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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

These fallacies against net metering have been disproven. See the linked citation for details.

“Nevertheless, by the end of 2015, regulators in at least 10 states had conducted studies to develop methodologies to value distributed generation and net metering, while other states conducted less formal inquiries, ranging from direct rate design or net-metering policy changes to general education of decisionmakers and the public. And there is a degree of consensus. What do the commission-sponsored analyses show? A growing number show that net metering benefits all utility customers.”

https://www.brookings.edu/research/rooftop-solar-net-meterin...

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That link of yours states again and again and again that net metering doesn't cost shift as if this were a general principle, but if you look at its sub resources you see support for very different conclusions, namely:

* Solar doesn't yet have enough market penetration for the duck curve to be a problem. We're still in the early days where cutting peak usage benefits everyone.

* Social good rationalizes the cost shifting

"It hasn't happened yet" and "it's for the best" are VERY different arguments from "it won't happen." Why the deception? Shifting the grid's role from generation to storage is not impossible. Barring that, distributed storage is not impossible. Making PV panels cheap was a huge but tractable step that is now behind us. Figuring out storage is the second huge but tractable step and it's well on the way to being solved. In the meantime, it absolutely makes sense to deploy PV at least until it starts cutting into base load, and from that point the economic case for storage becomes clear and obvious. The facts are on our side, so why lie?

I’m satisfied with the data and contents of the post to substantiate my assertion. You are free to cite your own sources if you disagree. I believe the Brookings Institute to be a reportable source.

My intent in no way is to deceive or put forth bad data.

Your source doesn't support your assertion, but I suppose you're free to ignore that little problem if you want to.

In the meantime, we should be talking about how best to make storage happen, because anyone who isn't busy playing semantics games can see that storage (critically: paying for storage) is going to dominate the back half of this transition.

The claims were being made that net metering currently has a set of issues that makes the referenced policy a generous policy. The link provides seems plenty to refute that claim to me. You seem to be moving the goals posts here.

If you combine net metering with time based pricing, it seems like there is plenty of incentive for smart people like you to build energy storage and make money off of arbitrage.

There is, but storage isn't cheap enough yet. Tesla powerwalls are still pretty expensive, at around $8k each, from what I hear. If they can get the cost down by another factor of 5-10, I think you'll see a huge acceleration in adoption and possible arbitrage.

IMO, the solution isn't storage. It's ways to use cheap energy. As solar energy becomes an increasingly large part of the grid, there are huge incentives to re-structure electricity demand around when solar is producing heavily. One possible way this plays out is that we start doing things like water desalinization to produce fresh water, and electrolysis to produce hydrogen during the day when electricity is free, and getting heavy energy industry like aluminum smelting to shut off in periods where demand is higher. Some amount of grid storage will be necessary, but I'm guessing a lot of the solution will be shifting demand rather than supply, since it's a lot easier to turn off machines than to store enough electricity to keep them on.

Two sides of the same coin, I'd say.

The post didn't describe net metering

edit: actually I think it did :) ignore me

Why isn't it net metering? It seems to be net metering whether you count in kilowatt hours or dollars.

They are selling back to the grid, with a smart meter that counts power in both direction. Theres many types of policies in net metering like details about what rate you buy and sell power to the utility. In some less favorable places, the grid sells you power at retail prices but buys it back from you at wholesale. In these places, to achieve a $0 utility bill you would be generating more during the day than you consume at night. If your net metering deal paid back at retail rates you may get a credit, but as far as i understand each utility can offer totally different net metering deals, if they offer it at all.

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