10 ms·

California is a rooftop solar giant. New rules could change that

37 points by orangebanana1 4y ago

HDThoreaun 4y ago
It never made sense to give rooftop solar owners a free unlimited battery via selling to the grid at or near retail price. Selling power to the grid should always pay wholesale price so that the poor who can't afford panels aren't subsidizing the rich who get inflated rates for their generation. Also incentivizes battery installs which is the next step needed to make renewables scale.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  Not true. Net metering incentives distributed generation, reduces transmission infra costs, but of course is ideal when the utility backfills with cleaner firm generation (California has no domestic coal generation and imports minimal amounts of coal fired power per ElectricityMap.org). You export excess solar when overproducing, and then can pull that kWh back from an energy source that can be stored (batteries, fossil gas, hydro). High level, high renewables penetration destroy the economics of slow throttle generators like coal and nuclear, but are ideal to pair with fast throttle fossil gas, which will then face stranding as utility scale battery manufacturing and deployment ramps. Batteries are key (and an expectation of some amount of tolerable clean energy overproduction), we’re just haggling over who is paying for them (retail electric or utilities). Like EVs (high end vehicles paid for manufacturing capacity ramp for lower value vehicles), wealthy people who buy solar and receive tax benefits not only generate clean power for themselves, but also export clean power to the grid and drive system efficiency improvements that will trickle down to those of lesser means with regards to rooftop solar (or community solar for folks without space for roof or ground mount solar). https://www.brookings.edu/research/rooftop-solar-net-metering-is-a-net-benefit/ https://www.brookings.edu/research/rooftop-solar-net-meterin... https://cleantechnica.com/2022/09/11/why-rooftop-solar-power-investments-are-worth-it-why-california-solar-net-metering-might-not-be-fair-competing-op-eds/ https://cleantechnica.com/2022/09/11/why-rooftop-solar-power... https://www.seia.org/initiatives/solar-cost-benefit-studies https://www.seia.org/initiatives/solar-cost-benefit-studies
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    Compromise: the net metering utilities must pay out is a function of their renewable generation. So a 100% renewable producer doesn’t pay, while a dirty one does. Not sure if we’d make the payout to homeowners variable, redistribute the unpaid amount to the dirty producers, or have a subsidy kick in from the public coffer.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      That's a neat compromise, but there is a lot of nasty bookkeeping tricks happening with 'green power' suppliers.
  - secabeen 4y ago
    > distributed generation, reduces transmission infra costs Distributed generation does reduce transmission costs slightly, but nowhere near in line with the amount of credit being given. Transmission costs mostly scale with the maximum power demand and the reliability needed, not with actual power delivered. Billing for distribution and grid reliability with a usage-based charge made sense when the power company was an absolute monopoly, but it doesn't with distributed power. Grid connectivity and distribution should be billed as a flat rate, or based on the size of the mains connection. That would be more in line with the actual costs.
    - jandrese 4y ago
      IMHO this is where the incentives are poorly aligned. The power companies should be offering incentives for people to install home battery systems but only if they are configured to act as a virtual peaker plant. IE the power company gets to decide when the battery is discharged to the grid. Maybe the power company buys the batteries and the homeowner pays the install cost. The homeowner gets a backup that works when the power is out, and the power company doesn't have to build and run expensive peaker plants and can further defer upgrading the backhaul lines. Total cost is higher than grid scale battery backup, but since the price is split it should be cheaper for the utility and also the grid scale battery storage doesn't help the backhaul problem. In the past the problem was that we simply were not making enough batteries so the market price was too high, but with battery production rapidly ramping up this should be practical if not now then within just a year or two.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  This argument doesn't hold. The effect that you are shooting for is that you minimize the damage to the planet. Having some people use the grid as an 'unlimited free battery' is a fantastic way to achieve the exact same effect as if all those people invest in large physical batteries without the investment and without the environmental impact. This sort of thing should be incentivized rather than discouraged because of the large scale effects, not because of petty accounting rules or by creating jealousy where there isn't ground for any: poor people without panels aren't subsidizing the rich, they are effectively not subsidizing the energy companies, which are far, far richer than the people with rooftop solar. It's citizens generating power for other citizens at the price that the market dictates. The thing to hope for is that enough of this will eventually lead to a reduction in retail prices rather than that we allow the energy companies to make money off surplus from one citizen sold to the next. Batteries are nice, reduced grid generation requirement during daylight hours is even better. And that's before we get into fire risks of large battery installations, space requirements, depreciation, recycling and so on.
  - majormajor 4y ago
    There's still an incentive. A smaller one, yes. I'm not sure how paying wholesale for generation instead of retail would change "citizens generating power for others at the rate the market dictates" - it seems like the wholesale one is much more in line with that rate. If there was never the super-generous payouts for excess power would we be having this discussion? I'm not convinced of the doom and gloom about the change since it's coming from highly-invested people.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      It's not 'super generous', it is a wash. And yes, you'd have the same problem but you'd also have more fires and a fair sized environmental problem. Having an inverter to recycle every decade or so is one thing (assuming it can't be cost effectively repaired), having to do the same thing with a 50 KWh battery is another matter entirely.
