This is harder than folks give credit. Folks want to leverage their own solar power for cheap, clean power; but they still want the availability of the grid for those moments when the sun isn't shining and the batteries are dry. The grid is expensive, and these folks are trying to avoid paying their share because the pricing scheme assumes that availability is highly correlated with actual usage.
The more self reliance individual customers have, the harder it is for generation plants to stay profitable. Break equilibrium stuff by adding more solar and seeing how it gets sustainably fixed might not be a terrible idea, but it is hard.
To be fair, it's possible to fix the pricing scheme.
I currently pay a bit over $40/month for a natural gas connection and a bit under $0.40/month (total) for the actual gas consumed by our stove top, our only gas appliance. (We'll probably go induction eventually, but it works for now.)
Of course, I don't generate gas and sell it back to the utility, but the point still stands that the electric utility could fix their pricing to correctly charge for availability and usage.
If this was actually above board and helpful, they wouldn't need any kind of coalition to do it, they would just build solar and sell it. But no, they are trying to do the easy part, and let the hard part fall on others.
And it doesn't help that they have requirements relating to the income of the end consumer! That's a sure sign of something that isn't useful on its own, rather they have other goals.
Yeah, the other side of the debate has legitimate points about free riders. This article dismisses them mostly by calling them names like "investor owned".
One reason for them being called investor owned is many people own solar systems based on leases which means you don't own the panels on your house, the company that installed them does. This is to distinguish between owned by the consumers of power vs corps.
You are talking as if this is an impasse. There are other things they can do, like fast expiring credits, or give users an ability to charge their car for free at work, when they can generate equivalent power at home, but don't let credits rollover.
This is not a consumers vs producers zero-sum issue. There are always more uses for cheap power. Desalination, agriculture, extracting water from air etc. The cheaper the energy we can produce, the better off everyone will be.
It's not an unsolvable impasse, but it's tricky. Just the technological mechanisms for your example proposals are rather hard; the economic and social problems are even harder.
> This is not a consumers vs producers zero-sum issue.
It's not zero sum, but if we externalize the entire cost of the infrastructure onto people who cannot deploy solar, it will be very inequitable; that's been the default path we've been on.
And it's going to be an issue of significant debate what exactly is equitable and good policy.
> The cheaper the energy we can produce, the better off everyone will be.
This is a good point. But it only holds if the benefits of the cheaper energy accrue to society in general. It does not hold if it goes entirely to the ones who have built the means of generation. Which ironically, unlikely almost every other economic situation, is the small indie consumers! The big players and the grid operators are the ones that get squeezed out and, as a result, causes harm to the majority of normal individuals.
Off the grid cabins frequently use a hybrid setup, where a (typically) propane generator refills the batteries during extreme load or whenever they dip below n%. It's handled by a smart system that can optimize for house temperature, minimum propane or electricity used, etc.
This works very well because you rarely need it and propane has a fixed, predictable cost. Unfortunately, it doesn't work in CA due to their rules about generators.
The specifics in CA are, the utilities want rich customers to subsidize the grid costs for poor customers. That is, you will pay for your grid connection based on your income, not usage.
If they go through with that I am going to feel so cheated. I live in a 1br apartment, in a dense city, using 2kwh a day, and they want me to subsidize people who literally own property??
IMO the grid connection cost should be based on the value of the property and billed to the property owner, not based on the income of each connection and billed to each person renting an apartment.
If it would be up to free market, you would be paying for supplying electricity from your solar panels to the grid during day (because there is nowhere to store it) and paying for feeding electricity of the grid during the night (because somebody must make it)
You should be sympathetic to the random company because it keeps the lights on for millions of people. If a handful of people have the ability to say "I've taken care of ME, so I'm not going to engage with society anymore", then they may put an impractically large burden on their neighbor who lacks the capital to build their own solar. You should also be sympathetic to the fact that the folks with their own solar still want to be attached to the grid without paying for its upkeep and that's not fair.
You absolutely, 100%, do not want free market economics on power! This is a necessity that has a huge capital cost meaning you are often given only a single company that can supply you with energy. You do NOT want that to be a free market. You want the government to protect your rates, which they do.
The sun does not shine at night, even in California. Summer is often accompanied by a loss of wind power. Energy sources that can be regulated are direly needed, depending on location, countries tgat decarbonized use either hydropower, geothermal or nuclear plants as a backup. Batteries are still too expensive for the needs of an industrial society, plus you have to replace them often.
