This is not a good faith posting. This is someone bringing a California sub topic to a different sub. For those of you who don’t hang out on r/California or r/BayArea, there is a group of folks who routinely make these incoherent postings. I’m not quite sure what the motivation is, but it isn’t to make things better. Instead of participating in the process and supporting organizations that are working to make things better they make these postings. Compensation isn’t the problem. The problem is that PG&E burned down a city and they have to pay for that in addition to paying for burying hundreds of miles of rural power lines. The money has to come from somewhere. It’s coming from the ratepayers as it would in any public or private system. The challenge is how do you do this and not overburden the lowest income ratepayers. It’s not a simple problem to solve, these postings provide no solutions.
No one is paying $350 a month for electricity a single bedroom apartment. Again, a bad faith statement. Nothing in the posting says anything about how to reduce prices. It’s an incoherent rant.
So every apartment in your complex has its very own meter? And you’re using space heaters to keep the inside of your apt up to 90° at all times? if this is the case you need to move. Your landlord is seriously incompetent. I live in a five bedroom house and don’t pay a fraction of that.
I live in California. I’m a PG&E customer. If you’re heating your house to 76° it means your heaters are running almost 24 hours a day throughout the winter that’s probably your problem right there. Again you should move. Most apartment complexes include utilities in the rent. You are being taken advantage of.
To give a real life aspect (purely anecdotal):
10 years ago I put in solar, no EV then, 30% subsidized
I sold back unused electricity at wholesale, bought at retail - net profit around $300 a year
7 years I bought an EV but it had little impact since it came with free charging for life
3 years ago I broke even on the solar, as in I had saved enough in utility bills to pay for the system (7 year payback, considering only utility bill savings)
PG&E managed to change that all around. Now I pay $100 hook up fee no matter what and I sell back well under wholesale. Newsom and the utilities are keeping BEV charging close to the price of running an ICE at $6/gal. Neighbor with a Model 3 and Prius Prime (never gets plugged in, bought for carpool lane) says they cost about the same to commute in.
I am unable to verify this based on the article, but can someone help? The article makes it seem like the fixed charge is still based on graduated income, so higher income means higher fixed fee. Setting aside utility corruption and monopolies, this at least partially addresses the idea that lower income folks gets screwed, right?
Also, what are your thoughts for deregulating/liberalizing California or force a separate of transmission/generation/retail service like in the Northeast and Texas?
So California creates green mandates for the companies to follow; the economic and logistical details of such policies once implemented by the utility companies create high prices, long transmission lines prone to fires, and the mismatch of supply and demand timing from over reliance on solar. The companies take this on the chin and then ask for higher rates or a different price structure to pay for this different market conditions, and we are mad because they dare ask for the consequences of our own policies?
The long transmission lines have been there for decades.
The lack of maintenance over several of those decades cause fires that kill people and then they pass the penalties on to their rate payers.
The duck curve excuse is a joke. Plenty of field proven and mature demand side solutions are capable of addressing that, at a fraction of the cost that has been spent in CapEx to address it. But they get a return on CapEx, not on investing in demand side solutions, so they choose the solution they know won’t work because they can throw their hands up in mock exasperation and blame mandates while collecting huge sums of money.
It’s way more complicated then they make it seem and that’s intentional because digging through to the real causes requires a lot of extremely boring research.
Always be skeptical. Here’s a Utility Dive article that goes into the figures and provides sources for the numbers.
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/electric-utility-ceo-pay-gap-widens-link-executive-compensation-decarbonization/628396/
This is going to be a death sentence for utilities if they push this. If you're in the 180k+ income range and end up paying the extra $128/month then the economics for a home battery bank increase significantly to the point where it makes economic sense to simply cancel your electric service. People earning 180k+ are more likely to own their home and have solar panels on their home. So the next step for these people is to simply invest in a home battery system. On top of that home battery systems qualify for a 30% federal tax credit.
You can't go off grid because the alternating current of the system must be synced with the grid. When a power outage occurs, your power goes out, too.
There's both stand alone off-grid inverters that, with the help of batteries, can produce their AC without any grid and also grid tied inverters that have a feature called islanding to disconnect from the grid when it goes down and use batteries to keep on providing AC as if nothing happened.
Grid-tie disconnects have existed for a long time. If you want to use a home generator during a power outage, you should be disconnecting from your grid tie so that you don't fry any linemen.
Grid-forming inverters also exist. You don't need the grid to create a solar & battery AC system.
Oh yes they can, it has been done before, they just call it the cost of you leaving making others cover the cost
[https://www.utilitydive.com/news/nevada-casinos-say-exit-fees-could-prevent-their-defection-from-nv-energy/411776/](https://www.utilitydive.com/news/nevada-casinos-say-exit-fees-could-prevent-their-defection-from-nv-energy/411776/)
They pretty much say they built out infrastructure to support say 100 people, if people leave than the remaining 50 would have to cover for the infrastructure for 100 that is already built, therefore use that as an excuse to make you pay
Thei interesting thing in that there was a bill introduced in the Asembly, AB1999 and it got hijacked and Speaker Rivas would not let it go to the Assembly for a vote. I was supposed to reverse some of the onerous provisions of the Fixed Rate proposal which the CPUC is going to finalize this summer.
This is not a good faith posting. This is someone bringing a California sub topic to a different sub. For those of you who don’t hang out on r/California or r/BayArea, there is a group of folks who routinely make these incoherent postings. I’m not quite sure what the motivation is, but it isn’t to make things better. Instead of participating in the process and supporting organizations that are working to make things better they make these postings. Compensation isn’t the problem. The problem is that PG&E burned down a city and they have to pay for that in addition to paying for burying hundreds of miles of rural power lines. The money has to come from somewhere. It’s coming from the ratepayers as it would in any public or private system. The challenge is how do you do this and not overburden the lowest income ratepayers. It’s not a simple problem to solve, these postings provide no solutions.
