[vegardx]

There's a lower bound to how cheap electricity can be, the infrastructure to distribute it isn't free. Every country price this differently, but one way to solve this is to split the cost per kWh in use and transport, which is common in Europe.

In Norway we have a model like that, and it effectively sets a lower boundary of (depending a little on the region) around 0.50NOK/kWh, around 0.05$/kWh. The price for electricity quite often go into the negative during summer, but you still end up paying for the distribution.

[nl]

This is clearly a good point in that infrastructure is a cost and needs continual upgrade and maintenance.

However it's not clear that the appropriate way to pay for that is usage based: looking at domestic supply for example it's roughly the same cost per house to connect to the grid, so it doesn't really make sense to pay more if you have more usage.

I'm not sure what alternative models look like for this and I'm not sure they are better or worse. But there probably is room for innovation on billing this part.

[vegardx]

For the last mile you're probably right, but the electricity has to come from somewhere. So you also need to size the production capacity, distribution network, sub-stations and whatnot to match the installed capacity. Things get really bad, really quickly, when demand and availability doens't match.

[londons_explore]

I recently learned that electricity meters cost ~150USD.

At that sort of price, for low usage users it might be multiple years simply to pay back the cost of the meter.

One can buy a $3 meter from China, but obviously it is less accurate. I'd like to see a system where less accurate meters are used, but you pay a small premium to cover any inaccuracies in metering.

[vegardx]

Are you sure you want less accurate meters? There's a lot of losses in the network itself, and without accurate meters it's hard to pinpoint where they are and if they can be fixed.

In Norway we quite recently switched to more accurate networked meters and at that time they said that as much as 30% of all electricity produced wasn't accounted for, which you end up paying for, one way or another. Some of these losses are from the network itself. But a not insignificant part was from people illegally tapping the grid or last-mile losses due to poorly maintained infrastructure that was hard to pinpoint without using expensive manpower to physically check every single connection.

[dzhiurgis]

Your infrastructure doesn’t have to be so beefy when you produce and cache it locally. In my climate, 500W vs 15kW wood be enough boost for winters. That’s 30x reduction in pricy infrastructure.

[7e]

Energy storage via batteries is ridiculously expensive if the storage is greater than 24 hours. Hydrogen tanks (or salt caverns) might be the solution, but there is still the capital cost of the electrolyzers and fuel cells.