Existing California solar customers may get blindsided with net metering cuts
Existing California solar customers may get blindsided with net metering cuts
Customers that have invested in solar under NEM 1.0 and 2.0 may be forced into a regulatory scheme that would threaten their return on investment, based on guidance from the California Public Advoc…
I make the investment and then don't get the return. Sounds about right for the criminals at PG&E and their paid for people in office. Time to turn them into a not for profit public institution.
102It’s so weird that a basic public utility is totally owned by a private company. Roads and water are maintained by the government in my county. Why not power?
54Power, water, internet, healthcare, education, transit, there’s a lot of things that should be public utilities or at least with a convincing public option because of the clear conflict of interest between private corporations and social benefit, but aren’t, because money controls politics.
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Here in europe we're gonna have to pay the electrical company for the energy our own solar panels generate above a certain amount.
"Can we just turn them off?"
"No 😠"
39Where in Europe is this? Europe isn't a monolith, after all.
Here in the Netherlands we (currently) still have the "salderingsregeling" which is used to reimburse people for the solar they feed back into the grid, though that will eventually go away.Paying people for solar on the roof is a bit tricky in general, and probably not sustainable long term:
- The money to maintain the grid has to come from somewhere, and if a lot of people have a bill of zero euros or a negative amount, that system kind of breaks down.
- The grid has a maximum capacity (especially in residential neighbourhoods) so you cannot pump an infinite amount of power back into the grid. If many houses in a neighbourhood have solar the grid simply cannot cope.
10Because they have to give that energy away in order to keep the grid stable.
Hopefully better battery storage will make this better in the future.
The aim with it is to naturally discourage people from overproducing in such overproduction times - e.g. maybe you disable your solar panels when you predict it will happen, lessening the sudden impact on the grid.
FWIW you could buy a high capacity home battery already to eliminate it yourself (charge the battery in those times), but they're still expensive.
7
PG&E was literally the villain in the real life Erin Brockovich story.
21I made a post with ideas on what initiatives could be proposed here: https://fedia.io/m/VoterInitiatives/t/883352/Electric-utility-company-reform
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Utilities have avoided infrastructure development such as more solar generators, rooftop solar buyback incentives.
They avoided power storage development too.
They now complain that there’s too much fluctuation between peak solar hours and have to charge the people that were taking action on their own to avoid excessive power costs to make ends meet.
45People are just going to install backup batteries and then PG&E isn’t going to get anything.
40EV car batteries have been used for the purpose of storing daytime-generated solar energy to power a home during the night.
13If I had an expensive EV with an expensive battery in it, I would not want to be wasting my precious limited number of charge cycles on running my house.
Unless you’re talking about a home-scale project to repurpose retired EV batteries for stationary storage. I’ve only ever read about grid-scale versions of such projects.
10
This is exactly what PG&E is hoping for, yes. ⭐
4It's a win-win. Those batteries are thousands of bucks.
It fully fucking misses the point, we should own the power we produce from our own fucking homes.
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Shifting costs to other people is the end goal.
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I mean, the existing scheme is economically-problematic, because it means that non-solar-generation users are subsidizing solar-generation-users grid connections.
The utilities have two separate set of costs, one from providing the grid connection, and the other from providing power over it.
Traditionally, because the two were linked for practical purposes, utilities just generated their revenue from charging a fee based on electricity use.
But they became decoupled when home solar power generation became more-common. That caused people who were doing solar power generation to not just not pay for electricity being provided -- which is fine, they're providing that -- but also to not pay the costs of keeping the grid available, which is not. Under the traditional billing system, those grid maintenance costs were transferred to people -- who statistically are poorer, another point of contention -- weren't doing home solar power generation.
Having a grid connection provides value to solar generation users. It means reliability, and ability to scale up use on demand. It costs something to provide that. And the folks who are incurring the cost and benefiting from it should pay those costs.
And yeah, I agree that it makes solar less-advantageous, and some rooftop solar users got sold a bill of goods by rooftop solar installers who promised that their rooftop solar would make more economic sense than it did, because they could exploit that billing inefficiency. But the point is, it was a bad policy, and rooftop solar installers had no ability to guarantee that it would continue.
If you've got rooftop solar, you can still avoid paying for the electricity that you're generating rather than pulling from the grid. You just have to pay your share of the grid maintenance cost. Or, if you really don't need that connectivity and you legitimately feel that you're better off off-grid -- which I suspect is probably not the case for most people -- you can just cut off from the grid, rely entirely on your local generation capacity of whatever sort. The only thing you can't do is have grid access and have non-solar-rooftop generation customers subsidize that grid access.
22We already pay a grid connect fee and on top of that we purchased over 10k in hardware and we make it so their needs to be less grid upgrades and we provide our excess power for 8 cents a kw for NO hardware cost to them. Sounds like they are getting a nice deal. But of course that is not nice enough for PG&E they want it all.
32Could easily just charge separate lines on the bill, just like they do for everything else.
1 - $0.0x c/KWh for line maintenance - this charges on both incoming and outgoing power.
2 - $0.xx c/KWh for power usage - this charges only on the incoming side.
