Re:Calgarians detail life with an electricity load limiter
by tomohawk on Monday March 21, 2022 @03:49PM
(#30758853)
This is not passing along a cost. It is taking money out of one person's pocket and directly benefiting another person who has not paid.
This is a lot different than paying the amortized/allocated cost of utility and all that is needed to run the utility. Paying people's bills for them when they do not pay is not necessary to run the utility. It generates no utility (in this case, electricity). A peaker plant generates utility, and it has associated costs.
Businesses often pass on the costs of dealing with people who don't pay because it is efficient, not because it is right.
Many times, businesses pass costs onto customers for things they don’t use. My college charged me a “sports fee” for games I never went to. My health insurance will charge me my premiums when I don’t get sick. I will share the cost of peaker plants even if I don’t use electricity during peak hours.
If the utility covered some of these costs, people who didn’t like the resulting rate hike could buy solar panels or a generator.
In contrast, the word “slavery” refers to a practice where someone is kidnapped and forced to perform actions (labor, sex acts, etc.), often under the threat of having “the shit beat out of them,” to use a colloquialism.