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This issue isn't as clearly cut as articles like this make it out to be. There are a few competing interests: the (wealthier than average) folks that own solar

This issue isn't as clearly cut as articles like this make it out to be. There are a few competing interests: the (wealthier than average) folks that own solar panels, the utility companies, and the plants. Solar is cutting into the margins that the plants need to be profitable. So the plants increase the base rates they charge so that they remain profitable. This increase is then paid for by everyone (not just the solar owners). But it's still a net win for the solar owners, because they're the ones saving the most when rates are highest (when it's hottest, and ACs are cranked up). So effectively, doing nothing (and letting plants increase rates) acts as a net wealth transfer to those with solar panels. This isn't in the interest of the common good. So the utilities try to soften the costs by taxing the solar owners. But then the math for the solar owners is thrown off because they anticipated saving more/making more over the life time of the panel. I don't know what the right answer is.

gandalfian 5y ago
The utility company using their scale to build their own cheap utility scale solar farms and give everyone bargain energy at sunny times? Thus making microgeneration uneconomic and restoring the communal system?
ericmay 5y ago
And with the proliferation of battery technology, eventually the solar owners (and increasing numbers of them) may just disconnect from the grid and then the numbers really won't work. My off the cuff solution here is that energy providers/plants/etc. need to invest in storage capacity, or eventually the economic incentives will win out and people just won't buy energy from them in states where solar + battery works. If you are a net producer of energy, the only calculus that makes sense (unless you want to pay for access to the grid as a form of insurance) is that you get money for providing energy back to the grid. Otherwise you just disconnect and figure it out afterward. With renewals, decentralization of energy production, and battery proliferation we're going to see some interesting market dynamics play out here soon. We probably need a general energy market accessible to producers as small as a single person all the way up to a nuclear plant. Perhaps you should be able to log in to an energy market like you do your brokerage and buy or sell energy.
- bsder 5y ago
  > may just disconnect from the grid and then the numbers really won't work Which works until everybody is off the grid and then collapses. Everybody relies on the fact that the grid is ubiquitous. Street lights, traffic lights, water pumps, etc. When the grid isn't ubiquitous, you lose all manner of things we take for granted. We've seen this before in California. Some suburbs made a point of being in unincorporated land to avoid being associated with LA. Well, they found out really quickly that their infrastructure was horribly expensive when they had to pay for it all themselves.
  - leephillips 5y ago
    In other words, the grid is part of critical infrastructure. As such, it should be a governmental function supported by taxes, rather than a product invested in by private companies.
- etempleton 5y ago
  The lack of energy storage is the issue. If the utilities could pay users to deploy the energy when they needed it there wouldn’t be an issue. The problem is solar energy peaks and there is nothing that can be done with that energy because power plants take time to bring on and off line. Natural Gas is relatively quick to bring online, but it still takes time and money. We no longer have a renewable energy production challenge. If we wanted to we could produce more than enough energy with wind and solar energy cheaply. The problem is we don’t have good affordable energy storage solutions.
bsder 5y ago
