The difference is key:
If you want a discount you can voluntarily submit your income information for verification to qualify.
This is unilateral sharing of PRIVATE data with a corporate entity. It's not legal on so many levels.
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Cali utilities propose Income Based electricity rates
- Thread starter bkp_duke
- Start date
The difference is key:
If you want a discount you can voluntarily submit your income information for verification to qualify.
This is unilateral sharing of PRIVATE data with a corporate entity. It's not legal on so many levels.
charlesj
Active Member
Someone else mentioned this in the comments of an article I was reading:
This is a GREAT argument for Tesla to implement Vehicle to Home/Grid (V2G/H). The batteries in a car can run a house for days/weeks.
I would love to supplement my powerwalls with one or more of the cars on a long week of grey. And if I needed more power, I could go pay Tesla for it at a Supercharger to fill the pack up.
This is a GREAT argument for Tesla to implement Vehicle to Home/Grid (V2G/H). The batteries in a car can run a house for days/weeks.
I would love to supplement my powerwalls with one or more of the cars on a long week of grey. And if I needed more power, I could go pay Tesla for it at a Supercharger to fill the pack up.
whisperingshad
Active Member
Someone explain to me why someone, such as myself, should pay $124/mo to connect to the grid when I have on-site batteries and only pull from the grid about 500-1000 kwh per year (and that's not NET, that's total draw, NET, I'm negative).
There is nothing "fair" about someone that barely uses a resource paying the same to connect to it as someone that utilizes that resource extensively.
charlesj
Active Member
Here is that AG 205, maybe someone here has a better understanding of this. It looks like it may expire in 2026?
Moving out of California will take a few years. In the meantime, it's time for me to pick one of the state on my short list (that doesn't have income tax), buy a condo there (to airbnb) and change my permanent address. My house is in our trust and my daughter, who makes little, will be the only person filing taxes at our address.
I think the big question is what to do about auto registration. Will they consider you living at an address if your car is registered there?
Let gaming-the-system-begin.
I think the big question is what to do about auto registration. Will they consider you living at an address if your car is registered there?
Let gaming-the-system-begin.
Well the whole point is to decouple base fees for grid maintenance from fees for actual usage of the resource. Of course, people who use the resource at times when it's scarce (5-8 pm) should pay more for it, and should probably pay a bigger share of the upgrade costs because they're the ones causing the need to upgrade the grid in the first place, but everyone needs to pay something to maintain the grid. It's just that everyone should NOT be paying the IOUs to pay dividends to their shareholders on top of everything else.
I don't see why they would. You can already have a primary residence address that's separate from your voting address (domicile), so long as you have an intention to return to your domiciled address at some point in the future. But PG&E is not the DMV, and has no damn business knowing where my car is registered in the first place.
Yep. If they do this, then I'll find an older, retired family member and put him/her on my PG&E bill and take myself off. The person whose name is on the bill doesn't even have to be the one that pays the bill.
Here's something that shows that these idiots at CPUC and the IOUs haven't thought things through: the difference between the highest rate PG&E has proposed -- $92 -- and the lowest -- $15 -- is $77 a month. That's $924 a year. Wouldn't I be able to create a C corp that basically has no income and then have PG&E bill it for electricity? The franchise tax fee on corporations is only $800 a year. Furthermore, I could get far more savings by creating a family corporation and have PG&E bill everyone in the family by billing the corporation instead, so that the savings is $924N - $800, where N is the number of accounts we have with PG&E across all of our properties. Everyone would contribute to the corporation's minimum franchise tax fee based on how many PG&E accounts he/she has, and since the corporation isn't taking in any income, shouldn't it qualify for the lowest rate?
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My point is I don't buy the "fairness" argument. If someone is on solar+battery, their grid utilization is TINY if they are in self-power mode.
If we extrapolate that to "grid purchases" then total demand drops precipitously, and the need for as many HVDC lines to "support the grid" drops like a stone.
The argument for "pay fair share for infrastructure" is a trope by the utilities that people have bought into. It's not one supported by the actual math. The argument is valid for those on solar only, because they have large feed-in to the grid. But for those with solar+onsite storage, it's not valid at all, that breaks the model, especially when NEM 3.0 is factored in and it's far more beneficial for rate payers to self-consume than to use the grid as one large battery.
