Do you pay taxes? Does the near-zero cost of the electricity vs the thousands of dollars the town will waste dealing with the matter seem like an odd tradeoff to you?
At first I was going to ask why the city was sticking its nose in people's private business and why they care what they're using that electricity for. But it seems that they aren't doing it for that reason, and residents are being pretty severely negatively affected.
On a side note, the city's goal was to use cheap electricity to lure industry to town, and their policy did exactly what they tried to. Seems like they didn't exactly plan out what would happen if they succeeded.
And that’s ridiculous. Me working on my computer in my house paying the asking rate for the electricity is really none of the business of my neighbors. It isn’t like someone is running a hair salon or a day care center where there could be traffic/disruption concerns.
If you have a rural vacation house (for instance) in Denmark, and you are off the grid and ... perhaps have some solar arrays ... you would have to pay tax on the power generated ? And possibly fines ?
My power goes directly into my neighbor's meter. The power company charges my neighbor the full rate for my power. They pay me almost nothing. Pure fucking profit.
Yes, you have to use the municipal electricity. You cannot lay your own power lines, it's illegal. And in most urban areas, you can't run your own generator for emissions restrictions. You also can't power your home with a bicycle. Even champion bicyclists output 50-100 watts.
Using Bing, DuckDuckGo, or other Google alternatives are incomparably easier than not using utilities like electricity and plumbing. I struggle to see how one can honestly make this comparison.
My parents pay $1,200/year for electricity, in a fairly large house. Given the expected lifetime of a power wall, that will eat all the 'savings' of living off the grid.
There's also the matter that if, say, 40% of the population disconnects itself from the grid, that doesn't mean that the cost of maintaining that infrastructure will drop by 60%. Someone will have to pay for it.
It's not necessarily bad policy it's just policy. The local residents are also the ones that generally live with the consequences and externalities of the local power generation industry.
I don’t understand the draw of your house being “off the grid”. It’s a house. Do you want to be off the water, sewer, gas, garbage, postal, newspaper, legal, and firefighting grids too, or just specifically the electrical grid? And your neighbors too or just you?
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