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This article seems to have a more thorough explanation: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/is-this-sunny-state-trying-to-kill-solar-power-2016-01-07 http://www.m

This article seems to have a more thorough explanation: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/is-this-sunny-state-trying-to-kill-solar-power-2016-01-07 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/is-this-sunny-state-trying-... snip ----------------------- A little-understood billing mechanism called net metering is at the heart of the Nevada controversy. Net metering means that residential and commercial solar customers are billed for their “net” energy consumption. They are allowed to send back to the grid the electricity their solar arrays generate when the supply outstrips demand -- such as during daytime hours, in the case of a home -- and take power from the grid when demand may exceed the system’s output -- such as at nighttime when all the lights are on, or during a cloudy spell. It’s a system usually based on power-bill credits. How that quid-pro-quo works, varies from state to state and from utility to utility. In Nevada, the utility regulators have decided to pay lower, wholesale prices for that surplus power, not the higher, retail prices they had been paying. California utility regulators evaluated a similar proposal, but decided against major changes. In Hawaii, regulators approved lower net metering rates, but not higher fees for the most part. Arizona and Wisconsin have imposed higher monthly surcharges for solar customers. More worrying in Nevada’s case, however, is that regulators made no provision to grandfather in existing customers, said Shayle Kann, a senior vice president at GTM Research, a green-energy consulting firm. -------------- end snip