While the sun does not shine at night in California, the energy usage of HVACs (the top consumer in the average house) is also about ¼ the need of in the daytime.
Hot water usage (2nd highest amp draw) is also reduced shortly after sunset.
Laundry dryers (3rd highest amp draw) is also typically reduced during the night.
what really gets me, is when the CPUC proposes plans to punish energy savers by increasing the base billing rate and then reducing the per KW charge. It's the exact opposite of what we need to encourage for reduced power consumption. Also, the ANTI solar campaigns that the CPUC has launched are really egregious. I'm surprised CA would allow such a thing as the new NET 3.0 crap.
This is pure regulatory capture. Plain and simple.
Look at the proposals of the past few years to see it. These proposals say things like helping under served communities or combating wealth inequality, but similar to “Save the children” bills, the titles rarely have any relevance to the content. Every proposal has been about nothing other than protecting and increasing utility company profits.
From my view as a consumer and constituent, the government has failed. The simple fact that we allow for profit companies to manage and profit from essential utilities is ridiculous. That we are allowing these companies to write laws that increase their profits at the expensive of society and the environment is a tragedy.
Simply put, sdge, pge, and friends, need to be non profits run by the government. CA state should nationalize these companies and reduce profits to zero while actually promoting roof top solar.
The equipment cost is getting closer and closer to just being able to remove your meter and go on your own. I keep watching them drop, and wonder at what point i'll just pull the trigger. Especially the last year, inverters and 48V batteries are really starting to come down.
But CPUC is already appointed by the Governor. And they control the prices.
I remember when Gray Davis got recalled. The prevailing opinion was that (dramatically) increasing vehicle registration costs pushed that over the finish line.
The fact that they've managed to keep virtually all of the outrage directed at the utility companies is an amazing PR success for the Governor.
The 'save the children' crap started decades ago when utilities demanded a lot of extraneous, huge ugly bright scary warning labels, extra disconnect boxes, and so on. The goal was to make it as ugly and expensive as possible to discourage residential installs.
Further, an inspection by the local government inspector wasn't sufficient. See, you've also got to get the electric company to inspect the system as well, and they'll demand things not spec'd in the state/national code...or they won't allow the system to be connected.
This shit is even going on at the grid level. Our regional electrical grid organization admits that their approval process for grid-scale solar or wind connects can take a decade. They insist that much planning is needed for "reliability."
> I'm surprised CA would allow such a thing as the new NET 3.0 crap.
The CA legislature actually required that a change be made with AB 327. The details were ultimately up to CPUC, but CPUC was attempting to meet the broad goals of the legislature in making this change.
Additional power produced during times of peak solar insolation is not very useful to the grid because of all the existing solar and is most useful during the late afternoon and early evening when demand is high but solar output is low. Maintaining the grid costs money independent of the cost of electricity generation and under the old rules solar customers were effectively subsidized by non-solar customers. Since non-solar customers are on average poorer than solar customers (owning your home is generally a per-requisite after all) this amounted to a regressive transfer.
EDIT: Fixed wording in sentence about customer cross-subsidy
> increasing the base billing rate and then reducing the per KW charge
(Almost) every utility should do this. It more accurately reflects the real cost structure of grid maintenance, which doesn't depend on how much energy you use so much as on your peak usage during peak hours. In a world where home solar installations are common it's especially important, since you don't want people relying on the grid for backup power during period of low sun without paying anything to maintain that infrastructure. That's unsustainable in the long term.
The rates are laundering the costs of paying everyone market rates for their houses burned down in wildfires. I agree that’s really fucking weird but what can I do?
If you feel very strongly about politics in California, you know, run for an elected office.
What if the new economics of solar mean that maintaining the wires actually costs more than producing the power? Who should pay more of those costs so that your preferred customer can pay less?
Seems like a lot of complexity that can be solved by simple spot pricing for electricity. With spot pricing you can decouple solar and battery storage, as battery owners can make a profit by storing electricity when it's cheap and selling it when it's expensive. Solar power owners can just sell to the grid at market rate.
The problem with unrestricted spot pricing is that it's easy to end up with a surprise bill due to circumstances beyond your knowledge or control. E.g. the heating system fails in the apartment complex next door, so everyone plugs in space heaters. Your bill goes up also due to the increased demand. They can get insurance to cover this sort of eventuality -- can you?
