Author: Paul

Well, for around here, anyway. We got 2″ in less than an hour and it should continue on-and-off the rest of the day – definitely the most we’ve seen in quite awhile. They are expecting 2 feet or more in some of the mountain areas today. It’ll be dropping to negative numbers tonight. Winter has set in.

And another frosty morning shot from a couple days later:

We only got about an inch so far this morning with up to around 6+ in some of the S-SW areas. This somehow turned into the worst morning commute traffic situation I can remember seeing in quite awhile. They even said so on the evening news, with pictures of vehicles of all kinds spun out and crashed everywhere. We were showing 36 crashes reported around the Denver Metro area by 8AM.

My theory is the influx of legal immigrants to CO over recent years has shifted the overall winter driving experience level to an abysmally frightening new low.

We have a full house for Christmas this year with Miguel, Alda, Telin and Daphne here visiting from Panama. See all their holiday trip pics starting at the 5th row on this page.

So I got tired of being browbeaten in the Utility Company newsletter with this new “demand rate” electricity pricing scheme, and commented on their website. Didn’t expect a response, but apparently it caught someone’s attention. So I replied to the reply, and after thinking about it a bit more decided to go full retard with a full retort.

Open letter to United Power of Colorado:

At what point did something to this effect go down: Suit at the head of a big conference table ends the meeting saying “We’ve got to come up with a way to make substantially more money off the same or even less amount of electricity!” And the minions were off to hatch their plans. Now we have “demand rate electricity pricing,” which basically means you just charge more for the largest block of electric.  Those nighttime electrons are so much brighter, surely they command a premium price.

Carefully reading the Business Director’s (BD) response exposes no justification or arithmetically-based description. There’s lots of talk about solar, and the logic of the textual so-called explanation seems a bit specious:   “Without this adjustment, the quality of the grid would be jeopardized or all the costs would be shifted to an ever smaller group of non-solar members.” Please define “quality of the grid.” It must be brimming with solar power during the day at least, and I can’t recall hearing anything about generating issues lately. Maintenance? What? Explain why my share of the grid should cost more than my neighbor’s when I am contributing to it and they are not. You wanna talk fair? If anything the maintenance burden should fall more on the people with greater use of your generation equipment.

So apparently this rate hike is primarily to offset revenue loss to PV generation.  After all, Mr. BD is the one who brought it up.  Reading between BD’s lines, the utility co-op is losing money to solar.  Whodathunkit?   It took years, but you were finally blindsided?   So rather than adjust to a changing market, you’ll simply take steps to cover up a money grab with a big bullshit campaign trying to compensate.  That’s your market adjustment:  just shift the burden to the customers in the most insidious way possible:  a reverse subsidy on Solar.  Because let’s face it – bottom line, all you are saying is daytime energy is less valuable than night time energy.  Do you see the inanity of your situation yet?

If you need to raise rates, do it.  But don’t get cute with schemes that unfairly penalize people in arbitrarily defined ways.  You punish everyone with higher nighttime rates and additionally punish the PV generators with lower rates during the day.  People don’t like being punished for other’s mistakes. It’s a concept called “fairness” with which United Power appears to have some serious comprehension issues.  It is fair to nobody and especially egregious to PV generators.  Brilliant!  United Power rakes it in while all customers get screwed to the maximum possible extent you can rationalize based on deceptive arguments about some contrived notion of the value and cost of electricity changing throughout the day.

One last thing: “As a solar customer you were helping to offset our energy charges but didn’t fully contribute to offsetting some of our fixed, grid charges.” Really? Would you mind explaining that one? Exactly what did I not contribute, besides dumping most of my actual generation into the neighbors or your batteries? Oh wait – now I get it: My contribution was reducing demand. You know – that thing you seem to have a problem with. Funny how that works, huh? Here’s a newsflash for you, just in case you weren’t paying attention: Reducing demand for carbon-based energy is probably one of the best things anyone in the whole goddamned world can do these days. Why do you believe penalizing people for that is a good idea? Get with the program.

I don’t like the idea of pissing off the people who manage my electricity. (However comma) I can afford to buy a bunch of batteries.  Imagine that!  At some point after enough private PV generators go off grid,  your traditional business model is out the window and it won’t be a “grid quality” issue by then.  Hopefully United Power of Colorado gets their battery situation sorted before we get going in that direction.

Nice job on the Tesla stuff over by I-25, BTW.  😉