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This is one of the forces driving the shift from rooftop solar to utility-scale installations. A residential installation needs guys up on a roof to install th

This is one of the forces driving the shift from rooftop solar to utility-scale installations. A residential installation needs guys up on a roof to install the panels, and then custom wiring for each house. A solar farm can use robots to install tens of thousands of panels cheaply. There are unfortunate side effects to this, even besides the attacks on net metering that have cut financial returns for existing solar customers. Distributed generation is more resilient. With a battery, you can keep your electricity during a power outage. Outages themselves are more isolated - with a VPP individual neighborhoods could keep power, while if a transmission line to a major solar farm goes down, a whole city could lose power. Large solar farms would be huge targets for warfare or sabotage, and wouldn't last very long at all. Transmission lines to them are vulnerable to natural disasters. Economically, large utilities have more market power and can capture their regulators, leading to higher prices and poor service for consumers. But the economic benefits of scale make it harder to justify putting panels on each individual home, when the same generation capacity can be built much cheaper at a solar farm.

pfdietz 2y ago
The attack on net metering isn't unfortunate; what's unfortunate is that people thought net metering ever made any sense. It's free riding on services provided by the grid, forcing others (who don't have PV) to pay for cost of providing those services. As PV rolled out, the craziness of net metering became impossible to ignore. Of course, those feeding at this trough objected loudly, and some naively fell for those objections.
- mercutio2 2y ago
  I think it's reasonable to subsidize adoption of early-stage technology that's promising but doesn't pencil out yet, to kick-start the learning curve. Thanks largely to Germany for doing the lion's share of the early subsidies with solar! But you're of course correct that this is a giant subsidy, and unfortunately it was funded by other rate payers rather than a central government, which was a nutty system from the beginning.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  It would be nice if this cost was actually all broken out; the grid operator should charge for connectivity, the various energy providers should charge for the energy itself. Net metering could still make sense; your residential solar installation might make enough to cover the gap.
  - DavidPeiffer 2y ago
    I'm sure it varies by locality, but if I look at my electric bill, I see charges for energy, transmission, and maintaining a connection to the grid. Transmission and generation are variable, connection is fixed. I doubt the $8.50/month is the "right" charge for maintaining a grid connection, but it's what MidAmerican Energy has gotten approved in Iowa. Presumably their charges for transmission and energy cover everything adequately.
    - pfdietz 2y ago
      It's not just maintaining a connection to the grid, it's maintaining the generating assets on the grid that you sometimes use.
  - MichaelNolan 2y ago
    That’s how it is in Texas. The company that owns the power lines to your house is unrelated from the company you buy the electricity from. (The latter of which you have dozens of options to pick from)
  - floatrock 2y ago
    This is exactly what happened in California recently with Net Metering 3.0 -- the utilities cut the value of the electrons you export back onto the grid, and they even broke that value out into a supply chunk and a transmission & distribution (which effectively cuts the total export value even more because they argued that the marginal electron is worth a tiny amount as far as the t&d line items go). What's happening in California is new rooftop solar doesn't pencil out unless you pair it with batteries (ie you self-consume all your excess), and even then it gets iffy. There's also the trend where operators charge fixed costs for connectivity. So even if you self-consume everything, you still pay $15-$50/mo just for the connection. That gets trickier because it punishes low-usage users like apartment dwellers and small households because that looks the same as a solar house that self-consumes most of their electricity.
ziga 2y ago
We need all the renewables we can get, and I think you can have both -- utility-scale and rooftop. Rooftop solar (and battery storage) just needs to be cost efficient to offset the rising cost of electricity and make it a good return on investment. The "attacks on net metering" are merely acknowledging that the proportion of renewables on the grid is high enough that balancing grid supply and demand is becoming an issue. I'm a big proponent of rooftop solar, but the reality is that 1:1 net metering just doesn't make sense once there's a critical mass of solar installed (the duck curve problem). This is not a problem unique to California or the US. If you look at other places with high solar adoption (Australia, EU), you'll find even stricter policies like negative feed-in tariffs: the utility will charge you for exporting solar to the grid. Battery storage is a solution to that problem, but that's where prices are still too high. I'm actually surprised that battery storage is not mentioned in the article, because that's a critical component of allowing solar/wind to grow further.
m463 2y ago
> A solar farm can use robots to install tens of thousands of panels cheaply. Doesn't matter if it doesn't bring down the cost of electricity. For example in california PG&E will still charge a substantial "delivery fee".
_ph_ 2y ago
Yes, roof-top installation is expensive, but if you combine it with other maintenance of the roof, it gets very cheap. And any new roof should have it planned in with the setup. Also, here the northern latitude helps, in Germany people start putting solar panels on walls and fences. There is plenty of cheap space and the efficiency isn't too bad considering the cheap panel costs.
martinald 2y ago
I think it's worse than that, for rooftop solar you have an enormous amount of sales and marketing expense baked in, plus you have homeowners which don't have enough experience to know what a good price/good install looks like. Much less of that with bigger systems. The other major problem is the grid is not setup at all for consumers to also be generators. At least in the UK it is rare/not possible for the DNO to send power back from a neighbourhood to the grid (at least not without a total remodel of the local grid infrastructure). So we are now hitting problems where solar is not allowed to be connected to the DNO if you have streets with a lot of solar on, because at some point the generation from the houses on the areas local transmission outstrips the demand in summer, and in that case you have too much power and nowhere for it to go (the excess cannot be sent back to the high voltage grid). The DNO cannot turn off individual solar generators easily (and even if they could, do they trust a load of chinese inverters to work reliably remotely?) I think the key problem with solar/renewables is not undersupply in winter in northern climates (though that is a big one for true net zero) it is oversupply in the summer. It's already causing massive issues in Europe with long spells of negative pricing. Interconnectors don't really help with this because when it is sunny (and potentially windy) in one place in Europe it tends to be similar elsewhere, so everyone has too much power. This is before the UK adds another huge amount of solar and wind in pipeline by 2030. Note this comment only applies to northern climates. It's far less of an issue further south because AC load tends to follow solar production much more, but that is far less common in the UK.

