24 ms·

California pulls the plug on rooftop solar

190 points by DocFeind 4y ago

floren 4y ago
Here's the main reason: > The utility-backed concept suggests poorer Californians are paying higher utility rates to pay for lost profits that utilities endure in order to pay solar owner for delivering clean energy to the grid. If every Californian reduced their electricity usage by half, PG&E would just double the rate and probably come up with a couple additional fees to tack on as well.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  California should've nationalized PG&E, but this is what they decided instead: continuing to rake ratepayers over the coals.
  - mc32 4y ago
    What would that solve? It would have never the less been subsidized by taxes. (see: LIPA)
    - jeromegv 4y ago
      Some government owned utility companies are extremely profitable and provide billion of dollars in profit to taxpayers. A good example is Quebec, they nationalized all the electric corporations in the 1960s and it became a government monopoly. http://www.hydroquebec.com/history-electricity-in-quebec/timeline/second-nationalization.html http://www.hydroquebec.com/history-electricity-in-quebec/tim...
      - mc32 4y ago
        Uh, well, if you get virtually free inputs, after initial construction, from a Lagrande watershed, it's not hard to make profits. So if PG&E had massive three gorges and itaipu dams they too could offer cut rate electricity just Like Paraguay too has cheap electricity.
  - analognoise 4y ago
    How do we get the ball rolling on nationalizing PG&E now?
    - toomuchtodo 4y ago
      You turn it into a co-op. California can afford to based on what its residents are already burning in fiat on allowing PG&E to exist, and it's the world's fourth largest economy. Far smaller economies of entire countries have nationalized electrical grids (France is in the process of nationalizing EDF, for example, at a cost of $9.7B; to do so in California would be closer to $2.5B). Your expenses are then governed by stakeholders within the state of California instead of shareholders sucking profits out of a dysfunctional public utility. Taxpayers already subsidize PG&E, so that's not an excuse against nationalizing, they've already Crossed The Rubicon with regards to ongoing state support; any profits shareholders have/would receive are potential re-investments back into the infrastructure. Why are taxpayers subsidizing PG&E shareholders? Subsidize the infrastructure directly! https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/business/pge-bankruptcy-newsom.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/business/pge-bankruptcy-n... https://www.eastbaydsa.org/campaigns/pge/ https://www.eastbaydsa.org/campaigns/pge/ https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/wildfires-california-pge/ https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/wildfires-californ... https://calmatters.org/politics/2020/02/what-happens-if-california-takes-over-pge/ https://calmatters.org/politics/2020/02/what-happens-if-cali... https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1182562176667512833.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1182562176667512833.html https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/04/28/pge-revenue-profit-rise-utility-charge-more-monthly-bill-wildfire/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/04/28/pge-revenue-profit-ri...
    - quags 4y ago
      Realistically pg&e being a publically traded company (like Twitter was) - California can use money from the budget and send a take over offer over 40 billion. The current market cap is around is 39 billion. They would need to bid a premium to get it approved by the current share holders. Boom it’s done and they can nationalize it.
    - robocat 4y ago
      You look at other states or other countries where the regulations have been configured to work, and model on that. The most important part is the network infrastructure (power lines, transformers, substations) is a natural monopoly so it needs to be owned by the state. Regulation and incentives keep failing when corporate ownership of the network infrastructure is tried. In New Zealand the national grid https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Transpower_New_Zealand https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Transpower_New_Zealand is a “state owned enterprise”, while local low voltage networks and power metering is owned by each local government. The idea is to use corporate (profit motivated) ownership for generators and retail metered billing to end consumers, but design the market to be competitive for multiple generation companies (don’t allow one generator to have a monopoly in any area) and for consumer choice of who bills them. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_electricity_market https://wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_electricity_market has a good high-level overview of how everything is configured, and also refers to some of the failures of the regulations. It refers to a disputed study that consumers are overpaying by ~33%, so in theory bills could be reduced with nationalisation. . . although I personally would expect a government department to be more than 33% inefficient, so I don’t think electricity consumers win either way.
  - yucky 4y ago
    How exactly would a state nationalize a company?
    - photochemsyn 4y ago
      Look at your local police or fire department. Imagine if they were private companies. You need to buy the necessary equipment, pay the salaries of the staff, fire the board of directors, and cut out the shareholders.
      - gamblor956 4y ago
        Fire departments and police departments began as private companies; see the history of NYC. They were nationalized to limit the massive corruption associated with private fire departments (i.e., fire departments deliberately setting fire to rivals' customers). But to the point: a U.S. state can't nationalize a private company. It simply lacks that power. The closest it can get is buying a private company, or creating a public agency or public-private partnership, all of which California has done before.
        gumby 4y ago
        > But to the point: a U.S. state can't nationalize a private company. It simply lacks that power. The closest it can get is buying a private company, or creating a public agency or public-private partnership, all of which California has done before. Or build its own competition. Quite a few califonia cities run their own utilities; Palo Alto started and ran its own phone company (sold to Pac Bell in the late 50s) and cable system (foolishly and destructively sold to crapcast in the '00s) but runs its own water, electricity, and gas system. Several counties run their own utility systems, often in cooperation. However the high speed rail project suggests that this is not the time for California to enter into such projects. A century ago progressivism flourished, building water, road, and other crucial infrastructure that we still depend on. But the "revolution" of the late 70s and 80s cut away all the maintenance and support for further such projects in the name of ideology.
        nitwit005 4y ago
  - refurb 4y ago
    Google the minutes from a PG&E and PBUC meeting. PG&E can’t replace a fence around a substation without PBUC approval. PG&E is privately funded but effectively managed by the state.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  That isn't the main reason... The main reason is that a power company defends its existence by generating and delivering as much power as possible. If everyone had on-site generation and batteries, PG&E would barely be required, and if they were to bill too much, users would just disconnect from the grid entirely (some battery systems can already work without a grid). To defend their existence, they need to do everything possible to stop homeowners not needing their service. And discouraging rooftop solar is part of that.
  - nine_k 4y ago
    Is there any industry in California? Some office buildings? Maybe some datacenters? I suspect that a power company could concentrate on them and still turn a profit, if 90% of detached houses stop buying electricity from it and disconnect. (But the latter requires a lot of batteries installed.)
    - blululu 4y ago
      Yes there is a lot of industry in California. It typically leads the nation in its manufacturing output. A basic Google search would reveal the depth of the state's manufacturing capabilities. This includes includes aerospace, automotive, chemical and quite a few other products.
      - nine_k 4y ago
        Indeed! That was the point, driven home by a tiny morsel of irony. No chance that selling electric power to large consumers in California could disappear any time soon. I bet the electrical grid operator's margins are much thinner in residential neighborhoods, sometimes maybe even negative.
carimura 4y ago
Huh. Charge 25-40 cents/kWh, give back 5-8 cents. And that's not counting their own taxes and fees that allegedly go to improving their aging infrastructure that they can't fix with the profits they make.
- londons_explore 4y ago
  For those kinds of prices, it almost makes sense to lay your own power cable between a group of 5-10 neighbours to exchange power whenever one person has excess solar generation and another needs power for their water heater. Only when the whole group needs power take from the grid. Technically, this would simply involve a ~200 amp cable down the street and one electricity meter for the group. No smartness is needed at all - electricity will always flow naturally in whatever direction saves the group the most money. Bureaucratically, moving power from one house to another requires so much paperwork the incumbent provider will never let you do it.
  - sparker72678 4y ago
    Sure, just multi-hundred amp capable infrastructure run in the middle of the street, installed to withstand weather and seismic events, with someone on call to fix it when it fails, liable for injury or other harm... PG&E might be shite, but the hand-wavy dismissal of modern electric infrastructure is overlooking something that is a real benefit to society, and that infrastructure has real costs to keep it running.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      > Sure, just multi-hundred amp capable infrastructure run in the middle of the street, installed to withstand weather and seismic events, with someone on call to fix it when it fails, liable for injury or other harm... You can pay people to install cables, and you can get insurance. We're talking about a lot of money to save and pay for it. > PG&E might be shite, but the hand-wavy dismissal of modern electric infrastructure is overlooking something that is a real benefit to society, and that infrastructure has real costs to keep it running. The real point here is that if you moved the meter slightly there could be a huge change in price, and that seems weird!
