[HN Gopher] PG&E Rates Could Drastically Change Based on Your In...
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PG&E Rates Could Drastically Change Based on Your Income
Author : devadvance
Score : 25 points
Date : 2023-04-16 16:08 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sfstandard.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (sfstandard.com)
| saltcured wrote:
| While I understand the desire to have a progressive pricing
| scheme to offset some of the criticism around solar subsidies
| being "subsidies for the rich", I think this would be a terrible
| precedent as far as invasion of privacy. I think it is cynical
| overreach. There is absolutely no reason that the utility company
| should gain access to household income data of their entire
| market.
|
| If the CA government thinks we should have this kind of pricing
| or means-based support of the utilities, I think they should
| design it into the income tax code and provide subsidies to the
| utility from collected tax revenue.
|
| An alternative might be to extend current CARE, FERA, and Medical
| Baseline Allowance programs to extend discounts or payment
| assistance for households in need. But I think these programs may
| also be flawed in that they endanger the privacy of those needing
| assistance. The state tax board already has the necessary data
| and the state should not be supporting the creation of additional
| parallel systems.
| JPws_Prntr_Fngr wrote:
| The US is an increasingly transparent kleptocracy. How do you
| even start to unwind from this level of regulatory capture?
| concerned_ wrote:
| More like unregulated capture. There is simply no way it
| legal for a utility to means test people. Regardless of where
| the data originated.
| JPws_Prntr_Fngr wrote:
| The bill in question seems to be AB 205 [0]:
|
| > Existing law authorizes the PUC to authorize fixed charges that
| do not exceed certain amounts per residential customer account
| per month, as provided. This bill would delete the requirement
| that each electrical corporation offer default rates to
| residential customers with at least two usage tiers. The bill
| would additionally require the PUC to ensure that the approved
| fixed charges do not unreasonably impair incentives for
| beneficial electrification and greenhouse gas reduction. The bill
| would instead authorize the PUC to authorize fixed charges for
| any rate schedule applicable to residential customer accounts.
| The bill would eliminate the cap on the amount of the fixed
| charge that the PUC may authorize. The bill would require the
| fixed charge to be established on an income-graduated basis, as
| provided, with no fewer than 3 income thresholds so that low-
| income ratepayers in each baseline territory would realize a
| lower average monthly bill without making any changes in usage.
|
| Since the income bracketing is a legal requirement, the CA state
| government will be sharing income data with these utility corps.
| I would imagine. So the bill's obviously being positioned as
| relief for low income households, but what it _would do_ is hand
| these utility oligopolies access to intelligence on their captive
| customers so it can fully exploit their price elasticities.
|
| [0]
| https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
| [deleted]
| noodlesUK wrote:
| I think that having energy be more affordable for people who are
| less well off makes sense. What this article seems to suggest is
| making electricity _unmetered_ and cost a fixed amount based on
| your income. This completely discourages people to be economical
| about saving energy. Rich people already tend to use their
| heating and AC more than poorer people. We should not incentivize
| people to be inefficient. Adjusting a unit price would be
| reasonable, but people should be charged just that -- a unit
| price.
| balderdash wrote:
| Isn't this just going to incentivize the people can afford to, to
| install residential solar/battery and go off grid? Which probably
| has negative consequences for the low/moderate income people who
| will have to share a larger portion of the fixed costs?
| shadowfu wrote:
| This was the first response when I shared this with someone
| else.
| zamalek wrote:
| Technology Connections has a really interesting (as always)
| video on this. Supposedly 10-20% of your power bill goes to
| power, the rest is for grid maintenance. The poor are going to
| have to pay more and more to maintain the grid, unless there is
| a radical change in how grid-tied is priced.
| zen_1 wrote:
| Off topic, but your username made me do a double take, wasn't
| expecting a name from my hometown to pop up as a HN user
| pengaru wrote:
| What business does the power company have knowing my income
| level? I already get offers to sign up for substantial low-income
| discounts from SCE, and it never strikes me as a good idea to
| pursue despite likely qualifying on my long sabbatical style
| stints of self-employment. My usage is so low in general it's
| just not an optimization worth further compromising my privacy
| for.
|
| Furthermore why would we want to disconnect cost from
| utilization? This seems ridiculous on the face of it, and the
| rates they're describing for the high-earners strike me as low
| compared to how wasteful such households tend to be.
|
| Am I missing something? Is some millionaire with an electric
| heated outdoor pool going to be paying $92/mo in this scheme?
| That's madness and incentivizing the wrong things entirely.
|
| Or are those figures listed just averages expected under the new
| scheme, but still scaled by utilization?
|
| Also what happens if you refuse to provide proof of income level
| under this scheme? Does it just default to the highest bracket?
