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”.
Why are the industrial factory and normal residences using the same electrical hookup? Seems fair if they use the same hookup.
Oh, they’re not? So then the factory likely pays one rate for their industrial connection that needs to pull more power than standard residential usage, and normal consumers pay a lower rate for their lower connection provided.
Exaggerated to clearly demonstrate the problem.
With residential housing, consider the cryptobro continuously drawing 180+ amps of his 200A service, while the rest of the community averages 10A, and one unit is down around 1.5A.
Why is Mr. Ampandahalf paying the same connection fee as Mr. Wunetty?
Because the connection fee is a fee for the connection, which is the same (200A) in both cases. This isn’t difficult.
… because consumption and service connectivity aren’t the same? Consumption and connectivity are two different line items on the bill representing different costs associated with the service.The high consumer will pay more on the quantity used, and possibly at a higher a per unit basis if it exceeds expected values.
From your hypothetical, no one is noted as having a different service hookup, so they’re paying for the same service hookup. What part of that are you struggling to grok?
E: removed unnecessary phrase
That’s fine. There are certainly some per-user costs. Such as the cost of billing each user every month. A fixed administrative charge makes sense to cover those billing costs. That cost is the same whether they are sending a $10 bill or a $50,000 bill, so a flat rate charge is reasonable.
“Infrastructure maintenance” is not a per-user cost. Maintenance is performed on the shared resources: the lines between the poles. The customer pays their own electrician to install, connect, and maintain a service feed; that is not part of the maintenance that the power company performs.
A transformer does not care whether it is maxed out serving 20 users, or it is maxed out serving just 2. It costs the same to maintain either way. Call it $1000 per transformer, just to illustrate.
In a neighborhood with 20 low-use customers (equivalent to 1 transformer) and 10 high-use customers (equivalent to 5 transformers), it is ludicrous that every one of these 30 households should be paying the same $200 “maintenance fee”. The 20 low-use customers incur an average of $50; the 10 high-use customers average $500.