londons_explore 4y ago
This will backfire in 10 years when EV's take off and PG&E doesn't have enough generation capacity.
- garbagecoder 4y ago
  Doesn't matter. They don't have enough transmission line capacity for it anyway. Was just an article in the Bee if you care, but it's not news. Thank god we didn't actual go through with shutting Diablo, but we will have neither the energy nor the distribution capacity in 10 years to meet the goals we've set. It always sounds good until you have to build something. Then you do and a few years later people blame it for being unfair, like this. Yes, it's unfair. But it worked. Solar is everywhere in California.
- umeshunni 4y ago
  16% of cars sold in California are already EVs
rdtwo 4y ago
This was always a subsidy for rich people by poor people. The power generated by rooftop solar isn’t not worth 30 cents
- paradoxyl 4y ago
  The entire Western empire as it's run today is a subsidy for rich people by poor people and the rest of world. But as Eurasia unites against it and dollar hegemony breaks, these technocrats just double-down on their ideology and failed ideas.
  - Jotra7 4y ago
- phil21 4y ago
  Yep. I've always considered net metering immoral. Rich folks using poor folks for a free nighttime battery. The fix is super simple. Just meter by the minute and pay out current wholesale electric rates as you send to the grid. When you buy, you pay retail for delivery depending on the instantaneous market. Don't want to buy at potentially high rates during evening peak? Sounds like you need to invest in a battery system. If you want to pretend you are a micro power plant, you should get paid as one.
  - westurner 4y ago
    With Buy-All Sell-All you buy all you use at retail rates and sell all you produce at wholesale rates. Buy-All Sell-All has a later breakeven point than Net Metering, where you buy what you can't produce at retail and sell back the rest at wholesale or better, which is an indirect subsidy for a resilient power grid with residential renewables with external benefits. What you describe sounds like Buy-All Sell-All, except you're allowed to use and store what you produce before paying retail rates for electricity purchased from the service provider. Is it anti-competitive to deny residential renewable energy producers the right to use the clean energy they invested in producing if they want to purchase electricity? Another exclusive monopoly contract: if you buy water from me, you can't use the water you capture yourself. Net metering in the United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_metering_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_metering_in_the_United_Sta... Net metering > "Post-net metering" successor tariffs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_metering#Post-net_metering_successor_tariffs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_metering#Post-net_metering... We want there to be renewable residential energy. Subsidizing renewable energy will hasten adoption. We should subsidize residential renewable energy if we want there to be more renewable energy. If we make the break-even point later in time, residential renewable energy will be less lucrative.
dehrmann 4y ago
Net metering doesn't make economic sense for utilities since it pays retail rates for production and doesn't charge for a connection to the grid. It makes sense at face value, but once you dig into cases like someone only producing power or everyone using net metering, you realize you have to change the payout structure to match the utility's costs.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  Austin was the first municipality (I think) to use a "value of solar" rate, and as much as I'd like to use net metering from a home owner perspective, it's much fairer. It basically just pays homeowners a wholesale rate for their excess power. It's currently 9.7 cents per kWh, not much different that this proposed rate in CA.
- ezfe 4y ago
  My power bill includes a delivery and an energy charge, both measured by kWh. The delivery charge is intended to pay for the actual electrical lines and maintenance, the point of issue here (providing a connection to the grid). If the issue is that a net-metered household isn't paying enough for the electrical lines, simply don't net-meter that part of the bill. Charge the full delivery charge per kWh drawn from the grid, without subtracting the amount sold back to the grid.
photochemsyn 4y ago
The Rural Electrification Model is the way to go, introduced during the FDR New Deal era. It consisted of municipal-scale networks (also applicable to fiber optic networks). https://www.investopedia.com/rural-electrification-act-5119177 https://www.investopedia.com/rural-electrification-act-51191... > "At first, the plan was to give these loans to companies in order to help them build electricity infrastructure in rural areas—a plan that proved too costly. So instead, lawmakers chose a type of organization well known to farmers: the cooperative, or co-op. The idea was that if farmers could organize themselves into co-ops, the REA could distribute loans to them at very low interest rates—between 2% and 3%, depending on their state—to build electricity infrastructure." Note that a key reason for its success was that they didn't use anything like a modern federal contracting program, i.e. paying private companies, but instead worked directly with rural co-ops (just extend that to towns and cities). Of course, this would mean taking over the transmission infrastructure from the investor-owned utilities in California.
- mikestew 4y ago
  I grew up using a rural electrical co-op. Despite the high winds, occasional blizzards, and regular thunderstorms of the Indiana plains, it was far more reliable than our current service in Redmond with Puget Sound Energy. To PSE's credit, their service is more reliable than it was ten years ago. But still, I'd never felt the need to own a generator until we moved to Redmond.
  - Arainach 4y ago
    To be somewhat fair to PSE, it's generally simpler to plan for wind and ice than falling trees, which the Indiana plains relatively lack. As a proponent of "if the trees are such a problem why not bury the lines" who has since had to dig some trenches in the hellish rocky clay of King County, I am somewhat more sympathetic to their plight.
    - vel0city 4y ago
      It's not even just the cost of digging. The cost of the design and the cables is also way more expensive. The wires hung on poles aren't even insulated, while buried cable needs some pretty fancy cabling (lots of insulation, lots of armoring, etc)
dzhiurgis 4y ago
Makes sense, but are they going to incentivise distributed batteries now?
- lh7777 4y ago
  The Inflation Reduction Act provides a 30% tax credit for clean energy upgrades, including batteries IIRC.
sidewndr46 4y ago
> Customers who have new systems installed and approved for grid interconnection before the effective date in April will be grandfathered in to NEM 2.0 rates. Am I reading that right? People who already had their system in place get to keep the old rate forever?
- yablak 4y ago
  Grandfathered for 20 years
  - tguvot 4y ago
    20 years from moment that system connected to the grid
- bombcar 4y ago
  That’s a decent thing to do especially since many of those people bought the system based on pricing assumptions over the next years.
- ncallaway 4y ago
  I mean, since it’s a purchase that people make that’s designed to recoup an upfront cost over 5-15 years, it seems like making a dramatic pricing change that retroactively screws over everyone who had previously installed solar would be a great way to ensure that people are extremely cautious when they install solar. This at least gives new purchasers some degree of confidence that they’ll be able to rely on the present pricing when costing out an install.
  - a9h74j 4y ago
    > that retroactively screws over everyone That's when you go on to mandate that all newly-built homes include solar.
  - sidewndr46 4y ago
    As others have pointed out, this isn't an optional thing. My understanding is to build a structure in California, it has to have solar on it. It's just part of the cost of housing at this point.
UIUC_06 4y ago
Suppose a small farmer went to Safeway and said, "Hey, I have 100 pounds of carrots every couple months. I want your cashiers to buy them from me at the retail price!" First, Safeway buys in very large lots from certified suppliers, who can commit to (almost) always having carrots. Second, those suppliers have to deliver at a loading dock, and maybe at a central location, too. Third, Safeway pays them wholesale prices, not retail. All of those analogies apply to selling power back to PG&E at retail prices. It's in small lots; it's undependable; it comes from many sources, not just a few; and it's priced wrongly. Yes, PG&E can be read as Pricks Grabbing Everything, but they're what we've got.
- ekidd 4y ago
  > "I want your cashiers to buy them from me at the retail price!" It's not anywhere near that simple. Electric power prices change dramatically throughout the day. For example, even retail prices may more than double during peak hours, if you have time-of-day billing. In some markets, peak demand is caused by day-time air conditioning during a few weeks in July or August. The extra generation capacity needed to cover that tiny window of time is idle the rest of the year. Those peak hours are very expensive, in real terms. In a market with small amounts of solar, that solar is helping offset some of the most expensive electricity of the year. And I've seen power companies push their major clients to install solar so that the power companies can avoid large investments in new power generation and transmission capacity. With net metering, power companies pay retail when wholesale electricity is most expensive. And they credit it back during the night, when wholesale power is cheaper. (The early evening window is trickier, and the hours of sunlight depend on latitude.) But once solar capacity is sufficient to offset air conditioning, the numbers for the power company get a lot worse. (Full disclosure: I signed a 10-year net metering contract which would barely break even in 12-15 years, in a market with little existing solar. The power company instituted separate grid fees a couple of years later, which substantially changed how the contract worked. And so my system will probably never pay for itself. Win some, lose some.)
  - worik 4y ago
