California plans to charge new installations $8/month per kilowatt of solar | Hacker News Reader

California plans to charge new installations $8/month per kilowatt of solar

teslamotorsclub.com

27 pointshedora45 comments

For reference, a solar panel lasts ~ 30 years, so this is a $2880 fee per kilowatt installed.

The average cost per watt for a new solar install is ~ $2.68 in California (and is dropping rapidly)

This will roughly double the cost of solar installations. (Ignoring the time value of money, monetary inflation, and deflationary solar pricing.)

yeah. small upside, it maybe violates some federal rules and won't be implemented https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/news/solar-backers-pan-...

This is obviously a big gift to the grid utilities.

It is also the beginning of the death spiral of grid power.

If I'm living there and planning to install solar, it was previously convenient and a good deal to connect to the grid and do net-metering, where you were typically paid at the end of the year for the surplus electricity you added to the grid. This was even a good deal with the extra costs of grid-tied inverters, etc.

Now, for a 30kw system, that's $240/month or $2880/year. That looks to me like a nice ROI to just go with a big PowerWall or other battery system and dump the grid.

Continuing cost declines for the equipment will only make the deal better as time goes on.

Every person who stops seeing it that way stops supporting the economics of grid distribution of power.

As fewer households are on the grid, it gets more expensive to maintain, and costs more for the remaining users.

Those increasing costs and declining quality drive more users to go off the grid...

I can also see neighborhood grids, pooling only local generation and storage possibly becoming more useful.

Pretty soon, the grid is unsustainable. I don't think it'll be sad to see it go.

a couple of fine points

- you need a lot of batteries to get through a couple of weeks of cloudy weather. or generator

- in california it might be kinda illegal to disconnect from grid (violation of building codes and such: https://www.cailaw.org/media/files/IEL/Publications/2016/gri...

Excellent points - thx!. Comments...

>>you need a lot of batteries to get through a couple of weeks of cloudy weather. or generator

Yes a generator would definitely help, and even with cloudy weather you get a portion of power generated. Mostly for off-grid, you'd just have to size bigger for x% generation on cloudy days.

>>in california it might be kinda illegal to disconnect from grid (violation of building codes and such: https://www.cailaw.org/media/files/IEL/Publications/2016/gri...

That is a real kick in the guts: "requirement of interconnection in residential installations". Especially considering the quote at the beginning: "Some authors have found that a subset of customers in Hawaii may already be better off disconnecting from the grid and relying on solar-plus-battery systems; moreover, California is not far behind".

Sounds like another gift to the utilities.

I'd bet there will be lawsuits to introduce a reasonable exception soon. Especially if the $8/month/kw capacity withstands the comment period.

This is utter bulls*t if California actually claims to have increasing solar capacity as a goal. Just disgusting.

Too bad California is also banning generators

https://rvmiles.com/california-generator-ban/

Any info on whether it is just 2-cycle engines? (iirc, that's what I remember from earlier articles, but...)

They should certainly ban 2-cycle engines to drive to batteries, but I think most stationary rigs for houses are 4-cycle, so you don't need oil mix.

this is small gasoline generators. usually when house has backup generator i believe it hooked up to gas

It might be illegal to install a setup without connecting it to the utility’s electric meter, but what if the utility disconnects it due to (for example) the customer requesting account cancellation, or refusing to pay bills?

Wouldn’t the result be a legal off-grid system that’s a small reconnection fee away from being attached to the grid (connection to utilities is generally required in order to get a mortgage, so having the right to reconnect is important).

I'm not sure I understand this.

"a monthly residential Grid Participation Charge of $8 per kilowatt (kW) of installed solar"

Does that mean for ever kW of solar capacity a customers has in the panels on their house, they'll be billed $8 per month to contribute power to the grid? Because that sounds crazy.

Apparently so. (Even if the panels are producing << 8kW, and the electricity is consumed on site.)

The rule isn’t finalized yet, so there’s still time to fight it.

What incentive does anyone have to go "green" with solar anymore. Combine this with the fact that they're trying to push all new homes to require solar, it's clear it's just another money grab.

If I was still in the Bay, I'd have a 280 ish bill to pay for the convenience of having solar, assuming i'm reading this right. Combine that with the payment of $300 for the solar system itself and i'm well above what my power bill was by a large margin.

All these rulings do is turn people away from trying to reduce carbon usage and make things more economically prohibitive.

You also earn money by selling the energy. This is cost of good essentially.

We pay this in Germany not as a flat rate but indirectly by a very low price offered by the grid company.

$8 however seems quite high but I do not know the offered price and solar output in California.

