this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2025
50 points (100.0% liked)
Green Energy
2568 readers
2 users here now
Everything about energy production and storage.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I would imagine it's something like this:
Say your electric company has a fixed budget of $1,000,000,000 and they have 500,000 customers.
Comes out to about $2,000 a year or $166 a month.
If 10% of their customer base goes solar, the companies fixed costs don't change, so $1B/450K is now $2,222 per year or $185 a month, an increase of $19/mo.
Budget goes up? They need to increase subscribers or increase rates.
Subscribers go down? They need to cut their budget or increase rates.
They’d better figure out a new business model. Solar and back up batteries aren’t going anywhere.
Definitely, they're currently at the start of a death spiral... People move to renewable energy, so they raise rates, causing more people to move to renewable energy.
It's not a tenable plan for much longer. Same plan as for cable television.
People cut the cord, which causes rates to go up for existing customers, which causes more people to cut the cord.
There's incentive to move to solar and batteries to avoid the rate increases due to solar installations reducing billable power delivery.
Is that supposed to be a parody on "ceteris paribus" economic thinking?