    > The power company instituted separate grid fees a couple of years later, which substantially changed how the contract worked. Is that legal? Sounds like you were defrauded
drewrbaker 4y ago
Sadly I’m not surprised by this blatant manipulation of government by the utility companies. I’m building a house about 15mins outside downtown Los Angeles. It’s on empty land on a public street. There is no power to the property. LADWP is requiring us to move/install 3 poles, and upgrade the transformer. Probably around $75k cost to us. Has to be their people doing the work. The Bureau of Street Lighting is also going to require us to move another pole that just has their street light on it with low voltage to it. I’ve been trying so hard to tell them all to get F’d and just install solar and a bunch of batteries instead. But they’ve told me it’s illegal to that (something about freezing to death). Oh and we have to widen the road ourselves too! The whole thing is insane. So they’ve basically created a system where we have no choice but to pay for the utilities failing infrastructure.
- knoebber 4y ago
  Up here in Northern California quite a few of us live off grid with just solar/batteries. What law says that a grid hookup is required? Is it at the county level?
  - rwbt 4y ago
    Most counties require houses to be hooked up to the grid. That's why people who prefer living off grid choose unincorporated lands.
    - nonethewiser 4y ago
      Most counties in California
      - jjeaff 4y ago
        Most all urban and suburban areas. I think it's usually municipalities that have these requirements.
  - HyperSane 4y ago
    Why would you want to live off the grid? Battery solar is more expensive than utility power.
bumbledraven 4y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20221217003034/https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/12/15/california-pulls-the-plug-on-rooftop-solar/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221217003034/https://pv-magazi...
newyankee 4y ago
Even at the rate of 0.08$/ kwh or may be 0.05$/kwh , it is not a bad deal for rooftop solar if you intend to use most of it personally.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  In Western Europe you're looking at $.50 / KWh right now. Payback time for rooftop solar is between two and three years.
  - rrmm 4y ago
    Wow...is there a big move towards it individually?
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      So much so that you can't buy panels, inverters or mounting materials. Everything is out of stock, earliest deliveries are weeks, sometimes months away depending on what you are looking for and suppliers that do still have some stock are playing favorites with their long term customers (which makes sense, from their perspective). I ended up buying two NOS inverters and one brand new one that was a bit larger than what I really needed (three separate sets of panels, 42 in all). One of them arrived damaged and I had the option to return it for a full refund or take a 50% discount, I took the discount because I knew I wasn't going to be able to find another one. Even second hand gear is priced through the roof.
- floatrock 4y ago
  > if you intend to use most of it personally. That's exactly the goal here: make grid export uneconomical so you need to pair solar with a storage system that banks your afternoon excess into self-consumption once the sun goes down and the duck curve kicks into peak territory.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
7e 4y ago
Grid solar is so much cheaper than residential solar. Net metering is a waste of money, which could be better spent on utility scale renewables.
- ghouse 4y ago
  Alas the economic evaluation is more complicated than that. Grid solar requires transmission lines. The largest transmission line in construction right now for California load is called the Ten West Link. It will be 125 miles, have a maximum capacity of 3,200 MW, and cost $390 MM. [0] [0] http://www.caiso.com/Documents/Feb12-2021-OpeningBrief-DCRT-TenWestLinkProject-CertificatePublicConvenienceNecessity-A1610012.pdf http://www.caiso.com/Documents/Feb12-2021-OpeningBrief-DCRT-...
  - 7e 4y ago
    That's $0.12/watt, which is nothing when amortized over dozens of years. Residential solar in California is roughly $2.75/watt installed and a recent utility scale solar project in Nevada looks to be coming in at $0.70/watt. Even with transmission, utility scale solar is 3x cheaper.
    - ghouse 4y ago
      All of these costs need to be adjusted for capacity factor. The 3.2 GW is the maximum rating of the line. The line will almost never be at the maximum rating (due to security-constrained economic dispatch). And obviously solar only generates when the sun is up (a mid-30s capacity factor is very good).
- shapefrog 4y ago
  Capital outlay on residential solar for the utility is $0.00. It doesnt get much cheaper than free.
  - joshjob42 4y ago
    Sort of but not really. If you install, say, an 11kW system only our house and this makes enough electricity to meet your average daily use, then during the day your house will be producing more power than it is using at the moment and then in the evening your solar array's output plummets but that's also usually about when demand peaks (except sometimes on very hot summer days). If you're on the grid, the grid operator has to have enough energy production capacity to give you whatever power you need on demand, up to some peak limit. At the highest demand parts of the day and year, they have to resort to weaker plants, basically plants that don't come online except at the highest demand times. They cost a similar amount as any other power generating plant, but only get used 20 or 10 to 5% of the time, which means power from them is phenomenally expensive as their capital costs have to be paid off somehow even though they don't get used much. This is a huge fraction of total costs for a grid operator, and it only gets worse as solar becomes a bigger part of the grid. For every kW of solar, the operator needs ~1kW of natural gas plants sitting around ready to turn on at a moment's notice. In CA during the day usually we have too much power, and our wholesale prices can actually go negative ie they pay people to take generators offline as there's too much being made, and that's because that's peak solar production times. Then in the evening all the solar goes away but if anything demand goes up, so now they have to spin up all these natural gas plants to power people's homes at enormous expense. The way we pay for electricity is by kWh mostly because it's been historically a reasonable enough way to allocate costs and it's easy. But solar is different. Without storage, the entire grid has to be available at all times even though it's getting less use during the day and certain parts of the year. Then net metering means the solar people give the operator electricity it really doesn't want or need during the day and get to cash in their credit during the high demand, extremely expensive parts the day while, on balance, pay ~ nothing for the system on which they are reliant and foist the costs of maintaining the grid onto everyone who is too broke to have solar on their house. So the capital outlay from the grid operator and power plants is ~ identical for a house that has solar but no batteries as compared to one without solar panels at all. But now the solar power person would use net metering so they have to pay basically nothing for the system even though they're radically reliant on it. So, on balance, there really is a very large cost with no real benefit to the utility. People should have to pay for the costs they impose on the grid / everyone else, and that's more or less what this new price structure does. It pays much less in credits during the day when the marginal unit of solar power is basically worthless and adds a per kW of installed solar monthly fee to pay for the capital costs of maintaining the generators those solar customers still need around for when the sun goes down. That's fair! iirc it has some reductions in this latter cost depending on how much storage you have, as is appropriate.
somishere 4y ago
I live in NE Australia (~17"S) and our feed in tariff recently went up from ~6.6c to 9.3c (so now around US$0.063). Massive boon for us, given rising prices. With a 5kw system we feed in 1500kwh per quarter and buy back 600kwh (at ~22c), averaged across the year. Lots of variation summer to winter (sun angle) and depending on wet season, WFH, etc. On our "best" days we'll generate >38kWh. Pool runs for free year round, aircons run for free during the day. For now it's very cost effective for us without a battery. Less so with one. Less so for friends without pool / large appliance running through day. Older systems, generally much smaller, have grandfathered feed in tariffs sitting around 40c. These people tend to go out of their way not to use power during the day. Pool on at night, etc. Interested to read other's experience.
- foxrob92 4y ago
  I'm in Perth. Our feed in tariff changed in July to 10c/kWh between 3pm and 9pm, and 2.5c/kWh at other times. Use tariff is 26.2c/kWh. I'm pretty sure our solar will pay itself back in under 5 years, but we have a 25 year warranty on the panels. My parents are building outside of Adelaide and they've decided to go off grid (solar + battery + backup generator). Their expected payback period is (iirc) 8 years, with a 10 year warranty on the batteries and a 25 year warranty on the panels. They're expecting to have to run the generator once a year or so.
  - somishere 4y ago
    2.5c isn't great, but 5 years is. Shows its definitely worth it if you've got any kind of load during the day. Are you able to make any use of the peak rates after 3 over there? From what I hear SA is one of the best places in the country to generate. Optimal temperature for the panels plus lots of sunlight. 8 years seems like nothing with the genny and battery. We tried but couldn't make the numbers work with any kind of decent backup, this was 3 years ago. Cheers for the info!
jacksonkmarley 4y ago
Or to express the headline in a less clickbaity (or metaphorical) way: California slashes rates paid for household solar contributions back to the grid.
- angry_octet 4y ago
  ... without considering long term consequences.
- pugworthy 4y ago
  "...[as they] are now considered uneconomical without an attached battery" to quote the article.
hedora 4y ago
I wish they would charge on an hourly basis based on net contribution to the grid's carbon emissions. They could scale the cost of emitting carbon so that PG&E's total revenue was still reasonable. Once the grid emissions started to approach zero, this pricing scheme would collapse. I'm OK with letting future politicians replace it at that time.
