• HobbitFoot @thelemmy.clubEnglish
    2·
    1 年前

    No one is saying you should pay the same total bill as they do, just the same connection fee if you and crypto boy have the same hookup.

    You’d pay $10 for a connection fee and $1 for power while they’d pay $10 for a connection fee and $1000 for power.

    • Rivalarrival@lemmy.todayEnglish
      11·
      1 年前

      Understood.

      And that “$10 connection fee” makes perfect sense for covering per-user administrative costs. The cost is the same to send a $1 bill or a $1000 bill to the customer; a per-user fee to cover that administrative fee is not unreasonable.

      But they aren’t talking about administration. They are talking about infrastructure maintenance. Infrastructure is a shared resource, and the maintenance costs scale (primarily) with total consumption, not per-user.

      From the original comment:

      Hence, the split that many utility companies are shifting to. There’s a fixed charge to have a connection to the grid, which covers the cost of grid maintenance. And there’s a separate cost per kWh of energy used.

      That “fixed cost to have a connection to the grid” does not cover grid maintenance. Grid maintenance costs are proportional to consumption, not number-of-users. It does not make sense that this fee should be divided among users rather than based on consumption.