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Why bother? Power companies will complain they are losing money and regulators will allow them to buy energy from residential solar panels basically for free (N

Why bother? Power companies will complain they are losing money and regulators will allow them to buy energy from residential solar panels basically for free (NEM 3.0). This is California. California has spent decades convincing people to convert to solar panels and EVs and now that many have switched, they doubled electricity prices and told us not to charge when it’s too hot. Now they want solar panel owners to pay a surcharge for “connecting to the grid”, upwards of $100/month or more than my actual solar bill. It’s all a scam.

thelastgallon 2mo ago
Completely agree with you, Govts sacred duty is to protect the super rich and utilities are the biggest monopolized cash cows (Eg: Warren Buffet). However,if people work with their local governments and change the building code to allow plug-in solar and plug-in batteries, that will continuously upgrade every home to become more and more energy independent and with the explosion of products, eventually be grid free. The biggest costs are labor, permits and delays; if its just products that people can plug and play, the adoption will be faster than just rooftop solar (or rooftop + batteries). Also, most utilities have tiered rates (higher utilization at higher rates), if you can have plug in systems that can bring the total kwh down, it immediately lowers the peak rate. The only bottleneck is making products that are safe to plug in, and this will happen as building code creates a standard to plug-in.
- alwa 2mo ago
  So… @lazide replied with a hahaha. It got flagged to death, understandably. If it were anybody but @lazide I’d have flagged it too, but… I can’t help but grimace and nod. To hazard a loosely-informed guess at their subtext… and politely ignoring your opening salvo of calorie-free populism… I’m not speaking from a place of certainty, but my impression is that there seem to be elements of “not even wrong” here. Some contra- lines of argument: * code, especially in the huge fundamental aspects, tends to flow from the NEC downward, rather than from municipal experiments in playing with literal fire. Not insurmountable, I guess, but it seems like a pretty big chicken-and-egg kind of obstacle to your proposed course of action; * individual household demand is several orders of magnitude removed from the considerations informing grid design and operations; * the last thing a grid needs is a meaningful amount of random feed-in that it can’t centrally (and near-instantly) manage; * the costs of home-scale labor/permits/whatever are only the biggest ones from the perspective of toting up individual homeowners considering uneconomical projects, not from utility-scale (much less whole-polity-scale) scratchwork… would an army of volunteer homeowners’ labor really still outperform specialist labor installing hundreds-of-homes’ worth of capacity per day at an energy facility somewhere? * the thing holding back the “explosion of products,” consumerist-salvation overtones aside, seems more likely to be {physics vs the existing built environment} than permits—that, plus the lack of a mass market; * one barrier to “plug and play” is that said plugs are safe only because of an interlocking set of assumptions upstream of said plugs—which definitely do not contemplate feeding back in whole-home current from a random convenience outlet on your front porch; * Rate tiers are an economic device to influence consumption patterns under the status quo. As the Californians are learning, there’s a hard floor on the price of “having a grid” vs “not having a grid”; as consumption patterns shift, rate schemes can and must shift too; * building codes care about safety, grids and ISOs and energy providers care about capacity and stability. Players on grids can realize enormous economies of scale with respect to pretty much any generation or storage technology. The bottleneck you describe is… I dunno, man… the only bottleneck to energy too cheap to meter is fusion, obviously all we have to do is just go crack fusion and we’ll have a fusion pot on every stove! I love your sense of empowerment; I’d encourage you to bring it to bear at a scale where it matters— much bigger than a home, much smaller than a whole polity… I think there are benefits to decentralization and to independence but I don’t think those are the benefits you’re emphasizing here.
  - thelastgallon 2mo ago
    > * code, especially in the huge fundamental aspects, tends to flow from the NEC downward, rather than from municipal experiments in playing with literal fire. Not insurmountable, I guess, but it seems like a pretty big chicken-and-egg kind of obstacle to your proposed course of action; UL 3700 exists. Local efforts are underway to let anyone use plug-in sola without contractors, permits, utility approval: https://pluginsolarusa.com/ https://pluginsolarusa.com/ > individual household demand is several orders of magnitude removed from the considerations informing grid design and operations; The grid connects millions of individual homes. I'm not sure what you are trying to say here? > the last thing a grid needs is a meaningful amount of random feed-in that it can’t centrally (and near-instantly) manage; Plug-in solar or batteries do not feed in to the grid. They are for consumption within the home. > the costs of home-scale labor/permits/whatever are only the biggest ones from the perspective of toting up individual homeowners considering uneconomical projects, not from utility-scale (much less whole-polity-scale) scratchwork… would an army of volunteer homeowners’ labor really still outperform specialist