lokar 4y ago
California should never have bailed out PG&E. They should have been forced into liquidation and taken over by the state.
- baldfat 4y ago
  It's the financial piece. The poor again get screwed with higher prices because they will never have solar panels. So electric company was charging more to the poor to pay for this. Just like they do for food and for gas. Just like poor voluntarily pay the education tax for the rich. Agreed that monopolies need to be regulated by the state. In PA my electricity went up over 300% in the first 6 years it was deregulated, and the company's profits were record quaters from 2008 - 2017.
  - ghouse 4y ago
    Investor-owned utility monopolies are regulated by the state. Either Public Utility Commissions or Corporation Commissions. The alternative is publicly-owned utilities, like munis or coops. Typically the publicly-owned utilities have materially lower electricity rates.
    - labcomputer 4y ago
      > The alternative is publicly-owned utilities, like munis or coops. You mean, like Silicon Valley Power (Santa Clara) or Los Angeles Department of Water and Power? Both of which charge a fraction of PG&E does, and have more reliable power, and offer better customer service (SVP's website is around 1000x better than PG&E's), and more transparent billing, and more assistance to needy customers.
      - ghouse 4y ago
        Yes. Other California, US examples are SMUD (Sacramento), TID (Turlock), MID (Modesto), IID (Imperial Valley), Redding, and Needles. Generally all have lower rates than PG&E, SCE, or SDG&E.
- 4y ago
colordrops 4y ago
What about the proposed tax per kWh of solar. Will that be going into effect too? Edit: Looks like the 8% per kilowatt-hour tax was already rejected.
29athrowaway 4y ago
Ask a firefighter what happens when they see a solar panel on your roof.
dontparticipate 4y ago
The net metering subsidy just didn't make sense anymore. Solar is "cheap" now and the next step of decarbonization is storage. From a carbon perspective, net metering was basically paying homeowners to provide useless power to the grid (at the bottom of the duck curve) but be able to cash it in when they actually needed it around 7 pm. This meant generating useless solar power and in exchange for letting burning a ton of natural gas when you actually needed the power. The next step is pairing solar with residential and grid scale storage. Personally, with how intermittent production can be now, the grid should be more like AWS. Allow for per minute billing and rates that fluctuate for some customers. If you can pair storage with solar (or even just storage if you could buy low sell high off the grid), that would be the next big step in the renewable revolution. Net metering always had to die for the next step (storage) to happen. With the electric car mandate coming into 2035 so that millions of homes will own a giant battery this will eventually be even more important.
- ghouse 4y ago
  To be clear, net metering was never "paying" customers, but instead providing them a credit for the energy they delivered during the period they delivered it. So, export power during the "off-peak" period, you build a credit at rate slightly less than the retail rate which you can then debit from the "off-peak" bucket later. Generally (with some exception), any remaining credit at the end of an annual billing cycle is lost. So, the characterization of paying exports for useless power and then getting it back during the 7 PM system peak isn't quite correct. Strongly agree with you that price signals are important to impact behavior (human or system) which will result in a lower overall price for society, so long as regulators do their work (align price with cost).
  - joshjob42 4y ago
    From the perspective of the grid/utility it is fairly accurate though. They pay for electricity to be made at wholesale rates at every instant of time to meet demand. During the peak of the day in CA, wholesale electricity prices are near zero, and sometimes even go negative due to overproduction. Then in the evening they shoot through the roof. So they're getting power that can be even worse than useless during the day and having to provide it at the most expensive times to those same customers. The grid operator experiences this as basically buying useless trinkets (daytime solar) for massive amounts of gold (peak power demands that require capital intensive plants that hardly get used).
emodendroket 4y ago
My home came with a solar panel and even before the change it's hard to see from a purely financial perspective why you'd do it. At least for what my house is set up with, unless I want to pay a huge sum to buy out my contract (and no longer get service if it breaks), I have to pay them by how much I generate and the savings seem pretty miniscule. It seems like it would take forever to make back your installation fee.
- gnicholas 4y ago
  I guarantee you those installation and maintenance fees will go down once the new reimbursement rates go into effect. The price you’re charged is calibrated to how much money you are expected to save.
sandos 4y ago
Ill keep saying this, I dont understand net metering or flat rates for solar electricity. I live in the EU, our electricity prices have gone up 1000% and solar gets what you surely wonder? Well, they get whatever the price is at the _moment they sell_ their electricity! Sure, this system does not really handle overloaded local grids and grid upgrades, but we pay through the nose for general grid access anyway. Paying the right price for every kWh just feels natural. It also automagically makes people take more or less correct decisions on batteries and when to produce.
- davnn 4y ago
  I just want to say that rooftop solar is a complete mess in my country in Central Europe. Since the Ukraine crisis, electricity prices went up like crazy and people actually got those prices for their solar energy. The problem is: nobody was actually paying the market rate prices as a consumer which means that you payed, for example, 8ct/KWh for using energy and got 80ct/KWh for delivering. Now the government is subsidizing those insane energy prices such that the consumers still pay an affordable rate and solar pays of in no time. Everyone who could afford it of course bought rooftop solar, but now a cap has been introduced such that you are only allowed to deliver a tiny amount of energy to the grid while your neighbor, who started before the cap was introduced, delivers 10x the amount.
time4tea 4y ago
0.30/kWh is really a lot. Its a massive subsidy. 0.5/kWh seems a bit mean, but it's the same as here in the UK. The main thing with solar is that it's cheaper to use what you generate. Due to the sun, you probably can't use all the midday, and are in deficit at night... but that's why flat rate doesn't make sense. Evening electricity is usually more expensive, daytime very cheap. (Weather dependent, of course) Paying at flat rate is to encourage adoption, but doesn't make economic sense. Batteries are pretty cheap now. Solar + battery will pay back in under 4y, even in dull England.
- dmix 4y ago
  So it's going from good intentioned gov subsidy over the short term to incentivized adoption -> hard cuts to meet the long term realities of the market? I guess the people who bet on centralized subsidies probably want some middle ground. But California saw it was mostly going to private companies engineered to take advantage of [current subsidy] and anything half-way would just continue pumping money into greenco instead of the future? And they decided to cut and run and bet on raw energy/climate outcomes instead of whats best for greenco?
egberts1 4y ago
Power companies in DFW (Texas) area are highly competitive: just got a contract for 14.59 cents kilowatt per hour. After visiting PG&E rate page, I cannot believe that Sacramento, CA is already pushing 50 cents kilowatt per hour. I pity the fools who live there (as I once did). https://www.pge.com/pge_global/common/pdfs/rate-plans/how-rates-work/Residential-Rates-Plan-Pricing.pdf https://www.pge.com/pge_global/common/pdfs/rate-plans/how-ra...
- LinuxBender 4y ago
  Similar deal in the mountain west. 11.09 cents per kwh and my power has only blipped once when they were tuning the voltages at the substation vs. regular planned and unplanned outages when I was on PG&E.
- gnicholas 4y ago
  Just to clarify, the price is only this high if you’re on time-of-use pricing and it’s peak hours, or you’re on regular pricing and you’ve used 400% of the baseline allocation. Neither of these events is rare, but it’s worth noting that we NorCal suckers aren’t paying this much for all of our electricity.
amirhirsch 4y ago
This is fine. Seems silly to put solar panels on rooftops in California until we have totally filled the I-8/10/15/40 corridors with massive utility scale plants stretching a couple miles in both directions from the highway. Solar panel production and installation has limited capacity so shouldn’t we prefer the desert climate multiplier to get 4x the energy? Take that panel off your roof and send it to the Mojave! The grid losses are negligible in comparison
- otabdeveloper4 4y ago
  > Let's completely destroy the desert biome because we are afraid of nuclear power
  - o_1 4y ago
    Agreed but avoid the fault lines, usually nuke needs a decent water source as well.
JoeAltmaier 4y ago
Trying to be responsible on my farm in Iowa. Thinking of solar (ground-mounted, plenty of space here). First we upgraded our HVAC, the old one was inefficient. Well now our power bill is < $100/month because the new blowers are so frugal. Ironically we now can't make solar pay, because it would take decades longer in payback than any solar system is expected to last!
BuckyBeaver 4y ago
I don't care about money. I just want one kwh credit for each kwh I give them. CA power and water utilities were abusive before. This not only takes that to a new level, but this move is antithetical to California's entire righteous environmental posture. Not to mention that the utility's excuse is vague, unsubstantiated bullshit. CA invents new ways to perpetrate hypocrisy.
wernerb 4y ago
In the end there is no realistic future where every home has an efficient battery. The bulk of power has to come from grid/utility that provides storage. Honestly my hope was that metering like this would be an incentive to build said storage but it is not. In the end the grid/utility operators are crying missed profits and lobbying government to step in "or they will become bankrupt". It's a sad state of affairs, these utilities make money hand over fist but not doing the investments they are supposed to do.