> I don't know what the right answer is. You have to unbundle the two different costs: 1) Infrastructure cost. It costs a fixed amount to connect someone to the always-on grid. This needs be set. 2) Consumption cost. It costs a different amount to consume produced electricity. The problem is that the panel owners are going to get very cranky (as you see in this article) when that happens because maintaining the grid is quite a bit more expensive than the production costs and they're going to lose their cost benefit.
- philipkglass 5y ago
  Panel owners aren't the only group that would get cranky about unbundling. Some non-solar consumers also reap effective subsidies from bundling costs into per-unit charges. Rural customers in low density areas would have higher bills if they paid for infrastructure explicitly. So would customers in dense areas who consume only a little electricity each month but still need the infrastructure to work around the clock. Customers who live in urban or suburban areas and consume a lot of electricity would see their bills fall. Since this latter group tends to be more affluent than the previous two groups, charging each customer proportionally to their incurred costs is also likely to be perceived as unfair.
  - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
    If we are going to subsidize certain groups, let’s make it explicit and subsidize the poor instead.
blitzar 5y ago
> Solar is cutting into the margins that the plants need to be profitable. There is more supply, the utilities should be dropping their prices and excess, high cost production drop out of the market. Ofc ourse that assumes that it is a f free market. > So the utilities try to soften the costs by taxing the solar owners. Oh how noble of them to look out for the little guy. There is a small chance that they are just opportunists gauging as much money as possible out of any avenue they can. Of course it would be unheard of for a big business with a practical monopoly over a basic human necessity to do such a thing.
- horsawlarway 5y ago
  I mean - regressive taxes are bad. And this situation is essentially a regressive tax bundled into your power bill. Those with less means are forced to continue buying power from utilities that are faced with shrinking customer bases, and which have high, long-term costs (Building power plants ain't cheap, and the costs to amortize the initial construction can't just be waved away because "there is more supply"...) Does that mean utilities aren't also angling to make the most of the situation? Of course not - they are businesses. But it does mean your black and white approach isn't really useful here - unless you're fine with poor people getting fucked. Maybe you are.
  - Kalium 5y ago
    You're describing a death spiral, like has happened with car insurance in some places. As the costs on those still in the market go up and the costs of getting away from it come down, you can expect more and more people to go for the exit. Which sounds great, except it eventually leaves the few who can't get out stuck with the bill for the whole thing. I suppose the question is what we expect to make of the electrical grid in the future and how to pay for it. If the goal is to stop having a grid, the death spiral seems like a reasonable way to get there.
    - horsawlarway 5y ago
      I suppose that may be the case - although I don't really see much solar specced for true off-grid use. I think the main point is that there are some negative consequences to allowing folks to opt out of what were previously shared utilities. Intentional or not - we had a form of social contract around pricing utilities, and that contract falls apart if the wealthiest can buy their way out of future payments. That doesn't mean I agree with the way that california (and many other states) are trying to hamfist those who buy solar into subsidizing utility companies, but it does mean there's a real conversation to be had that's not as simple as "Fuck the poor - I have mine". It's a similar conversation to the one around gas taxes. EV owners avoid paying them, but gas taxes are primarily funding road infrastructure, which is still shared by EV owners. So we had a social contract that worked, and we have to find a replacement. That's a real discussion, and not some simple black and white "They buy EV, they pay less" talk.

