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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."
Because I'm not really getting what the hell they mean about how solar panel users are mooching by NOT using the grid's energy. Maybe there's something electrical and complicated going on that I, as a mere mortal, don't understand that some kind EE can explain to me.
Right now all I'm hearing is "Damn them, how dare those freeloaders not buy things from us!"
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
I am not sure we can/should speculate on this without more details. Of course the energy company wants to ensure its revenues, but this may not be unreasonable. Even if you have solar, you're (probably) still connected to the grid. It's a huge convenience to you to use just a bit of energy when you really need it - but what if you only use $5 worth of electricity at a low cost? The billing probably process probably costs a nice percentage of your total bill! Is it really unreasonable to pay for a connectivity fee? I don't think it is necessarily...
Many electric providers charge a base "connection" fee to all customers to cover the costs of maintaining the connection, billing, etc. Power is charged on top of that. Nothing in the article says it will only be charged to customers with solar panels, so I assume this is just following what other providers already do.
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.
"Sir, we've learned that the government is PAYING our customers to get these solar panels, and then we have to pay them for the electricity that is generated. Some may actually see a net profit from this. We even get cheaper electricity out of the deal, without having to pay for the equipment."
"What? What?! No - absolutely not - we cannot allow this to continue unchallenged. Why, if everybody did that, then what would we be?"
"Well, sir, we'd be the company that provides power when the sun isn't providing it. We wouldn't have to pay for power we aren't using from them. We could even start reselling expensive solar equipment and batteries."
"Oh, so it wouldn't have to absolutely destroy us... oh, but damn, the shareholders!"
"The shareholders?"
"Yes, they'll go apeshit if they learn we aren't maximizing profits. Damnit, we'll have to do something to convince the shareholders that we're not letting an opportunity for shortterm profit fall away. I know - start charging a ridiculous fee for connecting, then using these solar systems, then they'll be another companies problem."
"Customers willing to provide cheap electricity are a problem?"
"No, shareholder expectations about making money from them are a problem. Losing customers for 'overzealous' charges we can explain, but losing profit margins from existing customers we get a shitstorm for. Commence the charges!"
---
Ryan Fenton
What about the monopoly Xcel has to distribute electricity. That's one hell of a subsidy. Oh, what about the free right of ways across the solar panel owner's property. Maybe the home owners should be permitted to charge for allowing a utility pole on their lawn.
Solar panels produce their highest output when demand is highest, namely on sunny summer days when everyone has their air conditioning cranked up. That's VERY expensive power. Keeping the power company from needing to fire up their peak power generators (versus relying on base load) and helping to prevent brownouts is worth serious $$$. Solar panel output is lowest when cheap base load power is plentiful. In management-speak this is called "synergy".
The PHB's at Xcel Energy need a whack with a cluestick. Nickel and diming people who are giving you expensive peak power for the price of base load is petty at best.
If they want to charge a connection fee then so be it. The gas company and other utilities often charge those so there's a track record of that and I doubt you'll be able to fight the lawyers and politicians they own without a lot of trouble.
The money you would spend to fight them could be better used to move yourself off the grid so you don't have to pay them. Anything. Ever.
But that's a lifestyle change too so I doubt enough people in the US are going to be motivated enough to do that.
Note - I live in the US and am reducing my usage until I can find a way to get off the grid. You can do it even in a suburban home if you plan well enough.
"Bah!" - Dogbert
It's called a line connection fee. EVERYONE already pays this. There is no reason that solar CONTRIBUTORS should have to be charged to help the power companies, if anything excel should have to pay them. Think about it, power, they dont have to maintain, service, or otherwise pay to implement, comes into their grid magically.
These guys just want to remain a near monopoly on power generation, so they want to create barriers of entry. People who propose stuff like this should be flogged, or worse.
Troll, Troll, go away and flame again some other day
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
Are you going to disconnect the sun if they refuse to pay you?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
G.O. would roll in his grave if he found out that 1984 was a mild version of the future.
Didn't you hear? Xcel dug him up, wrapped in wire and are generating electricity by how fast he's spinning.