      - majormajor 4y ago
- bee_rider 4y ago
  We’re so far away from doing what makes sense with regards to climate change that working out if one move makes sense in isolation is impossible.
- scythe 4y ago
  >so that the poor who can't afford panels aren't subsidizing the rich who get inflated rates for their generation. Perhaps we should quantify this subsidy, before we get up in arms about it. California gets around 14% of its electricity from solar [1]. The average electric bill is $2500 per year [2]. That's around $30 per month, total, for all solar. Of that, most of the solar is probably from farms, most poor people probably use less electricity than average, and wholesale electricity prices are not zero anyway. So you're probably looking at the single digits per month. There are better places to look for ways to help California's worst off. 1: https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/california-electricity-data/2021-total-system-electric-generation https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo... 2: https://www.energysage.com/local-data/electricity-cost/ca/ https://www.energysage.com/local-data/electricity-cost/ca/
- amluto 4y ago
  CA’s retail electricity prices are so completely disconnected from actual costs that trying to choose a notionally correct price for selling to the grid seems impossible. Look, you can literally order your rate schedule off a menu! https://www.pge.com/tariffs/index.page https://www.pge.com/tariffs/index.page Of course, supplying you costs the same amount regardless of which appetizer or entree you order. The times of day that are cheapest and the times of day that are the lowest-carbon for the grid have nothing to do with which time of use tariff you happen to get billed. Here’s E-6, a common residential schedule, and you can look at the utterly insane 53 cent/kWh top rate and its unbundling: https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHEDS_E-6.pdf https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHED... So that’s 27 cents for peak summer generation. Surely, if you sell PG&E a kWh during peak time, they can avoid buying a peak 27 cents of power, which IMO they should pay you for. (Or they should *stop pretending it costs 27 cents to buy this power in the first place!) I will grant that PG&E still has to pay to distribute the power you sell them. Fine, although their distribution rates are still nuts. They must be taking a page from AWS’s playbook here. Maybe they shouldn’t pay you that whole amount when you sell them power. Oh, and it apparently only costs PG&E to generate 27 cents to generate that peak summer kWh for agricultural users. Go figure. And all these numbers are 5-10x the LCoE of basically any type of new generation. edit: Santa Clara sells power for about 14 cents/kWh, all in, for residential users: https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/home/showpublisheddocument/6253/638084314235470000 https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/home/showpublisheddocumen... I do not believe for a second that Santa Clara can buy and distribute power for half the claimed amount that PG&E pays just to generate it.
  - opportune 4y ago
    The configurable time of use pricing is still probably useful for PG&E and indirectly consumers. If they know X% of customers here and Y% there are on a certain plan they’re somewhat incentivized to work around, they can use that to predict demand and incentivize some kind of useful demand pattern
- bloppe 4y ago
  How exactly are the poor subsidizing the rich if the rich can participate in the electricity market at (near) market rates? Sure, there's a tiny bit of power lost during transmission, so the price you can charge the grid should be a bit less than the price you would pay to the grid for the same energy, but does it actually make a difference to non-solar houses if that's the case? The only effect I can see is a reduction on the demand of the power plant, which might affect the economy of scale, but is that actually happening?
  - HDThoreaun 4y ago
    Net metering is not near market rate. Utilities pay wholesale rates which are generally around 10-20% of retail rates. And in "true" net metering it's even worse because you sell during the day when prices are low and buy at night when prices are high but pay nothing. Utilities are monopolies, they will get their profits one way or another. If the wealthy are paying them less that just means the poor will pay more.
    - bloppe 4y ago
      I'm not sure if you meant net billing instead of net metering, but this seems to reinforce the idea that the rich were never being subsidized by the poor in the first place
- DevKoala 4y ago
  None of these savings end up making it to “the poor”. They only subsidie PG&E’s continued inefficiencies.
  - HDThoreaun 4y ago
    PG&E is a regulated monopoly whose profits are guaranteed. Revenue decreasing would just lead to increased rates, meaning the poor pay more.
- opportune 4y ago
  I agree with this. I don’t think people understand how exactly net metering works or what the actual utility cost structure looks like. Utilities sell energy to you by exposing things like time of use pricing and maybe tiered rates (in California, PG&E has seasonal tiers by location that basically correspond to how bad they think you need AC). The time of use pricing is kind of them passing on their cost structure, but the rest is very simplified. There are power spot markets https://www.caiso.com/todaysoutlook/Pages/prices.html https://www.caiso.com/todaysoutlook/Pages/prices.html utilities interact with that have much more dynamic pricing involved. These depend on things like weather, time of day, demand, etc. Utilities are greatly simplifying this cost structure when they charge you for energy. Right now per that website we’re at about 18 GW renewables out of a demand of 21.2 GW. 11 of those 18 GW are solar. Go to the demand page and look at how demand fluctuates over the course of the day. It’s highest at around 7:30am and 8:30 pm. How do you think that interacts with the solar supply? The TLDR is, solar produces a ton of supply during the part of the day where demand is low, and it stops producing power right around when demand is highest. So with net metering, we’re effectively letting people buy expensive, highly demanded power at the rate of cheap, low-demand power. This breaks utilities’ cost