Understood.

And that “$10 connection fee” makes perfect sense for covering per-user administrative costs. The cost is the same to send a $1 bill or a $1000 bill to the customer; a per-user fee to cover that administrative fee is not unreasonable.

But they aren’t talking about administration. They are talking about infrastructure maintenance. Infrastructure is a shared resource, and the maintenance costs scale (primarily) with total consumption, not per-user.

From the original comment:

Hence, the split that many utility companies are shifting to. There’s a fixed charge to have a connection to the grid, which covers the cost of grid maintenance. And there’s a separate cost per kWh of energy used.

That “fixed cost to have a connection to the grid” does not cover grid maintenance. Grid maintenance costs are proportional to consumption, not number-of-users. It does not make sense that this fee should be divided among users rather than based on consumption.