The left diagram shows the payment of gas, water, electricity and heat in the absence of meters. At the same time, operating costs are about 30%. When installing meters, the average consumption drops by about half, see the diagram in the center, respectively, the service organization will receive only half of the funds necessary to operate the distribution network.
When allocating operating costs to a separate article, see the diagram on the right, the amount of funds received for maintenance will not depend on the volume of consumed gas, water, electricity and heat, which allows covering such expenses for network operation as: the cost of installation and verification of meters, the content of the relevant services, the maintenance of the distribution network in working order, the costs of software and billing, as well as the costs of equipment and maintenance of the remote accounting system BALANCE. This allows you to return costs to accounting points with zero or very low consumption.
The system of remote Internet energy accounting BALANCE allows you to give statistics on the number of subscribers with low consumption. Below is the table for the months from January 2017 to May 2018. It shows the total number of gas consumers in the BALANCE accounting system and the number of consumers consuming less than three cubic meters of gas per month. From the table it can be seen that such consumers on average about 47.8% or about half of the total number of consumers. And the percentage of consumption of this half of consumers was only about 0.14% of total consumption or almost nothing.
The system of subscription payments, in addition to payment for the amount of energy consumed, is valid in many countries of Europe. For example, for electricity and the Ministry of Energy of Russia intends to introduce a subscription fee (details here) of up to 100 rubles / month (about 1.6 USD). Regardless of how much a person pays for gas, water, electricity and heat, he pays for network maintenance.
First of all, the subscription fee will solve the problem of vacant houses and apartments. It is also important for “cottage houses” and garages where almost no energy is used by energy sources, and it is still necessary to pay for the maintenance of distribution networks in working order.
For the average consumer, the payment for energy resources will not change, or will become somewhat lower, since now the operating expenses for the distribution network are paid by the consuming subscriber, both for himself and for non-consuming.
More details can be read here: Social code, two-part tariff and energy efficiency reform.