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Comment by secabeen | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

You could institute something like time-of-day-based fees based on average demand for residential users without having the large unexpected bill problem.

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.

They are billed for demand, usage and power factor. They use capacitors to help with power factor.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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

$0.15/kWh seems like enough to begin the dis-incentivizing of usage, and that can certainly be pushed up more.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

You have to compare voltage, too.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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!

> The more power you generate locally, the less you need to transmit along expensive infrastructure,

This is true, but I don't think the savings on infrastructure scales linearly with the distributed power generated. For example, if you generate 1 MW of distributed power, that reduces the load on wires, transformers and towers across the grid, and may even mean you can eventually use cheaper gear at your next replacement, but it's not going to eliminate the baseline costs (towers, wires, transformer sites, etc.) of serving any particular customer or region.

Eventually you will be able to break large grids into smaller ones and still be as reliable as previously, thus eliminating longer runs of transmission lines and reducing power over the lines you cannot eliminate, which will reduce the sizes and costs of the lines, but not eliminate them. Someday, I would hope that you could tie small neighborhoods together as the grid cells, with very little interconnections needed between them.

I work in the industry, and my vision for the future is less about realtime power transmission and more about pooling energy in smaller grid cells, predicting the usage of the pooled energy in the future, and moving energy to the pools which will need more energy sometime in the future at a trickle rate based on predictions. The ideal situation is to reduce energy transfer to zero over time by distributing the energy generation densely amongst the most dense users of the energy. I don't think the industry is ready for such a step-change in thought yet, but someday electricity will be treated more like water than like it is today.

Water works because there are water towers that buffer usage. Until a thaw happens after a big freeze and drains all of the towers. If you can store electricity then you can increase the reliability and move the store pools around as needed depending on the usage.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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