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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."
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!"
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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
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.
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!!"
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.
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.