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Here's my local power company's tariff. Under GS-2 non-demand billing, it looks like you'd pay 8.173 cents/kWh in the summer and 7.452 cents/kWh in the winter including all charges for generation, distribution, and transmission. There's a $21.17 monthly charge, so your 4000 kWh use case would be $348.09 in the summer and $319.25 in the winter here in the Old Dominion.

Demand billing gets you $342.71 summer, $285.19 winter.

I didn't do the math for Schedule 10, but that might be even cheaper.

Solar's production curve does not match the peak user curve of electrical power.

Where'd you get that idea? Most power is used in the middle of the day, when it's hot and everyone turns on their A/C. Solar produces the most power right in the middle of the day, when the sun is shining brightest. Solar is perfect for supplying peak loads in places where people use A/C.

1. Hydro 2. Nuclear 3. Geothermal. 1 and 3 are location limted.

2 is location limited too: you can't put nuclear close to a fault line, in a place where there's tornadoes or hurricanes, and you generally need to put it next to a river for cooling though you can also use giant cooling towers. And of course, you can't put it anywhere near a metro area.

All power plants are location limited. Power plants need 3 main things- fuel, cooling, and high voltage lines. Fuel supply can be a huge issue. This plant doesn't have rail access for example. It's the only significant power plant I have visited which doesn't. From my back of the envelope calculation, they need at least 200 18-wheeler loads of fuel a day to maintain operations. Plus probably another 50 18-wheeler loads of lime for the pollution control equipment. They may be burning more in diesel fuel than they are getting out of their coal.

I never once mentioned the government running the infrastructure COMPANY. My local power company, Dominion, has two separate sides - a power generation side and a power distribution side. Both are heavily regulated by the Va State Corp Commission, and both have to apply for rate increases that are not always approved. The distribution company has strict performance requirements and fixed profit caps in exchange for being the only power distribution company that gets to run lines to your house. You can buy your power from any number of generation providers (including the generation side of Dominion) that all use the same distribution provider. Their rates are separate on my bill.

I could start "Dave's Power and Light" and provide my 'Green power from horse turds' over the same distribution network for not a whole lot of up-front cash. I propose the same structure for all utilities, including cellular.

I can think of lots of things that I'd like to socialize long before telco.

You realize that the same distribution company/provider company situation already exists in the landline telco industry, right? I can get my dialtone from anyone over my local telco's wires to my house.

For commercial customers billing already works this way.
Example Dominion Rate Schedules

If a customer is a power generator only, they get payed for power, but get charged for the meter and the facilities that connect the meter to the utilities system.
DOM Schedule 19

For a small business customer DOM schedule GS-2
The bill consists of
Distribution Service Charges
    Meter Fee (Flat fee for having a connection)
    Distribution (kwh and demand fee to cover costs of the distribution system)
Electricity Supply (ES) Service Charges
    Energy Charge (kWh based to cover the cost of generating power)
    Energy Demand Charge (Peak kWhr based to cover cost of having generating capacity available to meet the customers demand)

I suspect that most residential customers would be annoyed to see the residential bills look like commercial and industrial bills, but if solar / wind gets large enough that the utility needs to arrange for storage, or supply that can cover supply availability risks associated with solar and wind there will need to be some way to compensate them for the service.

None of this should apply if you simply unplug, and use your own storage, same as now if you want to run your house on your own generator.

If you don't like the changes, electric utilities in the US are mostly regulated utilities. Feel free to testify at the regulators rate setting meetings. Information for Virginia can be found here Virginia State Corporation Commission Division of Energy Regulation. Most other states have something similar.

A lot of Virginia and North Carolina's power supplied by Dominion power comes from other cheap sources like nuclear and natural gas...Dominon's full list of power generataing stations: https://www.dom.com/about/stations/index.jsp The North Anna Nuclear Power Station is about 40-50 miles from Ashburn, VA home to data centers for Amazon, Google, Verizon, and AOL. All of these DCs have complicated sets of diesel generators (even if Amazon's took it's DC down during maintenance). I'd be most worried if the availability of diesel became scarce. When I worked at a big DC, a transfer switch broke that disconnected a room from the Dominion feed. Batteries took over and the generators came online seamlessly. The room ran exclusively on redundant generators for 90 days and each had to be serviced every 30 days days of use. No down time. Many of these even move exclusively to generator power on high demand days at the request of Dominion. Hurricanes that have struck the Northern Virginia area have generally degraded to tropical storm strength. Isabel, now almost 9 years ago was a 3 or 4 as it came ashore at the NC/VA border and was a TS and nearly a TD by the time the eye moved through DC Metro. Most of the power loss was residential in nature from downed trees (I lost mine for 6.5--worse than the recent derecho). There are few trees around them and they have underground feeds.

You're lucky then. Mine was down 65+ hrs in Fairfax County, and we have buried lines. It took two days for us to find a hotel room, and good luck finding ice to salvage your food. Take a look at the current Dominion Power map...it was much worse yesterday, and still shows many outages.

https://www.dom.com/storm-center/northva.jsp

That is already being done but it seems to be happening at such a slow pace. There have been plenty of coal plants put online at the same time. OK what should Hudson Bay do or New Jersey? I'm not saying you should build wind solar, etc. but it isn't enough and if global warming has to be dealt with swiftly I think a Nuclear power plant would be safer to more people than a coal fired one.

And another one comes online.

http://www.dom.com/about/stations/fossil/virginia-city-hybrid-energy-center.jsp

Surry Power Station

A major part of the expense and construction delays are due to every reactor design being one-off and requiring individual approval by the government. The industry is now (finally) trying to get 'type acceptance' for a few well-engineered designs that can be built exactly to spec much quickly and for a lot less money.