labor installing hundreds-of-homes’ worth of capacity per day at an energy facility somewhere? There is no work involved other than just plugging it in. There is no volunteer home owners labor. Even if there is, it is their own home. When you turn the lights on, do you add that to your spreadsheet of volunteer home owners labor? Or do you consider plugging a cable into an outlet a big task that should require contractors, project managers, managers, directors, forecasts, estimates, daily standups? If thats your view, thats understandable, most enterprises work that way. > the thing holding back the “explosion of products,” consumerist-salvation overtones aside, seems more likely to be {physics vs the existing built environment} than permits—that, plus the lack of a mass market; plug-in battery uses existing built environment. Thats the whole point. > one barrier to “plug and play” is that said plugs are safe only because of an interlocking set of assumptions upstream of said plugs—which definitely do not contemplate feeding back in whole-home current from a random convenience outlet on your front porch; I don't know what you are trying to say here. It sounds like corporate speak: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QmAbQMukB4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QmAbQMukB4 > Rate tiers are an economic device to influence consumption patterns under the status quo. As the Californians are learning, there’s a hard floor on the price of “having a grid” vs “not having a grid”; as consumption patterns shift, rate schemes can and must shift too; Rate tiers are a politically convenient way to hide cost-recovery problems, cross-subsidize favored groups, and extract revenue while pretending the underlying cost structure of the grid is volume-driven when large parts of it are not. California homeowners are buying record numbers of home batteries to pair with solar panels. If the rates are entirely unreasonable, homeowners will go offgrid. California homeowners are smart enough to figure out how to freeze property taxes close to zero, I'm sure they will figure out the right laws when electricity rates become unreasonable. > building codes care about safety, grids and ISOs and energy providers care about capacity and stability. Players on grids can realize enormous economies of scale with respect to pretty much any generation or storage technology. The bottleneck you describe is… Yeah, just leave it to the utilities and regulators, they have nothing but consumers best interest at heart. > I dunno, man… the only bottleneck to energy too cheap to meter is fusion, obviously all we have to do is just go crack fusion and we’ll have a fusion pot on every stove! plug-in batteries are impossible and require home owners volunteer labor, but fusion, it can manifest from thin air!
- lazide 2mo ago
  [flagged]
Aurornis 2mo ago
In more well-run locations, power companies are providing incentives to install batteries because they help reduce the load on the grid. These are plug-in solutions, though. The whole idea is that a permit isn’t required. If approved in your area, you don’t need to work with the power company at all. You just buy one and plug it in. The plug-in stuff doesn’t play by the same rules as the big installs.
- skew-aberration 2mo ago
  Yes, and non plugin-in batteries don't just need a permit - typically the power company also directly controls the battery, via a web API that the manufacturer provides (at least in Australia, this is a condition for access to the incentives).
  - Aurornis 2mo ago
    For the incentive programs you need to submit to a virtual power program so the power company can coordinate the fleet. For normal non-subsidized installations here you don’t need to let the power company control it.
dghlsakjg 2mo ago
These are problems not inherent to solar, but to places that are underdeveloped and under-regulated. Plenty of places in modern and developing countries don’t have these issues.
appplication 2mo ago
The solar situation in CA is truly mind boggling for a state that is ostensibly progressive.
- labcomputer 2mo ago
  It’s not just solar. Property taxes increase at a rate legally-mandated to be less than inflation. Not just that, you can inherit your parents (or grandparents) property tax rate. Didn’t have parents who owned property in 1978 (shortly after racial covenants were declared unconstitutional)? Well, why don’t you just go fuck yourself? Everywhere you look are policies that are ostensibly progressive, but actually quite regressive.
  - hparadiz 2mo ago
    That doesn't really matter when you're buying a house in CA. It's a relatively small percentage of a difference in my overall mortgage. I'd rather have Prop 13 even if that means some people inherit a tax break. Homes that stay in a family have less administrative churn and keep neighborhoods more stable in the long term.
mkozlows 2mo ago
It's not a scam. Connecting to the grid has enormous value, and keeping the grid up has real costs. A model where your generation pays you retail prices doesn't make sense. California's current net metering system, which is more reflective of the true benefits and costs of solar to the power system, has been incentivizing people to add storage to keep their solar rather than get paid big money to feed back midday low-value solar, which is a big win.
- zugi 2mo ago
  > Connecting to the grid has enormous value Yet in most locales it's illegal to disconnect from the grid. If disconnection were legal for those who want to be energy self-sufficient, then charging just to connect would be more defensible.
  - bsder 2mo ago
