Income-based electricity bills coming (low income, flat fee, sale)

[AnythingOutdoors]

PG&E monthly bills could jump for many customers due to new state law
- Customer monthly bills will include a fixed charge based on income

Well this should be, uh, fun

Who's excited to send their tax info to the utility company? Once this is established as a "thing" we know what direction it'll go... UP!

[MechAndy]

This sounds great.
I’m sure everyone is excited about this opportunity.
What could possibly go wrong?

[509]

Utilities back east are doing this.

There is a charge for the infrastructure necessary to get the electricity to your home.

Then there is a charge for the electricity you consume.

The income level is a "California" refinement.

For many, many people the connection to the grid charge will be much greater than the charge for the electricity consumed.

[LakeLifePA]

I have to hand it to the liberal hacks in California, because they find creative ways to implement programs of extreme welfare under the guise of equity. Kudos to them and the reason why I'll never live in that crap pile again.

[Vision67]

They could achieve the same effect by using a steeper tiered rate structure.

i.e. Those who use the most pay the most for infrastructure improvements.

Wait! If I'm charging my new EV from a home socket I'd have to pay more?

The name of the game in every tax scheme is to figure out how to make the other guy pay.

Expect a huge political battle.

[citizensadvocate]

I believe some type of income based electric pricing had been in effect for years.

Both the very punitive tiered rates and the CARE program.

Apparently it is assumed low income users usually live in smaller homes, apartments, and rooms the later often with no water heaters and only a small heater(likely gas) and probably go back only to sleep pay the lowest tiers while those with larger homes with pools, hot tubs, flood lights, computer servers, Tesla or other electric vehicles, electric heaters, A/Cs need to pay much higher tier rates from the same utility company. It’s assumed that they can afford it if they can afford all those gadgets. So make them subsidize the grid. In the old days the PUC only allow rates to go no higher than $0.13 for any user at any season regardless of market rates it’s likely why the big three utilities went bankrupt after deregulation and skyrocketing market rates. That price ceiling applied to any utility selling electricity in the state whether it’s independent, municipal, or the big three.

I do hope they will lower the overall cost burden with this new program
But I doubt it under the current political climate and skeptical how do they make it work. Given the rates they charge even $92 isn’t much but I be asking whether it’s on top of any kilowatt hours consumed.

[Kings Gambit]

It shouldnt be income based. It should be tied to either property value (appraised value or amount of last sale of home) or average rent in the geographical area.

[mgforshort]

Communism could take over a country with a bang, like the Bolsheviks took Russia in 1917. It won't happen here. We'll have it coming in tiny, slow, careful steps carried out gently and stretched for half a century. Most of us here won't have to deal with it, but your grandchildren might lose their homes because a big homeless family needs it more. I witnessed it myself, my grandmothers lost their homes, but in their case the properties went to Communist Party members. Budapest, Hungary, 1953.

[wac_432]

The PG&E proposal is pretty unclear with vague language about lowering the per kWh rate. The SDG&E proposal includes better numbers. They would charge a flat fee, based on income, for delivery and the usual wholesale market generation costs.

This sounds like an end-run around the NEM 2.0 grandfathering. It seems like the flat fee for delivery would probably apply to 2.0 customers, and so their “retail rate” for electricity would just be the generation costs, anyway, same as it is for NEM 3.0. It really screws over anyone who installed solar, unless the NEM 2.0 grandfathering lets them avoid the flat fee (unlikely).

For me, I haven’t yet installed solar and the per kWh transmission costs are much higher than the generation costs, so I like this idea.

If something like the SDG&E proposal were implemented in my area, I would:
Cancel my plans to install solar and battery, because the (unavoidable and pretty big) flat fee nulls out a good 70% of the savings I’d see by generating/storing/consuming my own power.

Purchase a used EV (for the stack of incentives it comes with) as my daily commuter, as the cost for using more power drops by 60%. So using electricity to commute makes a lot more sense than gas.
And, for when everybody else figures out that blowing through thousands of grid supplied kWh is WAY cheaper than it used to be:

Purchase a NG-fired whole-house backup generator to replace the solar batteries I WAS going to get for rolling blackouts and PSPS nonsense.

Hold on to my ICE car--planned nonop--(and be ready to operate my PHEV without the P) for commuting when everybody else figures out that blowing through thousands of kWh is suddenly much cheaper than it used to be, wholesale electrical generation rates skyrocket, and the grid becomes even more unreliable due to a huge surge in useage.

I don’t think all the bad stuff will happen the second the power companies pull the rug out from under everyone. It will take a couple of years for most people to adjust their habits, then they’ll change the rules again. In the meanwhile, if you're agile, you can save some money.

I’m not 100% sure that these proposals will cancel out most of the effect of grandfathering NEM 2.0, but it sure sounds possible, based on the overview language:

On a month-to-month basis, bill credits for the excess generation are applied to a customer's bill at the same retail rate (including generation, distribution, and transmission components) that the customer would have paid for energy consumption according to their otherwise applicable rate structure.
NEM customer-generators must pay the same non-bypassable charges for public services as other IOU customers, which includes Department of Water Resources bond charges, the public purpose program charge, nuclear decommissioning charge, and competition transition charge. NEM customer-generators are exempt from standby charges.

Even if transmission costs aren’t currently broken out from infrastructure maintenance, the power company could change that.

the flat fee would account for delivery charges

Right now utilities charge separately per kWh for transmission and distribution, which is the majority of my bill. SDG&E says they’re going to fold that into the flat fee. That would be a huge windfall to the power companies from the NEM 2.0’ers. The language of NEM 2.0 and the new proposals are at odds. Given the emphasis on equality, and the fact that NEM 2.0 grandfathering is mainly applied to wealthy people who own their own place and were able to afford solar, my money is on the CPUCC screwing over the people who are grandfathered in favor of the utilities.

[1AngryTaxPayer]

Originally Posted by Kings Gambit

It shouldnt be income based. It should be tied to either property value (appraised value or amount of last sale of home) or average rent in the geographical area.

That's going to hit seniors on a fixed income hard.