Comment by jonhohle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonhohle | Hacker News Reader

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Most people aren’t familiar with a peak demand rate because it’s not common in many markets. Take the highest kW use period of the month, and multiply kW demand by $20. Run the oven; pulls 3kW; $60. Run the oven and the stove top (1.8kW) at the same time $96. Screw up one time during the month and you might as well not care about the rest of the month.

I’m being a bit hyperbolic - it’s averaged over the highest 1 hour peak demand period (4pm-7pm, M-F), but it does limit what things can be run simultaneously (no dryer, oven and AC at the same time, for example). We schedule things around that, Our peak demand for this past month was 2.3kW. That single line item charge is higher than our entire gas bill.

There’s a separate use charge as well, but per kWh that’s pretty low. Then, of course, there’s the dozens of other random charges and fees ($86) that have nothing to do with electricity generation and everything to do with being a monopoly (court resolution surcharge: $3.58). The idea of moving more things to electric is nauseating.

I agree it's not common. I don't think I've ever heard of anyone with demand charges on a residential account. That's typically for large industrial and commercial ratepayers.

Where do you live, with what power company?

It sounds like your electric company is straight up corrupt, which would indeed be a barrier to electrification. For reference, the main demand reduction my municipal electric company does is to send text messages on hot days asking us to use less air conditioning.

Commercial electric rates have long worked that way. The cheap coal power plants that were used commonly 40 years ago did not like to throttle down and so it made sense. Of course things have changed and Peak has a completely different cost structure now and so it no longer makes the sense it did 40 years ago but

Sure? I understand the fundamental problems here, but it's a residential electrical company's job to solve them as best they can with things statistical modeling and buying capacity ahead of time - not to pass them on and leave customers over a barrel!

I do understand that mine lands on the opposite side of not being the most economically optimal, compared to say variable time of use rates. I was just illustrating how out of wack the explained pricing structure is. At that point, why even bother upgrading from a 60A service?

If this is really a modern competitive cost structure with nearly free incremental electricity (great for running computers etc!) then the obvious answer is to get some batteries rather than contorting your life around the POCO's hyper-discretized schedule. But it reads to me like an electric company just putting customers over a barrel because it can. I would have to know the actual $/kWh incremental rate to think otherwise.

You have more options to manage this and so can get a lower total cost.

I don't quite understand what you're saying, and this seems like a recipe for talking past one another. In general of course there are many ways to individually mitigate a market failure, but this doesn't make it any less of a failure. And as described, OP's rate structure seems like the product of a market failure.

They themselves said that such charges aren't common from other providers, and that their POCO acts with unrestrained monopoly power to tack on a bunch of arbitrary fees. My only point was that this is part way to not even having electrical service in the first place, and is exactly the kind of stuff that needs to be reigned in if we want more things to be electrified.

I don't know where OP lives or his situation. I know a few people have chosen to put their house on a rate such as he lives in because by managing of themselves they can get a better better deal overall. Those people though do have a choice and they could go on the slightly higher constant rate per kilowatt hour price that most residential, customers have.

I chose to interpret it as his choice, but if - as you seem to think - he has no choice and this is how his electric is billed, I would agree that his utility is stupid.

OP doesn't sound very happy about the arrangement to me. If it were consensual due to saving money from running a bunch of steady heavy loads (a bunch of computers etc), I wouldn't expect words like "nauseating" but rather more of a recognition that intermittent heavy loads are incompatible with something they've chosen for another reason.

You could game the crap out of this with a small home battery or a V2H capable EV.

Though, at the prices and idiocy you are citing, you could probably just cancel your electrical service and get a big house battery. If they don't allow that, you could just stop paying your electric bill entirely. They'd cut you off the grid eventually, stop billing you. Good riddance, I suppose.

> Most people aren’t familiar with a peak demand rate because it’s not common in many markets.

That would be correct, I had never heard of this. it seems extremely punishing and something I would hope your government regulators are trying to fix.

The problem for you isn’t electricity it’s your local laws favouring gas and the utility extracting wealth. 86 usd in fees is more then my entire electric bill has been in the summer (the monthly fees here are 15cad a month)

I imagine your per kWh cost is also much higher too

That said I still don’t think on your math entirely holds up. Ovens and electric elements (even more so for induction) do not just draw their rated power continuously. Once they heat up they drop to a much lower duty cycle like 50%. But that is besides the point now.

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