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California strikes another blow against rooftop solar
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Asking the right questions over here. This is pretty clearly a billing method problem - mixing infrastructure maintenance charges in with electrical generation charges so that people who use more electricity pay more for infrastructure maintenance, which seemed like a fair way of doing things in a time before cheap, decentralized power generation.
I'm no industry expert, but it seems like maintenance costs are tied to the potential to deliver electricity rather than the actual delivery - systems need to be sized for peak load. So a fix for the billing problem might be to remove the cost of maintenance from the cost of generation, adding a line item to customer's bills to cover infrastructure maintenance, and for the size of that charge to be proportional to the potential peak load that customer places on the grid rather than their actual usage.