing assistance. The state tax board already has the necessary data and the state should not be supporting the creation of additional parallel systems.
Re: PG&E Rates Could Drastically Change Based on Your Income
#7The bill in question seems to be AB 205 [0]:
> Existing law authorizes the PUC to authorize fixed charges that do not exceed certain amounts per residential customer account per month, as provided. This bill would delete the requirement that each electrical corporation offer default rates to residential customers with at least two usage tiers. The bill would additionally require the PUC to ensure that the approved fixed charges do not unreasonably impair incentives for beneficial electrification and greenhouse gas reduction. The bill would instead authorize the PUC to authorize fixed charges for any rate schedule applicable to residential customer accounts. The bill would eliminate the cap on the amount of the fixed charge that the PUC may authorize. The bill would require the fixed charge to be established on an income-graduated basis, as provided, with no fewer than 3 income thresholds so that low-income ratepayers in each baseline territory would realize a lower average monthly bill without making any changes in usage.
Since the income bracketing is a legal requirement, the CA state government will be sharing income data with these utility corps. I would imagine. So the bill’s obviously being positioned as relief for low income households, but what it would do is hand these utility oligopolies access to intelligence on their captive customers so it can fully exploit their price elasticities.
[0] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
Re: PG&E Rates Could Drastically Change Based on Your Income
#8So rich people who can afford their accountant fees to hide their income, like with taxes, will pay almost nothing for energy, while the essentially broke person will pay more.
The “rich people who can afford accountants” in this case are going to be middle income families, and I’m not even talking about household income of more than 100k. Only the bottom 30% will see savings, which you’ll realize is not a big threshold.
Another problem I see is that by reducing the per-unit costs and shifting it back to a flat grid connection fee, they are reducing the incentive to save energy. Is this really going to bring the future we want?
I honestly think it is a mistake to allow grandfathered NEM rate structures to continue, if these other wacky plans are really attempting to compensate for that imbalance.
Maybe we need better than the NEM 3 proposal, to actually charge based on your grid connection size and usage. Something based on peak and actual power transfers as they reflect proportionate reliance on the grid infrastructure.That would be in addition to any actual energy consumption which I think should also follow the NEM 3 plan with retail rates for consumption and wholesale rates for production that vary by time of delivery.
Re: PG&E Rates Could Drastically Change Based on Your Income
#9Is PG&E electricity super cheap already or something? I pay 2x-3x the top tier they are talking about in FL for electricity.
This isn't a fixed rate "total bill," it's the fixed charge base amount onto which they then layer the variable usage-related costs.
Re: PG&E Rates Could Drastically Change Based on Your Income
#10You can't do the flim flam without the shim sham.