• RivalarrivalEnglish
    1·
    4 hours ago

    You would have a point if it were possible to downgrade a connection to closely match your consumption. But that is not the case. You can’t buy a 20A service when everyone in your neighborhood has 200A. It’s a matter of safety: service lines need to be sized based on the upstream current limited, but the current limiter for your service (the main breaker in your panel) is downstream of that service line. If you put an undersized service line to your house and it develops a fault, it will burn up before tripping the neighborhood “breaker”.

    It is more reasonable to charge you for the generation and distribution of 2A than for your 2A service to be charged the same “connection fee” as your cryptobro neighbor.

    • Passerby6497@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 hour ago

      You absolutely could pay for a lower rating if you chose to also pay for the equipment to step down the supply to your intake values. That what a transformer substation is for, and why the factory and residential lines can share the same upstream but get different local outputs. It’s just going to be so much more expensive that you’re never going to go that route unless you’ve got a lot of people that want to do the same.

      It is more reasonable to charge you for the generation and distribution of 2A than for your 2A service to be charged the same “connection fee” as your cryptobro neighbor.

      Is that not what your consumption fee is for? You’re paying for generation/distribution for the power you use, and the power company also tacks on a base fee to account for other maintenance costs that had been bundled but were being lost due to net metering.

      From a collective perspective, it makes sense to pay to connect, and also pay per usage when you have the potential to have distributes generation, but centralized maintenance of the shared infrastructure.