    > Yet in most locales it's illegal to disconnect from the grid. That's kind of ... required? Otherwise you have a bunch of people who are off the grid until the sun doesn't shine for a week and they run their batteries down and then they all try to connect simultaneously and collapse your grid. Most places I know of don't care if you never connect to the grid--you get your exemption and get on with life. However, once you are connected to the grid even once, the grid operator has to size things for the worst case when everybody is connected to the grid and drawing power and work things out for stability when everybody disconnects and they have to back off generation. At that point, the grid operator is well within their rights to demand that you comply with cooperative regulations like making a request to connect/disconnect from the grid itself.
    - labcomputer 2mo ago
      Are you being deliberately obtuse? It is illegal to discontinue your relationship with your local electrical utility. As in, completely disconnect from the grid, cut the wires and never look back. As the previous poster said, charging for the “privilege” of connecting to the enormously-valuable grid would be a little bit defensible if having a connection were not legally required in most places.
jampa 2mo ago
The new rule here requires you to pay for part of your imports (up to ~60%), even if you export more. I know people who installed batteries in the inverters because of this. It is more expensive overall (hybrid inverter + LFP batteries) but has other benefits (blackouts are not a problem, most months you don't even use the grid). I imagine that once sodium-ion battery production scales and costs decline, this will become the "default" option for a solar installation.
searealist 2mo ago
NEM 3.0 is more fair. The grid is expensive and just as expensive if it is needed to be fully utilized 1% of the time or 100% of the time. The problem is California forcing new construction to buy overpriced solar from builders that makes little sense compared to commercial solar installations + grid.
fortran77 2mo ago
When we got our solar system in CA, our electric bill went to zero. We calculated the payback to be 9 years. Eventually, they stopped buying back electricity and changed the way they metered and our bill was as high as ever. We save a bit because we're able to charge our electric car at times of peak PV output. We left California last year for this and many other reasons. They just don't want anyone to be productive here.
- aaomidi 2mo ago
  Literally one of the most productive states of the entire world btw
  - hparadiz 2mo ago
    It's not even close too.
- chris222 2mo ago
  Dishonest post. When you bought your system you were grandfathered into either NEM 1 or NEM 2. Please provide proof that your arrangement changed.
  - hparadiz 2mo ago
    NEM 2.0 doesn't pay as much anymore but that could just be increased grid electricity costs.
perpetuallunch 2mo ago
Similarly here in Australia. Electricity prices keep increasing, daily supply charge keeps increasing (this ones supposed to pay for the transmission network), while the solar feed-in tariff keeps decreasing. With the added stupidity that, obviously the sun works during the day and so do you. Now tax payers are forced to subsidies residential batteries as well as rooftop solar, which results in a wealth transfer from everyone else to home owners, and isn’t a policy that helps low income earners and / or renters. It’s also government picking winners, which historically has never worked, rather than letting private enterprise pick winners, and potentially failing, in an open and free market. Wild.
- chris222 2mo ago
  Australia has been a great success for solar and battery storage. Your statement about a wealth transfer is putting no value on climate change or good air quality which benefits all.
  - perpetuallunch 2mo ago
    No it hasn’t. What it has done is resulted in ridiculously high electricity prices, such that manufacturing anything in this country has become progressively less viable. The Net Zero story sold to Australians is, and always was always will be, complete bs, as evidenced by three facts: 1) It’s no longer the narrative, because “data centres” and 2) even when it was the narrative, it was always bs because Australia exports huge amounts of gas, and a metric ship load of coal, so other countries can have affordable electricity. So why don’t we just use it. There’s only one atmosphere. and 3) Australia could double or triple its emissions and it would have approximately no additional impact on total atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. We haven’t reduced our emissions, we’ve merely exported them. In before you say “shut up Pauline”, yes I did vote One Nation at the last federal election. And if you’re so sure I’m just drowning in koolaid, how certain are you you aren’t? Remember the good old days when governments weren’t to be trusted and we criticised them when they laid out idiotic policy?
    - deleted 2mo ago
labcomputer 2mo ago
> Why bother? Power companies will complain they are losing money and regulators will allow them to buy energy from residential solar panels basically for free (NEM 3.0). The way I would see this working is that you charge the batteries when electricity is cheap (generally, midnight through early afternoon), and then run the house (not supply the grid) the rest of the time. LFPs are cheap enough now that a strategy like this would pay back after about 2 years. If they try to adapt with a “NEM 4.0”, the whole thing will collapse because solar and LFPs are so cheap that everyone will just pay their mandatory $50/month grid connection fee and not buy any electricity from the grid.
pkulak 2mo ago
If being connected to the grid is a "scam", then disconnect. Buy 100 grand worth of batteries (which still may not get you through the winter), and pull the ol' plug.