structures and also causes utilities to have to deal with greater fluctuations in energy demand and supply, which leaves more infrastructure unused for part of the day (they provision for peaks, but they spend a ton of time very far from the peaks). For those of us not lucky enough to be able to engage in solar power arbitrage, we have to pay higher prices to compensate for all the people paying very low bills relative to the actual cost of their energy consumption. Solar power and renewable energy are good to incentivize, but this implementation is simply not good for the energy system or consumers. I completely agree that excess residential solar returned to the grid should be compensated based on the current energy market prices. The good part about that is it incentivizes residences to invest in battery tech rather than relying on a grid (which they pay very little into) to do it for them. It probably does disincentivize solar a bit, but the system obviously would not work with everybody taking advantage of this arbitrage opportunity.
  - rconti 4y ago
    > So with net metering, we’re effectively letting people buy expensive, highly demanded power at the rate of cheap, low-demand power. Sort of. During the summer, because I'm on a time-of-use plan, the bulk of my power is generated at part-peak rates. If I had air conditioning and participated in the "peak power hours", I'd be consuming at higher rates than I generate at. However, in actual fact, we consume most of our power at 2am charging the car, when electricity is "cheap". (although I'd argue it's not nearly cheap enough; it shouldn't cost 30c/kWh at 12-5am when that's ALSO what it costs at, say, 11am.
- Panino 4y ago
  > pay wholesale price so that the poor who can't afford panels aren't subsidizing the rich The poor are already heavily subsidizing the rich for both electricity and water via base charges and fees. Imagine a poor household of 800sq ft with nighttime open windows for cooling vs. a 4500sq ft rich household with always-on AC. They're both paying the same base charges and fees, artificially lowering the cost-per-kWh of energy. While the rich household is using 10x more electricity, they're not paying 10x as much. So the poor are subsidizing the rich. The greater the base charges, the more money taken from the poor and given to the rich. Moreover, this scheme financially disincentivizes usage reduction, as the savings on the bill don't properly track efforts made by the resident. You can (and should!) reduce your usage by 50%, but you won't save 50%. So in short, base fees move money from the poor to the rich while financially disincentivizing reducing energy usage, thereby accelerating climate change. We need to do the opposite by removing all base charges/fees and protecting net metering. We have to financially incentivize actions that allow us to have a future.
  - rconti 4y ago
    > While the rich household is using 10x more electricity, they're not paying 10x as much. So the poor are subsidizing the rich. The greater the base charges, the more money taken from the poor and given to the rich. You're correct about base fees, but your conclusion is incorrect. PG&E power plans are tiered or at least have a baseline allowance. The baseline allowance gives you power that's roughly 8c/kWh cheaper, or about 20%. The more you use, the more of your usage is in the higher tier. It used to be a 4-tier system. The only way this 'hurts' poorer families is in, say, a multi-generational household where people are home and using appliances all day vs a smaller family where it's more likely people are gone all day (at least, pre-pandemic). But of course, per-person, the more dense household is still paying less money for a given usage amount.
- chrismcb 4y ago
  There are lots of programs that help in this situation. Although I agree that they shouldn't be paying retail for the power. On the other hand sitting the power locally doesn't help anyone else either.
- sliken 4y ago
  It's really simple. Every grid user should pay retail price for power at the spot retail price when they buy it from the grid Every grid user should be paid retail price for power at the spot retail price when they send it to the grid. Every grid user should pay a grid connection fee. So sure, the grid is a "free battery", but time of use is taken into account. If there's a huge spike in electricity prices just after sundown that's fine. People will have an incentive to decrease power use then and produce power then. Suddenly batteries become much more profitable. Users with access to land, wind, water, or geothermal would have incentives to sell power when price is high.
  - HDThoreaun 4y ago
    Why should the grid be forced to pay retail price to homeowners when generators are offering for 10% of the price?
    - sliken 4y ago
      Because generators aren't paying their fair share of the grid, a chunk of their power is wasted on transmission losses, etc. If I make 10kw with solar on my roof and someone else in my neighborhood uses it it makes the world a better place. My house is cooler from solar panel shade, have close to zero transmission losses, and I don't stress the expensive long distance/high voltage transmission lines. I also pay a connection fee (say $25) for my 100 amp or whatever service. A generator is usually on cheap land, far from where it's needed, and has a huge cost for the grid to get the power from where it's generated to where it's used.
      - s1artibartfast 4y ago
        It is really a lot more simple than that. You have generators, consumers, and delivery. Generators make power and sell it (Wholesale) The delivery man buys power and pays for transmission infrastructure to move it. Consumers buy power and pay the delivery man (Retail). Transmission costs might be high or low, but it shouldnt matter to the generator or consumer. The delivery man pays for it and it is their incentive to find the cheapest source including transmission.
hnburnsy 4y ago
In some cases wouldn't installing a smaller system be a better choice than installing a battery?
- sbradford26 4y ago
  If you have net metering it is basically never worth installing batteries unless you are looking to be able to run during a power outage. Net metering turns the grid into an infinite battery so every kWh you generate offsets your overall usage.
  - hnburnsy 4y ago
    Sorry I meant without net metering, the article says... >It will also provide a much stronger incentive for solar owners to use as much of the power they generate as they can — or to install batteries that can store excess power for use after the sun goes down Seems likely a smaller system is a choice too.
