It’s astounding how many ways governments find to repackage what can trivially be done with tax policy.<p>What’s next, income-based pricing at the gas station? Just price it into the tax rates. This appears to basically be the equivalent of a (very approximately) .1% tax hike and a fixed electric rate across the board. But instead of that, which can be easily reasoned about, we get a death-by-a-thousand-cuts approach like this.
Doesn't this effectively eliminate the incentive for people to use less electricity? If I am going to pay a fixed amount every month, why make any effort to buy more efficient appliances, light bulbs, turn off my A/C and electric heaters when I don't need them.
Households receiving power are a superset of tax households.<p>I assume household income is the sum of all taxpayers? I hope this is done in a privacy preserving way where you don't need to tell your PGE bill paying roommate your income.<p>But even then that seems impossible. If my roommate makes $50k a year and I make > $130k, it seems it's impossible to not reveal that fact to him unless they are assessing fees per taxpayer.
This is utter bullshit.<p>There’s a huge set of people above $180K income, with homes all the way from small rental apartments, townhomes, to mega mansions. How come they are all being put into the same bucket.
>Households earning less than $28,000 a year would pay a fixed charge of $15 a month<p>So… can I just find a poor person and pay their electric bill for them in exchange for them letting me run some crypto miners in their house?
I imagine that part of the motivation here is that with on site generation and storage the grid becomes less and less viable to fund via usage fees. Without much further storage improvements, an ordinary single family home could run almost entirely on self generated power -- but then when there is sustained poor weather they'd all hit the grid at once.<p>In that future the grid needs loads of capacity which are seldom used. It's hard to pay for that with usage... and logically that potential demand cost should be a connection fee.<p>The income based part probably arises because when you price out the connection fee you find that it would be painfully expensive for some. I don't think having the utility further trying to invade your privacy is the right way to deal with this, but I guess it's a lot easier to impose a tax via an unaccountable body than via other means.
anyone who pays a utility bill regularly in California has the right and opportunity to be heard. Some media stories are painting this as "inevitable" and this is not true. Make your voice heard on this issue otherwise you get the future that you deserve.
When sending letters about this it might be worth keeping in mind that PG&E is a convicted felon and killer. ( <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=PG%26E+convicted+felon" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=PG%26E+convicted+felon</a> )<p>Even in the most charitable description they are criminally reckless and have repeatedly placed profit over the <i>lives</i> of the public. An organization that has killed people on multiple occasions through recklessness and greed is not the sort of organization that should be afforded any <i>additional</i> access to anyone's personal information.
Outrageous, of course. Just another reason for productive citizens to leave CA.<p>The last thing I want is for the power company to be intimately involved in studying the details of my income and the income of those who are living with me!