Rolling blackouts in California have power experts stumped
I think I can say that our entire neighborhood is up in arms about what&#x27;s going on with SCE in general.  In the last few months people have received bills that amount to 10 to 20 times their usual bill.<p>In our case, with a 13 kW solar array, our usual bill is in the order of  $15 per month and has been so for years.  Last month our bill was $350 and the prior month $184.  We have been sending excess energy to SCE for years.  I built a larger system than normal in preparation for electric vehicles.  Which means that, at times, we send as much as 6 kW or so back.  None of that mattered.<p>What complicates everything is that we were auto-magically signed-up for CPA (Clean Power Alliance).  Which is, as far as I am concerned, a government run scam (sorry if this offends anyone).  By &quot;we&quot; I mean, most of our neighborhood and town.<p>What makes this a mess is that SCE can&#x27;t talk about CPA rates and CPA can&#x27;t talk about SCE billing.  One, in theory, provides the electricity and the other charges you for the transport and some fees.  If you have ever tried to make sense out of one of these bills you know exactly what I am talking about.  I have spent hours on the phone will SCE billing people and they can&#x27;t tell me how some of it is actually calculated, even managers don&#x27;t know.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cleanpoweralliance.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cleanpoweralliance.org&#x2F;</a><p>What makes it even worse is that the rate comparison tools and calculators available before the transition to CPA+SCE evaporated after the transition.  The SCE website has been a mess for about two years and not having access to rate comparison tools makes it even worse.  Billing and data clarity is obfuscated, to say the least.<p>Some of us are now in the process of opting out of CPA just to that we can talk to a single point of contact and actually discuss the bill.  With CPA in the loop it is impossible because CPA and SCE point fingers at each other and consumers are left in the middle wondering what the heck happened.<p>Even beyond that, SCE told everyone that they had &quot;grandfathered rates&quot;.  This are the TOU-D-A and TOU-D-B rates from a few years ago.  One of the things that changed radically with respect to that time is that some of the costs per kWh have more than tripled.  When inquiring about how this could happen with &quot;grandfathered rates&quot; we were told that the <i>rate schedule</i> was grandfathered not the cost per kWh.  In other words, the demarcation times between &quot;On peak&quot;, &quot;Off peak&quot; and &quot;Super off peak&quot; remain fixed but your cost per kWh changes.<p>This is the most dishonest use of the term &quot;grandfathered&quot; I have seen in my life.  This might not make sense to readers outside of the US.  Here, the term refers to a condition being protected from future changes.  Anyone who heard that term pretty much assumed their <i>costs</i> were locked in, not just the times for each rate.  From my perspective this was a swindle.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Grandfather_clause" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Grandfather_clause</a><p>Frankly, this is about as anti-consumer as one can get.  The average person isn&#x27;t equipped to run through even the simplest electrical power calculations, they just don&#x27;t understand.  Add to this the complexities of tiered and time-of-day systems, varying rates and costs of transport, energy vs. power calculations, area under the power curve (which is what you pay for), difficulty in understanding energy utilization, etc. and you have the makings for a public that is powerless against this complexity.<p>I am quite comfortable with mathematics and complex financial modelling and still had to devote hours to getting enough answers from SCE to attempt to create a model in Excel in order to understand what happened during the last few months, not just for us but also our neighbors.  Even with that, the decision had to be made to opt-out of CPA because the math is simply too complex and nebulous.  Not to mention that I have better things to do with my life.<p>The decisions people like myself made a few years back --in my case the 13 kW system-- were based on promises made --a contract-- with SCE.  Never in my life I would have thought that a system of this size would result in us having to pay for electricity.  And so here we are.  If this continues the ROI will be negative forever and the size of the system would either have to increase by 50% or more or batteries will have to be added in order to manage consumption at lower rate-per-kWh times of the day (which can change at the will of SCE).<p>I am literally working on this as we speak, so the pain and aggravation is fresh and real.  At some point legal action might become the only recourse, I don&#x27;t know.  My neighbors are absolutely livid, unlike me (I engineered, bought and installed my own system), they ended-up with a range of leasing and other arrangements from a number of different vendors.  The typical systems these vendors install are based on the rate structure at the time of system installation and only seek to achieve a baseline cost structure between lease payments and electricity purchase beyond generation.  As rates and billing complexity changed, some of these folks are finding out that their 3.5 kW system is now almost useless and their electricity costs are going off the rails.  The trouble is, they will have to pay on these leases for years and years.<p>This is a mess.