United States | News & Politics

I agree. I have solar, in NH. I did not ever expect to get a $0 monthly bill, as I thought the 'customer charge' would never be covered by excess generation. But in our NEM plan, it is. As are delivery charges - because delivery charges are based on kWh consumed.

But you know what, I'll take it as it is. Because I get paid $0.25 on the dollar of what I generate on the roof. Indeed, for every four kWh I generate, I am paid for one.

But in NH ... We have essentially no state subsidies for solar. There sa $1000 max incentive. And it's a lottery as we don't generate enough tax revenue to give it to everyone that installs solar.

May I also just say I firmly believe all electric utilities should be public, not private. I'm very insensitive to the suffering of the profits of private utilities that drag their feet approving interconnection applications and defer maintence of their grid while also holding tax payers hostage during emergencies.

You’d think so, but companies like PG&E have spent the past 50 years not maintaining their infrastructure. As a result, they’re not equipped to handle multi-input supply efficiently, and are now having to add a bunch of expensive equipment to their network where they’ve spent the past 50 years getting subsidies that went into management bonuses instead of building out the grid.

It’s not like they didn’t know this was coming; the 1970s were the start of the solar revolution, and the incumbents have fought it every step of the way, for years refusing to take excess energy into the grid because they weren’t set up for it. But when the government responded with “why not? What have you been doing with the money we’ve been giving you to do precisely that?” they grudgingly complied and demanded more money.

So this is all about the downsides of privatization, just like all the fires caused by unmaintained electrical equipment.

How does the power from your panels get to your neighbors if not over the grid?

Asking the right questions over here. This is pretty clearly a billing method problem - mixing infrastructure maintenance charges in with electrical generation charges so that people who use more electricity pay more for infrastructure maintenance, which seemed like a fair way of doing things in a time before cheap, decentralized power generation.

I'm no industry expert, but it seems like maintenance costs are tied to the potential to deliver electricity rather than the actual delivery - systems need to be sized for peak load. So a fix for the billing problem might be to remove the cost of maintenance from the cost of generation, adding a line item to customer's bills to cover infrastructure maintenance, and for the size of that charge to be proportional to the potential peak load that customer places on the grid rather than their actual usage.

Billing, in my experience, is predominantly based on usage. For each kWh of use, you get charged x% for generation, y% for distribution, and z% for tax. I'm sure some providers do use a flat charge for some things. Originally, electric meters were pretty dumb and analog, so they could only track net electricity through the meter. Lots of companies have rolled out smarter meters that can track how much is sold back to the grid so they can adjust the price accordingly. I think loads of places still have the older style of meter; I know I do. Companies basically have to weigh the costs of replacing all the meters with the benefits of that extra bit of money.

I've never had to hook up a new place to infrastructure (though I did have to price it out once before deciding it wasn't worth it), but yeah, it'll just be a flat cost.

To steal a metaphor from my other comment, though, the way it works right now is like if you could grow a bunch of tomatoes over the summer and drop your extra off at the grocery store, and then when the winter comes around, you just went and grabbed the same amount off their shelves. It's disregarding the fact that tomatoes cost more in the winter cause they have to be imported or hothouse grown.

To continue the metaphor, though, they would need to pay an employee to check all your tomatoes to make sure they were safe to eat and up to standards, and make sure there aren't pests hitching a ride that would destroy their own tomatoes. This is made a little more complicated by the fact that grocery stores can and do charge more for those tomatoes during the winter, but power companies usually have to offer a flat rate. What they are trying to do now is price all of that in, so instead of getting the year-round on-the-shelf price, you'd get the summer wholesale price. At that point, you'd decide if you still want to sell your tomatoes, or you could start canning.

Which part?

Decentralized power generation can be good for redundancy/resilency/off-the-grid purposes, but if you want the highest efficiency, you need large scale, centrally engineered not-for-profit projects.

According to the op-ed

Those groups make the case that large solar farms produce electricity at a far lower cost than rooftop panels.

Which is kind of short on details. Googling, I see:

2019 non-partisan estimates put the midpoint unsubsidised levelised cost for residential rooftop solar at 20¢/kWh, for commercial/industrial rooftop solar at 11¢/kWh, and for grid-scale solar at 4¢/kWh. That’s a big gap.

As the author says, that's a big gap.

If we just called them freedom panels adoption would be so much faster. Then if everyone had panels it would be decentralized.

I think they should move to subsidising home batteries instead, just to smooth out the peaks and troughs that come with renewables. If you do that, and add some smarts to electric car chargers you'd be able to remove the need for fossil powered peaker plants. Solar is generating more than can be used on some days, and we need to focus on time shifting load and generation when possible.

In theory you’re not wrong. The problems with this in practice are several, which I won’t go into, except to say that it’s a very American/individualistic/neoliberal solution to what is a collective problem.