It’s a sticky subject for sure. TOU rates that more accurately reflect wholesale would be good, except for all the people who can’t shift their usage. Higher fixed charge to reduce how much TOU cost is covered with volumetric is good, except for poor low-usage customers. Etc. - ThreadSky

wombat-ee.bsky.social • 3 days ago

It’s a sticky subject for sure. TOU rates that more accurately reflect wholesale would be good, except for all the people who can’t shift their usage. Higher fixed charge to reduce how much TOU cost is covered with volumetric is good, except for poor low-usage customers. Etc.

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willparker.bsky.social•3 days ago

There could be solar-only TOU rates, though, or ones tailored to equalize costs for low income customers. e.g. 10c cheaper midday and 8c more at peak, with hours adjusted so average net bill change is zero.

There are ways to mitigate, I just think utilities/PUCs don't recognize the benefits.

wombat-ee.bsky.social•3 days ago

Like the best option on paper would be to take almost all T&D/infrastructure costs out of the per kWh cost. Costs $40 a month on average to serve a residential customer? Cool, your basic charge is $40/mo and your per kWh is lower. Kinda like how industrial tariffs work. But on paper isn’t everything

wombat-ee.bsky.social•3 days ago

Also some smaller utilities are starting to implement demand charges, which does pretty accurately represent the system requirements to serve a particular customer. So high fixed charge + a demand charge + low per kWh charge with aggressive TOU might be the ultimate answer.

willparker.bsky.social•3 days ago

That's a good model as long as demand charges are manageable, e.g. averaged over multiple hours and several peaks. Having high penalties for a single high load hour makes it hard to build a business case for batteries.

wombat-ee.bsky.social•3 days ago

We can’t hang everything on household batteries though. A lot of people in this country rent or are living paycheck to paycheck, and they just want reliable power at a reasonable price from their utility. So perhaps you’d need different rates for people with customer generation and people without.

wombat-ee.bsky.social•3 days ago

But expecting someone in a rental to spend the money to install a battery in a building they don’t own is not reasonable.

willparker.bsky.social•3 days ago

Agreed. There should be multiple rate options.

It just seems like a real regulatory failure when a jurisdiction like California can't offer a reasonable rate option where solar+batteries give customers cheaper than retail avg costs while flattening the duck as much as possible.

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