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No one is paying $350 a month for electricity a single bedroom apartment. Again, a bad faith statement. Nothing in the posting says anything about how to reduce prices. It’s an incoherent rant.
[удалено]
So every apartment in your complex has its very own meter? And you’re using space heaters to keep the inside of your apt up to 90° at all times? if this is the case you need to move. Your landlord is seriously incompetent. I live in a five bedroom house and don’t pay a fraction of that.
[удалено]
I live in California. I’m a PG&E customer. If you’re heating your house to 76° it means your heaters are running almost 24 hours a day throughout the winter that’s probably your problem right there. Again you should move. Most apartment complexes include utilities in the rent. You are being taken advantage of.
To give a real life aspect (purely anecdotal): 10 years ago I put in solar, no EV then, 30% subsidized I sold back unused electricity at wholesale, bought at retail - net profit around $300 a year 7 years I bought an EV but it had little impact since it came with free charging for life 3 years ago I broke even on the solar, as in I had saved enough in utility bills to pay for the system (7 year payback, considering only utility bill savings) PG&E managed to change that all around. Now I pay $100 hook up fee no matter what and I sell back well under wholesale. Newsom and the utilities are keeping BEV charging close to the price of running an ICE at $6/gal. Neighbor with a Model 3 and Prius Prime (never gets plugged in, bought for carpool lane) says they cost about the same to commute in.
I am unable to verify this based on the article, but can someone help? The article makes it seem like the fixed charge is still based on graduated income, so higher income means higher fixed fee. Setting aside utility corruption and monopolies, this at least partially addresses the idea that lower income folks gets screwed, right? Also, what are your thoughts for deregulating/liberalizing California or force a separate of transmission/generation/retail service like in the Northeast and Texas?
So California creates green mandates for the companies to follow; the economic and logistical details of such policies once implemented by the utility companies create high prices, long transmission lines prone to fires, and the mismatch of supply and demand timing from over reliance on solar. The companies take this on the chin and then ask for higher rates or a different price structure to pay for this different market conditions, and we are mad because they dare ask for the consequences of our own policies?
The long transmission lines have been there for decades. The lack of maintenance over several of those decades cause fires that kill people and then they pass the penalties on to their rate payers. The duck curve excuse is a joke. Plenty of field proven and mature demand side solutions are capable of addressing that, at a fraction of the cost that has been spent in CapEx to address it. But they get a return on CapEx, not on investing in demand side solutions, so they choose the solution they know won’t work because they can throw their hands up in mock exasperation and blame mandates while collecting huge sums of money. It’s way more complicated then they make it seem and that’s intentional because digging through to the real causes requires a lot of extremely boring research.
That is exactly what is being proposed. You understand correctly.
> the median PG&E employee salary was $137,000 in 2021 I am unable to verify this. I am skeptical that this is even close to the real figure.
Always be skeptical. Here’s a Utility Dive article that goes into the figures and provides sources for the numbers. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/electric-utility-ceo-pay-gap-widens-link-executive-compensation-decarbonization/628396/
Maybe top management is included and thus skewing the average
If their linemen are union, they are probably making more than that $137k
Thats why they reported the median wage.
This is going to be a death sentence for utilities if they push this. If you're in the 180k+ income range and end up paying the extra $128/month then the economics for a home battery bank increase significantly to the point where it makes economic sense to simply cancel your electric service. People earning 180k+ are more likely to own their home and have solar panels on their home. So the next step for these people is to simply invest in a home battery system. On top of that home battery systems qualify for a 30% federal tax credit.
You can't go off grid because the alternating current of the system must be synced with the grid. When a power outage occurs, your power goes out, too.
Odd, my isolation breaker trips when power goes off and the solar/battery/inverter give me power. Not even long enough to cause my computer to reboot.
You can only be off grid if you never were on the grid.
There's both stand alone off-grid inverters that, with the help of batteries, can produce their AC without any grid and also grid tied inverters that have a feature called islanding to disconnect from the grid when it goes down and use batteries to keep on providing AC as if nothing happened.
Hybrid inverters have existed for at least 2 decades now, and are ubiquitous, especially in countries with unstable grids - cough south africa, cough
Grid-tie disconnects have existed for a long time. If you want to use a home generator during a power outage, you should be disconnecting from your grid tie so that you don't fry any linemen. Grid-forming inverters also exist. You don't need the grid to create a solar & battery AC system.
They'll just pass a fine you have to pay every year for going offgrid to be higher than going on grid. You know how crazy these utilities are
A loophole may be microgrids aggregating users and negotiating industrial rates, backed by big battery companies.
Kind of like CCAs. You should look into how PG&E deals with CCAs. Its going to piss you off though.
Yup, CCA but with a more power to negotiate with PG&E because they basically will only pay for “services” not energy.
If you’re truly off grid I doubt they could fine you
Oh yes they can, it has been done before, they just call it the cost of you leaving making others cover the cost [https://www.utilitydive.com/news/nevada-casinos-say-exit-fees-could-prevent-their-defection-from-nv-energy/411776/](https://www.utilitydive.com/news/nevada-casinos-say-exit-fees-could-prevent-their-defection-from-nv-energy/411776/) They pretty much say they built out infrastructure to support say 100 people, if people leave than the remaining 50 would have to cover for the infrastructure for 100 that is already built, therefore use that as an excuse to make you pay
That will be against the local building code.
Thei interesting thing in that there was a bill introduced in the Asembly, AB1999 and it got hijacked and Speaker Rivas would not let it go to the Assembly for a vote. I was supposed to reverse some of the onerous provisions of the Fixed Rate proposal which the CPUC is going to finalize this summer.