    - sbradford26 4y ago
      With the style of net meter in the article is makes sense to install a battery because it allows you to sell back power during the times you get the full rate. But yes otherwise you are right the return on investment will benefit smaller systems. Since any additional power would simply be wasted. Now the new standards typically don't fully get rid of paying for additional power. So it is probably still best to build a system that covers your power usage for most of the year and get a small benefit when it is over producing.
  - drewnick 4y ago
    I have NEM 2.0 and 25 kWh of batteries. They'll be "paid for" in about 5 years because I load shift from $.81/kWh to $.15/kWh in summer. For example, during peak, my system will feed 100% of my solar back at the $.81 rate and then charge back during the $.15 off-peak. Penciling it out, this saves me an average of $12/day in charges. 5.4 years and then I saved more than I paid AND have whole home backup AND continue to save ~$300/mo. Two EV household, multiple kids, etc. We use more juice than we should.
axus 4y ago
Maybe government subsidies for installation could be changed to subsidies for net metering? Or subsidies for local battery storage? It'd be nice if utilities had to compete with local storage for the excess generation, instead of offering a take-it-or-leave-it price.
- opportune 4y ago
  Eliminating net metering is a strong enough incentive to install batteries that subsidies themselves probably aren’t needed. And it probably wouldn’t make sense to subsidize batteries while continuing net metering, because as long as the battery cost remains > 0, it would still be better in many circumstances to forego it and just use net metering. If we did subsidize batteries down to 0 it would make more sense for them to be centralized because it’d be a lot simpler to install and get some economies of scale.
foolfoolz 4y ago
for decades we have seen planned communities with common assets paid for by hoa such as a pool and parks. i bet we will see in the future a neighborhood that “comes with” a 40 acre solar installation and storage as a perk. maybe even just storage. and if everyone feeds into it and draws from it you can get away from the grid power sharing changing requirements and host your own micro grid
- jacquesm 4y ago
  This works, but it isn't nearly as efficient as getting people to create and consume their own power: it creates a level of awareness that is much higher than it would ever be if it is part of some larger pool.
- hnburnsy 4y ago
  Makes sense here is community geothermal.... https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/01/geothermal-powered-housing-development-saves-homeowners-big-bucks.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/01/geothermal-powered-housing-d... Also wished I could convince my community to run is own ISP.
- vkou 4y ago
  We already have those future neighbourhoods, but they are powered by 4,000 acre solar installations, operated by entities we call 'utilities'. Economies of scale greatly benefit them, for the same reason that economies of scale benefit industrial-scale smelters over the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace garbage that was pushed by 'great visionaries' of the last century. There's no universe where someone driving for an hour, then climbing onto your roof to install a solar panel is cheaper than doing it at scale. There is no universe where an HOA wasting 40 acres of expensive urban or suburban land is more economic than a utility deploying 40 acres of solar panels, 15 miles out of town.
- somethoughts 4y ago
  I remember watching something about a planned community in Florida. Here it is: https://babcockranch.com https://babcockranch.com https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7TrBu_uEhI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7TrBu_uEhI Florida may be called the Sunshine State, but it is no stranger to the damaging impacts of climate change. Miles O'Brien profiles one small Florida community that is trying to take advantage of all that sunshine, billed as the country's first solar-powered town.
rconti 4y ago
Funny thing is, net metering 1.0 (where a credit is a credit) would have been worse for us than NEM 2.0, where I can generate at peak hours for 40c/kWh and charge the car off-peak for 30c (for example). It was even better when I had 1pm-7pm peak hours; now that I've lost those, "peak" is fairly useless because 4pm-9pm is not exactly prime solar generating hours. We're looking at a remodel and I definitely missed the boat with the April 14 deadline. I just assumed I could grandfather in my old panels and maybe add capacity under the new scheme, but it sounds like any changes I make to capacity shift me right over to NEM3.0, which means there's probably no point in adding capacity. I'm not sure if the changes required in redoing my roof (removing panels, putting right back where they were) or optimizing (moving existing panels to a new location) hurt my NEM2.0 status or not. Which is frustrating, because currently my annual true-up is like $700/yr for power. I'd like to go from a gas furnace to an electric heat pump, meaning I'll be using more power, but financially it doesn't make a lot of sense to add panels and lose my NEM2.0. I had also assumed I'd need to add capacity by .. tomorrow, which I knew I wasn't ready to do. Turns out, I could have just engaged with our installer and had the plans drawn up and approved, and installed them later this year, which is the plan anyway. The frustrating thing about the whole system is tiering. You really just want to stay in tier 1 but that's impossible in the winter with an EV. And it'll be even harder with an EV and electric heat.
- ec109685 4y ago
  Tomorrow is probably pushing it, but SunRun, though expensive, was incredibly responsive and could do things from Google Maps. You could give it a shot.
- sedatk 4y ago
  Yeah my friend started the whole process last Sunday and managed to get into NEM2 today.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  You should look into thermal mass for daytime storage, you may well be able to shift a bunch of heating at night to your solar received during the day. It's the cheapest and safest way of storing energy, and it also has pretty much unlimited cycle times.
trallnag 4y ago
Sounds fair to me. Rooftop solar by itself is already a big incentive without any additional handouts.

