I don't think grid access fees should be equal personally. Why does someone in a condo in San Jose pay the same as someone in a remote Sierra foothill community (ex. Omo Ranch) with extremely high fire danger which is leading to enormous utility costs. Many of those people might be able to be off-grid if there was incentive (ie. high costs of grid access). You find more off grid homes in Alaska where connection is simply not feasible due to remoteness.

You're buying PG&E's lies.

Hydro Quebec serves a far, far tinier population than California, and has equal fire hazard, if not more, and far more untamed nature than California. Yet Hydro Quebec doesn't have PG&E's issues, and delivers the least expensive power in North America.

There are reasons for the lower costs, but my point is, they maintain their lines. They cut back brush. They deal with encroachment. The problem is PG&E does not perform the maintenance they need to.

All complaints by PG&E "oh, that's so hard to do, poor us!" is just wavy hand stuff, lies, and bull.

From what I've read, they just see trimming back brush and trees as "cost", and barely do it as a cost saving measure. Don't buy their bull! The problem is 100% them. Other power suppliers do not have this problem!

Roseville power and SMUD, that operate right next to PGE and deliver power at a fraction the price, kinda prove you are right.

I suspect there is a lot correct about what you are saying, PGE sucks. Hydro-Quebec is a crown corporation returning profits to the government unlike privatized PGE. However, the cost of generation is separate, Quebec has tons of hydro power and PGE doesn't generate power.

It seems that numerous remote communities are diesel powered, I know this is the case in the far north (https://www.canada.ca/en/natural-resources-canada/news/2023/...). Are there any communities in California not connected to the grid even in the very remote areas? I suspect the cost of electricity and everything in these communities is very high and also subsidized.

A few other questions I'm wondering is how much of the rural infrastructure in Quebec relies on the connections to the various (remote) hydropower projects (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/Quebec_M...). Are communities very far from those connections also served. I can't find a map of actual communities connected to the electric grid.

Interestingly California has over 95% of the population living in urban areas compared to 70-80% in Quebec, not really sure which that would favor.

Yes, PGE sucks. However, I still think my argument stands that the infrastructure could be much cheaper if the 95% of people living in urban California weren't paying for the rural infrastructure regardless of the nature of tree trimming costs.

The current proposal is the exact opposite. The condo owner with higher income would be paying far more.

The fundamental issue is further complicated by the government involvement in infrastructure expansions and funding.

In your case, if the government passes a funding bill to bring power into remote communities, why should citizens pay again?

California utilities break rates down into territories, so someone in San Jose does have different rates than Sierra foothills.

My understanding is this based more off weather-driven demands (Marin has much less AC needs than Davis), but still, there are regional differences in pricing.

Here's the real crux of what you're suggesting though: utilities are extremely regulated in what they can do, so it's quite possible the utilities commission said they can do price discrimination off of regional load differences but not off of a more nebulous "grid impact / risk score". The latter opens up all sorts of thorny equity questions (eg is what you're describing just redlining poorer rural communities through another mechanism?)

Redlining was bad because it was explicit racial discrimination.

Setting prices based on costs is not redlining. If we want to subsidize poorer people in rural communities, we can do that through a means-tested program just like we do for the urban poor.

It doesn’t seem that hard. Just calculate the number of end users served by transmission lines and divide the costs accordingly. Don’t even need to factor in risk. This would make denser areas less costly on a per home basis, which is exactly what you want to encourage, and in CA would also generally translate to risk as well.

I view safe/stable power, clean water, and waste/sewage systems as bare minimum utilities that everyone should have. I don't live in a third world country and so equal access to those kinds of utilities should be a given for everybody. I really like the idea that everyone in my state is entitled to equal access to the grid and I'd much prefer to have people on the grid rather than having people in poor/remote communities trying to create their own shitty replacements with the dangers and fire risks that'd create.

I see no reason why people who don't live in cities should be punished or burdened with higher access fees, especially if those people can't afford to move/live elsewhere. It may cost a lot more to run utilities out to users in remote areas but it costs very little to run them to users in ultra-dense urban areas and that's where the vast majority of the users are so it should all balance out.

I mean, it costs much more to expand and maintain access for them, why shouldn't they pay more?

Because electricity is a common good. Some subsidize others so we may all have electricity.

Kind of like the postal service. Or insurance.

So do it with marginal prices for electricity. The price for electricity should have nothing to do with the recipient’s income.

If people want wealth redistribution, then do it with wealth taxes and cash.

No, insurance is against things that didn't happen yet that are out of your control.

You can't just buy fire insurance when your house is burning down, so you shouldn't be able to have "electricity insurance" when you buy a far away house

The postal service is necessary to do things like send you IRS communications, drivers licenses, jury duty, etc.

When the government no longer uses paper to communicate with people we can talk about privatizing the postal service

Just saying… somehow states with huge rural areas manage to have prices 3x or more lower than cali

Isn't it already more expensive for remote customers?

