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Comment by zdragnar | Hacker News Reader

Our electric grids aren't designed for distributed generation- they are centrally planned and maintained.

Every person that generates their own electricity stops paying their fair share of maintaining the grid, forcing poorer people who cannot afford their own rooftops to subsidize them. It is actually quite regressive- the denser the population center, the less electricity per person can be generated by solar. The electricity might be free, but the cost of maintaining the grid never goes away.

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> Every person that generates their own electricity stops paying their fair share of maintaining the grid,

Nope. Not in California- even if solar covers 100% of your usage, PG&E is collecting money from you. You don’t pay any energy production costs, but you’ll pay ‘your fair share’.

You're confusing cost with billing structure.

When you go with net metering you still pay a bit, but PG&E sources power at around 10 cents per kwh. The rest of the bill people receive is for infrastructure - around 2/3rds of their bill. They do this to incentivize people to use less electricity.

California's net metering is not sustainable for forever, and you are not paying for the infrastructure you're using. Which I don't have a problem with, it's just something that can't continue forever.

Here in EU the energy prices are separate from distribution grid. In fact distribution grid is forbidden to sell you energy at all by law. So there are months where I pay more for a monthly standing fee for having a connection than I pay for energy. And they charge for energy transmission on top of it.

Anyway, in my country for historical reasons all of the electricity production was in one corner of the country. So if any of the generation moves away from there (and remembering that electricity always takes the shortest possible path [0] from producer to consumer) any new generation in any other part than the original producer lowers the demand on the grid.

[0] or to be more precise the lowest resistance

> Every person that generates their own electricity stops paying their fair share of maintaining the grid

This isn't true, at least not in Colorado. I pay a number of fees for maintaining the grid and these aren't going away when I have my net meter installed later this week. (hopefully)

I keep seeing this, but every power bill I've ever seen has a monthly connection fee. With solar panels, that connection fee is frequently higher than the consumed power charges.

Isn't that paying for the grid?

> Every person that generates their own electricity stops paying their fair share of maintaining the grid

"their fair share." What exactly is that for something you don't use?

This is a bit like saying everyone who walks/bikes to work stops paying their fair share of gas taxes that maintain the roads their food arrives on.

In this hypothetical, they are still using the Grid to power their homes at night

You added that part.

> This is a bit like saying everyone who walks/bikes to work stops paying their fair share of gas taxes that maintain the roads their food arrives on.

I haven't seen people argue this point for people who don't own a car, but my state does have a special levy on electric and high efficiency vehicles to make up for lost gas tax revenues: https://www.dmv.virginia.gov/vehicles/#highwayuse_fee.asp

They actually do. Gas taxes pay about 60% of the costs to maintain the road infrastructure and given that the damage caused to roads increases as the square of the vehicle's weight, walking/biking causes minimal wear and is offset by the 40% of road costs that come from general taxes.

That's a policy problem, not a technological problem. It becomes a political decision: convert grid maintenance to a progressive tax, subsidize local power generation for poor families or rental properties, etc.

There is no fair share to be paid

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