37 points by orangebanana1 4y ago

It never made sense to give rooftop solar owners a free unlimited battery via selling to the grid at or near retail price. Selling power to the grid should always pay wholesale price so that the poor who can't afford panels aren't subsidizing the rich who get inflated rates for their generation. Also incentivizes battery installs which is the next step needed to make renewables scale.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
Not true. Net metering incentives distributed generation, reduces transmission infra costs, but of course is ideal when the utility backfills with cleaner firm generation (California has no domestic coal generation and imports minimal amounts of coal fired power per ElectricityMap.org). You export excess solar when overproducing, and then can pull that kWh back from an energy source that can be stored (batteries, fossil gas, hydro). High level, high renewables penetration destroy the economics of slow throttle generators like coal and nuclear, but are ideal to pair with fast throttle fossil gas, which will then face stranding as utility scale battery manufacturing and deployment ramps. Batteries are key (and an expectation of some amount of tolerable clean energy overproduction), we’re just haggling over who is paying for them (retail electric or utilities). Like EVs (high end vehicles paid for manufacturing capacity ramp for lower value vehicles), wealthy people who buy solar and receive tax benefits not only generate clean power for themselves, but also export clean power to the grid and drive system efficiency improvements that will trickle down to those of lesser means with regards to rooftop solar (or community solar for folks without space for roof or ground mount solar). https://www.brookings.edu/research/rooftop-solar-net-metering-is-a-net-benefit/ https://www.brookings.edu/research/rooftop-solar-net-meterin... https://cleantechnica.com/2022/09/11/why-rooftop-solar-power-investments-are-worth-it-why-california-solar-net-metering-might-not-be-fair-competing-op-eds/ https://cleantechnica.com/2022/09/11/why-rooftop-solar-power... https://www.seia.org/initiatives/solar-cost-benefit-studies https://www.seia.org/initiatives/solar-cost-benefit-studies
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  Compromise: the net metering utilities must pay out is a function of their renewable generation. So a 100% renewable producer doesn’t pay, while a dirty one does. Not sure if we’d make the payout to homeowners variable, redistribute the unpaid amount to the dirty producers, or have a subsidy kick in from the public coffer.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    That's a neat compromise, but there is a lot of nasty bookkeeping tricks happening with 'green power' suppliers.
- secabeen 4y ago
  > distributed generation, reduces transmission infra costs Distributed generation does reduce transmission costs slightly, but nowhere near in line with the amount of credit being given. Transmission costs mostly scale with the maximum power demand and the reliability needed, not with actual power delivered. Billing for distribution and grid reliability with a usage-based charge made sense when the power company was an absolute monopoly, but it doesn't with distributed power. Grid connectivity and distribution should be billed as a flat rate, or based on the size of the mains connection. That would be more in line with the actual costs.
  - jandrese 4y ago
    IMHO this is where the incentives are poorly aligned. The power companies should be offering incentives for people to install home battery systems but only if they are configured to act as a virtual peaker plant. IE the power company gets to decide when the battery is discharged to the grid. Maybe the power company buys the batteries and the homeowner pays the install cost. The homeowner gets a backup that works when the power is out, and the power company doesn't have to build and run expensive peaker plants and can further defer upgrading the backhaul lines. Total cost is higher than grid scale battery backup, but since the price is split it should be cheaper for the utility and also the grid scale battery storage doesn't help the backhaul problem. In the past the problem was that we simply were not making enough batteries so the market price was too high, but with battery production rapidly ramping up this should be practical if not now then within just a year or two.
jacquesm 4y ago
This argument doesn't hold. The effect that you are shooting for is that you minimize the damage to the planet. Having some people use the grid as an 'unlimited free battery' is a fantastic way to achieve the exact same effect as if all those people invest in large physical batteries without the investment and without the environmental impact. This sort of thing should be incentivized rather than discouraged because of the large scale effects, not because of petty accounting rules or by creating jealousy where there isn't ground for any: poor people without panels aren't subsidizing the rich, they are effectively not subsidizing the energy companies, which are far, far richer than the people with rooftop solar. It's citizens generating power for other citizens at the price that the market dictates. The thing to hope for is that enough of this will eventually lead to a reduction in retail prices rather than that we allow the energy companies to make money off surplus from one citizen sold to the next. Batteries are nice, reduced grid generation requirement during daylight hours is even better. And that's before we get into fire risks of large battery installations, space requirements, depreciation, recycling and so on.
- majormajor 4y ago
  There's still an incentive. A smaller one, yes. I'm not sure how paying wholesale for generation instead of retail would change "citizens generating power for others at the rate the market dictates" - it seems like the wholesale one is much more in line with that rate. If there was never the super-generous payouts for excess power would we be having this discussion? I'm not convinced of the doom and gloom about the change since it's coming from highly-invested people.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    It's not 'super generous', it is a wash. And yes, you'd have the same problem but you'd also have more fires and a fair sized environmental problem. Having an inverter to recycle every decade or so is one thing (assuming it can't be cost effectively repaired), having to do the same thing with a 50 KWh battery is another matter entirely.
