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It was paused but California was proposing Net Metering 3.0 rules in which you would have to pay $10/mo for each kw/hr of grid-tied solar panels. So for a small

It was paused but California was proposing Net Metering 3.0 rules in which you would have to pay $10/mo for each kw/hr of grid-tied solar panels. So for a small 5kw/hr panel setup (15 panels at 370w each), they proposed that new solar homeowners would pay $50/month to PG&E simply for having 15 panels. Most people I know have double or triple that. Will Prowse on Youtube has great videos on off grid solar including equipment that is all UL certified. Getting over the hurdle of roof mounting panels or ground mounting up to code (seems to mainly be around using conduit for the wiring), I could buy a pallet of 10 solar panels, a converter/invetor all in one from EG4, and an EG4 5kw lithium iron phosphate battery for around $6000. Battery: https://signaturesolar.com/eg4-lifepower4-lithium-battery-48v-100ah/ https://signaturesolar.com/eg4-lifepower4-lithium-battery-48... Offgrid Converter: https://signaturesolar.com/eg4-6-5k-off-grid-inverter-6500ex-48/ https://signaturesolar.com/eg4-6-5k-off-grid-inverter-6500ex...

RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
After going with Tesla panels, this is my plan next time. I could have had 3x the system for 1/2 the price. At that cost/ scale I could truly be off the grid.
- pridkett 4y ago
  Funny thing I look at Tesla and my system and I’m seeing that my all in price for my panels + 3 powerwalls in 2020 is within 10% of what people in my town talk about paying for panels today. A lot of that cost gets eaten by installation and inefficient practices. I’m kinda with you on building my own off grid system - but, I don’t think I would’ve had the know how of where to start without the knowledge I got from getting my Tesla system installed.
  - RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
    Yep. I'm also planning on bumping the size by a pretty large amount. I love my tesla system, but I should have gone about 50% larger in both battery and panels.
bombcar 4y ago
@Syonyk has some good stuff here: https://www.sevarg.net/tag/solar/ https://www.sevarg.net/tag/solar/ - I'm sure he'll comment on this eventually, but he has built his own solar in Idaho.
- jonnycoder 4y ago
  I skimmed most of his off grid article and he states this: "If you want to get a rooftop solar system that powers your home with the grid down, you can do it! The hardware is out there. But such a system will be significantly more expensive than a normal grid tied system, and it will likely never “pay off” in terms of money saved." That may be true if he was paying $0.10 kw/hr in Idaho, but that's definitely false for a few reasons. -In California, it's $0.43 kw/hr so the ROI for solar+battery is getting much faster with the price of panels, inverter, battery coming down. Price of electricity will continue to go up in the short term. -A lithium iron phosphate EG4 5kw/hr battery for $1600, or even an EcoFlow Delta Pro for $2500 is a good deal considering around 8000 discharge cycles -Most critically, net metering (grid tie) means that all that excess solar power you are producing in the middle of the day is being bought back by the power company at CHEAPER rates than what you are paying, so that needs to be accounted for in grid-tie vs off-grid pricing. If you are off-grid producing x amount of your power needs and you are using 100% of that power via lithium battery (at night), you are getting full retail price for producing your own power at $0.43 kw/hr or $0.49 kw/hr peak rate from 5-9pm in California. Off-grid doesn't mean truly off grid if you already have electric hookup, it just means an off-grid panel for some or most of your house. Think of it like this... if you have 15 solar panels grid-tied, you are being "taxed" ~4 panels by your power company.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Yeah, the off-grid article is from almost five years ago now, things have changed, and power companies are more cognizant of it, too.
  - outworlder 4y ago
    > In California, it's $0.43 kw/hr PGE is ridiculous. But apparently whatever serves San Diego is even worse. There's Silicon Valley Power, with rates that are a fraction of PG&E's, smack in the middle of the Bay Area. Can get as low as $.10 Kw/h during off peak hours.
Nifty3929 4y ago
