I make the investment and then don’t get the return. Sounds about right for the criminals at PG&E and their paid for people in office. Time to turn them into a not for profit public institution.
PG&E was literally the villain in the real life Erin Brockovich story.
It’s so weird that a basic public utility is totally owned by a private company. Roads and water are maintained by the government in my county. Why not power?
Power, water, internet, healthcare, education, transit, there’s a lot of things that should be public utilities or at least with a convincing public option because of the clear conflict of interest between private corporations and social benefit, but aren’t, because money controls politics.
I mean, the existing scheme is economically-problematic, because it means that non-solar-generation users are subsidizing solar-generation-users grid connections.
The utilities have two separate set of costs, one from providing the grid connection, and the other from providing power over it.
Traditionally, because the two were linked for practical purposes, utilities just generated their revenue from charging a fee based on electricity use.
But they became decoupled when home solar power generation became more-common. That caused people who were doing solar power generation to not just not pay for electricity being provided – which is fine, they’re providing that – but also to not pay the costs of keeping the grid available, which is not. Under the traditional billing system, those grid maintenance costs were transferred to people – who statistically are poorer, another point of contention – weren’t doing home solar power generation.
Having a grid connection provides value to solar generation users. It means reliability, and ability to scale up. It costs something to provide that. And the folks who are incurring the cost and benefiting from it should pay those costs.
And yeah, I agree that it makes solar less-advantageous, and some rooftop solar users got sold a bill of goods by rooftop solar installers who promised that their rooftop solar would make more economic sense than it did, because they could exploit that billing inefficiency. But the point is, it was a bad policy, and rooftop solar installers had no ability to guarantee that it would continue.
If you’ve got rooftop solar, you can still avoid paying for the electricity that you’re generating rather than pulling from the grid. You just have to pay your share of the grid maintenance cost. Or, if you really don’t need that connectivity and you legitimately feel that you’re better off off-grid – which I suspect is probably not the case for most people – you can just cut off from the grid. The only thing you can’t do is have grid access and have non-solar-rooftop generation customers subsidize that grid access.
We already pay a grid connect fee and on top of that we purchased over 10k in hardware and we make it so their needs to be less grid upgrades and we provide our excess power for 8 cents a kw for NO hardware cost to them. Sounds like they are getting a nice deal. But of course that is not nice enough for PG&E they want it all.
Utilities have avoided infrastructure development such as more solar generators, rooftop solar buyback incentives.
They avoided power storage development too.
They now complain that there’s too much fluctuation between peak solar hours and have to charge the people that were taking action on their own to avoid excessive power costs to make ends meet.
Daamn how can one plan so poorly….
They had money rolling in for decades, why would you need a plan?
Maybe to keep on rolling 🤔
Fred Durst never made a plan in his damn life
It doesn’t really seem like net metering is sustainable. Say for example someone generates the same amount of electricity they use, in that case they pay $0 for electricity even though the grid has to take the burden of storing the electricity until they use it later in the day.
It doesn’t really seem like net metering is sustainable.
Not sure why you think that.
Say for example someone generates the same amount of electricity they use, in that case they pay $0 for electricity even though the grid has to take the burden of storing the electricity until they use it later in the day.
The grid isn’t storing their energy - it’s sending it to other customers, meaning that non-sustainable, polluting energy sources don’t have to be generated.
The only time that’s not true is when the net load on the grid dips below zero. According to the duck curve graph from the article, it does appear to be very briefly dipping for a very brief time period each day. At that point it could make sense to store the rest, but if the grid doesn’t have storage capacity then any excess is “wasted,” but at that point the grid engages in a process known as “curtailment,” which means it rejects the excess, meaning that nobody gets credit later for energy that isn’t used now.
Also, curtailment is often not because the grid itself is over-supplied, but because specific regions are over-supplied and the grid lacks transmission lines from them to regions where demand is higher.
in that case they pay $0 for electricity
True under NEM 1.0, but NEM 2.0 also includes “non-bypassable charges” - components of pulling from the grid that cannot be offset by what they contribute. Those charges are roughly 5% as far as I can tell, meaning that if they pulled $300 worth of energy from the grid and sent back $300 worth (or more), they’d still owe $15.