thelastgallon 2mo ago

Completely agree with you, Govts sacred duty is to protect the super rich and utilities are the biggest monopolized cash cows (Eg: Warren Buffet). However,if people work with their local governments and change the building code to allow plug-in solar and plug-in batteries, that will continuously upgrade every home to become more and more energy independent and with the explosion of products, eventually be grid free. The biggest costs are labor, permits and delays; if its just products that people can plug and play, the adoption will be faster than just rooftop solar (or rooftop + batteries). Also, most utilities have tiered rates (higher utilization at higher rates), if you can have plug in systems that can bring the total kwh down, it immediately lowers the peak rate. The only bottleneck is making products that are safe to plug in, and this will happen as building code creates a standard to plug-in.

alwa 2mo ago
So… @lazide replied with a hahaha. It got flagged to death, understandably. If it were anybody but @lazide I’d have flagged it too, but… I can’t help but grimace and nod. To hazard a loosely-informed guess at their subtext… and politely ignoring your opening salvo of calorie-free populism… I’m not speaking from a place of certainty, but my impression is that there seem to be elements of “not even wrong” here. Some contra- lines of argument: * code, especially in the huge fundamental aspects, tends to flow from the NEC downward, rather than from municipal experiments in playing with literal fire. Not insurmountable, I guess, but it seems like a pretty big chicken-and-egg kind of obstacle to your proposed course of action; * individual household demand is several orders of magnitude removed from the considerations informing grid design and operations; * the last thing a grid needs is a meaningful amount of random feed-in that it can’t centrally (and near-instantly) manage; * the costs of home-scale labor/permits/whatever are only the biggest ones from the perspective of toting up individual homeowners considering uneconomical projects, not from utility-scale (much less whole-polity-scale) scratchwork… would an army of volunteer homeowners’ labor really still outperform specialist labor installing hundreds-of-homes’ worth of capacity per day at an energy facility somewhere? * the thing holding back the “explosion of products,” consumerist-salvation overtones aside, seems more likely to be {physics vs the existing built environment} than permits—that, plus the lack of a mass market; * one barrier to “plug and play” is that said plugs are safe only because of an interlocking set of assumptions upstream of said plugs—which definitely do not contemplate feeding back in whole-home current from a random convenience outlet on your front porch; * Rate tiers are an economic device to influence consumption patterns under the status quo. As the Californians are learning, there’s a hard floor on the price of “having a grid” vs “not having a grid”; as consumption patterns shift, rate schemes can and must shift too; * building codes care about safety, grids and ISOs and energy providers care about capacity and stability. Players on grids can realize enormous economies of scale with respect to pretty much any generation or storage technology. The bottleneck you describe is… I dunno, man… the only bottleneck to energy too cheap to meter is fusion, obviously all we have to do is just go crack fusion and we’ll have a fusion pot on every stove! I love your sense of empowerment; I’d encourage you to bring it to bear at a scale where it matters— much bigger than a home, much smaller than a whole polity… I think there are benefits to decentralization and to independence but I don’t think those are the benefits you’re emphasizing here.
- thelastgallon 2mo ago
