Sounds like the reasonable thing to do is to the electric bill into a fixed fee portion (infrastructure) and a variable fee portion (energy).
The main difference is that a fully variable model subsidizes solar panel owners at the expense of the other clients, which makes solar panels a more attractive investment, whereas here the case for home solar is much weaker, particularly for low energy consumers.
I pay the company that supplies the electricity per kilowatt-hour for the energy and the company that owns the local distribution network for the rental of the cables and a per kilowatt-hour fee for transporting the energy.
In my case it is just one company but the energy supplier could be separate from the infrastructure owner.
Public utilities generally provide a higher caliber of service at a lower price, with less administrative bloat.
The performance of utilities is more a function of regulatory power and willingness to regulate rather than utility ownership.
This was designed to avoid the 'run it into the ground's privatisation mentality, but it went the other way. Sadly, there was no price component for improving the network with new ideas, so it is still the same design as 100 years ago.
A system designed by accountants has done things accountants love, and nothing for electrical engineering or the citizens. Surprise.
The old SEC wasn't innovative or cheap, and neither is the privatised system. For incentives to be effective they have to be broken down to be smaller components rewarding specific conduct, and tweaked in response to system performance.
And when things fail, demand can often be blamed.
And if you lump everything into the variable fee, at least you have more incentive to conserve.
That can be solved by implementing time-of-use pricing and incorporating the "peak demand" infrastructure cost into the price. You would calculate how much infrastructure is needed to provide a "baseline" load (the trough on a demand graph), and divide that among the "fixed" portion. Perhaps you also add some sort of locality adjustment so rural/urban areas pay their "fair share". The rest of the infrastructure cost would be added the variable electricity price.
>And if you lump everything into the variable fee, at least you have more incentive to conserve.
That in itself isn't a bad thing. The problem is that with solar panels/wind power, you're also shifting the cost from people who can afford to install renewables (usually richer people with money to invest) to people who can't (usually poorer).
Really should have a reward for users that can reduce their demand when asked, or use time of day pricing.