• oyo@lemm.ee
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    1 month ago

    Privately owned publicly enforced monopolies are rife with conflicts of interest. PG&E should be taken over by the state yesterday.

    • skip0110@lemm.ee
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      1 month ago

      There are public utilities in the US. And yes, they offer better service and lower costs than the competing private utilities.

      I didn’t know about the benefits until I moved somewhere served by them. I think we would have more of them if people could see the benefits, but unfortunately the utilities you have access to are limited by where you live.

    • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      It’s ridiculous that due to some old unique contract the city of San Mateo? Mountain View? (I forget) which is right in the heart of PG$E turf gets to set their own rates and they are less than a quarter of the price, for the same electricity from the same generators and wires. PG$E is such a horrible scam.

    • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Which is worse, PG&E or SDG&E? Thankfully my house is all electric and solar powered so I get a refund from SDG&E every quarter for the excess energy I’m producing, so I don’t have much experience with them.

  • irotsoma@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    We took profit for decades from letting our infrastructure decay. Now we still want that same amount of profit, so you have to pay more for us to fix all the problems that should have been fixed with that profit money in the past.

    • setVeryLoud(true);@lemmy.ca
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      1 month ago

      And then eventually we’ll stop fixing it for that amount of money, pocket the difference and go “tough, pay more” if you want it fixed again.

    • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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      1 month ago

      The other issue is the impact renewable energy has on the grid. Most renewables are either on or off instead of having a spinning generator. Rotation of a physical generator adds a lot of stability and makes it easier to sync the phase of the power. With things like solar panels you need to have a station to sync the phases which adds more things to worry about.

      • irotsoma@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        That is only an issue in very small grids that are entirely renewables in one location. And the impact of AI on the grid has been much more problematic than any renewable sources because it’s localized and its is sudden spikes in usage whereas spikes in generation can be mitigated with battery and capacitor tech. Spikes at the usage side need to either be mitigated by the user or the grid has to implement mitigation at just those locations which is more difficult to plan for.

      • desktop_user@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 month ago

        if solar was incentivized to have batteries, power factor correction, and (if the power companies can shut off the connection at the house during service to prevent backfeding) use frequency correcting inverters.

  • tal@lemmy.today
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    1 month ago

    Electrical service should have a fixed connection fee.

    The reason this happens is because electrical companies have two different kind of costs:

    • Those related to obtaining the electrical power from generation companies.

    • Those related to maintaining the grid and providing a connection.

    In the past, normally what they did was to simply reduce this to a single price, and for that to be per unit of electricity used. That is, the consumer pays $N. That was at least not an entirely unreasonable approximation when people were pulling electricity off the grid.

    The thing is, if a user mostly generates power locally, they still want to have that electrical connection and providing that connection still costs money. But now they’re also not paying for their share of the grid connectivity – it’s getting offloaded to the people who aren’t generating electricity locally.

    Hence, the split that many utility companies are shifting to. There’s a fixed charge to have a connection to the grid, which covers the cost of grid maintenance. And there’s a separate cost per kWh of energy used.

    If someone doesn’t care about the grid connection – like, they’re confident that they can handle their power needs locally, don’t care about having a grid connection, they do have the option to just drop service. But most people want to have the access to draw more power if they aren’t generating enough, so they want to retain their grid connection. With the grid connection fee being broken out, they cover their share of the costs.

    Now, I’ve no disagreement that California electricity rates are pretty bonkers. They’re some of the highest in the US:

    https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/

    But the issue isn’t having a separate grid connection fee from an electricity used fee.

    • The2b@lemmy.vg
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      1 month ago

      At least in Illinois, there is no option to go off grid. You’re legally required to maintain a grid connection even if you are generating all power locally.

    • GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk
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      1 month ago

      This is roughly what we have in the UK.

      For electricity, the standing charge is 61.6p/day, then 23.3p/kWh.
      And gas is 29.6p/day, then 6.1p/kWh. (The numbers vary, and you can choose to lock rates for the duration of a contract).

      There has been some discussion of it in recent years (after it doubled, thanks Putin).
      Whether it is fair for people using less energy…But in reality, everyone has similar 100 or 60A connections to the grid.
      There are tarrifs for very low users, where the standing charge is combined with the first kWh.

      Once I’m off the gas boiler, and on a heat pump, I may get my gas disconnected to save the standing charge.

      On a tangent, as you may be interested, we now have the option of flexible electricity pricing that tracks the wholesale rates for the day. Usually, it’s cheaper, sometimes even negative. Link.
      However, this week there has been a lot of expensive energy, so it’s been butting up against the £1/kWh limit!