    - majormajor 4y ago
bee_rider 4y ago
We’re so far away from doing what makes sense with regards to climate change that working out if one move makes sense in isolation is impossible.
scythe 4y ago
>so that the poor who can't afford panels aren't subsidizing the rich who get inflated rates for their generation. Perhaps we should quantify this subsidy, before we get up in arms about it. California gets around 14% of its electricity from solar [1]. The average electric bill is $2500 per year [2]. That's around $30 per month, total, for all solar. Of that, most of the solar is probably from farms, most poor people probably use less electricity than average, and wholesale electricity prices are not zero anyway. So you're probably looking at the single digits per month. There are better places to look for ways to help California's worst off. 1: https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/california-electricity-data/2021-total-system-electric-generation https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo... 2: https://www.energysage.com/local-data/electricity-cost/ca/ https://www.energysage.com/local-data/electricity-cost/ca/
amluto 4y ago
CA’s retail electricity prices are so completely disconnected from actual costs that trying to choose a notionally correct price for selling to the grid seems impossible. Look, you can literally order your rate schedule off a menu! https://www.pge.com/tariffs/index.page https://www.pge.com/tariffs/index.page Of course, supplying you costs the same amount regardless of which appetizer or entree you order. The times of day that are cheapest and the times of day that are the lowest-carbon for the grid have nothing to do with which time of use tariff you happen to get billed. Here’s E-6, a common residential schedule, and you can look at the utterly insane 53 cent/kWh top rate and its unbundling: https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHEDS_E-6.pdf https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHED... So that’s 27 cents for peak summer generation. Surely, if you sell PG&E a kWh during peak time, they can avoid buying a peak 27 cents of power, which IMO they should pay you for. (Or they should *stop pretending it costs 27 cents to buy this power in the first place!) I will grant that PG&E still has to pay to distribute the power you sell them. Fine, although their distribution rates are still nuts. They must be taking a page from AWS’s playbook here. Maybe they shouldn’t pay you that whole amount when you sell them power. Oh, and it apparently only costs PG&E to generate 27 cents to generate that peak summer kWh for agricultural users. Go figure. And all these numbers are 5-10x the LCoE of basically any type of new generation. edit: Santa Clara sells power for about 14 cents/kWh, all in, for residential users: https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/home/showpublisheddocument/6253/638084314235470000 https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/home/showpublisheddocumen... I do not believe for a second that Santa Clara can buy and distribute power for half the claimed amount that PG&E pays just to generate it.
- opportune 4y ago
  The configurable time of use pricing is still probably useful for PG&E and indirectly consumers. If they know X% of customers here and Y% there are on a certain plan they’re somewhat incentivized to work around, they can use that to predict demand and incentivize some kind of useful demand pattern
bloppe 4y ago
How exactly are the poor subsidizing the rich if the rich can participate in the electricity market at (near) market rates? Sure, there's a tiny bit of power lost during transmission, so the price you can charge the grid should be a bit less than the price you would pay to the grid for the same energy, but does it actually make a difference to non-solar houses if that's the case? The only effect I can see is a reduction on the demand of the power plant, which might affect the economy of scale, but is that actually happening?
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  Net metering is not near market rate. Utilities pay wholesale rates which are generally around 10-20% of retail rates. And in "true" net metering it's even worse because you sell during the day when prices are low and buy at night when prices are high but pay nothing. Utilities are monopolies, they will get their profits one way or another. If the wealthy are paying them less that just means the poor will pay more.
  - bloppe 4y ago
    I'm not sure if you meant net billing instead of net metering, but this seems to reinforce the idea that the rich were never being subsidized by the poor in the first place
DevKoala 4y ago
None of these savings end up making it to “the poor”. They only subsidie PG&E’s continued inefficiencies.
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  PG&E is a regulated monopoly whose profits are guaranteed. Revenue decreasing would just lead to increased rates, meaning the poor pay more.
opportune 4y ago
I agree with this. I don’t think people understand how exactly net metering works or what the actual utility cost structure looks like. Utilities sell energy to you by exposing things like time of use pricing and maybe tiered rates (in California, PG&E has seasonal tiers by location that basically correspond to how bad they think you need AC). The time of use pricing is kind of them passing on their cost structure, but the rest is very simplified. There are power spot markets https://www.caiso.com/todaysoutlook/Pages/prices.html https://www.caiso.com/todaysoutlook/Pages/prices.html utilities interact with that have much more dynamic pricing involved. These depend on things like weather, time of day, demand, etc. Utilities are greatly simplifying this cost structure when they charge you for energy. Right now per that website we’re at about 18 GW renewables out of a demand of 21.2 GW. 11 of those 18 GW are solar. Go to the demand page and look at how demand fluctuates over the course of the day. It’s highest at around 7:30am and 8:30 pm. How do you