If your energy truly comes from solar, you would have no problem. When solar is on, your energy is very cheap. It's if you are using that electricity at the "di

If your energy truly comes from solar, you would have no problem. When solar is on, your energy is very cheap. It's if you are using that electricity at the "dirty" times that you should pay for the externalities. Right now, I can come home and charge my electric car at 6:00pm. California fires up a natural gas turbine so that I can do that. Do I pay extra? Not really! Rates are cheaper by a few cents in the late evening and early morning, but not nearly enough to change my behavior. That's what this is about, changing behavior. Two things are necessary for that: (1) things need to be priced to align consumer behavior (subsidies for green energy and pigouvian taxes for dirty energy) (2) consumers need to have full knowledge of prices Right now, we are actually not bad at (1) although in my ideal world the cost differential is far more extreme (the actual cost of energy is like 4c/kWh when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing -- as the gp comment says, we make a lot of energy!). We totally fail at (2). Most consumers don't know that energy is more or less expensive at different times of the day. They see a monthly bill. Of course, you're right if you don't close other loopholes it won't work. A gallon of gas would be $10 and a Dodge Challenger would cost $100,000 or more if externalities were priced in.