I hope you're not too upset about that - there's a pretty good justification for it: It's both expensive and valuable for the utility to be there for your burst needs beyond whatever your panels generate at any particular time. But with net-metering by itself, there's no way to charge you for that expensive value if your net pull from the utility is zero, even though you might pull a lot at certain times. You could go off-grid to avoid this, or install your own batteries, but both of those are obviously expensive and inconvenient in their own ways. I'm not saying they got the price right ($10/kWh) or the model (more for larger arrays), but the overall principal is fine.
- eastbound 4y ago
  Then charge peak price for peak demand.
  - mikepavone 4y ago
    Everyone (including non-solar customers) is getting moved to time-of-use billing with some sort of phase in schedule and I believe it's already required for new solar hookups. Part of CPUC's proposed replacement for NEM 2.0 combined fairly agressive TOU billing with moving credits for grid exports to an "avoided cost" model so that you get very little for exporting in mid-day when there's currently an excess of solar generation and much more in the late afternoon when there's a big mismatch between demand and renewable generation. I think you can definitely argue about the specific values they chose, but the broad strokes make sense.
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  1)This sort of thing is covered by connection fees independent of usage fees 2)People providing green energy into the grid should not be charged more than others.
  - akira2501 4y ago
    If they are providing "green energy" into the grid, are they doing it for free or is there some kind of financial consideration for them? If so.. are they actually being charged _more_ than others who simply use power from the grid, or are they receiving an entirely different class of service all together?
colinmhayes 4y ago
The electric utility still has to pay for grid upkeep. Most of their costs in fact are grid upkeep. Until you go off grid you need to contribute to that. The status quo in california is that solar owners get to use the grid as a free limitless lossless battery, and that was just never going to work. It means the rich are being subsidized by the poor. And tbh if enough people go off grid I expect the state to enact a "grid tax" that every homeowner has to pay, regardless of if they're connected, because otherwise electricity costs for on grid users would skyrocket as fixed costs are spread between fewer users.
- hansvm 4y ago
  > And tbh if enough people go off grid I expect the state to enact a "grid tax" that every homeowner has to pay, regardless of if they're connected, because otherwise electricity costs for on grid users would skyrocket as fixed costs are spread between fewer users. Electricity in CA is already 3x the rate of rural Wyoming or Arkansas or what have you. Why exactly are their fixed costs so high, and why is it the responsibility of individuals capable of generating power more efficiently to subsidize that ineptitude?
mikepavone 4y ago
It's $8/month per-kilowatt and for PG&E customers the Market Transition Credit makes it $6.38/month per-kilowatt (at least initially). So you'd be paying ~$32 to PG&E for a 5kW system, not $50. It's really hard to know if the numbers CPUC settled on are really achieved the right balance, but they are trying to deal with a real problem here. There are a bunch of fixed costs associated with being attached to the grid that are currently baked into electric rates and since solar lets you avoid a bunch of electric charges (especially with the current NEM 2.0 rules) this represents a fairly large subsidy. As solar grows in share, the value of each additional solar installation falls unless its paired with storage to shift that generation to when there's the most net demand. Now I don't actually know if CPUC actually stuck the landing here. The proposed rulemaking is a pretty dense document and it seems non-trivial to model costs from parsing that. > I could buy a pallet of 10 solar panels, a converter/invetor all in one from EG4, and an EG4 5kw lithium iron phosphate battery for around $6000. 3.7 kW of panels (assuming these are 370 watt panels like you mentioned above) and 5 kWh of storage is not going to go very far in an off-grid system unless your electric use is pretty low. The thing about going completely off-grid is that you need a substantially larger system than in a grid-tied scenario both in terms of generation and storage.

