> Careful of the municipal utility bait and switch! Here in Idaho they recently adjusted the net metering credit to greatly decrease the value of solar energy.

> Careful of the municipal utility bait and switch! Here in Idaho they recently adjusted the net metering credit to greatly decrease the value of solar energy. As other have said, people taking the bait changed the economics, and that forced the switch. To be fair, it was foreseeable. Here in Australia we have the worlds highest rooftop solar take up. Feed-in rates are plummeting like a stone. It's not hard to see why - most days when the sun is shining brightly, the wholesale price of electricity is negative. Look at SA here at midday (the picture will change tomorrow): https://aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-electricity-market-nem/data-nem/data-dashboard-nem https://aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-elec... We do have plans here that expose you to that wholesale price. If you export electricity when the price is negative, you pay the grid. Ironically, at the same time this over supply is happening all states that mainly use coal have been hit by a price rise this month. I got mine today. In 22 days, the price of my electricity is going up 45%. That mainly caused by renewables (and particularly solar) making the old coal plants uneconomical. They used to be able to sell power 24 hours a day. Now since they can't ramp down quickly they have to pay the grid to export their excess power during the day. I don't know whether that's the cause, but right now we have gigawatt coal plants shutting down years earlier than they said they would five years ago. Which is how we get a 45% price rise. So we are in this situation where feed-in tariffs are worth nothing, electricity prices are going through the roof, we are throwing away a ton of electricity we can't use during the day and solar installs are slowing down. The solution is storage, of course. Batteries were hard to justify price wise a few days ago. But after this 45% price rise changed that. Again it's a double whammy, but in reverse this time. Remember during the day the price goes negative. That means the grid pays you to charge your battery. I would not be surprised if for a while, the return on a battery will be higher than installing solar panels. Which means the next phase of the renewable change over has hit us with a vengeance in Australia. It's the invisible hand of the market finally directing investment where it's needed most I guess. It arrived a little late, and it's not so much a hand as a fist. We would have been better off building storage a few years ago. And again, that was foreseeable. Indeed it was foreseen by numerous published articles. But who reads learned engineering articles on future electricity tariffs? Not your average noob looking purchase roof-top solar apparent and if the people hawking solar panel installs read them, they didn't mention it. So here we are. We wanted an energy transition. Now we've got one, ready or not.