Comment on If you save, we will charge you more
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 1 day agoIs the person’s connection to the grid using less energy a smaller connection, or is it the same? If they’re the same, why should someone using less be charges less of a connection fee? Why would usage impact a fixed on off fee?
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 1 day ago
You would have a point if it were possible to downgrade a connection to closely match your consumption. But that is not the case. You can’t buy a 20A service when everyone in your neighborhood has 200A. It’s a matter of safety: service lines need to be sized based on the upstream current limited, but the current limiter for your service (the main breaker in your panel) is downstream of that service line. If you put an undersized service line to your house and it develops a fault, it will burn up before tripping the neighborhood “breaker”.
It is more reasonable to charge you for the generation and distribution of 2A than for your 2A service to be charged the same “connection fee” as your cryptobro neighbor.
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 1 day ago
You absolutely could pay for a lower rating if you chose to also pay for the equipment to step down the supply to your intake values. That what a transformer substation is for, and why the factory and residential lines can share the same upstream but get different local outputs. It’s just going to be so much more expensive that you’re never going to go that route unless you’ve got a lot of people that want to do the same.
Is that not what your consumption fee is for? You’re paying for generation/distribution for the power you use, and the power company also tacks on a base fee to account for other maintenance costs that had been bundled but were being lost due to net metering.
From a collective perspective, it makes sense to pay to connect, and also pay per usage when you have the potential to have distributes generation, but centralized maintenance of the shared infrastructure.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 23 hours ago
Based on that comment, I think I understand the issue.
In my state, I can purchase power from literally any of a hundred generators. I pay them to put power on the grid, for me to take off.
I also pay a single grid provider to (ostensibly) transfer that power from where it generated to me.
What I am talking about here is the fact that both the generator and the grid operator have costs that depend on “consumption”. The more power I use, the greater the load on the grid, and the more infrastructure they need. They might be able to use a single transformer to adequately serve 20 low-use households; they might need 5 transformers to adequately serve 10 high-use households.
Even though all 30 of these households have 200A service, It does not make sense that the cost of these 6 transformers should be evenly assessed. It does make sense that two high-use households (who use a full transformer) pay the same total fee as the 20 low-use households (who also use a full transformer).