  > * code, especially in the huge fundamental aspects, tends to flow from the NEC downward, rather than from municipal experiments in playing with literal fire. Not insurmountable, I guess, but it seems like a pretty big chicken-and-egg kind of obstacle to your proposed course of action; UL 3700 exists. Local efforts are underway to let anyone use plug-in sola without contractors, permits, utility approval: https://pluginsolarusa.com/ https://pluginsolarusa.com/ > individual household demand is several orders of magnitude removed from the considerations informing grid design and operations; The grid connects millions of individual homes. I'm not sure what you are trying to say here? > the last thing a grid needs is a meaningful amount of random feed-in that it can’t centrally (and near-instantly) manage; Plug-in solar or batteries do not feed in to the grid. They are for consumption within the home. > the costs of home-scale labor/permits/whatever are only the biggest ones from the perspective of toting up individual homeowners considering uneconomical projects, not from utility-scale (much less whole-polity-scale) scratchwork… would an army of volunteer homeowners’ labor really still outperform specialist labor installing hundreds-of-homes’ worth of capacity per day at an energy facility somewhere? There is no work involved other than just plugging it in. There is no volunteer home owners labor. Even if there is, it is their own home. When you turn the lights on, do you add that to your spreadsheet of volunteer home owners labor? Or do you consider plugging a cable into an outlet a big task that should require contractors, project managers, managers, directors, forecasts, estimates, daily standups? If thats your view, thats understandable, most enterprises work that way. > the thing holding back the “explosion of products,” consumerist-salvation overtones aside, seems more likely to be {physics vs the existing built environment} than permits—that, plus the lack of a mass market; plug-in battery uses existing built environment. Thats the whole point. > one barrier to “plug and play” is that said plugs are safe only because of an interlocking set of assumptions upstream of said plugs—which definitely do not contemplate feeding back in whole-home current from a random convenience outlet on your front porch; I don't know what you are trying to say here. It sounds like corporate speak: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QmAbQMukB4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QmAbQMukB4 > Rate tiers are an economic device to influence consumption patterns under the status quo. As the Californians are learning, there’s a hard floor on the price of “having a grid” vs “not having a grid”; as consumption patterns shift, rate schemes can and must shift too; Rate tiers are a politically convenient way to hide cost-recovery problems, cross-subsidize favored groups, and extract revenue while pretending the underlying cost structure of the grid is volume-driven when large parts of it are not. California homeowners are buying record numbers of home batteries to pair with solar panels. If the rates are entirely unreasonable, homeowners will go offgrid. California homeowners are smart enough to figure out how to freeze property taxes close to zero, I'm sure they will figure out the right laws when electricity rates become unreasonable. > building codes care about safety, grids and ISOs and energy providers care about capacity and stability. Players on grids can realize enormous economies of scale with respect to pretty much any generation or storage technology. The bottleneck you describe is… Yeah, just leave it to the utilities and regulators, they have nothing but consumers best interest at heart. > I dunno, man… the only bottleneck to energy too cheap to meter is fusion, obviously all we have to do is just go crack fusion and we’ll have a fusion pot on every stove! plug-in batteries are impossible and require home owners volunteer labor, but fusion, it can manifest from thin air!
lazide 2mo ago
[flagged]