gandalfian 5y ago

The utility company using their scale to build their own cheap utility scale solar farms and give everyone bargain energy at sunny times? Thus making microgeneration uneconomic and restoring the communal system?

ericmay 5y ago

And with the proliferation of battery technology, eventually the solar owners (and increasing numbers of them) may just disconnect from the grid and then the numbers really won't work. My off the cuff solution here is that energy providers/plants/etc. need to invest in storage capacity, or eventually the economic incentives will win out and people just won't buy energy from them in states where solar + battery works. If you are a net producer of energy, the only calculus that makes sense (unless you want to pay for access to the grid as a form of insurance) is that you get money for providing energy back to the grid. Otherwise you just disconnect and figure it out afterward. With renewals, decentralization of energy production, and battery proliferation we're going to see some interesting market dynamics play out here soon. We probably need a general energy market accessible to producers as small as a single person all the way up to a nuclear plant. Perhaps you should be able to log in to an energy market like you do your brokerage and buy or sell energy.

bsder 5y ago
> may just disconnect from the grid and then the numbers really won't work Which works until everybody is off the grid and then collapses. Everybody relies on the fact that the grid is ubiquitous. Street lights, traffic lights, water pumps, etc. When the grid isn't ubiquitous, you lose all manner of things we take for granted. We've seen this before in California. Some suburbs made a point of being in unincorporated land to avoid being associated with LA. Well, they found out really quickly that their infrastructure was horribly expensive when they had to pay for it all themselves.
- leephillips 5y ago
  In other words, the grid is part of critical infrastructure. As such, it should be a governmental function supported by taxes, rather than a product invested in by private companies.
etempleton 5y ago
The lack of energy storage is the issue. If the utilities could pay users to deploy the energy when they needed it there wouldn’t be an issue. The problem is solar energy peaks and there is nothing that can be done with that energy because power plants take time to bring on and off line. Natural Gas is relatively quick to bring online, but it still takes time and money. We no longer have a renewable energy production challenge. If we wanted to we could produce more than enough energy with wind and solar energy cheaply. The problem is we don’t have good affordable energy storage solutions.

bsder 5y ago

> I don't know what the right answer is. You have to unbundle the two different costs: 1) Infrastructure cost. It costs a fixed amount to connect someone to the always-on grid. This needs be set. 2) Consumption cost. It costs a different amount to consume produced electricity. The problem is that the panel owners are going to get very cranky (as you see in this article) when that happens because maintaining the grid is quite a bit more expensive than the production costs and they're going to lose their cost benefit.

philipkglass 5y ago
Panel owners aren't the only group that would get cranky about unbundling. Some non-solar consumers also reap effective subsidies from bundling costs into per-unit charges. Rural customers in low density areas would have higher bills if they paid for infrastructure explicitly. So would customers in dense areas who consume only a little electricity each month but still need the infrastructure to work around the clock. Customers who live in urban or suburban areas and consume a lot of electricity would see their bills fall. Since this latter group tends to be more affluent than the previous two groups, charging each customer proportionally to their incurred costs is also likely to be perceived as unfair.
- amanaplanacanal 5y ago
  If we are going to subsidize certain groups, let’s make it explicit and subsidize the poor instead.

blitzar 5y ago

> Solar is cutting into the margins that the plants need to be profitable. There is more supply, the utilities should be dropping their prices and excess, high cost production drop out of the market. Ofc ourse that assumes that it is a f free market. > So the utilities try to soften the costs by taxing the solar owners. Oh how noble of them to look out for the little guy. There is a small chance that they are just opportunists gauging as much money as possible out of any avenue they can. Of course it would be unheard of for a big business with a practical monopoly over a basic human necessity to do such a thing.

horsawlarway 5y ago
I mean - regressive taxes are bad. And this situation is essentially a regressive tax bundled into your power bill. Those with less means are forced to continue buying power from utilities that are faced with shrinking customer bases, and which have high, long-term costs (Building power plants ain't cheap, and the costs to amortize the initial construction can't just be waved away because "there is more supply"...) Does that mean utilities aren't also angling to make the most of the situation? Of course not - they are businesses. But it does mean your black and white approach isn't really useful here - unless you're fine with poor people getting fucked. Maybe you are.
- Kalium 5y ago
  You're describing a death spiral, like has happened with car insurance in some places. As the costs on those still in the market go up and the costs of getting away from it come down, you can expect more and more people to go for the exit. Which sounds great, except it eventually leaves the few who can't get out stuck with the bill for the whole thing. I suppose the question is what we expect to make of the electrical grid in the future and how to pay for it. If the goal is to stop having a grid, the death spiral seems like a reasonable way to get there.
  - horsawlarway 5y ago
    I suppose that may be the case - although I don't really see much solar specced for true off-grid use. I think the main point is that there are some negative consequences to allowing folks to opt out of what were previously shared utilities. Intentional or not - we had a form of social contract around pricing utilities, and that contract falls apart if the wealthiest can buy their way out of future payments. That doesn't mean I agree with the way that california (and many other states) are trying to hamfist those who buy solar into subsidizing utility companies, but it does mean there's a real conversation to be had that's not as simple as "Fuck the poor - I have mine". It's a similar conversation to the one around gas taxes. EV owners avoid paying them, but gas taxes are primarily funding road infrastructure, which is still shared by EV owners. So we had a social contract that worked, and we have to find a replacement. That's a real discussion, and not some simple black and white "They buy EV, they pay less" talk.