During the first dotcom bubble back in the 1990s, the colocation companies (predecessors to today's cloud companies) sold bandwith based on peak bandwidth usage. It was called the 95/5 plan. It worked like this. They measured my egress data and stored it for every five minutes in the month. At the end of the month they'd calculate the 95th percentile of all those five-minute measurements and then charge me for that.
In other words, I paid for peak egress. Now AWS just bills US$0.09 per gigabyte. Their billing algorithm doesn't care about my peak load. And I have to pay just as much for the rest of the year as I would pay on Cyber Monday, when Amazon's bandwidth is spoken for by their own servers. That's a dislocation.
Lots of stuff works that way. Electricity, water, sewer, highway tolls.
Regulated monopoly electric grid operators traditionally get their rates set as a percentage of the value of their accumulated capital physical plant: turbines, poles, cables, transformers, switches, the land they sit on, and all that. Part of that cost is fixed, but most of it varies with the amount of power they sell.
Net billing for domestic solar electric panels isn't fair to the electric grid operator. When I connect to them on a net-zero tariff, I basically get 100%-efficient power storage for free. They're my battery, and a fine battery they are.
The local grid has an excellent pumped-storage hydroelectric rig. It's about 70% efficient, and it's about 70 miles from here. Shouldn't I pay something for all that if I use it? (The Northfield Mountain storage facility was originally built to store the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant's overnight output for peak load, and it outlasted the nuclear plant.)
During the first dotcom bubble back in the 1990s, the colocation companies (predecessors to today's cloud companies) sold bandwith based on peak bandwidth usage. It was called the 95/5 plan. It worked like this. They measured my egress data and stored it for every five minutes in the month. At the end of the month they'd calculate the 95th percentile of all those five-minute measurements and then charge me for that.
In other words, I paid for peak egress. Now AWS just bills US$0.09 per gigabyte. Their billing algorithm doesn't care about my peak load. And I have to pay just as much for the rest of the year as I would pay on Cyber Monday, when Amazon's bandwidth is spoken for by their own servers. That's a dislocation.
Lots of stuff works that way. Electricity, water, sewer, highway tolls.
Regulated monopoly electric grid operators traditionally get their rates set as a percentage of the value of their accumulated capital physical plant: turbines, poles, cables, transformers, switches, the land they sit on, and all that. Part of that cost is fixed, but most of it varies with the amount of power they sell.
Net billing for domestic solar electric panels isn't fair to the electric grid operator. When I connect to them on a net-zero tariff, I basically get 100%-efficient power storage for free. They're my battery, and a fine battery they are.
The local grid has an excellent pumped-storage hydroelectric rig. It's about 70% efficient, and it's about 70 miles from here. Shouldn't I pay something for all that if I use it? (The Northfield Mountain storage facility was originally built to store the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant's overnight output for peak load, and it outlasted the nuclear plant.)