Utilities work like that. You don't just have to pay the marginal cost of the electricity you consume. The entire infrastructure has to be supported by the customers (who else is there?) Which doesn't much depend on demand - the wires or pipes or drains or whatever have to be run to every potential consumer, regardless of their need.
"Under-earning fees" sound like more than just a connection fee. The non-generation portion of a standard bill should cover that. If the homeowner has surplus, you'd expect that to be sold into the grid at some sort of weak wholesale rate, not the retail rate.
The measured rate has some of the overhead in it. That's being revealed by this change. If you don't consume enough to 'pay your share' thru that part of the bill, well, then that bill will have to be increased. Call it what you like; it's paying for infrastructure.
The farce of paying for homeowner generation is something activists (whom I love) came up with, not the utility. It's clearly operating directly against the interests of the group, in as much as it is generally paid in 10X what the 'extra' electricity is worth. So, agreed. it should be some weak wholesale rate if it's anything.
> It's clearly operating directly against the interests of the group
It's operating against the profit margin of the for-profit utility company. It's operating for the interests of the general public as a group, as distributed residential solar has significant societal benefits for resiliency after natural disasters, lower pollution, etc.
The American energy grid is a mess of bad incentives and bad actors, where we get for-profit companies with monopoly control and often their incentives are to lobby politicians for rules and regulations which increase their profits to the detriment of everyone else.
Of course infrastracture costs depends on demand; you have less wear and tear on transformers, turbines etc. I live in the developing world (ex-USSR) and the government punish higher consumption (higher price), as it causes constant shutdown of tranformers due to overheating.
We have that in my part of the US, but my utility calls it a "connection fee". It's what you pay just to be connected to the grid, not for the actual electricity you use.
In Australia/Perth we have a "Daily Supply Charge".
We also have one of the higest rates of residential rooftop solar here, you get relatively little payback for exporting in Perth (its hard to get more than about $20/month) but can save quite a bit on what you self-consume during the day.
As a result, this Daily Supply Charge has been steadily going up over the last decade, much more than the per-unit fee. Currently it's $1.13 AUD/day + $0.316/kWh (that's 74c USD/day + $0.21 USD/kWh)
Looking at how cheap LFP batteries are getting and people not getting much for feeding back into the grid from their solar installs I think battery pack sales are about to rocket. Australia is in a very unique situation with a lot of land, big potential for solar and wind.
These charges are quite high compared to most places in the US. I pay somewhere around 11 or 12 cents USD per kWh and around 50 cents per day in a connection fee (in reality, it's 15 per bill and not adjusted for the number of days being billed).