marvin 11y ago
The ironic part here is that the Nevada utilities are accelerating their own demise by opposing rooftop solar. In a few short years, batteries will be cheap and plentiful enough that it will be unnecessary to cut deals like these with the utilities in order to have a profitable solar rooftop installation. By removing the incentive for customers to cooperate with the utilities, the utility companies are further incentivizing the installation of residential battery storage, which will further reduce the utilities' influence down the road.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  It's not that simple. A system that is not grid connected will need a lot more than just a battery to make it as reliable as a grid connection. Those 'few short years' are more likely a couple of decades, in other words well over the horizon for the people that are currently trying to squeeze the most profit from those utilities. Residential battery storage is just one component is a complex chain that needs to be deployed for every house that could be off the grid, it actually side-steps the need for net metering (because you can simply store your own excess). For those use cases the grid functions exactly like a battery, only one with near infinite capacity. It also serves as a back-up, in case of system failure, extended lack of power from whatever sources you've got and so on. And that function is far harder to engineer around than the mere energy storage and recovery one.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - Symmetry 11y ago
    I think the idea isn't that you can go off grid but rather that you can now make use of the excess power that you would have been selling back to the grid during the night and so effectively capture the same residential rates through reduced use.
    - jacquesm 11y ago
      Sure. But that's effectively the exact same thing as net-metering, only with a lot more fixed costs. And batteries wear out as well. The grid is a lot better for this, unfortunately that requires cooperation of the grid operators and owners. There is an alternative to this, the equivalent of a credit union but for power where a number of people band together to do their own little grid, but the complexities and dangers involved make this a very difficult thing, especially once you factor in insurance and approval.
      - msandford 11y ago
        I've thought for a long time that a neighborhood 48V DC exchange might be viable. You'll have to pull thick copper of course, but $1/foot for wires is pretty cheap compared to battery prices. Here in the US the NEC says that anything under 50V isn't really regulated because they don't want to get involved in people's path lighting, phone, ethernet, doorbells, thermostats, garage door opener signaling, etc. The other thing that will help enable going completely off grid are things like inverter AC units (which draw a continuously small amount of power instead of 5 minutes at 3kw and 10-30 minutes at 0kw) and ice "batteries" to store power instead of lead acid or lithium. Ice batteries never really go bad either, at least not the way chemical batteries do.
        jacquesm 11y ago
        You'll want to think long and hard about how you're going to deal with fuses. For the kind of currents that batteries can put out it can be quite expensive to properly fuse things. 50V was a fairly arbitrary voltage deemed to be 'safe', however there are cases known of people dying from 50V and even lower (in particular, one very nasty accident involving a Swiss ham in pre-internet times). A bus made of thick copper wire would be stolen here pretty much on the day that you installed it (copper theft is on the order of the day). I'm not convinced of the need to have any of this though, I got my power usage down to the point where a fair sized house ran year round from 16 solar panels and a small windmill. The year that we only had the solar panels we still needed the genset with some regularity but the year the windmill went up we used it only twice (when I was running a 12KW plasma cutter from the battery pack they tended to deplete a bit too quickly...).
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
twoodfin 11y ago
Can we change the link from the one-sided (and deliberately unclear!) press release to this article or a similar one?
- blisterpeanuts 11y ago
  One-sided and unclear, and with a TYPO in the headline!
sandworm101 11y ago
>> ... no provision to grandfather in existing customers. I might not like the decision, but I am glad to see they aren't grandfathering in anyone. Grandfathering is a definitive unleveling of the field. People/businesses shouldn't be given special treatment just because they have been around longer than others. I feel for those who made investments and haven't seen them come to fruition, but that's politics. Deal with it at the ballot box.
CWuestefeld 11y ago
Wow, that's a long reach to get to the OP's "de facto ban on rooftop solar". If we take the OP at face value, then, it seems to be declaring that solar energy is completely impractical, and can't survive without life support. I realize that other forms of energy generation are all subsidized in various ways, so it's clearly not as serious as my above interpretation, but still, it doesn't speak well of solar.
- vinceguidry 11y ago
  It's not that simple. Solar is only really practical if it fits into the grid system, otherwise there's no real point. The energy it gives you goes up and down, and not in sync with your own household needs. So you need something to do with excess capacity. All by itself, units of power aren't all that expensive. But a solar installation is very expensive. You need to amortize the cost of the installation, the people putting it in, the company developing the technology, over around 30 years before it's really worth it. Even then, normal consumers won't bother unless it's actually making their net energy expenditures lower. So you also need a finance company to come in and finance everything so the consumer isn't coming out of pocket for the installation. All of this is viable, only so long as the power companies are paying retail rates for excess electricity. There's enough money so everyone gets paid. What this is all about is the power companies are suddenly deciding they want to pay wholesale for excess power. Why should they pay wholesale? They're not buying in wholesale quantities from each consumer. This sucks enough profit potential from the industry that it makes more sense for them to go elsewhere to put together a workable business model than to stick around and deal with decimated revenues. The power companies are using their political muscle to stamp out competition. If they were to play fair, then they'd be forced to compete with solar. They don't want to compete, so they're using lobbyists to warp the political process.
  - dpark 11y ago
    >Why should they pay wholesale? They're not buying in wholesale quantities from each consumer. Why should they pay retail? As a consumer thinking about solar, I like that, but it makes no economical sense. What business can afford to buy and sell for the same price? You don't sell a car to the dealership for the price they will sell it for. That would be absurd.
cowkingdeluxe 11y ago
What is the actual cost to the grid of a solar home which only uses power at night from the grid and maybe delivers some to it during the day? In any of these anti-solar positions about grid costs I've never seen a factual statement of what it actually costs the power providers.
- Tuna-Fish 11y ago
  The same as any other house on the grid. How much power you typically use and when has almost no impact on how much grid connection costs. All that matters is the peak they must be able to deliver. That is why billing transfer together with consumption makes no sense. They should be completely split into two bills paid to two different companies like in Finland.
  - Retric 11y ago
    Night time peaks are likely far lower, also transmission losses are higher as temperature increases requiring more transmission infrastructure.
  - cowkingdeluxe 11y ago
    But what are some actual numbers for costs to the grid per household? I've yet to see any concrete numbers but I see a lot of justification of minimum fees using grid costs as the primary reason. If these costs are so visible and important, why is it hard to find actual costs? Is it $2k per year per household? $400? $100? Does it match up with some of these $50/mo minimum fees?
fmihaila 11y ago
The conventional wisdom is that rooftop solar stresses the grid, and therefore net metering at retail prices amounts to a subsidy extracted from the non-solar customers to the benefit of rooftop solar owners. This, however, is a myth (reinforced at every turn by the incumbent monopolies). Rooftop solar tends to overproduce on the hottest days, which also happens to be the time when the grid is overloaded by air conditioners running at full throttle. In effect, rooftop solar is at maximum production exactly when the grid needs it the most, thus providing very valuable demand smoothing. This greatly benefits utilities, since they don’t have to spend as much on peak-generation capacity. There is ample evidence that utilities vastly underpay for these benefits [1], while their profits rapidly increase. Three major Nevada casino operators “have expressed vocal criticism of NV Energy for generating huge profits over the past years and not lowering rates for customers of Nevada Power. [...] NV Energy’s profits increased 27.7% in 2014, yet the supplier has not introduced any electricity rates breaks to its customers since it was acquired by Berkshire Hathaway.“ [2] Over the short term, the incumbents will get their way by flexing their political muscle, but this will only delay the inevitable. Electricity spot prices are at their highest during daytime, while people are at work and their solar generators put power into the grid. Utilities will now pay wholesale for this power, then turn around and sell it to non-solar consumers at the top rate. People return from work as their solar generators become inactive, so they will have to buy power at retail rates. For now, utilities will win both ways. But what this means is that as storage prices drop, it will be more economical to invest in storage capacity in order to capture the valuable power during the day and use it during the night. This will deny utilities the demand-smoothing services that they currently enjoy, so they will have to increase their capex for peak generation, leading to higher rates for everyone else, which in turn will encourage _more_ customers to install solar and storage, etc. Soon after, people will start disconnecting from the grid altogether; welcome to Uber Energy. Tectonic plates move slowly, but they rearrange quickly. [1] http://cleantechnica.com/2015/09/01/review-of-net-metering-studies-finds-utilities-underpaying-for-solar-electricity/ http://cleantechnica.com/2015/09/01/review-of-net-metering-s... [2] http://www.casinonewsdaily.com/2015/11/26/major-casino-operators-leave-nevadas-main-electric-utility/ http://www.casinonewsdaily.com/2015/11/26/major-casino-opera...