Aurornis 2mo ago

In more well-run locations, power companies are providing incentives to install batteries because they help reduce the load on the grid. These are plug-in solutions, though. The whole idea is that a permit isn’t required. If approved in your area, you don’t need to work with the power company at all. You just buy one and plug it in. The plug-in stuff doesn’t play by the same rules as the big installs.

skew-aberration 2mo ago
Yes, and non plugin-in batteries don't just need a permit - typically the power company also directly controls the battery, via a web API that the manufacturer provides (at least in Australia, this is a condition for access to the incentives).
- Aurornis 2mo ago
  For the incentive programs you need to submit to a virtual power program so the power company can coordinate the fleet. For normal non-subsidized installations here you don’t need to let the power company control it.

dghlsakjg 2mo ago

These are problems not inherent to solar, but to places that are underdeveloped and under-regulated. Plenty of places in modern and developing countries don’t have these issues.

appplication 2mo ago

The solar situation in CA is truly mind boggling for a state that is ostensibly progressive.

labcomputer 2mo ago
It’s not just solar. Property taxes increase at a rate legally-mandated to be less than inflation. Not just that, you can inherit your parents (or grandparents) property tax rate. Didn’t have parents who owned property in 1978 (shortly after racial covenants were declared unconstitutional)? Well, why don’t you just go fuck yourself? Everywhere you look are policies that are ostensibly progressive, but actually quite regressive.
- hparadiz 2mo ago
  That doesn't really matter when you're buying a house in CA. It's a relatively small percentage of a difference in my overall mortgage. I'd rather have Prop 13 even if that means some people inherit a tax break. Homes that stay in a family have less administrative churn and keep neighborhoods more stable in the long term.

mkozlows 2mo ago

It's not a scam. Connecting to the grid has enormous value, and keeping the grid up has real costs. A model where your generation pays you retail prices doesn't make sense. California's current net metering system, which is more reflective of the true benefits and costs of solar to the power system, has been incentivizing people to add storage to keep their solar rather than get paid big money to feed back midday low-value solar, which is a big win.

zugi 2mo ago
> Connecting to the grid has enormous value Yet in most locales it's illegal to disconnect from the grid. If disconnection were legal for those who want to be energy self-sufficient, then charging just to connect would be more defensible.
- bsder 2mo ago
  > Yet in most locales it's illegal to disconnect from the grid. That's kind of ... required? Otherwise you have a bunch of people who are off the grid until the sun doesn't shine for a week and they run their batteries down and then they all try to connect simultaneously and collapse your grid. Most places I know of don't care if you never connect to the grid--you get your exemption and get on with life. However, once you are connected to the grid even once, the grid operator has to size things for the worst case when everybody is connected to the grid and drawing power and work things out for stability when everybody disconnects and they have to back off generation. At that point, the grid operator is well within their rights to demand that you comply with cooperative regulations like making a request to connect/disconnect from the grid itself.
  - labcomputer 2mo ago
    Are you being deliberately obtuse? It is illegal to discontinue your relationship with your local electrical utility. As in, completely disconnect from the grid, cut the wires and never look back. As the previous poster said, charging for the “privilege” of connecting to the enormously-valuable grid would be a little bit defensible if having a connection were not legally required in most places.