Sure, but if everyone does it then it wouldn’t work (no one would be drawing excess when the solar is at peak), so that makes it not very sustainable. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, just that it can’t continue to work if adoption becomes near-universal (it doesn’t seem to be for now). I guess these non-bypassable charges will fix that, but that sounds a lot like what they are talking about (only getting paid some large percentage of the price for energy sent to the grid).
Everything you’re saying is wrong.
We only have a stable grid now because the hottest days produce the most solar to power ac. Our grid would have collapsed otherwise .
In the past we had huge demand swings during the course of a single day, as factories and offices burned power, then people went home to cook food and run their laundry.
Solar helped that greatly, coupled with fracking gas which allowed us to plant ge90 turbines everywhere for nothing and have we extremely dispatchable power for load following.
Especially since bulbs went led and now might generation is much more manageable.
But mentally defective utilities can’t do the sane thing and write an API so that EV’s can coordinate charging to balance load.
The problem with utilities is that they’re stuffed to the gills with the idiot relatives of politicians who couldn’t get jobs anywhere else.
I didn’t say net metering isn’t useful now, I said it wouldn’t work if a large majority of people did it. I don’t see how what you said contradicts that.
Sure, but if everyone does it then it wouldn’t work (no one would be drawing excess when the solar is at peak)
If everyone did it then electric companies could prioritize investing in batteries and capacitors and further reduce their reliance on fossil fuels.
If everyone did it, then even without extra storage capacity, net metering would still work. You don’t get credits for generating energy, just for sending it to the grid. All they have to do is the same thing they already do - curtailment.
Finally, it’s impossible for everyone to be on net metering because NEM 3.0 doesn’t have net metering and NEM 1.0 and 2.0 are only available if you’re grandfathered in.
If oversupply were really a concern, then you’d think the prices during oversupply would reflect that, dropping to basically nothing. They don’t. If they did, then EVs could be charged for super cheap when solar power was flooding the grid.
that sounds a lot like what they are talking about
What they’re talking about is revoking the law that grandfathered people into NEM 1.0 and 2.0 contracts. Keep in mind, the people who purchased solar under NEM 1.0 and 2.0 did so under the presumption that they would be able to stay on it for at least 20 years (because that was codified in law).000
only getting paid some large percentage of the price for energy sent to the grid
NEM 3.0 reduces the way credits are calculated to, on average, 25% of what they were before, and that are not the same as the retail rate.
https://aurorasolar.com/blog/explaining-and-modeling-californias-net-billing-tariff-nem-3-0/ has some examples. At the same time that electricity from the grid costs $0.44/kWh, solar sent to the grid only returns a $0.05/kWh credit.
5 cents is not a large percentage of 44 cents.
If your neighbor has solar and you charge your EV in the middle of a sunny day when your neighbor is at work, you’re probably using your neighbor’s electricity to do so. That’s gonna cost you $15 and net your neighbor a $1.71 credit.
Under NEM 1.0 and 2.0, if you import from and export to the grid in the same hour, those amounts are netted, even before NBCs come into effect. But under NEM 3.0, you could get billed for importing in the same hour even if you exported far more than you used. If you imported 1 kWh from the grid, you’d need to export 9 kWh to break even.
Again, this doesn’t make sense. Someone is paying $0.44/kWh for the energy you exported, but you’re only getting $0.05 credit for it.
If your solar system has storage, you can strategically export energy to the grid when the compensation is higher. That’s something you can consider when installing your solar system… but that’s not true for the people who are grandfathered into NEM 1.0 and 2.0, who knew they were grandfathered in by law.
And from what I’ve heard, even that doesn’t actually help that much, because the credits don’t apply to the largest part of the bill - they apply to “generation,” not to “delivery.” I haven’t found a reliable source confirming that, but if true it just adds insult to injury - if you pay the added cost to install an intelligent storage system and configure it to return money to the grid when their costs are highest, you get a credit equal to the cost you helped them avoid, but then the credit’s actually only usable on a small portion of your bill. If the calculations are based on avoided cost, you should get those credits even if it means the electric company is paying you.
