At least the rich people will have power. And if their solar and batteries are down for a while, they'll likely also have their own personal Generac whole-house automatic diesel, gas, or propane generator. Individuals who can afford it will have reliable power.

I snagged a Generac a few years ago, and never looked back; it runs off my gas line and takes zero input from me to work (although you can fiddle with it if you like). That's definitely where anyone with any money at all is going to end up, not just the rich.

I want a propane one myself so it works hopefully even after a modest earthquake

Oh yeah, if I lived in a seismically active region I'd have gone that route as well.

>"At least the rich people will have power."

Phew. I am so relieved. Not a single day goes by when I do not think about how those poor riches manage.

The naive solution to the "people stop paying monthly utility bills" is to charge a high hook-up fee that covers that capital cost of baseload availability and then charge for marginal usage closer to marginal cost. Right now the baseload infrastructure is covered by artificially high costs for each marginal kilowatt-hour to slowly recoup the capital expense. The billing structure doesn't match the cost structure.

But that would make actual use effectively free and disincentivize conservation. So it's a hard problem to solve.

You could perhaps raise the effective price of solar by writing in high per-month fees for any houses with solar, but also waive those fees for homes which prove they have a substantial-enough battery solution to help ease demand on the grid during the relatively high-use hours of 5PM to 10PM.

IIRC the real costs of residential electricity are about half from infrastructure, half from actual energy consumption [1]. If we charged prices proportional to costs, high users would still pay significantly more than average users. The main problem (a political one) is that in a lot of places these costs have been bundled together in a single "per unit" charge that effectively subsidized the lowest consumers. Changing it so that prices go up at the low end of consumption and go down at the high end of consumption would widely be seen as unfair, so it's hard to correct the pricing mistake now that it's ossified into place by tradition.

[1] It's different for big industrial users, like factories operating 24/7; their per-unit costs are dominated by consumption rather than infrastructure. They also get lower prices partially reflecting these lower costs.

Thanks for the more detailed information. I double-checked and it seems you're right for the states I could find data for - industrial users have some extra per-month fees to cover the baseload made available to them (billed per kW rather than per kWh) but these don't offset the far lower rates per kWh that I found.

There is often a difference between "industrial" vs. "commercial" but both seem to pay lower rates than residential.

I wish I had the source for the stats, but I remember reading that a significant percentage (call it more than 1/8th of the total budget) of a electric utilities budget could be spent on -just- tree trimming services. This was discussed in the context of investments by a electric utility to decrease downtime during a storm, and how the (large) investments in the 12mos for tree trimming services is what allowed for so little downtime.

I can't square away this statement with the fact that all of the major electric utilities in California, and especially in southern California, are logging record-breaking profits and issuing record-breaking dividends.

I realize that in your scenario we're talking about millions of people no longer paying utility bills, but surely that could not and would not happen overnight, and I cannot imagine that these companies could not find some wiggle room in their billion dollar profit margins to adapt to a change that might for once lower monthly bills.