California strikes another blow against rooftop solar
California strikes another blow against rooftop solar
We need to stop arguing and start working together on a crucial climate solution.
But critics insist the costs of those solar panels are beginning to outweigh the benefits.
Incentive payments to homes with solar, they say, have led to higher electricity rates for everyone else — including families that can’t afford rooftop panels. If so, that’s not only unfair, it’s damaging to the state’s climate progress. Higher electricity rates make it less likely that people will drive electric cars and install electric heat pumps in their homes — crucial climate solutions.
The solar industry disputes the argument that solar incentive payments are driving up rates, as do many environmental activists. But Newsom’s appointees to the Public Utilities Commission are convinced, as they made clear Thursday.
“We need to reach our [climate] goals as fast as we can,” said Alice Reynolds, the commission’s president. “But we also need to be extremely thoughtful about how we reach our climate change goals in the most cost-effective manner.”
When I am having a stroke, I don't stop and calculate of the most cost effective treatment options. I go to the emergency room. We could have done this calculation in 1970 and acted, but that ship has sailed.
Sounds more like the electric company doesn’t like cheap energy. Gotta maximize that profit!
California should eminent domain PG&E, SCE, etc., and run the whole system as a public service.
Sure seems to me that the California Utilities Commission is serving the big utility corporations at the expense of people wanting rooftop solar, and at the expense of our renewable energy future. Solar is cutting into their profits.
This would all be so much simpler if power wasn’t a private company.
Sacramento has SMUD, which is so much better than PG&E that it's actually kinda hard to believe.
The article doesn't explain this, so I will. Anyone with solar panels who is still tied to the grid is still reliant on the grid. Any time they are not actively generating, they are pulling from the grid. Electricity costs are only partially generation; much of the cost is distribution infrastructure. People with enough solar to run their electric meter at a net negative are not paying their share of that infrastructure, and that cost goes to anyone else. People with solar panels are wealthier than those without due to the fact that you have to own a home to take advantage. Essentially, home solar subsidies are a wealth transfer from the poor to the rich. There are more equitable ways to make climate goals. It's the same problem with subsidizing electric cars.
i have three costs on my bill:
- generation
- distribution
- tax
rooftop solar should only reduce the first line
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.
That infrastructure would already have to be there without the solar panels on the roof. The electric company also gets excess power generated by the home sold to it at a discount.
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.
That infrastructure would already have to be there without the solar panels on the roof
Exactly, that's the whole problem. Maintenance of that connection costs money, and unless you have large amounts of battery storage, you are still using power generated by the electric company.
The electric company also gets excess power generated by the home sold to it at a discount.
Often, this is not the case at all. If 50% of electricity costs are generation, but someone's solar panels run the meter backward, the electric company is basically paying that homeowner double the going rate.
How does the billing work over there? Here in NZ, we pay a line charge and a unit rate, and power companies will buy power from rooftop solar at a lower rate than what they sell it for.
The buy price is typically half what they sell for.
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.
Isn't there typically a flat rate to cover the costs of hooking up to infrastructure?
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.
Every dollar the state spends on subsidizing private individuals’ renewable energy projects is a dollar the state can’t spend on public, at-scale renewal energy projects.
I don't understand. What's the difference? One one hand, energy production is distributed and on the other it's centralized.
What I mean is, if eveyone had solar then we would have a "public, at-scale renewable energy project"
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.
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.
Here in the uk we stopped subsidising private green energy a while ago, and it’s still worthwhile to install solar - we pay our energy supplier (one of a few privatised options) for the connection and infrastructure, and any power we use, and they pay us for the power we put back into the grid. Essentially, a portion of the money we earn from our power is kept by the utility company to cover infrastructure maintenance, and we still make money. I very much doubt that the base power generation or infrastructure costs in the us are so much higher as to stop it making money for homeowners without subsidies, unless (as I’d imagine) the local power generation is a monopoly, and they’re just trying to protect their profits. Solar became cheap enough to be genuinely profitable without subsidies here a few years back.
Did I miss the bit where they say how much roof top solar subsidies are increasing electricity rates? If it's one of two percent, that seems like it could be okay. If it's twenty or fifty percent, then maybe it's time to rethink.
According to a quick Google, distribution of electric, basically keeping the grid going, is 40% of the average cost. For anyone who makes enough solar to make their meter net 0, they aren't paying that 40%, so it gets distributed to anyone too poor to afford a house and solar panels
If roof top solar is so essential then just make it mandatory. Stop fiddling with market incentives or, better yet, built more state run nuclear.
Incentive payments to homes with solar, they say, have led to higher electricity rates for everyone else — including families that can’t afford rooftop panels.
If they can't afford rooftop panels, but can afford traditional generation, the rates aren't yet high enough.
So, you'd like to see a world where people either install rooftop solar, regardless of practicality, or just don't have power?