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You, the other commenters on the call, and the people replying to you are all wrong. I really wish people would bother actually learning about these issues befo
by Analemma_ 3y ago
You, the other commenters on the call, and the people replying to you are all wrong. I really wish people would bother actually learning about these issues before jumping to uninformed rants about government corruption or Citizens United or whatever.
Net metering is/was acceptable when solar was a tiny oddity, but at any kind of scale it's a horrible idea. At best it's a regressive tax on the poor, and at worst it's a doom loop that can kill the grid completely. Utilities have massive fixed costs, which have to be distributed over all rate-payers; when wealthy people install solar and get paid back at retail prices, those fixed costs remain the same and power rates have to go up on everybody else not fortunate enough to drop $20K on rooftop solar panels.
The reason you were blown off on the call is because a representative democracy is supposed to represent all voters, including the ones who are harmed by net metering, who- being on average poorer- probably don't have the leisure time to show up on a call and argue on their own behalf. This is why "local community meetings" are antithetical to democracy: they amplify the voices of people with tons of spare time to show up and yell at community meetings, which is an utterly unrepresentative segment of the general public.
- earleybird 3y agoThose same wealthy folks will install a battery component (just because they can) and will pay their own cost to produce have about the same effect as retail consumption/production. Tying fixed costs (infrastructure) to variable costs (power production) will always favor one group or another. Low consumers infrastructure costs are subsidized by higher consumers. It costs just as much to provide the grid access for 1 KWh/day as it does for 100 KWh/day.