I know two ways to fix this. First, obviously, you didn't say "unrestricted". There are various ways to restrict spot pricing to alleviate these issues, e.g. guarantee each home a particular amount at a fixed rate, and overages are at spot rates. Second, the "knowledge" angle can be attacked -- if you know that's happened, you can turn down your thermostat.
In Nordpool the prices are set the day behind so there's no surprise bill. If the spot price goes up one actually should pay more, which incentives reducing electricity consumption.
I think your apartment complex example is not that realistic as it won't affect the spot price. Something more like a war will..
The majority of consumers at home would against spot pricing like that. California already has time-of-use pricing. Peak hours are 4-9pm when there's no solar. Peak usage is people coming home from work, turning on their lights, stoves, hot water, ovens, air conditioning, etc. Are they supposed to not do that?
Raising those rates too much would just be raising rates for everyone, just so those who are rich enough to afford solar panels and batteries make more profit.
I don't think spot pricing for electricity is all that simple.
I don't think it's really reasonable for households to pay the raw spot pricing. Someone else (utility company? government?) should be backstopping the prices for them. Time of use pricing based on typical prices seems reasonable enough.
For large industrial consumers, sure; let them pay based on actual costs, and they'll adjust their peaks to save money, which helps even out the supply/demand, which is great.
For electricity producers, spot pricing isn't really enough either, though. There needs to be some compensation for available capacity as well as generation.
I agree that it makes sense to try to decouple solar and storage though. Storage's ability to move capacity from peak generation to other times is valuable and should be compensated, and there's no reason to tie it to generation.
Yeah, and then I can buy some insurance / hedges against the spot prices of electricity, day trade my air conditioner, and complete the financialization of my life.
At least on all supply side. Including residential.
On demand side, I think fixed price contracts could be allowed. It is then up to those contract providers to buy enough future contracts at lower price to generate profit. Or just ride it out and hope their math was correct.
I think the most dishonest thing about the boosters of small-scale solar is that we need their long tail of small batteries to cover peak hours in late summer. The large-scale batteries are doing the job perfectly well. The large-scale battery guys have installed way more batteries than whatever community-based, open-source, vehicle-to-grid thing you are imagining. Here's my graph of California's state of charge: https://observablehq.com/@jwb/caiso-state-of-charge
Don't forget that the CA energy market is highly regulated and isn't a free market, so there will always be haggling over anything that reduces the revenue of the utilities (as they don't really get to set prices).
Why only a nominal charge for deliver? Delivery is the most expensive part of the while thing! In particular reliable delivery - unless you intend for the power to shut off every night.
Because PG&E buys wholesale energy at 2-4c/kwh and distributes it broadly for 28-50c/kwh. why should it cost that much for delivery on the local set of wires?
Readit News
The more self reliance individual customers have, the harder it is for generation plants to stay profitable. Break equilibrium stuff by adding more solar and seeing how it gets sustainably fixed might not be a terrible idea, but it is hard.
I don't know anything about the specifics of CA.
I currently pay a bit over $40/month for a natural gas connection and a bit under $0.40/month (total) for the actual gas consumed by our stove top, our only gas appliance. (We'll probably go induction eventually, but it works for now.)
Of course, I don't generate gas and sell it back to the utility, but the point still stands that the electric utility could fix their pricing to correctly charge for availability and usage.
If this was actually above board and helpful, they wouldn't need any kind of coalition to do it, they would just build solar and sell it. But no, they are trying to do the easy part, and let the hard part fall on others.
And it doesn't help that they have requirements relating to the income of the end consumer! That's a sure sign of something that isn't useful on its own, rather they have other goals.
Deleted Comment
This is not a consumers vs producers zero-sum issue. There are always more uses for cheap power. Desalination, agriculture, extracting water from air etc. The cheaper the energy we can produce, the better off everyone will be.
> This is not a consumers vs producers zero-sum issue.
It's not zero sum, but if we externalize the entire cost of the infrastructure onto people who cannot deploy solar, it will be very inequitable; that's been the default path we've been on.
And it's going to be an issue of significant debate what exactly is equitable and good policy.
This is a good point. But it only holds if the benefits of the cheaper energy accrue to society in general. It does not hold if it goes entirely to the ones who have built the means of generation. Which ironically, unlikely almost every other economic situation, is the small indie consumers! The big players and the grid operators are the ones that get squeezed out and, as a result, causes harm to the majority of normal individuals.
This works very well because you rarely need it and propane has a fixed, predictable cost. Unfortunately, it doesn't work in CA due to their rules about generators.