marvin 11y ago

The ironic part here is that the Nevada utilities are accelerating their own demise by opposing rooftop solar. In a few short years, batteries will be cheap and plentiful enough that it will be unnecessary to cut deals like these with the utilities in order to have a profitable solar rooftop installation. By removing the incentive for customers to cooperate with the utilities, the utility companies are further incentivizing the installation of residential battery storage, which will further reduce the utilities' influence down the road.

jacquesm 11y ago
It's not that simple. A system that is not grid connected will need a lot more than just a battery to make it as reliable as a grid connection. Those 'few short years' are more likely a couple of decades, in other words well over the horizon for the people that are currently trying to squeeze the most profit from those utilities. Residential battery storage is just one component is a complex chain that needs to be deployed for every house that could be off the grid, it actually side-steps the need for net metering (because you can simply store your own excess). For those use cases the grid functions exactly like a battery, only one with near infinite capacity. It also serves as a back-up, in case of system failure, extended lack of power from whatever sources you've got and so on. And that function is far harder to engineer around than the mere energy storage and recovery one.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- Symmetry 11y ago
  I think the idea isn't that you can go off grid but rather that you can now make use of the excess power that you would have been selling back to the grid during the night and so effectively capture the same residential rates through reduced use.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    Sure. But that's effectively the exact same thing as net-metering, only with a lot more fixed costs. And batteries wear out as well. The grid is a lot better for this, unfortunately that requires cooperation of the grid operators and owners. There is an alternative to this, the equivalent of a credit union but for power where a number of people band together to do their own little grid, but the complexities and dangers involved make this a very difficult thing, especially once you factor in insurance and approval.
    - msandford 11y ago
      I've thought for a long time that a neighborhood 48V DC exchange might be viable. You'll have to pull thick copper of course, but $1/foot for wires is pretty cheap compared to battery prices. Here in the US the NEC says that anything under 50V isn't really regulated because they don't want to get involved in people's path lighting, phone, ethernet, doorbells, thermostats, garage door opener signaling, etc. The other thing that will help enable going completely off grid are things like inverter AC units (which draw a continuously small amount of power instead of 5 minutes at 3kw and 10-30 minutes at 0kw) and ice "batteries" to store power instead of lead acid or lithium. Ice batteries never really go bad either, at least not the way chemical batteries do.
      - jacquesm 11y ago
        You'll want to think long and hard about how you're going to deal with fuses. For the kind of currents that batteries can put out it can be quite expensive to properly fuse things. 50V was a fairly arbitrary voltage deemed to be 'safe', however there are cases known of people dying from 50V and even lower (in particular, one very nasty accident involving a Swiss ham in pre-internet times). A bus made of thick copper wire would be stolen here pretty much on the day that you installed it (copper theft is on the order of the day). I'm not convinced of the need to have any of this though, I got my power usage down to the point where a fair sized house ran year round from 16 solar panels and a small windmill. The year that we only had the solar panels we still needed the genset with some regularity but the year the windmill went up we used it only twice (when I was running a 12KW plasma cutter from the battery pack they tended to deplete a bit too quickly...).

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

twoodfin 11y ago

Can we change the link from the one-sided (and deliberately unclear!) press release to this article or a similar one?

blisterpeanuts 11y ago
One-sided and unclear, and with a TYPO in the headline!

sandworm101 11y ago

>> ... no provision to grandfather in existing customers. I might not like the decision, but I am glad to see they aren't grandfathering in anyone. Grandfathering is a definitive unleveling of the field. People/businesses shouldn't be given special treatment just because they have been around longer than others. I feel for those who made investments and haven't seen them come to fruition, but that's politics. Deal with it at the ballot box.

