I had a long and eloquent post all composed but then Windows crashed.
I'll see if I can get it back... maybe this time really short and eloquent.
Electric utilities send out monthly fliers which are cover-to-cover preaching about conserve, conserve, conserve. Well, by law they have to.
But in the last... oh... five years? My electric utility has changed it's rate structure to be far, far more conservation UNfriendly than it was already! Yes, heavy users pay less per KwH than light users.
Back in the day when my monthly service fee was $7, I discovered that users of >500 KwH/mo paid less per KwH than those using <500/mo.
This is a direct contradiction of the message they send to all of us 12 times per year.
It is a disincentive to conserve.
But that was then, back in the GOOD old days!
Now they've jacked up the monthly service fee
4X, yes you see that correctly,
FOUR TIMES what it was, all in one swell foop. Now my actual energy usage is 1/4-1/3 of the bill. In other words, I can up my usage substantially and only see a fractional increase in the bill.
Nothing anyone can say will convince me that fuel, wages, and whatnot increased like that, or even with some sort of accounting "smoothing" went up like that. It is a transferral of even more cost to the small (efficient) user i.e. subsidy to heavy users.
I'm not even talking about commercial users. This is only about residential accounts.
This isn't universal; my folks' farm on the other end of the same State still has a $5/mo service fee AND the price per KwH is lower. Must be magic, huh.
PG&E out on the West Coast has the right idea: progressively tiered pricing. Here in the dopey Midwest we have regressively tiered pricing, I think to prop up sales.