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The company I buy electricity from has a government-approved monopoly and is heavily regulated by the public utility commission. They run the generation plants. They maintain the wires and poles. They provide (and technically, own) the meters. Everything up to the meter is their fucking problem.

But guess what... they use old-school meters, but with some meter-reading electronics built in. Why? Probably because the answer to your "d" question is "they do", with a side of "PUC tapdancing on their head".

To me, it sounds like 'Murica got it right this time. (The "reconciliation authority" part just sounds so British, which leads me to believe your entire post is geared toward Commonwealth countries or the Euro-zone.)

I pay like $300 a year for "base costs" and about $300 for grid fees and another $300 (a bit more) for actual power.

OK, but is that uniformly applicable across Germany for residential electrical service? Seems unlikely, but I simply don't know - it's certainly not the way things are in the US. Info I've found with a quick search conflates German residential with commercial and industrial rates, so I'll have to rely on your word or someone else with a good source. Other posters have quoted up to $0.33/kWh (plus rather high taxes) for average German residential rates, but I wonder about the range of rates across the country, whether there are off-peak rates, and so on. Without more info, we cannot know if you're living in a German locality where such costs are comparatively low, so it's difficult to assess the claims you're making.

YOU ALSO PAY $300 BASE FEE (IF NOT MORE) AND $300 GRID FEE (LIKELY MUCH MORE) and that is factored into your immense usage of kWh. So your kWh price looks low, but is not.

Well, now you're just making some baseless assumptions. In your defense, it's well-known that Americans use more residential energy than their European counterparts, roughly double per capita the last time I checked - maybe that qualifies as "immense". However, costs are highly variable across the US, including rates and base costs.

Here are the rates relevant to me (sorry, PDF). Someone in San Francisco will pay much more. Some parts of the US will pay a little less. My locality also charges an infrastructure fee (for a nearby hydro-power dam), but it's only around $10 to $12 per month (partially based on usage). There is also a monthly "adjustment charge", typically ranging from -$8 to +$15 per month, depending on how much power is generated by that dam. So, the base fees for me, including even taxes (roughly $2.50 per month), are much lower than your assumptions, and as you can see from the PDF, so are the rates compared to typical German residential rates cited by other posters. I notice you did not specify your rate(s), nor how many kWh you use per year (at each rate level, if applicable).

My power bill for electricity plus gas is per year roughly $1200 ... in a 100sqm flat with bad insulation.

Well, 100m^2 is about 1076ft^2, so that's a large-ish US apartment, or a small-ish US house, depending on region and locality. Bad insulation is less of a problem in an apartment, and may even help you, depending on your neighbors. When I was young, I rented an apartment above people who kept their apartment very warm in the winter, and apparently there was little to no insulation in my floor, so my heating costs were very low, and there was no AC, so high costs in the summer were simply not possible. I've paid as little as you claim while living in a 2200ft^2 house with excellent insulation, and payed double that in a 1500 ft^2 house with minimum insulation required by building codes - both with AC. All of that while living in various parts of the US midwest, where summers are nowhere near as mild as in Germany. It's just too variable to make the kind of assumptions you have made, even for one US region, let alone the entire US.

- T

they're going to reach the point of needing to charge you a flat fee just for the connection to the power lines, plus the usual fees for actually using their electricity.

Where is this mythical place I keep hearing about that doesn't already do that? I'm in the middle of the middle of the middle of the midwestern US (a.k.a. "the last place on earth" for pretty much everything), and Ameren has been doing that for longer than I've been alive.

Just last month, my bill was approximately $85. Of that, about $75 was actually my electricity bill, the other $10 was surcharges and taxes. Of that $75, there's an $8 "customer charge" that is a flat fee every month, regardless of season. The per kWh rate is $0.0808 for the first 750kWh, then $0.0538 thereafter, per billing period. (The rates go up to a flat $0.1136/kWh from June to September.) So I used 874 kWh and got billed about $67 for it. But I also got billed $8 for just having service hooked up.

(Residential rate sheet for Ameren MO is here.)

Part of the reason for this battle in the US is the stupid way US consumers are billed, you usually pay a single per-kWh fee.

I think you've been misinformed. I pay a flat $8-per-month connection fee (constant, all year-round), plus a per-kWh usage fee (which varies season-to-season and has usage tiers). It's certainly not "the way US consumers are billed". It may even be common, but not where I'm from. That means there are at least two ways that US consumers are billed, making your statement nothing more than a wide, inaccurate brush to paint with.

I live on the outskirts of St. Louis, MO, which is about as "in the middle of the US" as you can get. Here's the official paperwork filed with the Missouri Public Service Commission (a division of the Missouri state government).

Also interesting to note: Ameren encourages their customers to use alternative electricity sources. Mostly because A) active electrical service has been written into the building codes everywhere in their service area to be a condition for occupancy, B) they get their $8 fee each month whether you buy from them or not, and due to (A), you have to pay it to live in any house anywhere in the area, and C) there are rumors that they don't have the generating capacity to serve their area fully past about 2025, and/or they don't have time to expand their capacity fast enough to meet demand.

I'm not sure if net metering is required here. I know commercial buildings buy at "on demand" rates, meaning that it's more expensive in the middle of the afternoon in summer, and overnight in winter. Some residential customers can sign up for those rate structures as well. Everyone gets a seasonal rate shift, regardless.

Anyone with any kind of common sense knows that the only facility safe in tornado alley is built underground.

Right. That's why there are no nuclear powerplants anywhere in tornado alley.

Ameren finished switching everyone in the St. Louis, MO, USA metro area to remote-read electric meters about 10 years ago. I think it's probably safe to assume that their entire service area is handled this way by now.

Their service area is approximately 30% of Missouri and 60% of Illinois. (See here: http://www.ameren.com/AboutUs/ADC_ServiceMap.asp)

Not only that, but a single SNUPPS (Standard Nuclear Unit Power Plant System) generator unit can crank out as much electricity as 2 or 3 coal-fired plants combined, each with 2 to 4 generator units.

Don't believe me? Ask AmerenUE. 4 Coal-fired plants, with a total of 12 generator units produce only about 2.5x the amount of power of one SNUPPS generator unit. And that's a real-world example.