190 points by DocFeind 4y ago

Here's the main reason: > The utility-backed concept suggests poorer Californians are paying higher utility rates to pay for lost profits that utilities endure in order to pay solar owner for delivering clean energy to the grid. If every Californian reduced their electricity usage by half, PG&E would just double the rate and probably come up with a couple additional fees to tack on as well.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
California should've nationalized PG&E, but this is what they decided instead: continuing to rake ratepayers over the coals.
- mc32 4y ago
  What would that solve? It would have never the less been subsidized by taxes. (see: LIPA)
  - jeromegv 4y ago
    Some government owned utility companies are extremely profitable and provide billion of dollars in profit to taxpayers. A good example is Quebec, they nationalized all the electric corporations in the 1960s and it became a government monopoly. http://www.hydroquebec.com/history-electricity-in-quebec/timeline/second-nationalization.html http://www.hydroquebec.com/history-electricity-in-quebec/tim...
    - mc32 4y ago
      Uh, well, if you get virtually free inputs, after initial construction, from a Lagrande watershed, it's not hard to make profits. So if PG&E had massive three gorges and itaipu dams they too could offer cut rate electricity just Like Paraguay too has cheap electricity.
- analognoise 4y ago
  How do we get the ball rolling on nationalizing PG&E now?
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    You turn it into a co-op. California can afford to based on what its residents are already burning in fiat on allowing PG&E to exist, and it's the world's fourth largest economy. Far smaller economies of entire countries have nationalized electrical grids (France is in the process of nationalizing EDF, for example, at a cost of $9.7B; to do so in California would be closer to $2.5B). Your expenses are then governed by stakeholders within the state of California instead of shareholders sucking profits out of a dysfunctional public utility. Taxpayers already subsidize PG&E, so that's not an excuse against nationalizing, they've already Crossed The Rubicon with regards to ongoing state support; any profits shareholders have/would receive are potential re-investments back into the infrastructure. Why are taxpayers subsidizing PG&E shareholders? Subsidize the infrastructure directly! https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/business/pge-bankruptcy-newsom.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/business/pge-bankruptcy-n... https://www.eastbaydsa.org/campaigns/pge/ https://www.eastbaydsa.org/campaigns/pge/ https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/wildfires-california-pge/ https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/wildfires-californ... https://calmatters.org/politics/2020/02/what-happens-if-california-takes-over-pge/ https://calmatters.org/politics/2020/02/what-happens-if-cali... https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1182562176667512833.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1182562176667512833.html https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/04/28/pge-revenue-profit-rise-utility-charge-more-monthly-bill-wildfire/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/04/28/pge-revenue-profit-ri...
  - quags 4y ago
    Realistically pg&e being a publically traded company (like Twitter was) - California can use money from the budget and send a take over offer over 40 billion. The current market cap is around is 39 billion. They would need to bid a premium to get it approved by the current share holders. Boom it’s done and they can nationalize it.
  - robocat 4y ago
    You look at other states or other countries where the regulations have been configured to work, and model on that. The most important part is the network infrastructure (power lines, transformers, substations) is a natural monopoly so it needs to be owned by the state. Regulation and incentives keep failing when corporate ownership of the network infrastructure is tried. In New Zealand the national grid https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Transpower_New_Zealand https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Transpower_New_Zealand is a “state owned enterprise”, while local low voltage networks and power metering is owned by each local government. The idea is to use corporate (profit motivated) ownership for generators and retail metered billing to end consumers, but design the market to be competitive for multiple generation companies (don’t allow one generator to have a monopoly in any area) and for consumer choice of who bills them. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_electricity_market https://wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_electricity_market has a good high-level overview of how everything is configured, and also refers to some of the failures of the regulations. It refers to a disputed study that consumers are overpaying by ~33%, so in theory bills could be reduced with nationalisation. . . although I personally would expect a government department to be more than 33% inefficient, so I don’t think electricity consumers win either way.
- yucky 4y ago
  How exactly would a state nationalize a company?
  - photochemsyn 4y ago
    Look at your local police or fire department. Imagine if they were private companies. You need to buy the necessary equipment, pay the salaries of the staff, fire the board of directors, and cut out the shareholders.
    - gamblor956 4y ago
      Fire departments and police departments began as private companies; see the history of NYC. They were nationalized to limit the massive corruption associated with private fire departments (i.e., fire departments deliberately setting fire to rivals' customers). But to the point: a U.S. state can't nationalize a private company. It simply lacks that power. The closest it can get is buying a private company, or creating a public agency or public-private partnership, all of which California has done before.
      - gumby 4y ago
        > But to the point: a U.S. state can't nationalize a private company. It simply lacks that power. The closest it can get is buying a private company, or creating a public agency or public-private partnership, all of which California has done before. Or build its own competition. Quite a few califonia cities run their own utilities; Palo Alto started and ran its own phone company (sold to Pac Bell in the late 50s) and cable system (foolishly and destructively sold to crapcast in the '00s) but runs its own water, electricity, and gas system. Several counties run their own utility systems, often in cooperation. However the high speed rail project suggests that this is not the time for California to enter into such projects. A century ago progressivism flourished, building water, road, and other crucial infrastructure that we still depend on. But the "revolution" of the late 70s and 80s cut away all the maintenance and support for further such projects in the name of ideology.
      - nitwit005 4y ago
- refurb 4y ago
  Google the minutes from a PG&E and PBUC meeting. PG&E can’t replace a fence around a substation without PBUC approval. PG&E is privately funded but effectively managed by the state.
londons_explore 4y ago
That isn't the main reason... The main reason is that a power company defends its existence by generating and delivering as much power as possible. If everyone had on-site generation and batteries, PG&E would barely be required, and if they were to bill too much, users would just disconnect from the grid entirely (some battery systems can already work without a grid). To defend their existence, they need to do everything possible to stop homeowners not needing their service. And discouraging rooftop solar is part of that.
- nine_k 4y ago
  Is there any industry in California? Some office buildings? Maybe some datacenters? I suspect that a power company could concentrate on them and still turn a profit, if 90% of detached houses stop buying electricity from it and disconnect. (But the latter requires a lot of batteries installed.)
  - blululu 4y ago
    Yes there is a lot of industry in California. It typically leads the nation in its manufacturing output. A basic Google search would reveal the depth of the state's manufacturing capabilities. This includes includes aerospace, automotive, chemical and quite a few other products.
    - nine_k 4y ago
      Indeed! That was the point, driven home by a tiny morsel of irony. No chance that selling electric power to large consumers in California could disappear any time soon. I bet the electrical grid operator's margins are much thinner in residential neighborhoods, sometimes maybe even negative.

carimura 4y ago

Huh. Charge 25-40 cents/kWh, give back 5-8 cents. And that's not counting their own taxes and fees that allegedly go to improving their aging infrastructure that they can't fix with the profits they make.

londons_explore 4y ago
For those kinds of prices, it almost makes sense to lay your own power cable between a group of 5-10 neighbours to exchange power whenever one person has excess solar generation and another needs power for their water heater. Only when the whole group needs power take from the grid. Technically, this would simply involve a ~200 amp cable down the street and one electricity meter for the group. No smartness is needed at all - electricity will always flow naturally in whatever direction saves the group the most money. Bureaucratically, moving power from one house to another requires so much paperwork the incumbent provider will never let you do it.
- sparker72678 4y ago
  Sure, just multi-hundred amp capable infrastructure run in the middle of the street, installed to withstand weather and seismic events, with someone on call to fix it when it fails, liable for injury or other harm... PG&E might be shite, but the hand-wavy dismissal of modern electric infrastructure is overlooking something that is a real benefit to society, and that infrastructure has real costs to keep it running.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    > Sure, just multi-hundred amp capable infrastructure run in the middle of the street, installed to withstand weather and seismic events, with someone on call to fix it when it fails, liable for injury or other harm... You can pay people to install cables, and you can get insurance. We're talking about a lot of money to save and pay for it. > PG&E might be shite, but the hand-wavy dismissal of modern electric infrastructure is overlooking something that is a real benefit to society, and that infrastructure has real costs to keep it running. The real point here is that if you moved the meter slightly there could be a huge change in price, and that seems weird!

londons_explore 4y ago

This will backfire in 10 years when EV's take off and PG&E doesn't have enough generation capacity.

