So rich people who can afford their accountant fees to hide their income, like with taxes, will pay almost nothing for energy, while the essentially broke person will pay more.
What percentage of the population do you believe is both rich and hires accountants to hide all of their income? What percentage of people serviced by PG&E do you think fall into that category? From my perspective you're referring to a number of people that I could count on one hand. Do you think it's some significant portion of the population?
Presume that everyone making above, say, $1 million per year isn't taking all their income as W2 income. How much this counts as "hiding" income is up to you to decide, but generally W2 is considered "normal people" income, 1099 "contractor people" income (whether that's a plumber who owns their own business, or an Uber driver), and 1099-DIV and 1099-INT and related are rich people incomes.
If we further assume big tech companies have 5 CxO (CEO, CFO, CTO, COO, CISO, CMO; pick 5), and that there are more than 1 big tech companies headquartered in California. If we assume those officers make large incomes that aren't W2 incomes, that they live in California, and, further, live in areas serviced by PG&E (which, statistically speaking is basically all of them), and then count individuals based on the fraction of income "hidden" as non-W2 income, and sum them up, then that number is surely greater than 5.
Not a statically significant portion of the 17M employed Californians mind you, but more than 5.
The “rich people who can afford accountants” in this case are going to be middle income families, and I’m not even talking about household income of more than 100k. Only the bottom 30% will see savings, which you’ll realize is not a big threshold.
Another problem I see is that by reducing the per-unit costs and shifting it back to a flat grid connection fee, they are reducing the incentive to save energy. Is this really going to bring the future we want?
I honestly think it is a mistake to allow grandfathered NEM rate structures to continue, if these other wacky plans are really attempting to compensate for that imbalance.
Maybe we need better than the NEM 3 proposal, to actually charge based on your grid connection size and usage. Something based on peak and actual power transfers as they reflect proportionate reliance on the grid infrastructure.That would be in addition to any actual energy consumption which I think should also follow the NEM 3 plan with retail rates for consumption and wholesale rates for production that vary by time of delivery.