You should look beyond the short-term consequences. Net metering is a benefit to well-off homeowners. Such benefits can be difficult to take back when they are

You should look beyond the short-term consequences. Net metering is a benefit to well-off homeowners. Such benefits can be difficult to take back when they are no longer useful, because those are the people who vote. That means you should avoid creating them unless you are sure of the long-term consequences. The question is not how net metering affects a grid still dominated by fossil fuels but how it works in a grid dominated by renewables. Some European countries are already getting there, so this is not hypothetical. When you have a period of high generation overlapping with a period of average demand, electricity is cheap. Paying a fraction of a cent for a kWh is common. When you get high generation and low demand, the prices can even go negative. On the other hand, when you have low generation and high demand, power becomes expensive and you may have to pay tens of cents for each kWh. If you have net metering, the power you sell to the grid is worth much less than the power you buy from it. One of the key tools for dealing with the variability of renewable energy is shifting demand that is insensitive to time of use automatically. Instead of buying expensive power now, you buy cheaper power hours or perhaps even days later. But if you have net metering, that does not concern you. You can keep using power as usual, because the price you pay is fixed. That can make net metering an incentive for inefficiency.