garbagecoder 4y ago
Doesn't matter. They don't have enough transmission line capacity for it anyway. Was just an article in the Bee if you care, but it's not news. Thank god we didn't actual go through with shutting Diablo, but we will have neither the energy nor the distribution capacity in 10 years to meet the goals we've set. It always sounds good until you have to build something. Then you do and a few years later people blame it for being unfair, like this. Yes, it's unfair. But it worked. Solar is everywhere in California.
umeshunni 4y ago
16% of cars sold in California are already EVs

rdtwo 4y ago

This was always a subsidy for rich people by poor people. The power generated by rooftop solar isn’t not worth 30 cents

paradoxyl 4y ago
The entire Western empire as it's run today is a subsidy for rich people by poor people and the rest of world. But as Eurasia unites against it and dollar hegemony breaks, these technocrats just double-down on their ideology and failed ideas.
- Jotra7 4y ago
phil21 4y ago
Yep. I've always considered net metering immoral. Rich folks using poor folks for a free nighttime battery. The fix is super simple. Just meter by the minute and pay out current wholesale electric rates as you send to the grid. When you buy, you pay retail for delivery depending on the instantaneous market. Don't want to buy at potentially high rates during evening peak? Sounds like you need to invest in a battery system. If you want to pretend you are a micro power plant, you should get paid as one.
- westurner 4y ago
  With Buy-All Sell-All you buy all you use at retail rates and sell all you produce at wholesale rates. Buy-All Sell-All has a later breakeven point than Net Metering, where you buy what you can't produce at retail and sell back the rest at wholesale or better, which is an indirect subsidy for a resilient power grid with residential renewables with external benefits. What you describe sounds like Buy-All Sell-All, except you're allowed to use and store what you produce before paying retail rates for electricity purchased from the service provider. Is it anti-competitive to deny residential renewable energy producers the right to use the clean energy they invested in producing if they want to purchase electricity? Another exclusive monopoly contract: if you buy water from me, you can't use the water you capture yourself. Net metering in the United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_metering_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_metering_in_the_United_Sta... Net metering > "Post-net metering" successor tariffs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_metering#Post-net_metering_successor_tariffs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_metering#Post-net_metering... We want there to be renewable residential energy. Subsidizing renewable energy will hasten adoption. We should subsidize residential renewable energy if we want there to be more renewable energy. If we make the break-even point later in time, residential renewable energy will be less lucrative.

dehrmann 4y ago

Net metering doesn't make economic sense for utilities since it pays retail rates for production and doesn't charge for a connection to the grid. It makes sense at face value, but once you dig into cases like someone only producing power or everyone using net metering, you realize you have to change the payout structure to match the utility's costs.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
Austin was the first municipality (I think) to use a "value of solar" rate, and as much as I'd like to use net metering from a home owner perspective, it's much fairer. It basically just pays homeowners a wholesale rate for their excess power. It's currently 9.7 cents per kWh, not much different that this proposed rate in CA.
ezfe 4y ago
My power bill includes a delivery and an energy charge, both measured by kWh. The delivery charge is intended to pay for the actual electrical lines and maintenance, the point of issue here (providing a connection to the grid). If the issue is that a net-metered household isn't paying enough for the electrical lines, simply don't net-meter that part of the bill. Charge the full delivery charge per kWh drawn from the grid, without subtracting the amount sold back to the grid.

photochemsyn 4y ago

The Rural Electrification Model is the way to go, introduced during the FDR New Deal era. It consisted of municipal-scale networks (also applicable to fiber optic networks). https://www.investopedia.com/rural-electrification-act-5119177 https://www.investopedia.com/rural-electrification-act-51191... > "At first, the plan was to give these loans to companies in order to help them build electricity infrastructure in rural areas—a plan that proved too costly. So instead, lawmakers chose a type of organization well known to farmers: the cooperative, or co-op. The idea was that if farmers could organize themselves into co-ops, the REA could distribute loans to them at very low interest rates—between 2% and 3%, depending on their state—to build electricity infrastructure." Note that a key reason for its success was that they didn't use anything like a modern federal contracting program, i.e. paying private companies, but instead worked directly with rural co-ops (just extend that to towns and cities). Of course, this would mean taking over the transmission infrastructure from the investor-owned utilities in California.

mikestew 4y ago
I grew up using a rural electrical co-op. Despite the high winds, occasional blizzards, and regular thunderstorms of the Indiana plains, it was far more reliable than our current service in Redmond with Puget Sound Energy. To PSE's credit, their service is more reliable than it was ten years ago. But still, I'd never felt the need to own a generator until we moved to Redmond.
- Arainach 4y ago
  To be somewhat fair to PSE, it's generally simpler to plan for wind and ice than falling trees, which the Indiana plains relatively lack. As a proponent of "if the trees are such a problem why not bury the lines" who has since had to dig some trenches in the hellish rocky clay of King County, I am somewhat more sympathetic to their plight.
  - vel0city 4y ago
    It's not even just the cost of digging. The cost of the design and the cables is also way more expensive. The wires hung on poles aren't even insulated, while buried cable needs some pretty fancy cabling (lots of insulation, lots of armoring, etc)

dzhiurgis 4y ago

Makes sense, but are they going to incentivise distributed batteries now?

lh7777 4y ago
The Inflation Reduction Act provides a 30% tax credit for clean energy upgrades, including batteries IIRC.

sidewndr46 4y ago

> Customers who have new systems installed and approved for grid interconnection before the effective date in April will be grandfathered in to NEM 2.0 rates. Am I reading that right? People who already had their system in place get to keep the old rate forever?

yablak 4y ago
Grandfathered for 20 years
- tguvot 4y ago
  20 years from moment that system connected to the grid
bombcar 4y ago
That’s a decent thing to do especially since many of those people bought the system based on pricing assumptions over the next years.
ncallaway 4y ago
I mean, since it’s a purchase that people make that’s designed to recoup an upfront cost over 5-15 years, it seems like making a dramatic pricing change that retroactively screws over everyone who had previously installed solar would be a great way to ensure that people are extremely cautious when they install solar. This at least gives new purchasers some degree of confidence that they’ll be able to rely on the present pricing when costing out an install.
- a9h74j 4y ago
  > that retroactively screws over everyone That's when you go on to mandate that all newly-built homes include solar.
- sidewndr46 4y ago
  As others have pointed out, this isn't an optional thing. My understanding is to build a structure in California, it has to have solar on it. It's just part of the cost of housing at this point.

UIUC_06 4y ago

Suppose a small farmer went to Safeway and said, "Hey, I have 100 pounds of carrots every couple months. I want your cashiers to buy them from me at the retail price!" First, Safeway buys in very large lots from certified suppliers, who can commit to (almost) always having carrots. Second, those suppliers have to deliver at a loading dock, and maybe at a central location, too. Third, Safeway pays them wholesale prices, not retail. All of those analogies apply to selling power back to PG&E at retail prices. It's in small lots; it's undependable; it comes from many sources, not just a few; and it's priced wrongly. Yes, PG&E can be read as Pricks Grabbing Everything, but they're what we've got.

ekidd 4y ago
> "I want your cashiers to buy them from me at the retail price!" It's not anywhere near that simple. Electric power prices change dramatically throughout the day. For example, even retail prices may more than double during peak hours, if you have time-of-day billing. In some markets, peak demand is caused by day-time air conditioning during a few weeks in July or August. The extra generation capacity needed to cover that tiny window of time is idle the rest of the year. Those peak hours are very expensive, in real terms. In a market with small amounts of solar, that solar is helping offset some of the most expensive electricity of the year. And I've seen power companies push their major clients to install solar so that the power companies can avoid large investments in new power generation and transmission capacity. With net metering, power companies pay retail when wholesale electricity is most expensive. And they credit it back during the night, when wholesale power is cheaper. (The early evening window is trickier, and the hours of sunlight depend on latitude.) But once solar capacity is sufficient to offset air conditioning, the numbers for the power company get a lot worse. (Full disclosure: I signed a 10-year net metering contract which would barely break even in 12-15 years, in a market with little existing solar. The power company instituted separate grid fees a couple of years later, which substantially changed how the contract worked. And so my system will probably never pay for itself. Win some, lose some.)
- worik 4y ago
  > The power company instituted separate grid fees a couple of years later, which substantially changed how the contract worked. Is that legal? Sounds like you were defrauded

drewrbaker 4y ago

Sadly I’m not surprised by this blatant manipulation of government by the utility companies. I’m building a house about 15mins outside downtown Los Angeles. It’s on empty land on a public street. There is no power to the property. LADWP is requiring us to move/install 3 poles, and upgrade the transformer. Probably around $75k cost to us. Has to be their people doing the work. The Bureau of Street Lighting is also going to require us to move another pole that just has their street light on it with low voltage to it. I’ve been trying so hard to tell them all to get F’d and just install solar and a bunch of batteries instead. But they’ve told me it’s illegal to that (something about freezing to death). Oh and we have to widen the road ourselves too! The whole thing is insane. So they’ve basically created a system where we have no choice but to pay for the utilities failing infrastructure.

