> It’s strange to me that people in rural areas pay for electricity. It makes no economic sense, at least here in the Caribbean.
This comment was very confusing until I read the second sentence. Electricity prices in the Caribbean are very high, and I can only imagine that rural areas are even worse.
Where I’m at in the United States a typical electric rate is around $0.10/kWh. Paying that nominal amount and avoiding the need to service additional equipment and deal with backup generators is an easy decision.
You’re in a good part of the country for grid power. I’m in Georgia where the typical rate is about 14 cents but summer rates are more like 18. Summer rates aren’t captured in this EIA chart but you can see the whole country. With summer rates and high energy use for cooling and dehumidification it’s a 7-8 year payback for a 13kW DC/10kW AC system.
So the increase was to buy spray equipment to attach to a helicopter. And a helicopter. One of the co-op ex-board members' son recently moved back to the area and had his license. . . It was a shameless cash grab by that family and was rightfully voted down by a wild majority of the co-op members. Every member of the board was replaced within 2 years of them proposing the increase as well.
They currently keep all the lines clear via bucket trucks, and when they spray, they use ATV's and trucks. It takes most of June to spray all the lines, but they get it done easily.
The actual physical infrastructure has been replaced almost entirely in the last 10 years through federal and/or state grants in combination with income from power charges.
Also, these are just fundamentally different entities. PGE is a private entity that operates for a profit. Our power company is a co-op owned and run by its members. If they have any profit at the end of the year (once infrastructure improvements and safety net investments are paid for), the money gets paid directly back to the co-op members. It's a WILDLY different incentive structure.
Not every place is built in a dry forest which traditionally burned regularly but the current infrastructure is built around never burning. The only risk in, say, Michigan, is the power going out at inopportune times.
Yeah - even with PGE trying their best to screw over solar customers in the last few years, I figure we've at least gotten our money back in ~15 years of owning a ~4KW system. Something like 75 MW generated in that time, assuming the inverter is more-or-less correct. At this point, doesn't make any sense anymore, since they only credit you like $0.1 and charge you $0.6 (I haven't looked too closely at it) - you'd have to generate 5-10x your consumption to mostly offset it.
We bought ours in '10 to offset high AC use in the summer - we were paying $1000-1500 a month for 2-4 months in the summer. The first few years, our "year-end" balance was < $1K (we just paid minimum payments the rest of the year), so I figure we easily saved $2-3K/year in those early years, and after the incentives in those days, we paid ~$14K, so maybe 7 years to pay it off. Our year-end balance was more like $3K the last time, and I think we're still producing 80-90% the same power, but PGE keeps changing the plans around. At this point, I'm interested in upgrading our cells from 300W to 450W, but I'd only do that with a battery system that also stores energy so that we could go more or less entirely off-grid. But probably need a new roof first..
I’m in a mountain town in BC Canada and pay $0.13/kWh. My 7.8kW solar system cost me $0 out of pocket after incentives and an interest free loan.
It’s making ~$1000 per year of electricity, so we’ll just put that onto the loan for the next 8 years instead of paying it to the power company. Then for ~25 years after that it will make me $1000/year. Free money.
(The price of electricity is already pre-approved to increase 5% a year, so actually my savings will be more every year than the year before)
Feral cats kill 2 billion birds a year, FYI the green energy kills birds thing is a right wing talking point designed to distract and delay. All human activity kills some nominal number of birds
Indeed. They care about the environment when pretending to do so lets them fight against things which are actually good for the environment and bad for the fossil fuel industry.
I'm in the Canadian prairies and we pay a similar electric rate. It's funny though...
> avoiding the need to service additional equipment and deal with backup generators is an easy decision.
We've got a house in a very small town (pop. 100) and there are solar panels on a ton of the houses there. I've asked a few people about it and it's 100% for grid redundancy. Sure, they save a bit of money on their power bill, but they're basically using the panels and batteries as an alternative to a backup generator. Winters are quite cold here and having enough power to run the natural-gas-fired furnace and a few light bulbs is a huge win when the power inevitably goes out. Lots of people have small generators kicking around too (like the Honda EU2200 that RV folks love) but the solar install has seriously cut down on the need for those.
Over here in PA I pay $0.095, so nine and a half cents, per KWh for electric supply, but then I pay that same amount for transmission, so it's functionally 19 cents per KWh, but maybe the person you're replying to isn't counting transmission fees?
I pay 11.6 cents per kilowatt hour inclusive of everything (taxes too). My household used 647 kilowatt hours in April and the bill for the month was $75.02. The per-unit charge neglecting taxes and delivery is only 7.4 cents. This is in Washington state.
I don't know why anyone would not include the "delivery" fee, I think it really is that cheap in many places in the US.
Here in NYC the "supply" charge is much less than half of the total bill. If I add up all the fees and surcharges and taxes etc, the total ends up around 35 cents / KWh, which I thought was rather high until I heard about California ...
I pay around 10 cents per kWh in the southern US; we have a nearby nuclear plant. We do have a base fee just for the meter, but no separate transmission fee. My in-laws in Texas have an open market for generation but pay transmission separately.
This comment was very confusing until I read the second sentence. Electricity prices in the Caribbean are very high, and I can only imagine that rural areas are even worse.
Where I’m at in the United States a typical electric rate is around $0.10/kWh. Paying that nominal amount and avoiding the need to service additional equipment and deal with backup generators is an easy decision.