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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 t

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.

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.