knoebber 4y ago
Up here in Northern California quite a few of us live off grid with just solar/batteries. What law says that a grid hookup is required? Is it at the county level?
- rwbt 4y ago
  Most counties require houses to be hooked up to the grid. That's why people who prefer living off grid choose unincorporated lands.
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    Most counties in California
    - jjeaff 4y ago
      Most all urban and suburban areas. I think it's usually municipalities that have these requirements.
- HyperSane 4y ago
  Why would you want to live off the grid? Battery solar is more expensive than utility power.

bumbledraven 4y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20221217003034/https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/12/15/california-pulls-the-plug-on-rooftop-solar/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221217003034/https://pv-magazi...

newyankee 4y ago

Even at the rate of 0.08$/ kwh or may be 0.05$/kwh , it is not a bad deal for rooftop solar if you intend to use most of it personally.

jacquesm 4y ago
In Western Europe you're looking at $.50 / KWh right now. Payback time for rooftop solar is between two and three years.
- rrmm 4y ago
  Wow...is there a big move towards it individually?
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    So much so that you can't buy panels, inverters or mounting materials. Everything is out of stock, earliest deliveries are weeks, sometimes months away depending on what you are looking for and suppliers that do still have some stock are playing favorites with their long term customers (which makes sense, from their perspective). I ended up buying two NOS inverters and one brand new one that was a bit larger than what I really needed (three separate sets of panels, 42 in all). One of them arrived damaged and I had the option to return it for a full refund or take a 50% discount, I took the discount because I knew I wasn't going to be able to find another one. Even second hand gear is priced through the roof.
floatrock 4y ago
> if you intend to use most of it personally. That's exactly the goal here: make grid export uneconomical so you need to pair solar with a storage system that banks your afternoon excess into self-consumption once the sun goes down and the duck curve kicks into peak territory.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

7e 4y ago

Grid solar is so much cheaper than residential solar. Net metering is a waste of money, which could be better spent on utility scale renewables.

ghouse 4y ago
Alas the economic evaluation is more complicated than that. Grid solar requires transmission lines. The largest transmission line in construction right now for California load is called the Ten West Link. It will be 125 miles, have a maximum capacity of 3,200 MW, and cost $390 MM. [0] [0] http://www.caiso.com/Documents/Feb12-2021-OpeningBrief-DCRT-TenWestLinkProject-CertificatePublicConvenienceNecessity-A1610012.pdf http://www.caiso.com/Documents/Feb12-2021-OpeningBrief-DCRT-...
- 7e 4y ago
  That's $0.12/watt, which is nothing when amortized over dozens of years. Residential solar in California is roughly $2.75/watt installed and a recent utility scale solar project in Nevada looks to be coming in at $0.70/watt. Even with transmission, utility scale solar is 3x cheaper.
  - ghouse 4y ago
    All of these costs need to be adjusted for capacity factor. The 3.2 GW is the maximum rating of the line. The line will almost never be at the maximum rating (due to security-constrained economic dispatch). And obviously solar only generates when the sun is up (a mid-30s capacity factor is very good).
shapefrog 4y ago
Capital outlay on residential solar for the utility is $0.00. It doesnt get much cheaper than free.
- joshjob42 4y ago
  Sort of but not really. If you install, say, an 11kW system only our house and this makes enough electricity to meet your average daily use, then during the day your house will be producing more power than it is using at the moment and then in the evening your solar array's output plummets but that's also usually about when demand peaks (except sometimes on very hot summer days). If you're on the grid, the grid operator has to have enough energy production capacity to give you whatever power you need on demand, up to some peak limit. At the highest demand parts of the day and year, they have to resort to weaker plants, basically plants that don't come online except at the highest demand times. They cost a similar amount as any other power generating plant, but only get used 20 or 10 to 5% of the time, which means power from them is phenomenally expensive as their capital costs have to be paid off somehow even though they don't get used much. This is a huge fraction of total costs for a grid operator, and it only gets worse as solar becomes a bigger part of the grid. For every kW of solar, the operator needs ~1kW of natural gas plants sitting around ready to turn on at a moment's notice. In CA during the day usually we have too much power, and our wholesale prices can actually go negative ie they pay people to take generators offline as there's too much being made, and that's because that's peak solar production times. Then in the evening all the solar goes away but if anything demand goes up, so now they have to spin up all these natural gas plants to power people's homes at enormous expense. The way we pay for electricity is by kWh mostly because it's been historically a reasonable enough way to allocate costs and it's easy. But solar is different. Without storage, the entire grid has to be available at all times even though it's getting less use during the day and certain parts of the year. Then net metering means the solar people give the operator electricity it really doesn't want or need during the day and get to cash in their credit during the high demand, extremely expensive parts the day while, on balance, pay ~ nothing for the system on which they are reliant and foist the costs of maintaining the grid onto everyone who is too broke to have solar on their house. So the capital outlay from the grid operator and power plants is ~ identical for a house that has solar but no batteries as compared to one without solar panels at all. But now the solar power person would use net metering so they have to pay basically nothing for the system even though they're radically reliant on it. So, on balance, there really is a very large cost with no real benefit to the utility. People should have to pay for the costs they impose on the grid / everyone else, and that's more or less what this new price structure does. It pays much less in credits during the day when the marginal unit of solar power is basically worthless and adds a per kW of installed solar monthly fee to pay for the capital costs of maintaining the generators those solar customers still need around for when the sun goes down. That's fair! iirc it has some reductions in this latter cost depending on how much storage you have, as is appropriate.

somishere 4y ago

I live in NE Australia (~17"S) and our feed in tariff recently went up from ~6.6c to 9.3c (so now around US$0.063). Massive boon for us, given rising prices. With a 5kw system we feed in 1500kwh per quarter and buy back 600kwh (at ~22c), averaged across the year. Lots of variation summer to winter (sun angle) and depending on wet season, WFH, etc. On our "best" days we'll generate >38kWh. Pool runs for free year round, aircons run for free during the day. For now it's very cost effective for us without a battery. Less so with one. Less so for friends without pool / large appliance running through day. Older systems, generally much smaller, have grandfathered feed in tariffs sitting around 40c. These people tend to go out of their way not to use power during the day. Pool on at night, etc. Interested to read other's experience.

foxrob92 4y ago
I'm in Perth. Our feed in tariff changed in July to 10c/kWh between 3pm and 9pm, and 2.5c/kWh at other times. Use tariff is 26.2c/kWh. I'm pretty sure our solar will pay itself back in under 5 years, but we have a 25 year warranty on the panels. My parents are building outside of Adelaide and they've decided to go off grid (solar + battery + backup generator). Their expected payback period is (iirc) 8 years, with a 10 year warranty on the batteries and a 25 year warranty on the panels. They're expecting to have to run the generator once a year or so.
- somishere 4y ago
  2.5c isn't great, but 5 years is. Shows its definitely worth it if you've got any kind of load during the day. Are you able to make any use of the peak rates after 3 over there? From what I hear SA is one of the best places in the country to generate. Optimal temperature for the panels plus lots of sunlight. 8 years seems like nothing with the genny and battery. We tried but couldn't make the numbers work with any kind of decent backup, this was 3 years ago. Cheers for the info!

jacksonkmarley 4y ago

Or to express the headline in a less clickbaity (or metaphorical) way: California slashes rates paid for household solar contributions back to the grid.

angry_octet 4y ago
... without considering long term consequences.
pugworthy 4y ago
"...[as they] are now considered uneconomical without an attached battery" to quote the article.

hedora 4y ago

I wish they would charge on an hourly basis based on net contribution to the grid's carbon emissions. They could scale the cost of emitting carbon so that PG&E's total revenue was still reasonable. Once the grid emissions started to approach zero, this pricing scheme would collapse. I'm OK with letting future politicians replace it at that time.

lokar 4y ago

California should never have bailed out PG&E. They should have been forced into liquidation and taken over by the state.

baldfat 4y ago
It's the financial piece. The poor again get screwed with higher prices because they will never have solar panels. So electric company was charging more to the poor to pay for this. Just like they do for food and for gas. Just like poor voluntarily pay the education tax for the rich. Agreed that monopolies need to be regulated by the state. In PA my electricity went up over 300% in the first 6 years it was deregulated, and the company's profits were record quaters from 2008 - 2017.
- ghouse 4y ago
  Investor-owned utility monopolies are regulated by the state. Either Public Utility Commissions or Corporation Commissions. The alternative is publicly-owned utilities, like munis or coops. Typically the publicly-owned utilities have materially lower electricity rates.
  - labcomputer 4y ago
    > The alternative is publicly-owned utilities, like munis or coops. You mean, like Silicon Valley Power (Santa Clara) or Los Angeles Department of Water and Power? Both of which charge a fraction of PG&E does, and have more reliable power, and offer better customer service (SVP's website is around 1000x better than PG&E's), and more transparent billing, and more assistance to needy customers.
    - ghouse 4y ago
      Yes. Other California, US examples are SMUD (Sacramento), TID (Turlock), MID (Modesto), IID (Imperial Valley), Redding, and Needles. Generally all have lower rates than PG&E, SCE, or SDG&E.
4y ago

colordrops 4y ago

What about the proposed tax per kWh of solar. Will that be going into effect too? Edit: Looks like the 8% per kilowatt-hour tax was already rejected.