One further argument on this - the pricing in Cali is absolutely bonkers (higher than Hawaii now). It's just a convenient excuse by the utilities to push up the "fixed costs" argument further and further. They are including things like paying for their legal failings (i.e. fires) in the fixed costs now. Their "true" fixed costs of how much it takes to maintain the poles+wires is far less than what they are tossing out.
Yeah but on the other hand, we don't let people not pay for emergency services (fire, police, etc.) just because he doesn't use/hasn't used them.
The power grid is a critical piece of public infrastructure and everyone should have to pay something to maintain it, regardless of how much or little electricity he or she uses. But I object to having this critical piece of infrastructure owned by a for-profit company.
Yeah, that's the big issue I have with the rates the CPUC has approved. Paying for the fires they start should come out of their shareholders' equity (including that of the C level executives, who are shareholders too). And wiping out shareholder equity should reduce the amount of money the state needs to pay to take control of the grid via eminent domain.
In the past few months, I'm told - haven't had time to dig on my own, it is now fully LEGAL to disconnect from the grid should someone care to do so (until 2022 this was not legal).
My beef with "paying fair share" for the grid is that our grid is HORRIBLY inefficient. And here's why:
The utilities are incentivized to buy power from large producers, i.e. large solar farms, wind farms, nuclear plants, NG peakers, etc. This means that by necessity they have to string hundreds of HVDC lines, which are expensive, require lots of additional substations for the transformation phase, and are generally costly infrastucture.
IF the grid, by design, was much more distributed (like VPP type of design), you would need far fewer of those HVDC lines and transformer substations. Your costs for infrastructure would be substantially less (like 2/3 less).
It's because the utilities are intentionally choosing options which financially benefit them the most that the infrastructure costs are so high. We're having to finance their POOR decisions. Imagine what kind of grid resiliency we could get if those same funds were dumped into more local storage. Wouldn't have to be powerwalls installed in everyone's home, you could spread Megapacks around like candy to soak up solar from rooftops and then send that power back to the customers after the sun sets.
whisperingshad
Active Member
whisperingshad
Active Member
whisperingshad
Active Member
GreenCoffee
Member
What are my thoughts? Well seems fair what with record profits and all while running 100 plus year old overhead powerlines that cause devastating and deadly numerous fires, Yeah I vote we bail them out, poor guys!
Edison monthly bills could change for many customers due to new state law
Customers for California’s three major power companies can expect to see some big changes in their monthly electricity bills.www.ocregister.com
The proposal, as quoted from the article:
Here’s how the fixed charges would work in the PG&E service territory. The numbers are based on a four-person household:
**************************************************************************************************
- Households earning less than $28,000 a year would pay a fixed charge of $15 a month on their electric bills.
- Households with annual income from $28,000 to $69,000 would pay $30 a month.
- Households earning from $69,000 to $180,000 would pay $51 a month.
- Those with incomes above $180,000 would pay $92 a month.
On the one hand, I suppose it is no different from income tax brackets. I have personally benefited from tax incentives to "go green" so money asked of me to help the general population do the same should theoretically not bother me.
On the other hand...something about this whole thing is really disturbing.
What are your thoughts?
Yeah, that's why this class/income stuff is total garbage. We should all be demanding more accountability and efficiency from the IOUs. But they know the masses are more interested in fighting each other over some misguided notion of fair share or class warfare. But our politicians are too easily bribed; almost all of them have taken money from the IOUs and their related PACs. If there was a single thing I think all Californians (who aren't politicians) would align on is that it should be illegal for any politician to take money from one of these energy monopolies.
But I wouldn't know how to begin to codify that type of initiative.
Imagine if you had a Unicorn Model X with free Supercharging for life?
V2G/H is not something technically that can be turned on with the flip of a switch. It will require completely new inverters, inverters that are not compatible with said unicorn. This is not speculation, it's fact. And Tesla doesn't sell cars with free supercharging anymore. So it won't be possible for someone to "tank up" at a supercharger and head home to power their house for days with it.
The extra wear and tear on the HV system and inverters is most likely why Tesla has been hesitant to implement this in the first place. That, and you basically need something that is the equivalent of the "Gateway" on the powerwall to accept and regulate the current flow.
Can someone explain (as far as we understand it currently, at least), what this new proposal means for existing solar installs? Is this only going to apply as an optional plan? Will existing customers have an option to be grandfathered in? My family just installed solar a month ago, just before the NEM2 deadline, does this change mean that our break-even point will be much farther in the future than expected?
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