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[Specter]

Fran, that would greatly simplify the billing, and let the people know exactly where the money is being spent.
You have generation, (this would include purchase agreements as well, maybe we should call it acquisition), transmission and distribution basically.  They like to keep them bunched up and murky so they can keep scaring you into believing their bs and adding more Tariffs every time you turn around.

Right now the big kerfluffle is going to eventually be paying people with solar fairly for what they put  back on the grid.
Of course the power companies don't want to pay much of anything for it, they want it for free.
of course the people want full retail rate for it
Of course any mention of ANY sort of compromise, you get glared at from both sides because they just can't comprehend the concept of sharing / or working together, maybe I should use the catch phrase, the common good, how about.. let EVERYONE get a little bit of the pie.  Nope!!

The power plants love to give their bullshit how they can get electric for pennies on the megawatt, but they conveniently forget to add in the times when they are paying tens of thousands of dollars per megawatt because there just is NO spare electric out there and when buying at emergency prices, well, anything goes, but oh hey that lowly customer who is selling at market rate, well his power is 100x cheaper than ANYthing currently available.  Shush you, you'll ruin our swindle.

Back to the article.  How can they call that profit, didn't they just lose a few billion in the previous year or three due to fire damages, and a 20 billion or something obscene like that from lawsuits?  Don't they have like thousands of miles of wire to bury so it's no longer a fire hazard, and that was going to cost a trillion dollars or whatever goofy amount they said it would?

You would think that after the shitstorm that the entire state went thru concerning electricity, fires, and culpability, they'd be real careful about throwing around the word profit.   Call it cutting losses, call it, making progress on our fire hardening program, something, but profit?  Yah, not a good word to use there.

At the end of the day though, that one magic word, shareholders, is how they get away with it.  By law, they are in the game to make money, PERIOD. If they are a corporation, they LEGALLY have to make as much money as they possibly can for their shareholders or they can be held in negligence.  Yes we could cut a deal that would help the customers, but we answer to the SHAREHOLDERS, who want to see a PROFIT, more than we answer to the customers, so making the customers happier, at the expense of the shareholders ROI, well, that's a lawsuit there.

Ive been doing solar since 1986, and worked for the power company for close to 20 years.  Ive been all in and out and upside down in the solar thing, trying to find someone to talk to, to pitch a good deal for our entire city, (my opinion, but strongly backed by hard numbers)_  Nobody is interested.  Solar is expensive, and no money in it for them, the power companies are NOT interested.  There COULD be money in it for them IF they did it correctly, but as usual, they ALL get dragged to the table kicking and screaming, and nothing good for YOU is ever going to come out of that.  If anything they do shit to punish you for making them comply.  Just like EPA compliance, rarely if ever will you see proactive, it's always reactive or damage control from them.  Why?  Because PROactive costs money.

Are you starting to see a pattern here?

Aaron

[Richard230]

BTW. PG&E a few years ago started billing separately for electric generation and transmission costs. Even if you don't use any electricity you still get billed for their maintenance and the value of their transmission infrastructure. I am on their "Trier 1" rate plan and last month I was billed $.515 per KWh with more PUC approved rate increases in the pipeline.   

[Fran K]

Just a bit more.  It is a motorcycle forum anyway.  When they made the electric company which is now Eversource, it was CL&P (Connecticut light and power) and maybe more in between divest their power plants the customer got the choice of choosing their supplier or have the electric company do it. This led to much tele marketing as other entities woud offer less price but only guarantee it for 6 months.  And there were (and are you are not locked in the way I understane it) eco-friendly generation company to choose from.  I think the end user is kind of insulated from the peak fees.  I just stayed with not picking a supplier.

I read on a sort of competing forum about I think it is in Washington state that has resevoirs and hydro generators.  They can pay well for electricity put back into the grid because it is essentially more water in their resevoir which they use to play the peak market as much as they can.  This will make other places expect the same treatment with any surpllus solar they might have during sunny times.  Last sentence my reasoning.

I was in Northwestern Ohio pretty close to indiana and saw lots of towers with wind turbines.  I tried to find out what it was on the intenet.  Best I can describe here is that they found a buyer for the electricity, it was an university and the amount they paid was to me shockingly small.  Quite likely that contract has ran out and they may will sell it somewhere else now.

How to get the dc from solar panels up to the high voltage lines on the poles along the road and get it in phase seems pretty hard to envision.  No one need try it is an electric motorcycle forum.

Edit:  In Ct say it costs $15 to be connected and have your meter read once a month.  Residential, overhead wires and transformers for each residence or a few residences per transformer for what difference that makes.  All other lines on the bill have a per kwh decimal fee, including the ones I am calling wealth redistribution.  Hope I am not in error not looking at a bill now.  There may and probably are ways if you are low income to have your bill somewhat different.

Double edit"  Gee Richard do you mean there isn't a seperate distribution charge and transmission charge like in Ct?  I am not like Don who keeps telling of all his houses and travels, but I do have a few meters fed by the Willow Island coal plant and now there is a low head hydro on the Ohio river, and it costs $6 a month to be hooked up and 11 cents per kwh.  Admittedly I have right of ways and poles with two wires the hot being the top one as the wires don't always follow the road.  Probably the ash dump is subsidized somehow.

[Richard230]

PG&E has so many charges and fees that make up my electric bill it makes my eyes glaze over. But the two big ones seem to be power purchases and transmission infrastructure charges. My daughter has gone all electric and just had her gas meter removed. She used to pay $5 a month to have her electric and gas meter read manually. When PG&E started installing "smart" meters, she didn't trust them and starting paying a fee to keep her dumb meters and having someone come buy once a month to read them.  However, when she went all-electric, with solar, backup batteries, electric induction stoves and heat-pump everything, she finally had to have a smart meter installed. It took her months, but she finally got the company to remove her gas meter and stop billing for it even though she was not using any gas.

