Why does electric energy get cheaper as consumption gets higher?

[qwerty]

Where I live, we pay a lump sum each month and then energy gets
cheaper as the total consumption gets higher. What is the reason
for this? I know that it's cheaper for the electric company if
you keep your consumption as steady as possible, but the pricing
doesn't seem to reflect that.

 

[Palindrome]

Where I live, we pay a lump sum each month and then energy gets
cheaper as the total consumption gets higher. What is the reason
for this? I know that it's cheaper for the electric company if
you keep your consumption as steady as possible, but the pricing
doesn't seem to reflect that.

Here in the UK, there are a number of tariffs available to customers.

The suppliers have fixed and variable costs. If you buy just a little
electricity, their fixed costs have to be met from the sale of just a
few units of electricity. So units cost a lot. If you buy a lot, their
fixed costs per unit will be a lot less, so units cost less.

Some tariffs have a relatively high rate for the first few units. But
once those have been paid for, the fixed cost element has been covered.
So subsequent units can be sold at a lower price.

SOme tariffs have a fixed daily standing charge plus an additional cost
per unit. This cost is invariably less than those tariffs which do not
include a standing charge.

For very light users, a high unit cost and no standing charge can work
out best value.

 

[Andrew Gabriel]

Where I live, we pay a lump sum each month and then energy gets
cheaper as the total consumption gets higher. What is the reason
for this? I know that it's cheaper for the electric company if
you keep your consumption as steady as possible, but the pricing
doesn't seem to reflect that.

There are two components to the cost of providing you with
electricity. The first part doesn't depend how much electricity
you use and is payment mainly for the fixed infrastructure.
The second part is the part which depends how much energy you
use, such as the cost of power station fuel, and some of the
replacement cost of parts of the infrastructure which age faster
with more load or need upgrading for higher load.

You can think of these as matching the fixed (standing) charge,
and the energy usage charge. The trouble is that the fixed
charge would be rather higher than people are willing to accept.
So what's done is that the fixed charge is reduced and subsidised
from the energy usage part. This makes electricity accessible to
low users without being price-prohibitive, which is generally
regarded as a socially responsible thing to do. However, if you
are a high user, you would end up paying too much subsidy towards
the fixed costs, so your energy usage price is reduced at this
level to prevent over subsidy of the fixed costs.

 

[Don Kelly]

The basic Econ 101 reason for the rate structure is that the utility is
attempting to get customers to pay not just why the electricity is worth
to
the customer "on the average" but pay more for that first kWh than the
last
kWh.

As an example: we I live we lose electricity for over 24hours at a time
a
few times each year. I paid about $500 for a generator that puts out
about 5kW. When the "grid" is down, I run the generator about 6 hours a
day to keep my food cold, the water flowing, and some TV and computer
time.
I happily pay about $10/day for this power. "Doing the math," I consume
about 30 kWh per day when running on the generator. At peak local rates
that would cost me about $3/day.

If the utility could get away with it, it could charge me $10 a day for
the
first 30 kWh/day of usage (or even more if you consider the wear and tear
on
my generator.) But at $.33/kWh I would not use much more power.

But the utility can charge me more for the first few kWh than for the last
few by other schemes which "fly" by the regulators more easily. But it's
all BS.

It's quite rational for a utility to charge and have a rate structure to
extract all from the customers they are willing to pay. Sometimes that
results in downright fantastic profits and sometimes even with such a rate
structure the utility can't cover its fixed costs.

If you look at a "demand curve" for electricity consumption, the utility
is
trying to recover all the area under the demand curve up to the point of
total demand rather than just the product of total demand and the price at
which supply = demand.

