Just got charged for reading it
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Is this some USA joke I'm too European to understand?
Yeah probably. I’m in the US. Here’s how my bill is broken down and how much it costs for 1000kWh:
Generation Service Charge: $117
Customer Charge: $10 flat fee
Distribution Charge: $94
Transition Charge: -$1
Transmission Charge: $45
Net Meter Recovery Surcharge: $16
Revenue Decoupling Charge: -$1
Distributed Solar Charge: $4
Renewable Energy Charge: $0.50
Energy Efficiency Charge: $31
Electric Vehicle Program: $1 -
I’ve tried setting up bank draft for my electric like 6 times, to avoid the 3% “convenience fee” for using a credit card. For some reason, it will not work. They have the option, I set it up, it says I need to wait several days to use it, and then it just vanishes from my account.
Calling the company gets me a rude person who barely speaks English. Government subsidized monopolies. Internet is even worse.
Not sure your location, but in the us at least most banks have a bill pay service where they will send a paper check for you at no cost.
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The worst for me is my gas bill. My bill is usually around $50-$60 per month, and when you break it down, the actual gas I use is $3. The rest are fees.
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Yeah probably. I’m in the US. Here’s how my bill is broken down and how much it costs for 1000kWh:
Generation Service Charge: $117
Customer Charge: $10 flat fee
Distribution Charge: $94
Transition Charge: -$1
Transmission Charge: $45
Net Meter Recovery Surcharge: $16
Revenue Decoupling Charge: -$1
Distributed Solar Charge: $4
Renewable Energy Charge: $0.50
Energy Efficiency Charge: $31
Electric Vehicle Program: $1wrote on last edited by [email protected]720kWh, Germany:
- Consumption charge: 183€
- Base fee: 182€
- Electricity tax: 15€
- Revenue tax: 72€
Total 450€
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You're allowed to buy electricity from a separate broker than your "power company" so they split the bill between power usage and service fees plus there's state and local taxes.
Being allowed to on paper and actually being able to are wildly different things. They're monopolies in most areas that get away with it by stringently denying that fact. Same with cable companies.
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In the UK it's all rolled up into the "service charge". Including the "loads of other companies couldn't manage themselves properly and went bust and we had to take on their customers fee"
Same in Germany, it's called "base fee"
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The worst for me is my gas bill. My bill is usually around $50-$60 per month, and when you break it down, the actual gas I use is $3. The rest are fees.
If fees are independent or partially independent of consumption, i would consider jumping to all electric.
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Not sure your location, but in the us at least most banks have a bill pay service where they will send a paper check for you at no cost.
Not sure your location
I bet it's Texas.
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You're allowed to buy electricity from a separate broker than your "power company" so they split the bill between power usage and service fees plus there's state and local taxes.
You're allowed to buy electricity from a separate broker than your "power company"
I'm curious about this, would you be willing to elaborate?
Where I live we don't have a choice of electricity providers for my home. Are you talking about states that have deregulated energy markets?
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I always thought BT should get into the property market. They could sell a house, then rent that house to its new owner, then charge them a fee for using each room.
I would be the shithead that would rotate from room to room daily just to fuck their billing up.
company I worked for had a customer that did this with virtual machines. every single week they would request their VMs from last week to be decommissioned and new ones to be built in their place. not bad if there's only five or six. they had this done to over 300 VMs. we accepted for two years, the length of the contract and then promptly dropped them, hard.
the collective backlash caused the company to go bankrupt. they attempted to sue but our lawyers had already created enough documentation to prove we had successfully executed the contract the best of our abilities and had decided to not renew based on high operational costs attributed to the high maintenance requirement of their account and recommended they seek help from a larger competitive service.
the chaos they put operations through was horrible but was only part of the hell they unleashed. we had to dedicate a billing representative to their account because they contested every-single-fucking-bill. these calls would drag on for weeks before ending with them agreeing to pay what we were charging them, just before starting up for the next billing cycle.
point is, just because you're locked in contract doesn't mean they're in control.
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If fees are independent or partially independent of consumption, i would consider jumping to all electric.
That’s the plan for the future. It’s easy to switch to induction for cooking. The bigger and more expensive switch are the A/C and water heater, which I need to assess (and budget) for.