3 - $xx flat fee every month for administration of your account.Charge what things cost and it won't matter how your use your energy.
edit: formatting
21I agree -- that decoupling of fees is what's happening and is what the article is complaining about.
EDIT: I'd also add I kind of feel like this pattern is turning into something of a chronic problem for California. The same sort of thing happened with EVs getting to ignore carpool rules.
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California tells people that if they buy an EV, they can ignore carpool rules and use the carpool lane without carpooling. Advocates get this past voters by billing it as being "green".
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EV companies sell a relatively-costly product, implying that the policy will continue ad-infinitum. They can charge a premium because they're giving special road access bundled with the vehicle. This is lucrative for EV manufacturers; they're actually profiting by selling access to a state service that they aren't paying for.
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Well-to-do people do the math and figure out that while the car costs more, it's a pretty cheap deal for your own road. They buy the car.
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California announces that the policy is going to expire. People who paid more and had an expectation of never-ending special road access are angry.
There are over 400,000 drivers in California who currently have decals - many of them bought their clean air vehicle to speed up their commute so losing that privilege is a big deal.
A Tesla driver says, " It is frustrating. Like I said the main reason for the decision is driving in Bay Area traffic."
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They do that now.
For pge the distribution fees are 5x the actual generation fees, because while you can get power from other companies, pge owns all the lines and milks them dry.
3
You’ve articulated well a lot of good points, but you’re missing a few key considerations. One elephant in the room is that the Investor Owned Utilities (which cover the vast majority of accounts in California) are abusing their monopoly powers as much as possible (including regulatory capture). That is sadly inextricably linked with the resentment felt by their solar customers, even as it is also felt by all of their non-solar customers.
You’re talking about the kind of tradeoffs that make sense in an ideal system, pricing things according to what they actually cost to provide. But the IOUs price things at “how much can we get the CPUC to allow us to charge?” And they love to stoke class warfare politically when it suits their business purposes. It’s just one more area where the actual problem is the billionaires (or just call it capitalism) against the 99% but they keep the water too muddy for most people to see it.
I believe it’s also still generally either illegal or at least infeasible to disconnect from the grid entirely in most of urban and suburban California, because it’s tied to occupancy permitting. I think the best hope of ending the madness does lie in that direction though. Solar customers tend to be much wealthier than non solar customers, which in aggregate means many of them will have the means to go full battery off grid as the pricing disparity continues to grow. This loss of legally-mandated captive market is the only chance to force monopolies to behave better.
4Sounds good, but it essentially means you would then have to buy and maintain the method of power generation and delivery back to a company to sell it to someone else. I totally get remaining grid connected is important, but those grid connected systems are supplying a whole lot of power back to the grid. Perhaps if you generate more than you use, the power company should pay you to maintain your generators and infrastructure.
Transparent pricing and not itemized billing could help a lot (and allow for better application of fees based on use case).
2
We are paving over the Mojave and prime ag lands to build solar instead of incentivizing people to put it on top of their homes. Also, the current PUC is hopelessly corrupted by PGE influence. Anything that could be twisted to create more profit for PGE should be construed as doing so in practice.
17It doesn’t really seem like net metering is sustainable. Say for example someone generates the same amount of electricity they use, in that case they pay $0 for electricity even though the grid has to take the burden of storing the electricity until they use it later in the day.
5It doesn’t really seem like net metering is sustainable.
Not sure why you think that.
Say for example someone generates the same amount of electricity they use, in that case they pay $0 for electricity even though the grid has to take the burden of storing the electricity until they use it later in the day.
The grid isn’t storing their energy - it’s sending it to other customers, meaning that non-sustainable, polluting energy sources don’t have to be generated.
The only time that’s not true is when the net load on the grid dips below zero. According to the duck curve graph from the article, it does appear to be very briefly dipping for a very brief time period each day. At that point it could make sense to store the rest, but if the grid doesn’t have storage capacity then any excess is “wasted,” but at that point the grid engages in a process known as “curtailment,” which means it rejects the excess, meaning that nobody gets credit later for energy that isn’t used now.
Also, curtailment is often not because the grid itself is over-supplied, but because specific regions are over-supplied and the grid lacks transmission lines from them to regions where demand is higher.
in that case they pay $0 for electricity
True under NEM 1.0, but NEM 2.0 also includes “non-bypassable charges” - components of pulling from the grid that cannot be offset by what they contribute. Those charges are roughly 5% as far as I can tell, meaning that if they pulled $300 worth of energy from the grid and sent back $300 worth (or more), they’d still owe $15.
13Sure, but if everyone does it then it wouldn’t work (no one would be drawing excess when the solar is at peak), so that makes it not very sustainable. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, just that it can’t continue to work if adoption becomes near-universal (it doesn’t seem to be for now). I guess these non-bypassable charges will fix that, but that sounds a lot like what they are talking about (only getting paid some large percentage of the price for energy sent to the grid).
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They can pay for the grid maintenance and storage if they’d like to set it up that way. NEM sort of addresses this but they’ve planned it poorly.
4Ah yes, the “burden” of free energy. 🙄
0No, the burden of providing free energy storage.
2