Re:What if half of Switzerland's rooftops produced electricity?
by angry_octet on Saturday February 08, 2020 @09:37AM
(#22275893)
The problem is that electricity costs would spike to insane levels (as seen on wholesale spot markets) and consumers should have price certainty and confidence in supply, otherwise you get lots of costs in other parts of the economy. See e.g. California, where diesel gen sets are proliferating like crazy, or other markets where high CO2, high cost gas is the game theoretic optimum, eventually leading to an all-peak supply side.
That can be solved by implementing time-of-use pricing and incorporating the "peak demand" infrastructure cost into the price. You would calculate how much infrastructure is needed to provide a "baseline" load (the trough on a demand graph), and divide that among the "fixed" portion. Perhaps you also add some sort of locality adjustment so rural/urban areas pay their "fair share". The rest of the infrastructure cost would be added the variable electricity price.
>And if you lump everything into the variable fee, at least you have more incentive to conserve.
That in itself isn't a bad thing. The problem is that with solar panels/wind power, you're also shifting the cost from people who can afford to install renewables (usually richer people with money to invest) to people who can't (usually poorer).