RosanaAnaDana 4y ago

After going with Tesla panels, this is my plan next time. I could have had 3x the system for 1/2 the price. At that cost/ scale I could truly be off the grid.

pridkett 4y ago
Funny thing I look at Tesla and my system and I’m seeing that my all in price for my panels + 3 powerwalls in 2020 is within 10% of what people in my town talk about paying for panels today. A lot of that cost gets eaten by installation and inefficient practices. I’m kinda with you on building my own off grid system - but, I don’t think I would’ve had the know how of where to start without the knowledge I got from getting my Tesla system installed.
- RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
  Yep. I'm also planning on bumping the size by a pretty large amount. I love my tesla system, but I should have gone about 50% larger in both battery and panels.

bombcar 4y ago

@Syonyk has some good stuff here: https://www.sevarg.net/tag/solar/ https://www.sevarg.net/tag/solar/ - I'm sure he'll comment on this eventually, but he has built his own solar in Idaho.

jonnycoder 4y ago
I skimmed most of his off grid article and he states this: "If you want to get a rooftop solar system that powers your home with the grid down, you can do it! The hardware is out there. But such a system will be significantly more expensive than a normal grid tied system, and it will likely never “pay off” in terms of money saved." That may be true if he was paying $0.10 kw/hr in Idaho, but that's definitely false for a few reasons. -In California, it's $0.43 kw/hr so the ROI for solar+battery is getting much faster with the price of panels, inverter, battery coming down. Price of electricity will continue to go up in the short term. -A lithium iron phosphate EG4 5kw/hr battery for $1600, or even an EcoFlow Delta Pro for $2500 is a good deal considering around 8000 discharge cycles -Most critically, net metering (grid tie) means that all that excess solar power you are producing in the middle of the day is being bought back by the power company at CHEAPER rates than what you are paying, so that needs to be accounted for in grid-tie vs off-grid pricing. If you are off-grid producing x amount of your power needs and you are using 100% of that power via lithium battery (at night), you are getting full retail price for producing your own power at $0.43 kw/hr or $0.49 kw/hr peak rate from 5-9pm in California. Off-grid doesn't mean truly off grid if you already have electric hookup, it just means an off-grid panel for some or most of your house. Think of it like this... if you have 15 solar panels grid-tied, you are being "taxed" ~4 panels by your power company.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Yeah, the off-grid article is from almost five years ago now, things have changed, and power companies are more cognizant of it, too.
- outworlder 4y ago
  > In California, it's $0.43 kw/hr PGE is ridiculous. But apparently whatever serves San Diego is even worse. There's Silicon Valley Power, with rates that are a fraction of PG&E's, smack in the middle of the Bay Area. Can get as low as $.10 Kw/h during off peak hours.

Nifty3929 4y ago

I hope you're not too upset about that - there's a pretty good justification for it: It's both expensive and valuable for the utility to be there for your burst needs beyond whatever your panels generate at any particular time. But with net-metering by itself, there's no way to charge you for that expensive value if your net pull from the utility is zero, even though you might pull a lot at certain times. You could go off-grid to avoid this, or install your own batteries, but both of those are obviously expensive and inconvenient in their own ways. I'm not saying they got the price right ($10/kWh) or the model (more for larger arrays), but the overall principal is fine.

eastbound 4y ago
Then charge peak price for peak demand.
- mikepavone 4y ago
  Everyone (including non-solar customers) is getting moved to time-of-use billing with some sort of phase in schedule and I believe it's already required for new solar hookups. Part of CPUC's proposed replacement for NEM 2.0 combined fairly agressive TOU billing with moving credits for grid exports to an "avoided cost" model so that you get very little for exporting in mid-day when there's currently an excess of solar generation and much more in the late afternoon when there's a big mismatch between demand and renewable generation. I think you can definitely argue about the specific values they chose, but the broad strokes make sense.
KennyBlanken 4y ago
1)This sort of thing is covered by connection fees independent of usage fees 2)People providing green energy into the grid should not be charged more than others.
- akira2501 4y ago
  If they are providing "green energy" into the grid, are they doing it for free or is there some kind of financial consideration for them? If so.. are they actually being charged _more_ than others who simply use power from the grid, or are they receiving an entirely different class of service all together?

colinmhayes 4y ago

The electric utility still has to pay for grid upkeep. Most of their costs in fact are grid upkeep. Until you go off grid you need to contribute to that. The status quo in california is that solar owners get to use the grid as a free limitless lossless battery, and that was just never going to work. It means the rich are being subsidized by the poor. And tbh if enough people go off grid I expect the state to enact a "grid tax" that every homeowner has to pay, regardless of if they're connected, because otherwise electricity costs for on grid users would skyrocket as fixed costs are spread between fewer users.

hansvm 4y ago
> And tbh if enough people go off grid I expect the state to enact a "grid tax" that every homeowner has to pay, regardless of if they're connected, because otherwise electricity costs for on grid users would skyrocket as fixed costs are spread between fewer users. Electricity in CA is already 3x the rate of rural Wyoming or Arkansas or what have you. Why exactly are their fixed costs so high, and why is it the responsibility of individuals capable of generating power more efficiently to subsidize that ineptitude?

mikepavone 4y ago

It's $8/month per-kilowatt and for PG&E customers the Market Transition Credit makes it $6.38/month per-kilowatt (at least initially). So you'd be paying ~$32 to PG&E for a 5kW system, not $50. It's really hard to know if the numbers CPUC settled on are really achieved the right balance, but they are trying to deal with a real problem here. There are a bunch of fixed costs associated with being attached to the grid that are currently baked into electric rates and since solar lets you avoid a bunch of electric charges (especially with the current NEM 2.0 rules) this represents a fairly large subsidy. As solar grows in share, the value of each additional solar installation falls unless its paired with storage to shift that generation to when there's the most net demand. Now I don't actually know if CPUC actually stuck the landing here. The proposed rulemaking is a pretty dense document and it seems non-trivial to model costs from parsing that. > I could buy a pallet of 10 solar panels, a converter/invetor all in one from EG4, and an EG4 5kw lithium iron phosphate battery for around $6000. 3.7 kW of panels (assuming these are 370 watt panels like you mentioned above) and 5 kWh of storage is not going to go very far in an off-grid system unless your electric use is pretty low. The thing about going completely off-grid is that you need a substantially larger system than in a grid-tied scenario both in terms of generation and storage.