29athrowaway 4y ago

Ask a firefighter what happens when they see a solar panel on your roof.

dontparticipate 4y ago

The net metering subsidy just didn't make sense anymore. Solar is "cheap" now and the next step of decarbonization is storage. From a carbon perspective, net metering was basically paying homeowners to provide useless power to the grid (at the bottom of the duck curve) but be able to cash it in when they actually needed it around 7 pm. This meant generating useless solar power and in exchange for letting burning a ton of natural gas when you actually needed the power. The next step is pairing solar with residential and grid scale storage. Personally, with how intermittent production can be now, the grid should be more like AWS. Allow for per minute billing and rates that fluctuate for some customers. If you can pair storage with solar (or even just storage if you could buy low sell high off the grid), that would be the next big step in the renewable revolution. Net metering always had to die for the next step (storage) to happen. With the electric car mandate coming into 2035 so that millions of homes will own a giant battery this will eventually be even more important.

ghouse 4y ago
To be clear, net metering was never "paying" customers, but instead providing them a credit for the energy they delivered during the period they delivered it. So, export power during the "off-peak" period, you build a credit at rate slightly less than the retail rate which you can then debit from the "off-peak" bucket later. Generally (with some exception), any remaining credit at the end of an annual billing cycle is lost. So, the characterization of paying exports for useless power and then getting it back during the 7 PM system peak isn't quite correct. Strongly agree with you that price signals are important to impact behavior (human or system) which will result in a lower overall price for society, so long as regulators do their work (align price with cost).
- joshjob42 4y ago
  From the perspective of the grid/utility it is fairly accurate though. They pay for electricity to be made at wholesale rates at every instant of time to meet demand. During the peak of the day in CA, wholesale electricity prices are near zero, and sometimes even go negative due to overproduction. Then in the evening they shoot through the roof. So they're getting power that can be even worse than useless during the day and having to provide it at the most expensive times to those same customers. The grid operator experiences this as basically buying useless trinkets (daytime solar) for massive amounts of gold (peak power demands that require capital intensive plants that hardly get used).

emodendroket 4y ago

My home came with a solar panel and even before the change it's hard to see from a purely financial perspective why you'd do it. At least for what my house is set up with, unless I want to pay a huge sum to buy out my contract (and no longer get service if it breaks), I have to pay them by how much I generate and the savings seem pretty miniscule. It seems like it would take forever to make back your installation fee.

gnicholas 4y ago
I guarantee you those installation and maintenance fees will go down once the new reimbursement rates go into effect. The price you’re charged is calibrated to how much money you are expected to save.

sandos 4y ago

Ill keep saying this, I dont understand net metering or flat rates for solar electricity. I live in the EU, our electricity prices have gone up 1000% and solar gets what you surely wonder? Well, they get whatever the price is at the _moment they sell_ their electricity! Sure, this system does not really handle overloaded local grids and grid upgrades, but we pay through the nose for general grid access anyway. Paying the right price for every kWh just feels natural. It also automagically makes people take more or less correct decisions on batteries and when to produce.

davnn 4y ago
I just want to say that rooftop solar is a complete mess in my country in Central Europe. Since the Ukraine crisis, electricity prices went up like crazy and people actually got those prices for their solar energy. The problem is: nobody was actually paying the market rate prices as a consumer which means that you payed, for example, 8ct/KWh for using energy and got 80ct/KWh for delivering. Now the government is subsidizing those insane energy prices such that the consumers still pay an affordable rate and solar pays of in no time. Everyone who could afford it of course bought rooftop solar, but now a cap has been introduced such that you are only allowed to deliver a tiny amount of energy to the grid while your neighbor, who started before the cap was introduced, delivers 10x the amount.

time4tea 4y ago

0.30/kWh is really a lot. Its a massive subsidy. 0.5/kWh seems a bit mean, but it's the same as here in the UK. The main thing with solar is that it's cheaper to use what you generate. Due to the sun, you probably can't use all the midday, and are in deficit at night... but that's why flat rate doesn't make sense. Evening electricity is usually more expensive, daytime very cheap. (Weather dependent, of course) Paying at flat rate is to encourage adoption, but doesn't make economic sense. Batteries are pretty cheap now. Solar + battery will pay back in under 4y, even in dull England.

dmix 4y ago
So it's going from good intentioned gov subsidy over the short term to incentivized adoption -> hard cuts to meet the long term realities of the market? I guess the people who bet on centralized subsidies probably want some middle ground. But California saw it was mostly going to private companies engineered to take advantage of [current subsidy] and anything half-way would just continue pumping money into greenco instead of the future? And they decided to cut and run and bet on raw energy/climate outcomes instead of whats best for greenco?

egberts1 4y ago

Power companies in DFW (Texas) area are highly competitive: just got a contract for 14.59 cents kilowatt per hour. After visiting PG&E rate page, I cannot believe that Sacramento, CA is already pushing 50 cents kilowatt per hour. I pity the fools who live there (as I once did). https://www.pge.com/pge_global/common/pdfs/rate-plans/how-rates-work/Residential-Rates-Plan-Pricing.pdf https://www.pge.com/pge_global/common/pdfs/rate-plans/how-ra...

LinuxBender 4y ago
Similar deal in the mountain west. 11.09 cents per kwh and my power has only blipped once when they were tuning the voltages at the substation vs. regular planned and unplanned outages when I was on PG&E.
gnicholas 4y ago
Just to clarify, the price is only this high if you’re on time-of-use pricing and it’s peak hours, or you’re on regular pricing and you’ve used 400% of the baseline allocation. Neither of these events is rare, but it’s worth noting that we NorCal suckers aren’t paying this much for all of our electricity.

amirhirsch 4y ago

This is fine. Seems silly to put solar panels on rooftops in California until we have totally filled the I-8/10/15/40 corridors with massive utility scale plants stretching a couple miles in both directions from the highway. Solar panel production and installation has limited capacity so shouldn’t we prefer the desert climate multiplier to get 4x the energy? Take that panel off your roof and send it to the Mojave! The grid losses are negligible in comparison

otabdeveloper4 4y ago
> Let's completely destroy the desert biome because we are afraid of nuclear power
- o_1 4y ago
  Agreed but avoid the fault lines, usually nuke needs a decent water source as well.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago

Trying to be responsible on my farm in Iowa. Thinking of solar (ground-mounted, plenty of space here). First we upgraded our HVAC, the old one was inefficient. Well now our power bill is < $100/month because the new blowers are so frugal. Ironically we now can't make solar pay, because it would take decades longer in payback than any solar system is expected to last!

BuckyBeaver 4y ago

I don't care about money. I just want one kwh credit for each kwh I give them. CA power and water utilities were abusive before. This not only takes that to a new level, but this move is antithetical to California's entire righteous environmental posture. Not to mention that the utility's excuse is vague, unsubstantiated bullshit. CA invents new ways to perpetrate hypocrisy.

wernerb 4y ago

In the end there is no realistic future where every home has an efficient battery. The bulk of power has to come from grid/utility that provides storage. Honestly my hope was that metering like this would be an incentive to build said storage but it is not. In the end the grid/utility operators are crying missed profits and lobbying government to step in "or they will become bankrupt". It's a sad state of affairs, these utilities make money hand over fist but not doing the investments they are supposed to do.