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I would be the shithead that would rotate from room to room daily just to fuck their billing up.
company I worked for had a customer that did this with virtual machines. every single week they would request their VMs from last week to be decommissioned and new ones to be built in their place. not bad if there's only five or six. they had this done to over 300 VMs. we accepted for two years, the length of the contract and then promptly dropped them, hard.
the collective backlash caused the company to go bankrupt. they attempted to sue but our lawyers had already created enough documentation to prove we had successfully executed the contract the best of our abilities and had decided to not renew based on high operational costs attributed to the high maintenance requirement of their account and recommended they seek help from a larger competitive service.
the chaos they put operations through was horrible but was only part of the hell they unleashed. we had to dedicate a billing representative to their account because they contested every-single-fucking-bill. these calls would drag on for weeks before ending with them agreeing to pay what we were charging them, just before starting up for the next billing cycle.
point is, just because you're locked in contract doesn't mean they're in control.
So I'm trying to wrap my head around why they would do this and how that even worked. They would decommission them on Friday and have them rebuilt on Monday? These didn't have a specific config then I assume? And they did it because they paid per hour the machine existed so it made sense cost wise?
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My condo building just got rid of the company that meters our water. After years of this we could finally break the contract.
My water bill usage was something like $15/mo and they had an admin fee of $13/mo. In a building of like 150 apartments, those guys were raking in like $2k a month from us for keeping their automated shit plugged in.
The managers said they would just stop metering and our monthly fees would pay the bill. After a year, they would adjust our monthly rates to balance it out.
They never had to balance it out - that’s how little the overall water usage cost was.
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You're allowed to buy electricity from a separate broker than your "power company"
I'm curious about this, would you be willing to elaborate?
Where I live we don't have a choice of electricity providers for my home. Are you talking about states that have deregulated energy markets?
Yes, they're called retail electric suppliers. Some have offers to lock in a fixed Price for a year and others have variable rates. Then you can choose to have power billed separately from delivery or not.
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another dollar wont hurt fee ahould be 1.75 cos of taxes
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So I'm trying to wrap my head around why they would do this and how that even worked. They would decommission them on Friday and have them rebuilt on Monday? These didn't have a specific config then I assume? And they did it because they paid per hour the machine existed so it made sense cost wise?
it doesn't make sense because it was never supposed to.
they wanted out of the contract and didn't want to pay the fees. The contract was large enough that we couldn't really take the hit to MRR and wouldn't let them out without the fees. so, they were dicks about it and threatened the CEO with legal action, which is why we forced them into fulfilling the contract to term. they could have left at any time, had they been willing to pay the fees.
as for the VMs. they were remote consoles used in some financial business. I think they had a VPN from each of their locations that used thin-clients to connect to the VMs somehow. it didn't matter if their user data was gone since they were all based on a single image that had all the software/configs built-in.
they paid per machine and storage volume. as long as they didn't go over their contracted amount or under a threshold then they were in compliance with the contract. it was a mutually beneficial contract in the sense that they needed HA high volume VMs with low storage requirements at a fixed price. we offered that to them with volumetric licensing for Microsoft software at a competitive price. think of them like virtual workspaces.
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If fees are independent or partially independent of consumption, i would consider jumping to all electric.
And then when more than a third of people do that, suddenly the state mandates paying for a connection anyways. (Of course the mandate is completely unrelated to the nice dinners that senators enjoy.)
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I would be the shithead that would rotate from room to room daily just to fuck their billing up.
company I worked for had a customer that did this with virtual machines. every single week they would request their VMs from last week to be decommissioned and new ones to be built in their place. not bad if there's only five or six. they had this done to over 300 VMs. we accepted for two years, the length of the contract and then promptly dropped them, hard.
the collective backlash caused the company to go bankrupt. they attempted to sue but our lawyers had already created enough documentation to prove we had successfully executed the contract the best of our abilities and had decided to not renew based on high operational costs attributed to the high maintenance requirement of their account and recommended they seek help from a larger competitive service.
the chaos they put operations through was horrible but was only part of the hell they unleashed. we had to dedicate a billing representative to their account because they contested every-single-fucking-bill. these calls would drag on for weeks before ending with them agreeing to pay what we were charging them, just before starting up for the next billing cycle.
point is, just because you're locked in contract doesn't mean they're in control.
If your company was hosting virtual machines and people staring and stopping them caused you headaches, it just seems to me like the company you worked at was absolute trash lol.
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The worst for me is my gas bill. My bill is usually around $50-$60 per month, and when you break it down, the actual gas I use is $3. The rest are fees.
I have converted to a heat pump and induction stove. I legally need auxiliary power to heat my home, so I have to pay 30 dollars a month just for the gas hookup.
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If fees are independent or partially independent of consumption, i would consider jumping to all electric.
I'm in Texas, and our electric provider added a $200/month fee for all accounts for the next 2 decades to pay for the 2021 winter storm. They bought electricity from other providers during the storm for like 1000x the standard rate and passed the cost towards future customers.
And the beauty of that is that those fees also impact solar users who aren't even using power, since a certificate of occupancy requires that a house be connected to the grid.
