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29 comments on Big boost for solar rebates in South Australia
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I couldn't agree more with this.
Calls for rationing drive me mad - no one is ever going to voluntarily agree to this (Well - no one outside a very small minority) - the only time rationing ever seems to work is during wartime, when people aren't given any other option and there is a strong social incentive not to complain about it.
Well, according to the ABS, in 2004 there were produced 564.7 Mt CO2e (table 24.20), 27,400kg per Aussie.
So a carbon tax of $0.01/kg could raise $5.6 billion. That's $274 per Aussie, not a big deal given that a lot of the carbon-intensive spending is discretionary. It'd add $0.028/lt to the price of petrol, about $6
to the price of a Sydney-Melbourne round trip flight, $0.013/kWh to the price of coal-derived electricity, and so on.
What I'd probably do is to have the carbon tax be something like $0.05/kg, but with rebates for people on less than full-time minimum wage equivalent.
If you wanted to do it through retail stuff progressively, you could just do it as I said earlier, set some goal household power consumption, and charge like a wounded bull for amounts above that. I'd have no "account charge" or "service charge" at all - you use nothing, you pay nothing. Account charges are the "corkage fees" of the utilities world, complete bollocks.
Something like,
- no service charge
- the first kWh is $0.22
- each kWh after that is charged at another $0.02
So you'd get,
so that if you use 5kWh or less, you pay less than you currently do. If you use the average 14kWh/day, it works out to $2.10 more a day, or $189 a bill. It starts getting crazy in the 20s of kWh daily.
As usual there'd be discounts for people living on low incomes, etc.
This rate would apply only to power got from fossil fuels. If you got your power from wind or solar, you'd pay whatever rate they charge.
Carrot and stick, mate :D
Not quite. There is a cost for providing and maintaining that infrastructure.
Yeah, like the cost of the waiter's corkscrew.
The costs should be rolled into the per kWh cost; if you use less power, you put less strain on infrastructure, if you use none at all you put no strain.
There's no account or service charge for water. Does water require no provision or maintenance of infrastructure?
For all discretionary consumption: Use nothing, pay nothing; use lots, pay lots.
A certain amount of utilities consumption is non-discretionary - but only maybe one-tenth to one-fifth of the average use. The rest we just piss away.
So I guess I shouldn't have to pay for those roads I don't drive on? Should I pay for those parks I don't visit? Or maybe I shouldn't have to pay for that hospital until I arrive at emergency. And I think we know how well THAT system operates.
I live on rainwater, so I don't know about water service fees. But I do know (pers comm) that the main activity of Melbourne Water is infrastructure provision and maintenance. The charges for water are to cover this cost... so maybe you are right and they roll it all up into that.
Perhaps consumption of water is less variable than consumption of electricity... so electricity companies charge a higher service connection fee to "level" that variability out...?? maybe?
I think your approach is a tad extreme.
A service has been provided to you even if you don't flick the switch. That service is the ability to flick the switch at any time of your choosing. You can quibble over the price... but it is a real service.
And I think it is more significant than your analogy of the waiter and the cork screw.
Can you build a sub station?
I said, "all discretionary consumption."
Roads are partly funded by the general revenue, since some amount of roads are necessary regardless of an individual's chosen mode of transport; but they're mostly funded by vehicle registration and fuel excise, so that the amount you pay is more or less proportional to how much you use the roads.
Parks give people pleasure whether they visit them or not, since you pass by them on your way to other places. But in any case, parks are in general funded by local council rates, and the spending of rates is generally determined by a council of about nine elected representatives sitting in a room with 10-100 members of the public - and those 10-100 people are usually regular attendees at council meetings, and their voice is decisive in allocation of spending; so that if your payment isn't proportional to use, at least you have some say in it if you can be bothered to go to the meetings.
Hospital treatment is not discretionary consumption.
Water consumption is very variable across the country. Just state to state we see hre that Victoria has a 81kl per capita domestic water consumption, while WA had 180kl. So we see a factor of two variation from state to state. From place to place we see a variation of a factor of ten, from about 50lt/day per person in some towns in far north Qld, to 500lt/day per person in western Sydney, much of Perth and so on.
Historically the power service fee comes from the State Electricity Commission days, when the account fees were set aside for infrastructure and paying off the loans the government had to take out to build the power stations, while the per unit used fees were used for maintenance, fuel and so on.
Nowadays we have a three-tiered privatised system. All the infrastucture remains owned by the government, but is leased out to private companies. We have the producers (run the power plants), the distributors (buy the power off the plant operators, sell it to retailers), and the retailers (buy the power from the distributors, sell it to the public).
There's some overlap as some of the retailers invest in generation, like Origin building its own wind turbines. But basically we have this three-tiered system.
The government sets wholesale and retail prices, so if you're at all competent where you really want to be is as a distributor, all they do is buy and sell units of power, produce nothing... If you're incompetent you don't want to do it, you might stuff it up and the retailers won't have enough to sell, someone gets a blackout and then the state government steps in and takes over.
Basically we need the account fee to keep all those useless middlemen employed.