think that interacts with the solar supply? The TLDR is, solar produces a ton of supply during the part of the day where demand is low, and it stops producing power right around when demand is highest. So with net metering, we’re effectively letting people buy expensive, highly demanded power at the rate of cheap, low-demand power. This breaks utilities’ cost structures and also causes utilities to have to deal with greater fluctuations in energy demand and supply, which leaves more infrastructure unused for part of the day (they provision for peaks, but they spend a ton of time very far from the peaks). For those of us not lucky enough to be able to engage in solar power arbitrage, we have to pay higher prices to compensate for all the people paying very low bills relative to the actual cost of their energy consumption. Solar power and renewable energy are good to incentivize, but this implementation is simply not good for the energy system or consumers. I completely agree that excess residential solar returned to the grid should be compensated based on the current energy market prices. The good part about that is it incentivizes residences to invest in battery tech rather than relying on a grid (which they pay very little into) to do it for them. It probably does disincentivize solar a bit, but the system obviously would not work with everybody taking advantage of this arbitrage opportunity.
- rconti 4y ago
  > So with net metering, we’re effectively letting people buy expensive, highly demanded power at the rate of cheap, low-demand power. Sort of. During the summer, because I'm on a time-of-use plan, the bulk of my power is generated at part-peak rates. If I had air conditioning and participated in the "peak power hours", I'd be consuming at higher rates than I generate at. However, in actual fact, we consume most of our power at 2am charging the car, when electricity is "cheap". (although I'd argue it's not nearly cheap enough; it shouldn't cost 30c/kWh at 12-5am when that's ALSO what it costs at, say, 11am.
Panino 4y ago
> pay wholesale price so that the poor who can't afford panels aren't subsidizing the rich The poor are already heavily subsidizing the rich for both electricity and water via base charges and fees. Imagine a poor household of 800sq ft with nighttime open windows for cooling vs. a 4500sq ft rich household with always-on AC. They're both paying the same base charges and fees, artificially lowering the cost-per-kWh of energy. While the rich household is using 10x more electricity, they're not paying 10x as much. So the poor are subsidizing the rich. The greater the base charges, the more money taken from the poor and given to the rich. Moreover, this scheme financially disincentivizes usage reduction, as the savings on the bill don't properly track efforts made by the resident. You can (and should!) reduce your usage by 50%, but you won't save 50%. So in short, base fees move money from the poor to the rich while financially disincentivizing reducing energy usage, thereby accelerating climate change. We need to do the opposite by removing all base charges/fees and protecting net metering. We have to financially incentivize actions that allow us to have a future.
- rconti 4y ago
  > While the rich household is using 10x more electricity, they're not paying 10x as much. So the poor are subsidizing the rich. The greater the base charges, the more money taken from the poor and given to the rich. You're correct about base fees, but your conclusion is incorrect. PG&E power plans are tiered or at least have a baseline allowance. The baseline allowance gives you power that's roughly 8c/kWh cheaper, or about 20%. The more you use, the more of your usage is in the higher tier. It used to be a 4-tier system. The only way this 'hurts' poorer families is in, say, a multi-generational household where people are home and using appliances all day vs a smaller family where it's more likely people are gone all day (at least, pre-pandemic). But of course, per-person, the more dense household is still paying less money for a given usage amount.
chrismcb 4y ago
There are lots of programs that help in this situation. Although I agree that they shouldn't be paying retail for the power. On the other hand sitting the power locally doesn't help anyone else either.
sliken 4y ago
It's really simple. Every grid user should pay retail price for power at the spot retail price when they buy it from the grid Every grid user should be paid retail price for power at the spot retail price when they send it to the grid. Every grid user should pay a grid connection fee. So sure, the grid is a "free battery", but time of use is taken into account. If there's a huge spike in electricity prices just after sundown that's fine. People will have an incentive to decrease power use then and produce power then. Suddenly batteries become much more profitable. Users with access to land, wind, water, or geothermal would have incentives to sell power when price is high.
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  Why should the grid be forced to pay retail price to homeowners when generators are offering for 10% of the price?
  - sliken 4y ago
    Because generators aren't paying their fair share of the grid, a chunk of their power is wasted on transmission losses, etc. If I make 10kw with solar on my roof and someone else in my neighborhood uses it it makes the world a better place. My house is cooler from solar panel shade, have close to zero transmission losses, and I don't stress the expensive long distance/high voltage transmission lines. I also pay a connection fee (say $25) for my 100 amp or whatever service. A generator is usually on cheap land, far from where it's needed, and has a huge cost for the grid to get the power from where it's generated to where it's used.
    - s1artibartfast 4y ago
      It is really a lot more simple than that. You have generators, consumers, and delivery. Generators make power and sell it (Wholesale) The delivery man buys power and pays for transmission infrastructure to move it. Consumers buy power and pay the delivery man (Retail). Transmission costs might be high or low, but it shouldnt matter to the generator or consumer. The delivery man pays for it and it is their incentive to find the cheapest source including transmission.

