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Electric Company Wants Monthly Fee For Solar Users
7-Vodka writes
"Xcel Energy customers who have their own solar panels are worried about a new fee being proposed by the company. A monthly fee to pay for transmission and distribution of energy would be charged to customers who have solar panels, irrespective of their energy use for the month. An Xcel Energy spokesman said the fee is to ensure that regular customers don't subsidize the 'connectivity fees' for the solar panel customers who don't pay when they generate as much as they use. When pressed, the spokesman admitted that nobody actually pays a 'connectivity fee,' yet they wanted to prevent the mooching from occurring in the future (presumably when they hit everyone with such a fee). He also called the absence of a connectivity fee for solar customers a 'double subsidy' because many solar customers receive rebates to install the panels."
Your natural gas company charges you a monthly connection fee, even in the summer when you don't use it. Just 'cause you're not burning gas, they still have to maintain the pipes.
Your ISP charges you a monthly fee for your Internet link regardless of whether you transmit any packets. They have to maintain their infrastructure on the expectation that you can use it at any time. That costs them money whether you use it or not.
Singling out solar customers and only making them pay a fee seems unfair and if it isn't illegal it should be. But simply saying, hey: there's a minimum monthly fee for an electrical hookup whether you use it or not doesn't strike me as out of line.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
The logic is that even if the customer isn't using the power from the electric company, they will still be using the companies lines when the meter runs backwards. With that logic, why should the power company be able to use land for their poles and such without compensation to the who don't use their electricity?
I've got 101 mod points and you can't have them!
This one's easy. Split the bill into two portions: transmission, and generation.
Line usage gets billed per day, and generation, per kWh. The line usage fees cover the maintenance of the power lines and are charged whether or not you use (or contribute) any power. The generation fees can range from negative (if you offer a net surplus) to positive (if you use more than you contribute).
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
All loans and mortgages involve some degree of risk. Homeowner loses their job, simply gets tired of making house payments, etc, etc. Risk, however, can be mitigated by pooling -- the principle behind insurance. If we pool a whole bunch of mortgages together, the risk kind of average out, doesn't it? One homeowner may lose their job, but they are not going to all lose their jobs at the same time, right? Yeah, one house gets the roof blown off in a windstorm, but the roof's are not going to blow off all the houses? For a Midwestern tornado, maybe an OK assumption, for Hurricane Katrina, maybe not so much.
That is how we got into the Financial Crisis. It wasn't so much that any one loan was higher risk than any other, but they all got bundled into some kind of traded mortgage bonds where everyone thought, "hey, they can't all default all at once." A recent discussion of this matter mentioned that the key factor was the Pearson r-coefficient of all of those mortgages, and no one doing the bundling or buying the bundled mortgages had a clue.
Wind and solar have a "capacity factor", a kind of risk that they cannot be relied upon to supply electricity when called upon. I used to think that one could "pool the risk", interconnect all of these wind generators and solar panels into the grid and average out the fluctuation. For wind power, I am pretty sure that the capacity factor is highly correlated and hence wind is almost worthlessly unreliable. For solar, I need to see some more data.
The thing is that wind is highly variable, and the variability can be correlated over continental land masses within the reach of any grid, and that wind can just quit for weeks at a time (summer doldrums, if you will). One of the things often suggested is "try it out and get real-world experience." Well, wind is being tried in a major way in Europe, and the capacity factors in practice are proving to be well below original predictions and projections.
Now solar could be another thing, especially in the desert Southwest. Maybe the availability of solar electricity correlates nicely with A/C demand, but I would need to see some data on this, and I imagine the A/C peak lags the sunshine peak on account of thermal lag, and maybe some of this could be compensated with some kind of "smart grid" where people are encourage to run their A/C more at noon instead of waiting till late afternoon and early evening when the heat finally filters through the walls.
The electric power companies never did like solar and wind interconnects, especially from residential users, and maybe they have solid reasons for not liking them, apart from utility executives being Blue Meanies with sharp teeth where most people have their stomachs. Maybe a homeowner with a wind or solar setup is producing much less in the way of usable green power than they think and is increasing the use of expensive natural gas in less-than-efficient peaking plants. We are geeks, here, and we can come up with some reasonable back-of-the-envelope estimates of these effects, instead of lapsing into, "Oh the humanity, those EVIL power companies!!"
I call bullshit (no offense :) )
Back in the 70s when per house power consumption was considerably less the grid was still paid for by power sales and/or a charge everyone paid. In rural areas where the cost of the infrastructure on a per house basis is much higher the infrastructure is still paid for the same ways.
Now, per house energy consumption is at an all time high and only increasing and if you effectively use less power you are expected to subsidize the infrastructure for those who use more? If you push power into the grid at a cost less than the power company could generate it for and which they will turn around and sell at the going rate which will mean a greater profit than from their own power generation, you have to subsidize their infrastructure?
I call bullshit. A flat infrastructure charge to everyone or this is nothing more than an attempt to tax your own power generation. The money they lose is due to free market forces (cheap solar availability) and the money they gain is from the cheaper power available to them. Any charge for infrastructure should be equal to everyone OR scaled to the infrastructure costs of the area, which would mean higher costs for rural areas.
Are the power companies the next RIAA? Better methods exist so we'll charge you to use them since we won't make money on it?
That depends on your location. In the southern US you may be right. At higher latitudes, peak demand's could be in the winter.
I think the point is probably that the "base" fee currently charged to all customers is likely not indicative of the true cost of the connection and some of that cost is incorporated into the kWh fees to more fairly distribute the charges to customers of different sizes. For example, a commercial business with 200A service actually costs about the same to connect to the grid as a residence with 200A service, only their actual usage might be 4 times higher. Likewise the cost to connect a single rural customer with 200A service might be astronomical even if actual usage is minimal.
I would think a better model might be to establish minimum fees that more closely resemble the true costs of connection. Say your "base fee" is $20 but your connectivity actually costs about $100 net to the power company -- Well you are going to need to offset this difference some way -- either by buying $80 of power from them or by giving them $80. In the case of solar customers, this would be an incentive to reduce their grid connection by taking smaller grid service (or no service) or reducing their energy consumption in order to put enough power back onto the grid to offset the fee.
Here in Colorado we have net metering, so two meters aren't needed. If my solar generates more than I use the excess is sent back to the grid, "State 3" in your post, I sell my electricity back to Xcel at wholesale prices, not what I pay if I get the power from the grid, "State 1" from your post. Lets say I need power from Xcel, I would pay them (for simplicity) 10 cents per kw, but if I generate more on a sunny day I sell it back to them for 6 cents per kw. Please point out to me how are they getting screwed again?
Us fine folks here in Colorado passed a law several years ago that 20% of electricity has to come from renewable resources by 2020, so Xcel would benefit from having more people getting solar on their houses, but they want to have the generation facilities to keep their monopoly.
Plain and simple, this is just a money grab by Xcel as they are going for the triple bonus of not having to generate as much electricity (less money spent on coal), getting a "connection fee", and getting closer to the requirement of 20% renewable without any capitol outlay.
I think most all power companies are scared that their monopoly on electricity production and distribution is in jeopardy with advances and the new smart grid. Power companies are the single biggest roadblock to any advancement of our aged and ailing electrical grid. They refuse to look at any other way of doing business other than having huge power plants and huge power lines feeding. (sound familiar? Music industry anyone?) I realize that there will always be a need for power plants and lines, but there are many ways to get the job done better.
I am guessing that you work for a power company?