| Many actual low-income folks won't be filing paperwork proving
| their taxed income level with the power company, will this just
| fuck them over by treating them as high earners?
| lsaferite wrote:
| Is PG&E electricity super cheap already or something? I pay 2x-3x
| the top tier they are talking about in FL for electricity.
| davidandgoliath wrote:
| .47c a kWh. Highest outside of Hawaii, third or fourth highest
| in the world.
|
| You're not paying that in Florida.
| MrFoof wrote:
| For CA, depends very much on where you are. $0.47 is not the
| highest in CA, nor in the continental US.
|
| Here in Boston, my rate is $0.14479/Kwh for delivery with a
| $0.33891/kWh supply charge, _or $0.4837 per kWh._ Yep, higher
| than you 're paying. That excludes a fixed standing charge of
| $7/mo. About 53% of our base load (IIRC) is natural gas, so
| when natural gas wholesale prices spiked, so did our rates by
| 80+ percent back in October 2022.
|
| My electric bill nearly doubled over the course of 6 weeks.
| I'm fortunate that over the years I had always driven my
| power consumption into the ground. Certainly paid off. Back
| in 2017, the rate was legitimately under half what I paid
| now.
|
| Again, I believe there might be some parts of CA where the
| delivery+supply rate might be approaching $0.60/kWh at some
| points in time, but it'll be location dependent.
| mkozlows wrote:
| This isn't a fixed rate "total bill," it's the fixed charge
| base amount onto which they then layer the variable usage-
| related costs.
| gbtw wrote:
| So rich people who can afford their accountant fees to hide their
| income, like with taxes, will pay almost nothing for energy,
| while the essentially broke person will pay more.
| thegrim33 wrote:
| What percentage of the population do you believe is both rich
| and hires accountants to hide all of their income? What
| percentage of people serviced by PG&E do you think fall into
| that category? From my perspective you're referring to a number
| of people that I could count on one hand. Do you think it's
| some significant portion of the population?
| 1123581321 wrote:
| What makes you confident it's between one and five
| individuals?
| zamnos wrote:
| Presume that everyone making above, say, $1 million per year
| isn't taking all their income as W2 income. How much this
| counts as "hiding" income is up to you to decide, but
| generally W2 is considered "normal people" income, 1099
| "contractor people" income (whether that's a plumber who owns
| their own business, or an Uber driver), and 1099-DIV and
| 1099-INT and related are rich people incomes.
|
| If we further assume big tech companies have 5 CxO (CEO, CFO,
| CTO, COO, CISO, CMO; pick 5), and that there are more than 1
| big tech companies headquartered in California. If we assume
| those officers make large incomes that aren't W2 incomes,
| that they live in California, and, further, live in areas
| serviced by PG&E (which, statistically speaking is basically
| all of them), and then count individuals based on the
| fraction of income "hidden" as non-W2 income, and sum them
| up, then that number is surely greater than 5.
|
| Not a statically significant portion of the 17M employed
| Californians mind you, but more than 5.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| The "rich people who can afford accountants" in this case are
| going to be middle income families, and I'm not even talking
| about household income of more than 100k. Only the bottom 30%
| will see savings, which you'll realize is not a big threshold.
| saltcured wrote:
| Another problem I see is that by reducing the per-unit costs
| and shifting it back to a flat grid connection fee, they are
| reducing the incentive to save energy. Is this really going
| to bring the future we want?
|
| I honestly think it is a mistake to allow grandfathered NEM
| rate structures to continue, if these other wacky plans are
| really attempting to compensate for that imbalance.
|
| Maybe we need better than the NEM 3 proposal, to actually
| charge based on your grid connection size and usage.
| Something based on peak and actual power transfers as they
| reflect proportionate reliance on the grid
| infrastructure.That would be in addition to any actual energy
| consumption which I think should also follow the NEM 3 plan
| with retail rates for consumption and wholesale rates for
| production that vary by time of delivery.
| fwungy wrote:
| You can't do the flim flam without the shim sham.
| raylad wrote:
| This is a horrible proposal. Whether or not you are upset about
| PG&E knowing your income, the mere fact that it would be a flat
| rate reduces or eliminates the incentive to reduce electricity
| usage.
|
| If this goes through, we will probably see people running their
| AC and heat more because there's no incremental cost for them to
| do so.
|
| We need to be incentivizing reduction in energy use, not making
| it free to use more.
| Plasmoid wrote:
| The article is bad. It's not switching to flat rate, it's
| raising the stand-by charge and reducing the per-unit cost of
| energy.
|
| So it will definitely encourage more consumption but it's not
| the complete lunacy of flat rate electricity.
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(page generated 2023-04-16 23:02 UTC)