Looking at my most recent bill, I think I pay $10.68 even if I use 0 KWH, so I already pay such a "connection fee" with Consumers Energy in Michigan.
System Access Charge - 6.00
Delivery Surcharges - 4.68
Morphing Software
There are some solar users with battery banks large enough to ride all the way through a typical night, but very few solar users with enough battery to last through a week of storms. In this case the power company's infrastructure is acting as insurance, and a fee like this is the price for that insurance.
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!!"
"We're not making enough of a profit, therefore we're going to start making up fees so we do. Thanks for the idea, air travel industry!"
I call shenanigans on them for this. By all means, let's start making solar power for individual property owners less attractive! Let's punish them for being green and smart and trying to save themselves some money! Yeah, that'll sure incentivize them to invest $20,000 or more for solar panel installation!
Stupid bastards. Can't wait until someone steps in and tells them "NO!".
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
It appears, from another article, that Xcel wants to charge a fee based on the power generation capacity of a customer's solar panels. This seems totally unreasonable, except for one thing -- net metering. Net metering means Xcel essentially buys the customer's power at _retail_. So Xcel has to eat part of the transmission and distribution costs for the customer electricity. Net metering is required by federal law, so they can't just not do it. This seems to be an attempt to find a way around it.
Xcel already charges a flat fee to all customers (in addition to metered charges); this is on top of that.
http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_12914520?source=rss
In your analogy, please don't forget that you'd also be obligated to buy my leftover groceries. However, since you don't know how much I might send back, you have to pay to mail me a big box every week, which I may or may not return.
Power companies have, for decades, been advocating energy conservation, through rebates, in part because it's less expensive for them to do that than to build new power plants.
Now a power company is saying that the rebates THEY offer to prevent construction THEY don't want is only desirable up to the point...where they can't make as much money off of it? Is the objective to reduce power grid usage, or to maximize revenue? Sounds like they are reaching that decision point. Thoughts?
Because I know you have a rep reading this.
I AM GLAD you are doing this. Because now you open up the dialogue in which we discuss what I am going to CHARGE YOU per kilowatt hour that I GENERATE.
capiche?
kulakovich
ps - we're unregulated so I'll just put something out there after you say yes.
My electricity bill has a daily standing charge + a charge for each unit of electricity I use. I thought that was a pretty common arrangement
Some energy companies have lower daily standing charges and higher charges per megajoule. As far as I can tell from the article, the fee described is just an increase to the daily standing charge to cover the cost of engineering the grid to work with more customers who tie their solar panels to the grid.
Switching utilities, the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission in the DC area charges me 11 bucks a month just to stay hooked up to their pipes. Since Washington DC area tap water is so foul, particularly when the Potomac River gets low, I drink only Deer Park Spring Water. (I buy them in the huge 2.5 gallon jugs, which my county recycles.) So basically, all I ever use tap water for is to hand wash dishes / dinnerware, toilet flushing and the shower. Fortunately, I don't have to estimate that part, because those uses are shown in the non-connection-fee part of the bill. I calculated it out (I assure you, correctly, because I was a Math major), and I'm spending more per gallon for tap water (when you include connection fees) than I am for Deer Park.
I really love the comedian Lewis Black, and if I temporarily suspend remembrance of that calculation, I can still laugh at his tirade about how we're all so stupid for buying bottled water, which we could get "for free".
I'm not saying that people shouldn't have to pay their fair share for services and infrastructure they use. The idea of connection fees is completely fair. I'm just saying, keep an eye on what's actually costing you what, and demand a fair accounting. In justifying price increases, don't let them argue that the rising cost of power production justifies an increase in the connection fee too. And don't let them argue that the rising cost of repairing transmission lines justifies increasing the price per kilowatt-hour.
