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Comment by ursAxZA | Hacker News Reader

It’s strange that in 2025 we still don’t have even a minimal, per-capita baseline tier for electricity.

If a household uses less than the monthly per-capita average, why not cap that baseline at something like $10?

Yes — that gap would need to be subsidized, probably through taxes. But that’s already how grid maintenance works: we socialize the fixed costs while pretending rates are purely volumetric.(and I might be overstating this slightly).

Right now we punish low-usage consumers and reward structural inefficiency. A baseline tier would at least make the incentives coherent.

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> we socialize the fixed costs

Then we should socialize that infrastructure as well. Otherwise if we're merely _amortizing_ the costs then a total capacity metric should apply to each user.

A private company shouldn't be allowed to socialize important shared infrastructure simply because a weak PUC pretends to engage in oversight.

I get the intuition behind fully socializing it, but I wouldn’t go that far. Single-operator systems lose redundancy fast, and that’s dangerous for infrastructure.

A layered mix — county-level public utilities, some private operators, and some hybrid/municipal entities — might be closer to a resilient structure.

Not clean or elegant, but fault-tolerant.

You say this like it is a law of nature, but we can plan and build it directly if we want it. Redundancy is not something that only emerges from an indirect 4d-chess strategy of ownership mixes.

Good point. For example, the TVA and BPA are federal agencies that produce electricity. Clearly publicly owned utilities can be successful.

Exactly — if we want redundancy, we should plan and build it.

That’s why I offered one possible implementation as a hypothesis, not as a law of nature.

If you have a better non-ideal, real-world design in mind, I’d be interested to hear it — it makes the discussion much easier.

I live in a province in Canada where the electrical system is owned and operated by a crown corporation. They are mandated to maintain a very high uptime and they do through several means including redundancy. Our electrical bills are cheaper than much of the US. It certainly can be done; there are other means than competition to ensure adequate service.

It is essentially socialized. The government dictates the rates that utilities company is allowed to charge.

The reason we're all here is because the government currently is dictating those rates in representation of the utility companies needs and not the citizens. How this is essentially socialized is beyond me; yet, I do concede that the same rules applied differently would much more likely meet that standard.

We already have an independent systems operator (ISO) to match the amount of load on the grid with the amount of generator current supplying it. I think this model could be expanded to where the state could literally own the transmission lines and equipment and use various regional contractors which would be engaged to maintain it in coordination with the ISO.

Then we have stable infrastructure where generation _and_ maintenance are open markets which may allow customer rates to no longer be controlled by a utilities commission and instead be directly computed from the actual suppliers costs plus taxes. It may even allow for more regional electric companies to form to provide better service to peculiar areas of the state.

Who owns Edison?

That's more or less the system that exists today? You pay a lower rate up to a certain threshold and then a higher rate kicks in.

The problem with PG&E isn't the rate structure, which isn't all that different from utilities anywhere else in the world. It's that their costs are exceedingly high, through a combination of regulatory pressures and grift. This is exacerbated by municipal and state regulators who are pushing consumers to be more reliant on electric power (bans on gas appliances in new construction, pushes toward EVs, etc).

There are vast swathes of the country where people pay 5-10x less for electricity.

My point was simply that electricity has a “civilization tax” aspect to it, and lower baseline access feels closer to the kind of future-proof system we should be aiming for.

If the floor is gentle, people can actually reduce usage without feeling punished for doing the right thing.

At the moment the baseline tier feels… maybe a “C-rating” version of what a real baseline could be?

So who pays the tax? I mean, California already has some of the highest income taxes, corporate taxes, extra capital gains taxes, sales taxes, etc, etc. If you want to lower the cost of electricity for tens of millions of people without addressing systemic problems that make it ridiculously expensive in the first place, you gotta tax someone.

The effective income tax rate for many SF Bay Area techies is around 50%. Do we jack it up to 65% so that PG&E bills can go down from $400 to $100, like almost everywhere else in the country?

The long version would take us far off-topic, so here’s the short one: if the tax-paying base collapses, none of this matters.

At that point the debate isn’t about pricing — it’s about survival of the system.

I could outline the full methodology behind this view, but that would turn the thread into a private seminar — and that’s not what comment sections are for.

All the majority of people heard from you is “I pay more taxes”

We’ve become an incredibly selfish nation on average, and until these systems collapse and people get to feel the hot stove, they aren’t going to change their minds about keeping any sort of system or infrastructure in place

Where do people pay 3-6 cents for electricity in the US?

which country, UAE? :)

So PG&E already has something like this. It’s called either E-1 or TOU-C, depending on whether time-of-use billing applies. The price for the baseline tier is higher than you’d expect, though.

That makes sense — but it feels like the balance could be better.

If we treat baseline access as a kind of ‘civilization tax,’ the pricing shouldn’t feel punitive for low-usage households.

I don't get it. A very cheap baseline tier would encourage consumption versus what we have today, not reduce it.

Today if I build a cabin somewhere I might decide not to electrify if it costs me $50 per month. But at $10? Sure!

Then if you do electrify, you'll use electricity instead of less-efficient, more-polluting alternatives.

It's a feature, not a bug.

Not if you would have used solar otherwise, or just went without (like a hunting cabin which is often unheated).

Limit it to one use per SSN (dependents included).

I can only imagine the bureaucrats we could hire to manage it!

And why dependents included? Kids can’t move out? I already see ways to game it.

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