A follow-up, and my thoughts on rooftop solar

On your main point about grid maintenance, you're spot on. Almost. In order to get people to sign up for distributed power (remember Edison vs Telsa?) both systems just based upon the used energy as metered. This way the infrastructure was hidden in the variable costs, and local governments could vary the per kilowatt rate so high users were paying more for the infrastucture than low (poor) users. When rooftop solar came around, this allowed the grid infrastructure payments to be funneled to the nascent solar energy industry, incentivizing advances. But, at some point, (and this will probably need to be done by governments) we have to say "Enough! The technology is good enough, so we now need to limit discounts to only the amount of energy put into the grid, but the connection costs are still there." This is how the old land-line AT&T worked. You paid for a connection to your house. (Today, you pay for a connection to the internet.) That will give you a fixed amount of bandwidth. If you need more, you have to pay more (long-distance charges, 1Gigabit fiber, etc.) So the model is there, but there'll be pushback since people's companies are set up for the way we do business now, and change is expensive.

Mike Bird

If you're doing a "ton of laundry", wouldn't you also use a lot of hot water? We seem to. But we wash whites in hot, everything else in warm.

Mike Bird

I would have the same exact concerns, but we've actually already fixed this in many places (and the solution is known for places which haven't). Where I live, it now costs more to register an EV to offset the loss in gas tax revenue. Whether that amount is fairly covering it I'm not sure, and there are more precise ways to do it. The amount should ideally account for the vehicle's weight and shouldn't be the flat amount that it is right now, and it doesn't account for how heavily (or lightly) someone might drive, which the gas tax sort of naturally figured. A mileage tax is likely the fairest approach, but that has issues, too. For now, I'm comfortable with the extra $100 I pay yearly for my EV as the vast majority of road damage comes from heavy-duty vehicles and not passenger cars. But I wouldn't be upset if I had to pay more - especially as we rightfully should be spending more public money on transit to make owning a car less necessary.

Technology Connections

EVs aren't paying their fair share of tax on maintenance of roads, you don't seem to have the same objections about them.

Ed Bratton

The easiest way would be to have the grid run by the government and don't have it financed over the electrical bill but through taxes. A Tax that is payed for a piece of land and using the grid. And there you could have different classes for example on how much it is used. That would be fair. In Germany on the other hand, the grid is owned by private companies that make billions of it without investing or sustaining it. That is so bad, oh not forgetting to mention that the politicians that sold the grid to those companies ended up in well paying positions there.