I think it’s more like this: Say maintenance of a grid costs $1 million/year, power generation costs another $1 million/year and people use 10 million kWh at 20¢ per. Everything is balanced. Then half the people cut their usage in half. Grid maintenance still costs $1 million/year, generation dropped to $750,000, but revenue dropped to $1.5 million. They have to raise the price 16% to go back to paying for maintenance. You’re still saving money if you dropped your usage more than 16%, but those that didn’t pay the difference.
Since you generally have to be fairly well-off to afford the massive upfront labor costs involved with solar, its adoption has disproportionately raised the living expenses of the lower class.
The alternative is a base services charge, where everyone pays a flat percentage of the grid maintenance costs and then his or her usage is on top of that. No idea why it’s taking this long for PG&E to adopt that model, but adding charges for solar is a big improvement in equity.
possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 1 hour ago
Fuel is not the biggest cost especially in areas with renewable sources. The machinery that keeps the grid going is very complex and expensive. There are needs to be redundancy and flexibility build it which costs even more.