Electricity bills are typically separated into generation, transmission and distribution.

Remote customers have to pay more to get connected to the grid in the first place, but the higher maintenance costs for low density grid service aren't passed along on an ongoing basis.

The problem is that electricity prices in California historically lumped a bunch of infrastructure costs into the per-unit costs for a kilowatt hour of electricity. This was an implicit subsidy for anyone whose costs to the electricity system came disproportionately more from infrastructure maintenance than from energy consumption. It has become a growing problem in recent years as rooftop solar has proliferated, since solar households are (mostly) still connected to and reliant on the grid but are consuming much less energy from the grid.

The most straightforward solution would be to split out energy consumption and infrastructure charges and bill each customer for their actual infrastructure needs and energy consumption. This is politically unpalatable because it would raise costs more than average for low-energy-consumption customers (typically lower income households).

The better solution that wouldn't hurt lower income households would be to change billing like proposed above but offer state financial assistance to low-income households in proportion to the old implied subsidies. This way the economic distortion would end but low-income groups wouldn't suffer. I don't know why California didn't do this.

The worse solution that California has selected is to charge households a fixed connection charge according to income rather than according to infrastructure costs. This maintains the economic distortions of the old billing system since it means that there is no incentive to avoid wasteful infrastructure. If you're affluent and you're going to be soaked on electricity service either way, you might as well live in a big sprawling rural property since you'll not get any economic benefit from living in more infrastructure-thrifty urban or suburban housing.

Commercial rates have a demand charge, essentially a charge based on peak power usage.

Meter cost plus demand charge is what would match usage to utility infrastructure cost.

The weirdo progressive rates will push parties to grid detach, which will not be good for the economics of the grid.

I remember living downtown San Jose last year and being charged $0.75/kWh and it was mostly due to a mandatory 50% upcharge for green power. Totally bullshit.

> but grid access fees should be equal for every household

No, they should vary depending on the grid connection type. Someone with a three-phase max 100A per phase connection should pay more than someone with a single-phase max 50A per phase connection.

Why is that the case if they are next door and tying into the same line? They require identical infrastructure.

Because infrastructure can handle a finite number of users based on their connection types.

If you’re running a 50kW kiln (or more realistically 4 x 12kW) in your back yard then your annual use may not be that high but the grid needs to handle larger demand spikes. Paying per kWh alone doesn’t adjust for the relevant infrastructure.

Demand charges (peak kW rather than kWh) are very common in commercial and industrial.

It's very rare a residential house has a 50kW kiln, so those kinds of spikey loads basically balance out over a subdivision.

Although interestingly, an unintended side-effect of aggressive time-of-use pricing is the entire subdivision has programmed their air conditioners or EV chargers to turn back on right at 9pm when peak pricing ends. That kind of unintended mass-coordination DOES create sometimes-problematic high demand spikes.

Ultimately, there's a need for customer-specific real-time pricing that's responded to by behind-the-meter "power control systems"... managing flexible loads, in a way that doesn't negatively affect occupants.

> If you’re running a 50kW kiln (or more realistically 4 x 12kW) in your back yard then your annual use may not be that high but the grid needs to handle larger demand spikes. Paying per kWh alone doesn’t adjust for the relevant infrastructure.

There are two alternatives here. One is that your spiky demand doesn't correlate with others, in which case it's irrelevant because although 50kW is a lot for one house it's really not a big deal for the power grid. The other is that it does correlate with other spiky demand, at which point you charge everyone a higher price per kWh at those times.

Charging based on regional demand works great on the production side, but residential, industrial, and commercial experiences different peak times. Thus distribution demand at the level of substations don’t necessarily correlate well.

You could model things with individual per customer rates per minute, but charging based on connection sizes is a lot simpler.

It isn't clear that connection size is correlated with any production costs whatsoever, and if it is, what the degree of that cost is.

If the goal is simply to gouge customers, independent of use or cost, you might as well charge by height.

Distribution costs and production costs are different things.

The grid itself needs to be paid for as does electricity production. A random neighborhood that wants a huge number of Christmas lights isn’t an issue from the production side, but it can be a real issue in terms of distribution without using enough kWh to pay for that infrastructure.

So your argument is that it is a proxy for use variability, and that determines how much the grid needs to be overbuilt.

I'm not sure that either of those are solid assumptions,but worth some thought.

Because they have the potential to load the grid up in very different ways.

Is that true in practice and is it more than simply proportional to the power consumed. In the US, most new residential electric services are 200 Amps at 240 Volts. The maximum power that could be drawn would be 48 kW. Seems like the potential variability from a home is already enormous. Conversely, someone with a high capacity connection could have very regular usage patterns

The US is very different from Europe in this sense. My house uses a small fraction of an equivalent family home in the United States. On the coldest days in winter I might go through 10 KWh of electricity and 15 cubic meters of natural gas. During a summer day gas usage will be < 0.5 cubic meters (mostly for shower water) and electricity will be 60 KWh or more returned to the grid.

