6 ms·
It’s strange that in 2025 we still don’t have even a minimal, per-capita baseline tier for electricity. If a household uses less than the monthly per-capita av
by ursAxZA 9mo ago
It’s strange that in 2025 we still don’t have even a minimal, per-capita baseline tier for electricity.
If a household uses less than the monthly per-capita average, why not cap that baseline at something like $10?
Yes — that gap would need to be subsidized, probably through taxes.
But that’s already how grid maintenance works: we socialize the fixed costs while pretending rates are purely volumetric.(and I might be overstating this slightly).
Right now we punish low-usage consumers and reward structural inefficiency.
A baseline tier would at least make the incentives coherent.
- labcomputer 9mo agoSo PG&E already has something like this. It’s called either E-1 or TOU-C, depending on whether time-of-use billing applies. The price for the baseline tier is higher than you’d expect, though.
- ursAxZA 9mo agoThat makes sense — but it feels like the balance could be better. If we treat baseline access as a kind of ‘civilization tax,’ the pricing shouldn’t feel punitive for low-usage households.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- nospice 9mo agoThat's more or less the system that exists today? You pay a lower rate up to a certain threshold and then a higher rate kicks in. The problem with PG&E isn't the rate structure, which isn't all that different from utilities anywhere else in the world. It's that their costs are exceedingly high, through a combination of regulatory pressures and grift. This is exacerbated by municipal and state regulators who are pushing consumers to be more reliant on electric power (bans on gas appliances in new construction, pushes toward EVs, etc). There are vast swathes of the country where people pay 5-10x less for electricity.
- ursAxZA 9mo agoMy point was simply that electricity has a “civilization tax” aspect to it, and lower baseline access feels closer to the kind of future-proof system we should be aiming for. If the floor is gentle, people can actually reduce usage without feeling punished for doing the right thing. At the moment the baseline tier feels… maybe a “C-rating” version of what a real baseline could be?
- nospice 9mo agoSo who pays the tax? I mean, California already has some of the highest income taxes, corporate taxes, extra capital gains taxes, sales taxes, etc, etc. If you want to lower the cost of electricity for tens of millions of people without addressing systemic problems that make it ridiculously expensive in the first place, you gotta tax someone. The effective income tax rate for many SF Bay Area techies is around 50%. Do we jack it up to 65% so that PG&E bills can go down from $400 to $100, like almost everywhere else in the country?
- ursAxZA 9mo agoThe long version would take us far off-topic, so here’s the short one: if the tax-paying base collapses, none of this matters. At that point the debate isn’t about pricing — it’s about survival of the system. I could outline the full methodology behind this view, but that would turn the thread into a private seminar — and that’s not what comment sections are for.
- lovich 9mo agoAll the majority of people heard from you is “I pay more taxes” We’ve become an incredibly selfish nation on average, and until these systems collapse and people get to feel the hot stove, they aren’t going to change their minds about keeping any sort of system or infrastructure in place
- itsdrewmiller 9mo agoWhere do people pay 3-6 cents for electricity in the US?
- themafia 9mo ago> we socialize the fixed costs Then we should socialize that infrastructure as well. Otherwise if we're merely _amortizing_ the costs then a total capacity metric should apply to each user. A private company shouldn't be allowed to socialize important shared infrastructure simply because a weak PUC pretends to engage in oversight.
- ursAxZA 9mo agoI get the intuition behind fully socializing it, but I wouldn’t go that far. Single-operator systems lose redundancy fast, and that’s dangerous for infrastructure. A layered mix — county-level public utilities, some private operators, and some hybrid/municipal entities — might be closer to a resilient structure. Not clean or elegant, but fault-tolerant.
- littlecosmic 9mo agoYou say this like it is a law of nature, but we can plan and build it directly if we want it. Redundancy is not something that only emerges from an indirect 4d-chess strategy of ownership mixes.
- gregbot 9mo agoGood point. For example, the TVA and BPA are federal agencies that produce electricity. Clearly publicly owned utilities can be successful.
- ursAxZA 9mo agoExactly — if we want redundancy, we should plan and build it. That’s why I offered one possible implementation as a hypothesis, not as a law of nature. If you have a better non-ideal, real-world design in mind, I’d be interested to hear it — it makes the discussion much easier.
- RevEng 9mo agoI live in a province in Canada where the electrical system is owned and operated by a crown corporation. They are mandated to maintain a very high uptime and they do through several means including redundancy. Our electrical bills are cheaper than much of the US. It certainly can be done; there are other means than competition to ensure adequate service.
- refurb 9mo agoI don't get it. A very cheap baseline tier would encourage consumption versus what we have today, not reduce it. Today if I build a cabin somewhere I might decide not to electrify if it costs me $50 per month. But at $10? Sure!
- ThePowerOfFuet 9mo agoThen if you do electrify, you'll use electricity instead of less-efficient, more-polluting alternatives. It's a feature, not a bug.
- refurb 9mo agoNot if you would have used solar otherwise, or just went without (like a hunting cabin which is often unheated).
- JumpCrisscross 9mo agoLimit it to one use per SSN (dependents included).
- refurb 9mo agoI can only imagine the bureaucrats we could hire to manage it! And why dependents included? Kids can’t move out? I already see ways to game it.