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vissalyn t1_isbeg0g wrote

Reply to comment by chowder-san in FREE ELECTRICITY! Credit Suisse analysis says Inflation Reduction Act will produce solar modules for two pennies a watt in Ohio, while federal tax credits will cover 50% of project costs. by manual_tranny

It’s not an excuse it’s real. If you want to go ahead and disconnect your home from the grid, go ahead. Utilities can’t continue to support a reliable grid for you to use when your panels aren’t generating without some sort of compensation from the customers to do so. Where are they going to get the money to maintain the grid if everyone did this? All operating and maintenance expenses are passed directly to the customer. Utilities “make money” on capital investments.

Every solar installation at a home requires a model be run for that distribution area to see if it will cause overloading or voltage issues. It’s not an excuse, it’s a very complicated issue that many people around the world are working on.

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Loeden t1_isbk41n wrote

My hookup fee is eight dollars a month. 90 is an unreasonable fee for work actually being performed, although maintaining the grid and net metering is still a service and should have some sort of fee, I agree. The issue here is with gouging solar customers with a different hookup price that regular customers don't get hit with.

I am not paid for what I generate but instead have banked kwh that I can pull from, which is honestly more beneficial than grids having to pay out. Mind you, my utilities are run by my city and not a corporation.

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RatmanThomas t1_isc8ll3 wrote

The government doesn’t have to charge a fee for up keep, they tax you for it.

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Loeden t1_isc8qs6 wrote

Uh? We're talking about power companies. Many of which are not public utilities, although I wish they were.

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chowder-san t1_isbgmcx wrote

my point isn't that they should do that without compensation, but that they are using that as an excuse to cover for their negligence that lasted decades and increase prices much more than they deserve. Over years they cashed profit margins instead of investing in improving the grids, leaving them in a sorry state and now, that they are tested by sudden influx of solar panels, companies need to make rapid changes and maintenance that costs. And customers are being bled to cover those.

If power companies did their job properly and fulfilled the tasks they were supposed to complete and cared for stuff they were supposed to oversee, we wouldn't have issues we do now.

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vissalyn t1_isbi04g wrote

Not sure how you think they cashed profit margins - again they create new wealth from a guaranteed rate of return on invested capital - both of which needs to be approved by the state utility board. All other costs are transferred to the customers on a 1:1 basis. And there is no doubt every company/utility could cut costs in some way, but to say they are intentionally overcharging to make a cash profit is not correct.

If by someway they could see the future, perhaps they would have built the grid in a more robust state, but that would have been more expensive back then and customers at the time would not have been happy about it - costs would have been higher, let alone the utility board approving rate increases for extensive costs to cover what would have seemed to be an imaginary future scenario.

I hope this helps some in understanding how this works, it’s very complicated and has taken me years to understand. Nothing is black and white.

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pitlane17 t1_isbkwwt wrote

Everyone gets charged a customer charge out of the gate. That covers a portion of their cost for maintenance. Whether you use 5kwh or 3000 in a month as residential. The charge is the same. Just because I now add solar and lower my kwh usage now I have to pay fees for the amount of kw I have in solar? That doesn't make since, I contribute more then the person who only has small livestock well, yet they pay the same customer charge, and I still have to pay the customer charge and the kw solar fee.

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vissalyn t1_isbm7n5 wrote

Yeah a customer charge vs revenue to cover expenses through the rate case are separate here. If everyone suddenly had solar installed, the utility wouldn’t have enough revenue from customers to maintain the current grid without upping that base charge, so now that base charge would be substantial. Since now you aren’t recovering costs from a kWh basis but instead it’s more of a fixed cost to all customers to just maintain the grid.

Let’s say 50% of the customer base installs solar - now the utility must cover the same costs to maintain the grid, yet their revenue is substantially lowered, so the money has to come from somewhere. Do you just increase the rate cost and now the half of customers not using solar are paying double what they were? Well that doesn’t make much sense since anyone with solar is still benefiting from that entire grid.

Perhaps the best solution is to break out electrical bills to generation costs (fuel, maintenance at power plants, wind sites etc. ) and charge those through a rate structure $/kwh, then take the grid maintenance side and just charge that evenly across all households. Many people wouldn’t think this is fair either, but it’s one option.

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