CWuestefeld 11y ago

Wow, that's a long reach to get to the OP's "de facto ban on rooftop solar". If we take the OP at face value, then, it seems to be declaring that solar energy is completely impractical, and can't survive without life support. I realize that other forms of energy generation are all subsidized in various ways, so it's clearly not as serious as my above interpretation, but still, it doesn't speak well of solar.

vinceguidry 11y ago
It's not that simple. Solar is only really practical if it fits into the grid system, otherwise there's no real point. The energy it gives you goes up and down, and not in sync with your own household needs. So you need something to do with excess capacity. All by itself, units of power aren't all that expensive. But a solar installation is very expensive. You need to amortize the cost of the installation, the people putting it in, the company developing the technology, over around 30 years before it's really worth it. Even then, normal consumers won't bother unless it's actually making their net energy expenditures lower. So you also need a finance company to come in and finance everything so the consumer isn't coming out of pocket for the installation. All of this is viable, only so long as the power companies are paying retail rates for excess electricity. There's enough money so everyone gets paid. What this is all about is the power companies are suddenly deciding they want to pay wholesale for excess power. Why should they pay wholesale? They're not buying in wholesale quantities from each consumer. This sucks enough profit potential from the industry that it makes more sense for them to go elsewhere to put together a workable business model than to stick around and deal with decimated revenues. The power companies are using their political muscle to stamp out competition. If they were to play fair, then they'd be forced to compete with solar. They don't want to compete, so they're using lobbyists to warp the political process.
- dpark 11y ago
  >Why should they pay wholesale? They're not buying in wholesale quantities from each consumer. Why should they pay retail? As a consumer thinking about solar, I like that, but it makes no economical sense. What business can afford to buy and sell for the same price? You don't sell a car to the dealership for the price they will sell it for. That would be absurd.

cowkingdeluxe 11y ago

What is the actual cost to the grid of a solar home which only uses power at night from the grid and maybe delivers some to it during the day? In any of these anti-solar positions about grid costs I've never seen a factual statement of what it actually costs the power providers.

Tuna-Fish 11y ago
The same as any other house on the grid. How much power you typically use and when has almost no impact on how much grid connection costs. All that matters is the peak they must be able to deliver. That is why billing transfer together with consumption makes no sense. They should be completely split into two bills paid to two different companies like in Finland.
- Retric 11y ago
  Night time peaks are likely far lower, also transmission losses are higher as temperature increases requiring more transmission infrastructure.
- cowkingdeluxe 11y ago
  But what are some actual numbers for costs to the grid per household? I've yet to see any concrete numbers but I see a lot of justification of minimum fees using grid costs as the primary reason. If these costs are so visible and important, why is it hard to find actual costs? Is it $2k per year per household? $400? $100? Does it match up with some of these $50/mo minimum fees?

fmihaila 11y ago

The conventional wisdom is that rooftop solar stresses the grid, and therefore net metering at retail prices amounts to a subsidy extracted from the non-solar customers to the benefit of rooftop solar owners. This, however, is a myth (reinforced at every turn by the incumbent monopolies). Rooftop solar tends to overproduce on the hottest days, which also happens to be the time when the grid is overloaded by air conditioners running at full throttle. In effect, rooftop solar is at maximum production exactly when the grid needs it the most, thus providing very valuable demand smoothing. This greatly benefits utilities, since they don’t have to spend as much on peak-generation capacity. There is ample evidence that utilities vastly underpay for these benefits [1], while their profits rapidly increase. Three major Nevada casino operators “have expressed vocal criticism of NV Energy for generating huge profits over the past years and not lowering rates for customers of Nevada Power. [...] NV Energy’s profits increased 27.7% in 2014, yet the supplier has not introduced any electricity rates breaks to its customers since it was acquired by Berkshire Hathaway.“ [2] Over the short term, the incumbents will get their way by flexing their political muscle, but this will only delay the inevitable. Electricity spot prices are at their highest during daytime, while people are at work and their solar generators put power into the grid. Utilities will now pay wholesale for this power, then turn around and sell it to non-solar consumers at the top rate. People return from work as their solar generators become inactive, so they will have to buy power at retail rates. For now, utilities will win both ways. But what this means is that as storage prices drop, it will be more economical to invest in storage capacity in order to capture the valuable power during the day and use it during the night. This will deny utilities the demand-smoothing services that they currently enjoy, so they will have to increase their capex for peak generation, leading to higher rates for everyone else, which in turn will encourage _more_ customers to install solar and storage, etc. Soon after, people will start disconnecting from the grid altogether; welcome to Uber Energy. Tectonic plates move slowly, but they rearrange quickly. [1] http://cleantechnica.com/2015/09/01/review-of-net-metering-studies-finds-utilities-underpaying-for-solar-electricity/ http://cleantechnica.com/2015/09/01/review-of-net-metering-s... [2] http://www.casinonewsdaily.com/2015/11/26/major-casino-operators-leave-nevadas-main-electric-utility/ http://www.casinonewsdaily.com/2015/11/26/major-casino-opera...