In other words, I read it as:
You want the utility to supply you electricity at the "fuel" cost/kWh of the
energy delivered to you + a profit margin but ignore the cost of capital to
provide the infrastructure which is the same whether you require 1kWh
/month or 10000 kWh/month. If you had no outages then what is the cost/kWh
of your emergency supply? I would suggest infinite $/kWh. Simple economics
that you use with respect to buying a car- capital cost amortised over
lifetime +operating cost.
It's not the "demand curve" but the cost of capital +fuel to supply the
demand at any time + the capital cost of capacity which must be there (a
100MW unit which happens to be off line due to low demand, has the same
capital cost that it would at full load.).
The utility can handle this by some formula where capital costs are lumped
in the bill independent of load, which would be honest, but "politically"
undesirable. " I have to pay this whopping amount when I have been in Italy
on a wine and food tour for the whole month and my nght lights only drew
1kWh?". Hence rates that were based on decreasing cost/kWh with load in the
days when Reddy Kilowatt was encouraging use of electrical energy and fossil
fuels were cheap and plentiful and pollution was restricted to "put the
outhouse downhill from the well"
Regulation does limit greed when the utility has to justify its rates (I
used to live in such a region . De-regulation and market forces were
supposed to do the same through market competition- but in many cases,
hasn't had this effect as far as the consumer is concerned because MBA's
don't realize that a utility and a grocery store operate under different
financial regimes and outlooks.

There, I have got this off my chest and have probably pissed off a bunch of
people. I hope you are not one of them because, from what I have seen, you
think.

 

[Beachcomber]

In other words, I read it as:
You want the utility to supply you electricity at the "fuel" cost/kWh of the
energy delivered to you + a profit margin but ignore the cost of capital to
provide the infrastructure which is the same whether you require 1kWh
/month or 10000 kWh/month. If you had no outages then what is the cost/kWh
of your emergency supply? I would suggest infinite $/kWh. Simple economics
that you use with respect to buying a car- capital cost amortised over
lifetime +operating cost.
It's not the "demand curve" but the cost of capital +fuel to supply the
demand at any time + the capital cost of capacity which must be there (a
100MW unit which happens to be off line due to low demand, has the same
capital cost that it would at full load.).
The utility can handle this by some formula where capital costs are lumped
in the bill independent of load, which would be honest, but "politically"
undesirable. " I have to pay this whopping amount when I have been in Italy
on a wine and food tour for the whole month and my nght lights only drew
1kWh?". Hence rates that were based on decreasing cost/kWh with load in the
days when Reddy Kilowatt was encouraging use of electrical energy and fossil
fuels were cheap and plentiful and pollution was restricted to "put the
outhouse downhill from the well"
Regulation does limit greed when the utility has to justify its rates (I
used to live in such a region . De-regulation and market forces were
supposed to do the same through market competition- but in many cases,
hasn't had this effect as far as the consumer is concerned because MBA's
don't realize that a utility and a grocery store operate under different
financial regimes and outlooks.

There, I have got this off my chest and have probably pissed off a bunch of
people. I hope you are not one of them because, from what I have seen, you
think.
--

The economics for delivery of electricity were well thought out in the
early years of the Twentieth Century where the concepts of 'demand'
and 'diversity' were created.

The Chicago electricity mogul Samuel Insull was looking for ways to
lower the cost and increase the market share of his electrical service
and came across the 'demand' meter, which had been invented and was
usefully employed in Great Brittain to measure the maximum power
consumption for a set period of time during each monthly billing
period.

Suppose you have factory A and factory B as electrical customers.
Both use 10000 kWh per month, but...

Factory A spreads the load evenly throughout the day and evening
hours.
Factory B has short periods when electricity usage soars to a very
high level.

Who should pay the higher overall bill at the end of each month?

With the concept of 'demand', factory B is going to require bigger
generators, place more demands on transformers, (larger size)
distribution, and transmission for the peak load periods. Even though
most of the time this equipment is idle, it has a cost and must be
financed and paid for. Often this cost is higher then the amount of
electricity that is supplied in kWh.

Factory A has more or less a constant, smaller and predictable load.
It can be served with far less capital cost.

Note that the capital cost is mostly paid for by the utility (for the
equipment on the utility side of the meter). The utility must have
some means of recovering this cost that avoids just passing it along
to other customers.

Thus, both companies might pay the same per kWH, but factory A must
pay for the greater peak demand it imposes on the system. It gets
more complex than that, but this is the basic idea.

Beachcomber