Unlike me, she also gets her power from a local county system that buys wind, solar, geothermal and hydro power directly from the producers and she pays a little more for the "green" power, which is then sent to her home via PG&E's transmission and billing system, which adds on the power that she buys from the county purchasing system and charges to transmit it. In my case, I don't use much power, compared with anyone else in my neighborhood, and have stayed entirely on the PG&E power generation system.

[Specter]

Ideally, electricity, the price should fall in 3 general categories.

1. Generation / Procurement.  How much does it cost to generate it, or buy it.
2. Transmission - This refers to long distance transference of it.  move it across the country, across your state, or just across your town, the very high voltage side of it
3. Distribution - Ok, the high voltage lines are outside your little neighborhood, now there is a transformer which steps down the voltage to run down the street in front of your house, and then finally, the pole, or pad mounted transformer to step it down one final time from the distribution voltage to the voltage you need in your house to run your stuff.  ie  the 240 / 120 vac in the US, and whatever, elsewhere.

Electricity is an instantaneous commodity, you need to generate it on the spot when you need it, it really can not be stored in it's natural form that you use it.  You can't store AC, you can convert to DC, then chemically convert it and store in batteries, or convert to DC and store in huge supercaps, but then it needs to be re chemically converted back to DC, in a battery .. and/or the DC back to AC to run your home.  Storing electricity is expensive, unlike say, storing water, where, ok it's sunny out, we are making a shit ton of power, lets pump the water tower full during the day, using solar to run the pumps, then at night, when solar is no longer generating, use the water we put in the tanks earlier.  Also remember that there are always losses in any storage sytem.

People paying more for green power.  It's all a scam really.  The power you are using is probably made from coal, natural gas or whatever is running at 3 am.  All that means is that sometime during the day, when someone was making solar, you paid them to put that on the grid, for whomever to use, then when it was YOUR turn to use electricity, you used the amount you paid for, pretending it was green, but in reality it came from whatever was generating it at the moment you used it.  Unless you actually use it at the moment it is being generated, you can not guarantee it was green, even IF you use it at that moment, you can NOT really track what motive force was used to energize those electrons you specifically utilized.

Unless you have a grid that is entirely powered by 'green power' there is no way to guarantee it's 'green'.  An interconnected grid is not going to give you that.

Most people don't know this, or have a clue how to figure it out, just drool, hit the I believe button and pay whatever their power company tells them to  pay and pretend they are doing 'their share' to save a planet that has been thru ice ages, volcano's meteor impacts, yet humans think they are actually significant on it and can somehow control it.  Now lets throw in a company that is only interested in making a profit, so will hide any and all of this, so that those few percent of their customers who actually DO have the ability to understand this stuff, don't catch on as easy and tell the others what is really going on.

The more complicated we can make shit, the easier it is to slip in an extra fee, tariff, judgement, adjunct, tax, levy, stipend, etc to squeeze even more money out of the customer.  Welcome to the power industry!

The TLDR tards that are being bred today, make this kind of tactic even more simple to pull off.  Ignorance is not only bliss, it is also very profitable!

Aaron

[Richard230]

Speaking of power production, an article in my newspaper yesterday reports that the city of Oroville, CA, is trolling for an $18 million grant to construct a "microgrid" with solar panels and battery storage so that their city emergency infrastructure can be independent of the PG&E system during outages and emergencies. The city council has awarded a $5K contract to a Santa Cruz consultant company, Our Energy, asking them to apply for a grant to fund the project. Our Energy CEO stated that the city of Oroville is "uniquely qualified for the grant because of its rural and fire risk status."

[Richard230]

This morning I heard a 30-second news report on my local CBS radio station that a city in the San Francisco Bay Area (I don't recall which one) has passed a law that would prevent large storage battery facilities from being constructed within its jurisdiction for the next couple of years due to their concern that the the batteries might catch on fire and release noxious fumes and other nasty chemicals into the environment. I assume that they aimed the regulation at PG&E. I was relieved that they didn't try to outlaw home battery storage systems (yet).

[Specter]

Richard, they are going to hit a bit of a snag when they try their we are independent thing and the PGE says, oh but WAIT!! you are using OUR lines, OUR transformers, OUR wire etc etc, put your own in, or lease it at very obscene rates.  (yep that's been tried before in other places).  Grant or not, the people there are going to see their electric rates skyrocket very soon afterwards, that also happens with these projects as well, they cost money to keep running, gee whuda thunkit!!

Another problem with solar is resiliency (and btw I am a supporter of solar), one hailstorm and that plant is wiped OUT!  It can take a better part of a year to get it back online, whereas a regular power plant, short of an F5 tornado wiping it off the map or an earthquake splitting it in half, a week or so at worse case and it's right back online making power again.

BTW, those panels, turns out the unicorn farts they manufacture them with are quite toxic to dispose of as well.  A gas station, or a jiffy lube catching on fire is going to put nasty smoke into the air as well, so will an ICE vehicle, and pretty much any other building they got around or business.  However there is one new tech on the market now that while still expensive, might alleviate some of that.  Supercaps are coming mainstream now and are looking VERY interesting and VERY doable, even on a large scale.

Aaron

[Richard230]

Aaron, the situation that you mention with the power company wanting to charge local public utility companies for using their transmission and distribution facilities is already happening in the city of San Jose, CA. They are trying to ween themselves off of the PG&E system to the point where they are planing to build their own transmission lines. Needless to say, they are running into push-back from PG&E who is tossing roadblocks in front of their plans. Right now things are moving very slowly as it is tough to get past PG&E and the state's PUC that they control.