hnburnsy 4y ago

In some cases wouldn't installing a smaller system be a better choice than installing a battery?

sbradford26 4y ago
If you have net metering it is basically never worth installing batteries unless you are looking to be able to run during a power outage. Net metering turns the grid into an infinite battery so every kWh you generate offsets your overall usage.
- hnburnsy 4y ago
  Sorry I meant without net metering, the article says... >It will also provide a much stronger incentive for solar owners to use as much of the power they generate as they can — or to install batteries that can store excess power for use after the sun goes down Seems likely a smaller system is a choice too.
  - sbradford26 4y ago
    With the style of net meter in the article is makes sense to install a battery because it allows you to sell back power during the times you get the full rate. But yes otherwise you are right the return on investment will benefit smaller systems. Since any additional power would simply be wasted. Now the new standards typically don't fully get rid of paying for additional power. So it is probably still best to build a system that covers your power usage for most of the year and get a small benefit when it is over producing.
- drewnick 4y ago
  I have NEM 2.0 and 25 kWh of batteries. They'll be "paid for" in about 5 years because I load shift from $.81/kWh to $.15/kWh in summer. For example, during peak, my system will feed 100% of my solar back at the $.81 rate and then charge back during the $.15 off-peak. Penciling it out, this saves me an average of $12/day in charges. 5.4 years and then I saved more than I paid AND have whole home backup AND continue to save ~$300/mo. Two EV household, multiple kids, etc. We use more juice than we should.

axus 4y ago

Maybe government subsidies for installation could be changed to subsidies for net metering? Or subsidies for local battery storage? It'd be nice if utilities had to compete with local storage for the excess generation, instead of offering a take-it-or-leave-it price.

opportune 4y ago
Eliminating net metering is a strong enough incentive to install batteries that subsidies themselves probably aren’t needed. And it probably wouldn’t make sense to subsidize batteries while continuing net metering, because as long as the battery cost remains > 0, it would still be better in many circumstances to forego it and just use net metering. If we did subsidize batteries down to 0 it would make more sense for them to be centralized because it’d be a lot simpler to install and get some economies of scale.

foolfoolz 4y ago

for decades we have seen planned communities with common assets paid for by hoa such as a pool and parks. i bet we will see in the future a neighborhood that “comes with” a 40 acre solar installation and storage as a perk. maybe even just storage. and if everyone feeds into it and draws from it you can get away from the grid power sharing changing requirements and host your own micro grid

jacquesm 4y ago
This works, but it isn't nearly as efficient as getting people to create and consume their own power: it creates a level of awareness that is much higher than it would ever be if it is part of some larger pool.
hnburnsy 4y ago
Makes sense here is community geothermal.... https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/01/geothermal-powered-housing-development-saves-homeowners-big-bucks.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/01/geothermal-powered-housing-d... Also wished I could convince my community to run is own ISP.
vkou 4y ago
We already have those future neighbourhoods, but they are powered by 4,000 acre solar installations, operated by entities we call 'utilities'. Economies of scale greatly benefit them, for the same reason that economies of scale benefit industrial-scale smelters over the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace garbage that was pushed by 'great visionaries' of the last century. There's no universe where someone driving for an hour, then climbing onto your roof to install a solar panel is cheaper than doing it at scale. There is no universe where an HOA wasting 40 acres of expensive urban or suburban land is more economic than a utility deploying 40 acres of solar panels, 15 miles out of town.
somethoughts 4y ago
I remember watching something about a planned community in Florida. Here it is: https://babcockranch.com https://babcockranch.com https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7TrBu_uEhI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7TrBu_uEhI Florida may be called the Sunshine State, but it is no stranger to the damaging impacts of climate change. Miles O'Brien profiles one small Florida community that is trying to take advantage of all that sunshine, billed as the country's first solar-powered town.

rconti 4y ago

Funny thing is, net metering 1.0 (where a credit is a credit) would have been worse for us than NEM 2.0, where I can generate at peak hours for 40c/kWh and charge the car off-peak for 30c (for example). It was even better when I had 1pm-7pm peak hours; now that I've lost those, "peak" is fairly useless because 4pm-9pm is not exactly prime solar generating hours. We're looking at a remodel and I definitely missed the boat with the April 14 deadline. I just assumed I could grandfather in my old panels and maybe add capacity under the new scheme, but it sounds like any changes I make to capacity shift me right over to NEM3.0, which means there's probably no point in adding capacity. I'm not sure if the changes required in redoing my roof (removing panels, putting right back where they were) or optimizing (moving existing panels to a new location) hurt my NEM2.0 status or not. Which is frustrating, because currently my annual true-up is like $700/yr for power. I'd like to go from a gas furnace to an electric heat pump, meaning I'll be using more power, but financially it doesn't make a lot of sense to add panels and lose my NEM2.0. I had also assumed I'd need to add capacity by .. tomorrow, which I knew I wasn't ready to do. Turns out, I could have just engaged with our installer and had the plans drawn up and approved, and installed them later this year, which is the plan anyway. The frustrating thing about the whole system is tiering. You really just want to stay in tier 1 but that's impossible in the winter with an EV. And it'll be even harder with an EV and electric heat.

ec109685 4y ago
Tomorrow is probably pushing it, but SunRun, though expensive, was incredibly responsive and could do things from Google Maps. You could give it a shot.
sedatk 4y ago
Yeah my friend started the whole process last Sunday and managed to get into NEM2 today.
jacquesm 4y ago
You should look into thermal mass for daytime storage, you may well be able to shift a bunch of heating at night to your solar received during the day. It's the cheapest and safest way of storing energy, and it also has pretty much unlimited cycle times.

trallnag 4y ago

Sounds fair to me. Rooftop solar by itself is already a big incentive without any additional handouts.