Someone with smaller service won't be able to create as much variability in load as someone with a much more beefy hookup.

>Someone with smaller service won't be able to create as much variability in load as someone with a much more beefy hookup.

I think we are in dangerous waters when we are are basing public policy on "ability" to have impact opposed to "actual impact. I think it is a genuinely interesting question if and how much this variability contributes to the grid capacity requirements.

You can basically think of individual variability as noise on an analog signal. Does single user variability average out, and if so, on what scale?

How does this variability compare to other amplitude changes, like aggregate or seasonal daily use patterns?

I think it is entirely possible that this noise could be negligible at most scales, but obviously dont have the data.

However, someone with the actual data could easily do an ANOVA evaluation, and see what the actual numbers are.

It's simple physics, actual impact follows ability. In other words: you don't ask for a hookup larger than the one that you intend to use because you already pay more per month for that larger hookup.

Except that it doesn't, necessarily.

You could have some unusually heavy usage during off-peak hours and that doesn't require any additional grid infrastructure because there is already plenty of capacity during off-peak hours. Whereas if you want to use the same amount of power during peak hours, that would require more grid capacity, but in general the way to handle that is by charging a higher price per kWh during peak hours, giving everyone the incentive to use less then (and charging them appropriately if they don't/can't).

Impact does not follow ability, it is the exact opposite when we are talking about variability.

Total demand for power increases linearly with the number of users. Percent variability of demand decreases with the number of users and approaches a limit of zero.

If we are talking with sizing power infrastructure, capacity required increases with the number of users, but safety factor required decreases with the number of users.

At the margin, infrastructure cost scales with per capita power usage, not with individual variability. The variability cancels out.

Not California, but in general terms this is not accurate. My local grid connection provider (the largest in the country), does not differentiate between 1x25A and 3x63A in cost. It's the same price.

That's a pretty big difference in available power for the same price. (5.8~43.5 kW)

But the only differing cost in that scenarios is the 2 extra conductors to the local transformer, and more likely just to the edge of the property. The 3-phase power is still present in the area, as ideally alternating houses are on alternating phases to balance the load over the phases. The difference in cost would be a one-time hit during installation, and the ongoing maintenance would be the same as 3 separate houses (1 house per phase). That maintenance could be rolled into the cost per watt, so the more you have available the more you can use and the more you could pay.

The installation cost should vary based on what the house wants access to, and the ongoing cost should be the same as every household. A standing charge for the cost of the infrastructure existing is ridiculous when that same infrastructure is what the power company relies on to deliver their chargeable commodity. It's effectively double dipping - how is it any different from ISPs charging for access and then charging for data on top?

I think an important consideration is that the overall grid is not designed for all houses to have the higher capacity connections. So enough connections and they're forced to make massive changes to the infrastructure.

Not to say utility companies don't make obscene profits instead of reinvesting much of that into the infrastructure.

Regarding the ISP, its really the same argument. If I want 2GB/s on a neighbourhood line that supports a max avg service size of 1GB/s then they would be forced to upgrade their lines to service me. Granted, unlike power grids they're liable to just not do that and let service quality degrade and quote the "Up to X Gbps" clause

Solar panels and batteries are so cheap now that I expect a lot of SFHes in California to go off-grid when the income-graded access charge hits. My SFH is in the south bay and I disconnected in November.

The income based fees aren't the utility's idea (although maybe the specific amounts are?).

CPUC was empowered to create the income based fees after AB205 was passed. The individual utilities are just trying to satisfy the government's requirements in a way that won't hurt their profits.

This doesn't seem to be coming from utilities

"The proposal he's referring to comes after California passed a law last year requiring that utility companies establish a fixed monthly fee based on a customer's household income."

The utility companies have absolutely no business knowing the subscribers household income. What a completely ridiculous proposal, they're in a 'cost+' business.

Its not a proposal, It was passed in 2022.

It is simply another example of California introducing back door welfare taxes that aren't included in the state budget.

Taxes aren't increased, but companies are mandated to charge different prices to customers.

This is exactly what it is. It’s actually a tax, basically a back door to raise prices across the board and generate huge revenues, disingenuously passed under the auspices of equity and fair share politics.

Also, now the state government has detailed access to income based billing of every citizen, all set up and ready to go. But I’m sure it will never be used for anything else.

The idea here was to charge an income-based fixed charge to cover the costs of infrastructure, nebulous future “climate investments” and “general operation” (read: offload costs to generate more profits), and then cut the rates for the electricity that’s actually used. Lower rates, the theory goes, will encourage all Californians to buy new electric appliances and electric cars.

But all that’s going to happen is that the cost will go up, and the three companies that sponsored this bill will make massive profits as they shift more of the cost of infrastructure onto rate payers and play the “investment game” they’ve been at for 30 years: the game that’s killed hundreds of people and burned entire cities off the map.

But this time will be different I’m sure.