IMO the grid connection cost should be based on the value of the property and billed to the property owner, not based on the income of each connection and billed to each person renting an apartment.
Why should I be sympathetic to the profits of some random company?
Let the market figure it out. Suppressing community solar is suppressing the free market. It's not right.
You absolutely, 100%, do not want free market economics on power! This is a necessity that has a huge capital cost meaning you are often given only a single company that can supply you with energy. You do NOT want that to be a free market. You want the government to protect your rates, which they do.
Hot water usage (2nd highest amp draw) is also reduced shortly after sunset.
Laundry dryers (3rd highest amp draw) is also typically reduced during the night.
Look at the proposals of the past few years to see it. These proposals say things like helping under served communities or combating wealth inequality, but similar to “Save the children” bills, the titles rarely have any relevance to the content. Every proposal has been about nothing other than protecting and increasing utility company profits.
From my view as a consumer and constituent, the government has failed. The simple fact that we allow for profit companies to manage and profit from essential utilities is ridiculous. That we are allowing these companies to write laws that increase their profits at the expensive of society and the environment is a tragedy.
Simply put, sdge, pge, and friends, need to be non profits run by the government. CA state should nationalize these companies and reduce profits to zero while actually promoting roof top solar.
https://signaturesolar.com/complete-all-in-one-off-grid-sola...
I remember when Gray Davis got recalled. The prevailing opinion was that (dramatically) increasing vehicle registration costs pushed that over the finish line.
The fact that they've managed to keep virtually all of the outrage directed at the utility companies is an amazing PR success for the Governor.
Further, an inspection by the local government inspector wasn't sufficient. See, you've also got to get the electric company to inspect the system as well, and they'll demand things not spec'd in the state/national code...or they won't allow the system to be connected.
This shit is even going on at the grid level. Our regional electrical grid organization admits that their approval process for grid-scale solar or wind connects can take a decade. They insist that much planning is needed for "reliability."
You mean more than it does by mandating it on all new single- and multi-family dwellings?
The CA legislature actually required that a change be made with AB 327. The details were ultimately up to CPUC, but CPUC was attempting to meet the broad goals of the legislature in making this change.
Additional power produced during times of peak solar insolation is not very useful to the grid because of all the existing solar and is most useful during the late afternoon and early evening when demand is high but solar output is low. Maintaining the grid costs money independent of the cost of electricity generation and under the old rules solar customers were effectively subsidized by non-solar customers. Since non-solar customers are on average poorer than solar customers (owning your home is generally a per-requisite after all) this amounted to a regressive transfer.
EDIT: Fixed wording in sentence about customer cross-subsidy
(Almost) every utility should do this. It more accurately reflects the real cost structure of grid maintenance, which doesn't depend on how much energy you use so much as on your peak usage during peak hours. In a world where home solar installations are common it's especially important, since you don't want people relying on the grid for backup power during period of low sun without paying anything to maintain that infrastructure. That's unsustainable in the long term.
If you feel very strongly about politics in California, you know, run for an elected office.
I know two ways to fix this. First, obviously, you didn't say "unrestricted". There are various ways to restrict spot pricing to alleviate these issues, e.g. guarantee each home a particular amount at a fixed rate, and overages are at spot rates. Second, the "knowledge" angle can be attacked -- if you know that's happened, you can turn down your thermostat.
I think your apartment complex example is not that realistic as it won't affect the spot price. Something more like a war will..
Raising those rates too much would just be raising rates for everyone, just so those who are rich enough to afford solar panels and batteries make more profit.
I don't think it's really reasonable for households to pay the raw spot pricing. Someone else (utility company? government?) should be backstopping the prices for them. Time of use pricing based on typical prices seems reasonable enough.
For large industrial consumers, sure; let them pay based on actual costs, and they'll adjust their peaks to save money, which helps even out the supply/demand, which is great.
For electricity producers, spot pricing isn't really enough either, though. There needs to be some compensation for available capacity as well as generation.
I agree that it makes sense to try to decouple solar and storage though. Storage's ability to move capacity from peak generation to other times is valuable and should be compensated, and there's no reason to tie it to generation.
On demand side, I think fixed price contracts could be allowed. It is then up to those contract providers to buy enough future contracts at lower price to generate profit. Or just ride it out and hope their math was correct.
Put solar upstream in place 1, allow it to be removed downstream at place 2.
People at place 2 could subscribe to solar from place 1 and get it at cost + a nominal delivery charge.