Ok, so you prevent your system from giving back extra during sunny days ( which is the right thing to do.. ) how would they ever know you can generate your own power? ( hey, we go on vacation a lot so we shut everything off )
Also, if i'm giving back back to the grid on good days, they are in effect getting free power to distribute elsewhere so they shouldn't bitch about it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Not disagreeing with you, but in almost all cases, the people with solar panels on their roofs are both generators AND consumers. They are already paying various fees and taxes, just as any other customer would. The fact that they only use $5 a month in electricity because of their generation costs is irrelevant. The electric company isn't going to pay them per watt/hour of electricity what they are charging for the same... Not even close. THAT is their profit. That is also the pool that they use when they build or maintain THEIR grid. They get cheap electricity at a fraction of what they charge for it, and Joe Solar gets a low monthly bill because his overall generation minus use is minimal.
If you view Joe Solar as ONLY a generator, then sure, he's mooching off the electric company's infrastructure. But as both... no way. The problem is that more and more people are putting panels on their roofs and their overall profit is at risk of dropping. They don't make as much if you don't use as much. Their "fee" is just a means of trying to recoup that potential lost profit by getting people used to paying extra just for the privilege of having solar panels on their roofs. And that's bogus. Make no mistake, there's no "free lunch" here. If we were getting electricity AT COST, then sure, they could charge us for infrastructure. But they are very much in it for the money, and so make a profit.
Think of electricity like any other commodity. If you were buying shares of stock, wouldn't you be a little upset if you were charged a fee just because the price was lower than it was last week and a lot of people were taking advantage of it?
Let's consider the value of the pollution externalities that the power companies benefit from every day, balance that against the cost of hooking wires to my house, and we'll call it even.
It's a really good deal for the power company.
To explain further, an externality is an economic term that refers to a cost or an impact on someone not directly involved. When a power company pollutes with a coal plant, there are many people who are impacted by the pollution, even though they are not involved in either the generation or the consumption of the electricity causing the pollution.
A homeowner bears more than his fair share of the cost of pollution, and a factory which uses far more electricity bears much less than its fair share.
Clean air is worth something. It has a value. And when that clean air is destroyed, the value is uncompensated. That's an externality.
So if the electric company wants to charge me for the house hookup, then I would like to start charging the electric company for the value of the clean air I no longer have access to.
Fair's fair.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
1) I pay a connection fee all the time its not installation.
2) I have a cabin. It has gone all year without some years and I STILL pay a connection fee for not using any power.
3) Xcel runs to the state to get tax payer money every time they do anything that SHOULD have been planned for as part of their private business; but they are essentially a sanctioned monopoly with regulations to keep the public suckered.
The power grid like the ROADS should be managed by the public; around here our roads are handled well, our bridges not so well. The one bridge that fell down you heard about in the news was actually part of the federal highway system and they should take part of the blame along with the low bid contractors involved. The public here was ALSO to blame for cutting funding for decades leading many of us to predict bridge collapses years in advance! Sadly, the public DID approve measures to restore some funding but it was too late.
Point is, a public run system like the roads can be run as well as the public's competence at democracy - regardless of the use of contractors or regulated privatization (think of the overhead: profit, regulation, enforcement, fines, corruption...all paid by the public.) The power lines, phone lines, and cable lines run over PUBLIC LAND and should be owned by the public which essentially PAYS for them; bad contractors can result in replacement contractors or government management. Rural phones, cable, power etc were forced by regulation and payed for by the users and tax payers. When a rare private investment pays for something like cable lines that is funded by the customers and quite often corporate welfare "incentives." The process encourages corruption and monopoly abuses. If Xcel merely sold power and another entity maintained the grid itself this would be much less of an issue.
FYI:
In MN we have OLD OLD gas lines around the whole city and nobody wants to pay for it and naturally Xcel didn't plan long term because that is bad business since they can just force the state to pay it. You'd think a bridge falling would wake people up but we've had gas explosion accidents for many years ALREADY but nothing big enough and frequent enough to wake people up (or the local media which gets money from Xcel.) Want to know the solution? They wait for reports of gas leaks and then check that area or maybe the road to determine if they need to fix it-- they are too cheap to run plastic pipe in the old pipe in my area and continue to make a patchwork of the road on a house-by-house basis for the last decade.
Xcel won't listen until you have a significant amount of STOCK; you can't vote, you can't shop elsewhere, and you can't revoke any local contracts with them.
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