My local utility had chosen (see legend) the GE ESBWR but has switched to the Mitsubishi US-APWR.

In Austin, TX the city runs the electric service. The residential rate is 3.5 cents per kwh for under 500 kwh, and 7.5 cents per kwh over 500.

That's odd; I thought most places charge less for usage above their break point (but as you can see, my provider flip-flops based on season - it didn't do that in years gone by). My power company's rates reflect this for the winter months, at least - the first 800 kWh are charged at 4.073 cents/kWh, and 3.205 cents/kWh for usage above 800 kWh. The summer is reversed, however. 6.051 cents/kWh for the first 800 kWh, and 4.073 cents/kWh thereafter. That's new for me, AFAIK.

An Example. I've toured it a few times, back before 911 - really neat.

Just dam up a valley, and there you go!

I toured this facility a long time ago back before the days of evil terrorists - it's pretty impressive! It actually helps the local ecosystem.

...or a lake in the mountains of Virginia. I've visited this station - it's very cool. The generators are the pumps - power in, water up. Water in, power out.

I've visited it - it's quite impressive.

Net Generating Capacity: 2,100 megawatts

License Issued: January, 1977

Commercial Operation: December, 1985

Cost: $1.7 billion (1985)

Owners:
Dominion (60%), Allegheny Power System (40%)

Lower Reservoir:

Dam:
135 feet high (41 meters)
2,400 feet long (732 meters)
Contains 4 million cubic yards (3.1 million cubic meters) of earth and rock fill

Reservoir:
555 surface acres (2.25 sq. kilometers)
Water level fluctuates 60 feet (18 meters) during operation

Upper Reservoir:

Dam:
460 feet high (140 meters)
2,200 feet long (671 meters)
Contains 18 million cubic yards (13.8 million cubic meters) of earth and rock fill

Reservoir:
265 surface acres (1.07 sq. kilometers)
Water level fluctuates 105 feet (32 meters) during operation

Water Flow:

Pumping:
11 million gallons (694 cubic meters/second) per minute

Generating:
14.5 million gallons (915 cubic meters/second) per minute

Turbine Generators:
Six Francis-type 350-megawatt units manufactured by Allis Chalmers

Maximum Pumping Power (per unit):
563,400 horsepower (420,127 kilowatts)

I was able to get my router (a PC with several NICs, running Linux) down to 35W idle and near silence by using a passive-cooled 700MHz VIA C3 CPU. The old router was a 27W 160MHz 486, but that one just couldn't quite manage fast-ethernet speed forwarding between the two LANs.

19" CRT monitors are about 80-150W depending on whether the picture is mostly black or mostly white. 17" LCDs are about 40W active, doesn't matter what's on the screen. A monitor in "sleep" mode is 1-5W. An ATX PC in "soft-off" (S5 sleep) takes about 4W.

I use a pass-through watt meter to measure this stuff.

What you really want is for minimum ecological impact is a "pumped storage" hydro plant. Build a man-made reservoir at the top of the hill, and a basin at the bottom of the hill. Fill the top reservoir with water. During the day, you let the water flow with gravity downhill through a set of turbines to generate electricity. At night, power the turbines to flow in reverse, and pump the water back up to the reservoir, basically "refuelling" itself.

But, you say, what's the sense in doing that? Conservation of energy says motors use more energy than they can generate in reverse, so aren't you wasting electricity just moving water about? You'll go out of business!

The key is not the volume of water, but WHEN you're generating. In deregulated energy markets like in most of the USA, there is also an ebb and flow to the price of electricity along the day... at night, when people are sleeping, there's too much online supply and not enough people using it, so the price drops... and during the day, when everyone is awake and watching TV and cooking and cleaning and working and computing, the demand for electricity is much higher, therefore the price of energy is higher.

So, generate electricity during the day and have people buy from you at higher rates, and run your pumps at night purchasing electricity from someone else for lower rates. Net, you're making money, keeping your average costs low. Not only that, you avoid erosion and killing fish like you do with conventional run-of-river dams. For an impressive beast of a plant, check out Bath County Station in Virginia.

Well I do other stuff with her too. She's run's samba on a mirrored drive setup to store/share/backup all of my critical documents, mp3s, digipictures, etc etc. Mainly for the redundancy of the mirrored drive, but also so I can access them from any of my other PCs. Samba rocks.

I also (though this is overkill for my setup) run Squid. Plus once in awhile I do some code development, so a P100 would kind of be a drag there :)

The heat output is actually pretty impressive if I max out her CPU (dnetc or seti@home) and close the door of the room she is in. This also seems to take the power consumption from about 70 watts to 90 watts (This is a fun little toy), which is odd because my Athlon system only increases power consumption by about 5 watts going from 0% CPU usage to 100%. Is this a CPU difference or an OS difference? The Athlon based system runs Windows XP... perhaps it doesn't idle the CPU the same way Linux does? Ditto for the temp difference... the Duron (w/Linux) runs at about 70 degrees idle... and 95 maxed out. The Athlon always stays at about 105 degrees.

In any event, the electric usage doesn't bother me because I have dirt cheap municipal electric (4 cents/kilowatt hour), and it probably saves me a tiny little bit on my heating bill ;) I could build a smaller setup that would use less juice, but I get to do other stuff with it, so it works out nicely.

Of course, searching for manufacturer code F9C, product ID C1R-1 on the FCC Product ID Search page returns little useful info regarding the exact freqs and modulation techniques in use. They asked for and received confidential status on the most interesting bits. Ugh.

PS - The FCC product ID search page can return all sorts of useful info on any product with an FCC ID. For instance, the info on the electronic key for my car returns schematics, data format info, etc. Sweet!