pfdietz 2y ago

The attack on net metering isn't unfortunate; what's unfortunate is that people thought net metering ever made any sense. It's free riding on services provided by the grid, forcing others (who don't have PV) to pay for cost of providing those services. As PV rolled out, the craziness of net metering became impossible to ignore. Of course, those feeding at this trough objected loudly, and some naively fell for those objections.

mercutio2 2y ago
I think it's reasonable to subsidize adoption of early-stage technology that's promising but doesn't pencil out yet, to kick-start the learning curve. Thanks largely to Germany for doing the lion's share of the early subsidies with solar! But you're of course correct that this is a giant subsidy, and unfortunately it was funded by other rate payers rather than a central government, which was a nutty system from the beginning.
bee_rider 2y ago
It would be nice if this cost was actually all broken out; the grid operator should charge for connectivity, the various energy providers should charge for the energy itself. Net metering could still make sense; your residential solar installation might make enough to cover the gap.
- DavidPeiffer 2y ago
  I'm sure it varies by locality, but if I look at my electric bill, I see charges for energy, transmission, and maintaining a connection to the grid. Transmission and generation are variable, connection is fixed. I doubt the $8.50/month is the "right" charge for maintaining a grid connection, but it's what MidAmerican Energy has gotten approved in Iowa. Presumably their charges for transmission and energy cover everything adequately.
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    It's not just maintaining a connection to the grid, it's maintaining the generating assets on the grid that you sometimes use.
- MichaelNolan 2y ago
  That’s how it is in Texas. The company that owns the power lines to your house is unrelated from the company you buy the electricity from. (The latter of which you have dozens of options to pick from)
- floatrock 2y ago
  This is exactly what happened in California recently with Net Metering 3.0 -- the utilities cut the value of the electrons you export back onto the grid, and they even broke that value out into a supply chunk and a transmission & distribution (which effectively cuts the total export value even more because they argued that the marginal electron is worth a tiny amount as far as the t&d line items go). What's happening in California is new rooftop solar doesn't pencil out unless you pair it with batteries (ie you self-consume all your excess), and even then it gets iffy. There's also the trend where operators charge fixed costs for connectivity. So even if you self-consume everything, you still pay $15-$50/mo just for the connection. That gets trickier because it punishes low-usage users like apartment dwellers and small households because that looks the same as a solar house that self-consumes most of their electricity.

ziga 2y ago

We need all the renewables we can get, and I think you can have both -- utility-scale and rooftop. Rooftop solar (and battery storage) just needs to be cost efficient to offset the rising cost of electricity and make it a good return on investment. The "attacks on net metering" are merely acknowledging that the proportion of renewables on the grid is high enough that balancing grid supply and demand is becoming an issue. I'm a big proponent of rooftop solar, but the reality is that 1:1 net metering just doesn't make sense once there's a critical mass of solar installed (the duck curve problem). This is not a problem unique to California or the US. If you look at other places with high solar adoption (Australia, EU), you'll find even stricter policies like negative feed-in tariffs: the utility will charge you for exporting solar to the grid. Battery storage is a solution to that problem, but that's where prices are still too high. I'm actually surprised that battery storage is not mentioned in the article, because that's a critical component of allowing solar/wind to grow further.

m463 2y ago

> A solar farm can use robots to install tens of thousands of panels cheaply. Doesn't matter if it doesn't bring down the cost of electricity. For example in california PG&E will still charge a substantial "delivery fee".

_ph_ 2y ago

Yes, roof-top installation is expensive, but if you combine it with other maintenance of the roof, it gets very cheap. And any new roof should have it planned in with the setup. Also, here the northern latitude helps, in Germany people start putting solar panels on walls and fences. There is plenty of cheap space and the efficiency isn't too bad considering the cheap panel costs.

martinald 2y ago

I think it's worse than that, for rooftop solar you have an enormous amount of sales and marketing expense baked in, plus you have homeowners which don't have enough experience to know what a good price/good install looks like. Much less of that with bigger systems. The other major problem is the grid is not setup at all for consumers to also be generators. At least in the UK it is rare/not possible for the DNO to send power back from a neighbourhood to the grid (at least not without a total remodel of the local grid infrastructure). So we are now hitting problems where solar is not allowed to be connected to the DNO if you have streets with a lot of solar on, because at some point the generation from the houses on the areas local transmission outstrips the demand in summer, and in that case you have too much power and nowhere for it to go (the excess cannot be sent back to the high voltage grid). The DNO cannot turn off individual solar generators easily (and even if they could, do they trust a load of chinese inverters to work reliably remotely?) I think the key problem with solar/renewables is not undersupply in winter in northern climates (though that is a big one for true net zero) it is oversupply in the summer. It's already causing massive issues in Europe with long spells of negative pricing. Interconnectors don't really help with this because when it is sunny (and potentially windy) in one place in Europe it tends to be similar elsewhere, so everyone has too much power. This is before the UK adds another huge amount of solar and wind in pipeline by 2030. Note this comment only applies to northern climates. It's far less of an issue further south because AC load tends to follow solar production much more, but that is far less common in the UK.