Dr. Schund, how can we empower the power company to more passionately plow our purses by charging us for energy we gave back?
Thomas Edison understood direct current. Heck, Gustav Kirchhoff understood DC and he was before Maxwell's equations. Meddlesome Nikola Tesla made alternating current all tits and giggles. Resistance gave way to impedance and everything went wowser. Ohm said, "V = IR." We can handle that. Electrical impedance uses imaginary numbers in polar coordinates, the ratio of the voltage phasor to the electric current phasor. It is a screwdriver and you are the Phillips head.
If a circuit's voltage, current, and power all stayed in phase the world would have meaning. Everything unravels in an AC circuit with capacitance and inductance. It can wander into negative power regions! Fluorescent lights saving the world one $7 CFL at a time suck juice through your meter, swish it around a bit, then spit back distasteful parts. How dare you be allowed to have something you give back without paying for the privilege of (fleeting) ownership!
Switching mode power supplies (computers) drive the power plug mad every 120th second (every 100th in Europe). Current gushes in if line voltage exceeds capacitor voltage. That giant charge pulse refills what capacitors then discharge the rest of the half-cycle. This has the felicitous side effect of blowing harmonics up the ying-yang back into the line.
Dr. Schund says, "enough!" If he were paid enough by power companies wishing they were healthcare insurance companies he would show them how to extort coverage without paying compensation. This is America! What aged frat boys with three-window offices cannot comprehend is readily apparent to terrorists and investment bankers.
We begin with a power company special surcharge on line impedance "to recover stolen energy," the Impedance Matching Program. Purely resistive users will pay a modest but increasing IMP fee covering periodic inspection. Nobody who can pass this test can be innocent, hence a blanket fee.
Abusive users (anybody with a fluorescent light, computer, TV, microwave oven, battery charger, transformer, or Hitachi Wand) will be wrung dry in several IMP tiers. The bottom tier, "lifeline," doubles charges to encourage conservation. There then follows "Carbon Credits" that adds 50% more. Anthropogenic Global Warming causing extreme weather can only be studied by levying the Carbon Tax on Everything.
The ultimate IMP level is "Gore Violation." Dr. Schund estimates 90% of users, certainly 90% of living users, will pay top tier. As the slogan will go, "Everything is IMPossible!" Social equity spreads one man's misery among many - without dilution.
It would be unfair to cut Congresscritters' itchy palms out of the ground loop. Any abusive user paying more than a $20 luxury electric bill will pay an additional 40% Federal excise tax atop their Impedance Matching Program surcharge to sweeten the deal for important caring people
10% of the whole will be charitably thrown at the poor to elevate them. The productive who steal their boons must surrender them to the unproductive who deserve said boons. The Impedance Matching Program will therefore require an 11.1% across the board surcharge increase right at the get go.
The street finds its own uses for things. Inductance/capacitance tunable black market black boxes will be hawked on Amazon.com and eBay. Fearful consumers in dead of night will plug in and hope to rephase voltage, current, and power out of IMPositions. The boxes will be bulk-manufactured in China and quietly imported by your power company. Each will have a GPS locator allowing sporadic 0200 hrs full military raids. No opium poppy rides for free in Afghanistan. The War on Drugs needs its fix. Ditto your Hitachi wand and Gore Violations.
We will all be richer for it. By consuming less but paying more children are saved and wealth trickles down. It will hopscotch across suburbia to land square in Inner Cities where bulk diversity hiring will assure votes are cast consonant with social engineering goals (more studies). Didn't you always want to be a social engineer driving the big choo-choo? Yer gonna be wearing silk suits and alligator shoes, boyo. But first some sacrifices must be made by those with just the right amount to lose.
Look at your electricity and gas bills right now. You pay a monthly fee to have the meter and have it read. You have fully purchased those meters who knows how many times over and more to come. You are forbidden from buying one of your own. Is it any wonder that central administrators are now feeling a little IMPetuous with the possibilities of having you rent your whole life with no credit toward ownership?