I think other utilities like internet service adopt this construct, then monetize worry to get you to pay a little more for all-you-can-eat.
There's an interesting quote from a former chairman of the atomic energy commission:
It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age
Even if climate change is as bad as WW2 (doubtful over the same time scale), people still had children then, and they still had children when every city was covered in a foot of horse poop, all your kids died at 14 and doctors didn't believe in handwashing. In fact they had more!
It takes a bit less than 3x resources to have 3 kids though, since they share things.
Wow. If you are only paying $12 a month for access to the grid, you are paying a small fraction of your share of the cost of maintaining the grid. These consumer solar subsidies are a massive subsidy from the poor to the wealthy and really aren't sustainable.
Residential solar IMO is mal-investment because grid scale solar has better economies of scale. Solar plants are easier to maintain. The grid is not built for widespread net metering. Rooftop solar has more fatalities than nuclear because of installers falling off.
You are likely confusing wholesale and retail prices of electricity. Even just considering solar, the cost for a utility to generate the power itself is likely between 2-4 cents per kilowatt. Most states require the utility to essentially pay the retail rate for electric power for any power generated by rooftop solar since it directly offsets the electrical usage. (Never mind that the electric power might have to be purchased when the utility doesn't want the power.)
Buffet has complained about how this issue:
>...His logic is simple, he wants to have to pay wholesale electricity rates for the energy generated by rooftop solar instead of the same price NV Energy is charging these customers since he says it will penalized customers without solar panels.
https://electrek.co/2016/03/01/warren-buffett-explains-his-l...
So unless you are using the wholesale price for the estimate for the value of the excess electricity generated, you are greatly overestimating its value.
Besides overpaying for the electricity generated by rooftop solar, your $20 access bill is another subsidy. One estimate is that the average yearly cost to maintain the grid is about $750 per customer.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/the-u-s-elec...
Why do you say that? If the government wants to subsidize solar power, isn't it better to do it in a way that is safer, less expensive and the benefits are shared by all consumers?