| Or convince the utility that you're a business and probably pay a lower rate than the high income tier. This is already the case for kwh rates if your usage is significantly above average (e.g. large house with a lot of people) -- commercial rates are lower, because the high usage tier residential rates are jacked up to subsidize the low usage tier rates. PG&E will presumably also leak and sell the info, even if it's illegal for them to do so, but AFAICT it wouldn't be illegal for them to do so. What are your rates supposed to be if the people living at the residence aren't a constant set but ebb and flow? --- yet another law that assumes that everyone lives a particular way, has a single or a finite set of fixed residences that they own and live in, collects wages at a relatively fixed rate from an employer, etc. As far as detaching from the grid. It's becoming more viable to do so, which I presume is part of the driver for this change: More and more people are only pulling lots of power when there is sustained bad weather. This creates a lot of transmission costs that aren't paid for by usage. PG&E residential high peak rates aren't that noncompetitive with running a natural gas generator. So well overbuilt solar, plus batteries, plus natural gas backup for winter storms and you might be able to detach assuming you don't get an EV. You may want to add a few kW bitcoin mining capacity to shed your excess summer power. Right now the economics of solar support spending money to overbuild solar rather than putting in more battery. An intuitive way to think about it is that a battery provides value when and only when its discharged. Capacity that is discharged every day costs little per use, capacity that is discharged only once a year during a winter storm is extremely expensive per use. Solar provides value only if you can use the energy, but the cost per unit power is much lower, and there are cheap ways to usefully sink excess power. (heating a hot water tank, regenerating a desiccant for cooling, or running a bitcoin miner). Commercial availability of small flow batteries would likely help the economics of grid detaching a lot-- because the marginal cost of additional capacity can be extremely low. There are other costs in being grid detached-- a lot less redundancy and spare capacity in your power. If parts fail your power is out. Suddenly the power factor of your devices starts to matter, etc. |