jampa 2mo ago

The new rule here requires you to pay for part of your imports (up to ~60%), even if you export more. I know people who installed batteries in the inverters because of this. It is more expensive overall (hybrid inverter + LFP batteries) but has other benefits (blackouts are not a problem, most months you don't even use the grid). I imagine that once sodium-ion battery production scales and costs decline, this will become the "default" option for a solar installation.

searealist 2mo ago

NEM 3.0 is more fair. The grid is expensive and just as expensive if it is needed to be fully utilized 1% of the time or 100% of the time. The problem is California forcing new construction to buy overpriced solar from builders that makes little sense compared to commercial solar installations + grid.

fortran77 2mo ago

When we got our solar system in CA, our electric bill went to zero. We calculated the payback to be 9 years. Eventually, they stopped buying back electricity and changed the way they metered and our bill was as high as ever. We save a bit because we're able to charge our electric car at times of peak PV output. We left California last year for this and many other reasons. They just don't want anyone to be productive here.

aaomidi 2mo ago
Literally one of the most productive states of the entire world btw
- hparadiz 2mo ago
  It's not even close too.
chris222 2mo ago
Dishonest post. When you bought your system you were grandfathered into either NEM 1 or NEM 2. Please provide proof that your arrangement changed.
- hparadiz 2mo ago
  NEM 2.0 doesn't pay as much anymore but that could just be increased grid electricity costs.

perpetuallunch 2mo ago

Similarly here in Australia. Electricity prices keep increasing, daily supply charge keeps increasing (this ones supposed to pay for the transmission network), while the solar feed-in tariff keeps decreasing. With the added stupidity that, obviously the sun works during the day and so do you. Now tax payers are forced to subsidies residential batteries as well as rooftop solar, which results in a wealth transfer from everyone else to home owners, and isn’t a policy that helps low income earners and / or renters. It’s also government picking winners, which historically has never worked, rather than letting private enterprise pick winners, and potentially failing, in an open and free market. Wild.

chris222 2mo ago
Australia has been a great success for solar and battery storage. Your statement about a wealth transfer is putting no value on climate change or good air quality which benefits all.
- perpetuallunch 2mo ago
  No it hasn’t. What it has done is resulted in ridiculously high electricity prices, such that manufacturing anything in this country has become progressively less viable. The Net Zero story sold to Australians is, and always was always will be, complete bs, as evidenced by three facts: 1) It’s no longer the narrative, because “data centres” and 2) even when it was the narrative, it was always bs because Australia exports huge amounts of gas, and a metric ship load of coal, so other countries can have affordable electricity. So why don’t we just use it. There’s only one atmosphere. and 3) Australia could double or triple its emissions and it would have approximately no additional impact on total atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. We haven’t reduced our emissions, we’ve merely exported them. In before you say “shut up Pauline”, yes I did vote One Nation at the last federal election. And if you’re so sure I’m just drowning in koolaid, how certain are you you aren’t? Remember the good old days when governments weren’t to be trusted and we criticised them when they laid out idiotic policy?
  - deleted 2mo ago

labcomputer 2mo ago

> Why bother? Power companies will complain they are losing money and regulators will allow them to buy energy from residential solar panels basically for free (NEM 3.0). The way I would see this working is that you charge the batteries when electricity is cheap (generally, midnight through early afternoon), and then run the house (not supply the grid) the rest of the time. LFPs are cheap enough now that a strategy like this would pay back after about 2 years. If they try to adapt with a “NEM 4.0”, the whole thing will collapse because solar and LFPs are so cheap that everyone will just pay their mandatory $50/month grid connection fee and not buy any electricity from the grid.

pkulak 2mo ago

If being connected to the grid is a "scam", then disconnect. Buy 100 grand worth of batteries (which still may not get you through the winter), and pull the ol' plug.