If few people use net metering it's kind of fair. Your solar installation generates electricity, any excess gets delivered to your neighbors. The electricity is providing the infrastructure for that without making any money on that specific transaction (it gets deducted from your meter and added to your neighbors' meter), but that's easy enough to account for in base fees.
The issues start if too many people do net metering. Imagine everyone has a solar roof and reaches net-zero electricity. You can still maintain the infrastructure with base fees, but the electricity company still has to run power plants in the morning and evening when demand outstrips solar supply, and for baseload in the night. And during the day there's now an oversupply of electricity that they somehow have to sell.
In commercial electricity generation many countries have a kind of spot market for electricity, where prices are determined by demand (down to the minute) and available supply. Prices can go close to zero if lots of solar and wind capacity is available, or far above the price charged to consumer for capacity to cover the evening peak. If we changed consumer prices to more accurately reflected this "true" market price (plus markup for the grid operator), with prices changing by the minute, net metering would be pretty fair. But so far there's little desire to dump all that complexity on regular consumers.
> You can still maintain the infrastructure with base fees
In theory yes, but the grid has not used properly scoped base fees to pay for infrastructure. Delivery costs of power are more than half the total cost; to get to a base+generation model, you'd probably see monthly connection fees for Electricity in the $100+ range for many Americans.
I don't think there's any obligation for people's financial trickery to be sustainable. Like, a new power pole costs (say) $1000 regardless of how many watts are going through the wires attached to it. Someone has to pay the person that cut down the tree and hauled it to its final location money. That they loan you money on the infrastructure and you repay through using electricity isn't the actual cost model, it's just a pricing model people are OK with. When it stops working, the model will have to change.
I always laughed about the pricing structure of the business ISP that I worked at. We charged $1000 to install your service, then $1000 per month (without a contract). This was a financial game; we would lose money if you cancelled after your first month. I always thought the pricing should be $15,000 to install, and then $5 per month. That's closer to what the actual costs are. But instead of you going to the bank to get a loan to pay the $15,000, we hid that for you. It made more people sign up, and we had a better source of funding than bank loans. But, at the end of the day, we would have been out of business if a bunch of people signed up and didn't pay. If that happened, I imagine the pricing would have changed to reflect actual costs.
Comcast quoted rates in this range for installations in areas near Palo Alto. IIRC my friend was quoted $20k for the installation. She might have gone for it if they'd charged $5/mo after that, but of course Comcast wouldn't be so kind. Last I heard, she was still on AT&T copper. Hopefully Starlink will be able to help people like this, who are just outside the reach of existing wired internet.
> Like, a new power pole costs (say) $1000 regardless of how many watts are going through the wires attached to it. Someone has to pay the person that cut down the tree and hauled it to its final location money.
That pole is carrying the power for, say, 100 people.
Half of them use a below-average amount of electricity. If you stick them with a $100/month fixed fee, they don't need a large solar/battery system to get off the grid entirely, so you've made that economical and that's what they do.
Now you have the same number of poles and half as many customers, so the fixed fee rises to $200/month, and more customers do the same thing. This is not going to a great place.
Meanwhile there is a rural road somewhere that only has two things on it. One is a large commercial operation and the other is somebody's house. Putting up poles along that road is going to cost $100,000, but the commercial operation is content to pay the entire amount because their alternative is buying land somewhere that it costs significantly more than $100,000 more. The house on the same road is not content to pay half of that and will just use their $50,000 to install a solar/battery system and have quite a bit left over, even though a model where they only pay for usage would get them to sign up, and the power company is installing the poles either way.
The problem we're looking at is that if you charge a fixed fee for a grid connection, low users opt out of the grid, and then the fixed fee goes up and creates a new set of low users. But if you charge for distribution per kWh, everybody installs local solar generation because it's cheaper than any generation method that has a significant distribution fee as part of the cost per kWh, which in turn raises the distribution component of the price per kWh even more. Under the first option, a large proportion of rural and suburban customers aren't going to want a grid connection at all. Under the second option, they'll take the grid connection but then only use it if local generation isn't available (i.e. it's cloudy) and the grid price per kWh at those times will be quite high. But that's plausibly the better of the two alternatives, because a grid connection with a high price per kWh will generally be better than losing power at those times, or having enough local storage/generation to prevent that from ever happening even in rare circumstances.
A third option is to charge everyone the fixed fee for the power grid and force them to take a grid connection even if that isn't economical, but that's even worse. You've essentially created a head tax with no way to avoid it even if you can't afford it, because you can't cancel your service and you can't pay less by reducing consumption.
Your analysis is spot on. My main question is how viable is it to get off the grid entirely? I think that the number of people who will actually go off-grid and take the risk of outage is really small. The cost of going off-grid is a lot higher than you'd think, and the size of batteries needed to get through a week-long rainy spell is significant.
There is also a pole closer to the substation which is carrying the power for 5000 people.
Meanwhile if four of the eight people near your house decide to disconnect from the grid because the fixed fee is too high, you still have to cover the cost of that pole with half as many people, some of whom might then decide that the higher fixed fee is too much and disconnect too, etc.
If a customer is permitted to buy as much electricity as they want at a fixed price while also being able to sell as much as they can at a different time at a fixed price, it seems like there's an obvious subsidy happening anytime they sell electricity at other than when the wholesale price is the highest or buy other than when the wholesale price is lowest. (In areas with an excess of solar generation capacity, these distortions become quite large.)
(I'm still all for these subsidies on the balance of factors; we just shouldn't pretend that they're not subsidies.)