    • bobs_monkey@lemm.ee
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      1 month ago

      You do have to be careful here, because some localities actually require a grid connection to maintain a certificate of occupancy. Title 24 changed in recent years (here in CA), but you may still end up fighting your municipality and the POCO.

    • kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      There’s certainly some reasonability to that. However, if the person decides to terminate service, maintaining the grid doesn’t become any cheaper for the power company. The lines are already installed, the connections made, and the company will continue to upkeep your connection all the way up to your home, even if it is terminated locally. They’ll do that just in case you or future homeowners no longer generate power and wish to continue service, and your neighbors will likely still be using it anyway. So by that same reasoning, maintaining a just-in-case service connection that you don’t typically need because you generate your own power also doesn’t result in increased maintenance costs to the power company. So there is also an argument to be made that that cost shouldn’t be pushed to them, but to the power drawers that the power company actually wants to serve anyway, the ones motivating them to build more grid in the first place.

      • GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca
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        1 month ago

        Well, I suppose they could just take out the stretch of power line between me and my neighbors who use their service and cut down those maintenance costs altogether!

        This isn’t like a driveway, it’s more like a road. It’s used by more people than the people whose property it’s in front of. And where I live, the property owner is considered to be the owner of the lines that extend from the grid to the home, so guess who already pays the maintenance costs on that?

    • Legom7@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      The way we do it in New York city is that the power bill has two columns. Delivery charges to pay for the lines and maintenance, and supply charges for the power generation. Both are per kW, like 3cents delivery plus 15cents supply. Plus a couple of fees and sales tax.

    • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
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      1 month ago

      Are you saying that someone who uses 10kWh of grid power per month should pay the same “connection fee” as someone who uses 990kWh per month?

      • thebestaquaman@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        No, they’re arguing that the price of power should be split:

        • A fee for grid maintenance (equal for all)
        • A fee per unit of consumed power (scales linearly with consumption)

        This makes sense, because regardless of you much power someone uses, the costs associated with maintaining the infrastructure that allows them to draw any power at all remain the same. This also happens to be the model used in Norway, so it’s not an untested concept.

        Another option, relevant when the cost of building the power plant is large and the cost of energy production is negligible, is that everyone connected to the grid pays a near-flat fee in total, which is distributed among consumers depending on how much power they use. I’ve never heard of that option being used before.

      • bob_lemon@feddit.org
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        1 month ago

        Assuming both of those people use exactly the same infrastructure (which they do), yes.

        The person with the higher usage will still pay more in total because the connection fee is just a base price, you’re still paying per kWh (which is forwarded to the companies running the power stations)

        • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
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          1 month ago

          Ok, so, you’re in a neighborhood. You and 100 neighbors are each using 10kWh. 1000kWh total.

          Now a heavy industrial user comes in adjacent to your neighborhood. They are going to need 990,000kWh. The distribution infrastructure is going to need to be upgraded to meet the new need. It is going to need to be upgrade a lot. Those upgrades are going to be extraordinarily expensive to meet the extraordinary needs of that new user.

          Should you and your 100 neighbors each have their recurring connection fee jacked up next month and that charge made equal to the 101st “neighbor”?

          Of course not. That’s just absurd.

          The whole “local generation” issue you were raising is a red herring.

          • forrgott@lemm.ee
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            1 month ago

            Wow. Talk about moving the goal posts. You’re not even taking about the same thing anymore.

            If you just wanna bitch about something, uh, then go in with your bad self. Or something. But rather than even attempt a rebuttal to any of the points raised in this thread, you’ve literally completely changed the scenario being discussed.

            Like, why even bother replying? Your whole tirade doesn’t even make sense in the context of the thread…

            • miss_demeanour@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              1 month ago

              I love when folks introduce hypotheticals, then pile on hypotheticals and nonsensicals, and believe they’ve championed their cleverness.

            • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
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              1 month ago

              I used exaggerated examples to clearly demonstrate the nature of the problem, not to quantify it.

              The problem is still present even within the neighborhood. Residential consumers rarely draw more than 1/10th of their rated service. Crypto-bro comes into the neighborhood and his miners continuously max out his service.

              The power company normally installs and maintains a single service transformer per block; but he alone uses as much power as the rest of the block combined. They have to install and maintain a second transformer just for him, but they spread those extra costs among the entire block.

              Why is it reasonable for the power company to demand you subsidize his electrical connection than for him to pay for what he is using?

          • ramble81@lemm.ee
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            1 month ago

            The “connection fee” would probably be flat by service size. Most homes have 200A connections so that would be one flat rate for everyone with a 200A ingress. If a business uses 400A, they’d get a different price but all 400A would be the same.

            Get it now? That has nothing to do with amount used, but rather the size of your “pipe”