The transformer is dimensioned based on the max capacity of the houses in the neighbourhood, which are standardised.
100 houses with 200 A main fuse each? Supplied by a 20 000 A transformer (plus safety margin obviously).
If cryptoboy wants a non-standard main fuse size that requires an upgrade of the transformer, he has to pay for that.
This is definitely a simplification, which is why I pointed out the possibility of distributing costs among the consumers based on how much of the total consumption each consumer is responsible for.
I think the major point still stands though: In order to take advantage of production at scale, you need to build some minimal size production facility. For stuff like hydropower, that minimum can be quite high, depending on available geography.
If marginal cost is zero, it makes most sense to charge some form of flat rate to have access to power, rather than a consumption-based price, because it’s not necessarily feasible to downscale the facility, even if there’s low demand (in that sense, hydro or nuclear would be better examples than solar).
The details of how this more or less flat rate should be distributed among consumers is a discussion in itself (should those living further away pay more since they require more power lines? etc.)
You’re making the argument yourself here:
A 1000 A transformer costs more than a 10 A transformer
Yes. And that is true regardless of how heavily it is used, which means you should pay a flat rate for maintenance of the infrastructure you use, and another rate for the power you draw.
Residential buildings use standardised infrastructure, which then leads to the same standard fee for everyone. Industry that needs heavier equipment pays a different fee, because they require different infrastructure.
No, they’re arguing that the price of power should be split:
This makes sense, because regardless of you much power someone uses, the costs associated with maintaining the infrastructure that allows them to draw any power at all remain the same. This also happens to be the model used in Norway, so it’s not an untested concept.
Another option, relevant when the cost of building the power plant is large and the cost of energy production is negligible, is that everyone connected to the grid pays a near-flat fee in total, which is distributed among consumers depending on how much power they use. I’ve never heard of that option being used before.
I’m all for eating the rich, but I’m still going to point out why exactly this can make sense.
Let’s say you have an energy company that owns a solar farm, you’re not looking to turn a profit, just provide clean energy to the world: You produce electricity at effectively zero cost.
However, your solar farm needs to be paid down within its lifetime of ≈30 years, which is independent of energy consumption. So you decide to charge a rate that ensures 1/30th of your production costs are paid back each year, so that you can replace the solar farm after 30 years.
This effectively means you are charging a constant rate for access to energy supply, independent of consumption. This again means that the rate per kWh goes up if average consumption goes down.
Individual customers can still save money by reducing consumption relative to the other customers, but nobody saves money if everyone reduces consumption. This makes complete sense when your “marginal cost” (i.e. the cost of producing energy) is negligible compared to the initial investment of building the power plant, and also applies more or less to nuclear, hydropower, and wind power as well.
Given that this is not an ideal organisation though, I wouldn’t put it past them to increase the rate such that it more than offsets the decrease in consumption, thereby increasing their profit. In that case: Fuck them.
I just think we should be aware that our current understanding of energy prices as linked to day-to-day consumption (because the primary expense for a thermal power plant is the cost of fuel), will become outdated as we move to clean energy sources. At some point, we should be paying a near-flat rate for “access to power”, rather than a rate for each unit of power consumed.
Would have been much better if they just pasted the (probably quite short) script into the readme so that I can just paste it into my terminal. I have no issue running commands I can have a quick look at.
I would never blindly pipe a script to be executed on my machine though. That’s just next level “asking to get pwned”.