Think of an install that generates enough for the customer during the day and needs grid supplement at night. Based on reading this, they'd still get charged. Maybe it's only for solar that feeds back to the grid, but event then, if I only have a small amount of excess capacity, it's possible it won't even cover the monthly charge.

Per LA Times [ https://www.latimes.com/environment/newsletter/2021-12-16/ca... ]

They propose to pay customers $0.05 / generated kWh instead of the $0.20-$0.30/kWh that customers pay in California. So you would have to generate an excess 160 kWh /month to cover the $8 fee (per installed kW of capacity). Your non-solar neighbor who uses your 160kWh of generated electrons will pay the utility $32-$48 for them, while reaping the benefit of lowered stress on the grid.

It makes sense. The cost of generation is just a part of the cost of distribution. It never made much sense to force the power company to buy power from consumers at consumer prices, it amounted basically to a subsidy for grid-tie installations. What I hope is that this incentives people to move towards off-grid systems with their own storage. Grid-tie was never viable in large scale if you really think about all the details.

160kWh is twenty 8 hour days at 100% efficiency. That will almost never be worth it. I guess that’s the end of net energy metering in California.

According to an article about the legality of the fee linked elsewhere in this thread, customers can still opt out of NEM, and just waste the excess electricity generation.

That will essentially always be the right financial decision.

It would actually be less hostile towards solar installs if they simply paid $0 for excess energy, and didn’t introduce the fee.

See it from the grid perspective: who pays the grid owner for maintaining the uplink. For working with the unfortunate peeks in solar/wind energy availability.

solar owners already paying for grid hookup like everybody if they think it doesn't cover real costs of grid maintainance, they should raise it. for everybody

It is far more complicated than just “maintaining” the cables as most lay people think when they hear grid costs. The problem is that the grid has to match power demand with the roughly the same amount of power generation during all the time. So, if a cloud passes over your system and reduces your output by 25%, those 25% need to come from somewhere, usually from rotational inertia from giant steam or hydro turbogenerators in the nearest second, and either by regulating steam production or water flow in the long run or if necessary by either taking offline generator or adding more easily dispatchable power sources. And all the while making sure the frequency keeps very close to 60hz all the time. It is not just about sending a man in a pole to change some insulators from time to time.

I pay for grid hookup and for electricity, if they think that they don't have enough money for managing their stuff properly across the board (both wires and loads), they should increase those costs for everybody and not just throw some charges (or essentially tax to benefit utilities) on panels.

how is it exactly fair that in case when there are two households having same minimal use (essentially grid connection price) with one of them having 10k of solar, the household without solar will pay $10 per month and the other one will pay $90 per month ? (as i said, they consume same amount of energy from grid)

In CA? That’s the taxpayers - PG&E spent a few decades making a “profit” by under maintaining the grid, and distributing those profits to investors through dividends.

Then when the failure to maintain the grid killed numerous people and billions in damages they increased prices, increased “fees” (somehow separate from prices), and threatened bankruptcy unless CA gave them enough money to keep going. Then increased fees again.

This new fee for people with solar is because their poorly managed and under maintained grid might fall over if people add power to the grid, and more importantly they lose the ability to price gouge people who have a solar alternative.

Why CA didn’t simply seize their assets as compensation for the damage they’ve caused and instead have them a “loan” that the victims end up paying for is beyond me.

It appears like they’re figuring it’s mostly “people who have money” who install solar, not poor folks, so we’re going to tax “people who have money’s” solar “consumption.”

A bit of cutting of your nose (sustainable power) to spite the middle class (people who are more than poor).

Do you want to kill all new solar projects? Because that’s how you kill all new solar projects.

Dont worry they already passed the law forcing new developments to install rooftop solar.

That’s just crazy.

If this applies only to grid tie is a good thing toward systems that are as much off grid as possible and that have their own storage.

So let’s game this, shall we?

Put up solar panels. Have them charge a battery. Have a wind turbine which charges another battery. Have the first battery charge the second. Now you’ve comingled the energy and can claim it’s wind power.

I’m not suggesting this would work, and also not suggesting that it should be done - rather I’m just trying to show that poorly implemented regulations (regardless of intent) will have people either give up or figure out a way to get around it.

Yea but the panels need to be up and working, that's what they charge

Didn't they also make a law that all new houses in Cali must have solar panels?

So if you build a new house in Cali it must have solar and every new house must pay the grid every month?

A thread with no context and no answer as to why?

Some context: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/13/solar-power-advocates-slam-n...

Specifically:

>The California Public Utilities Commission said the proposed changes, in a decision known as NEM 3.0, are meant to encourage consumers to install battery storage systems alongside solar panels, so they can store the excess power generated by solar panels and feed it back to the grid when it’s most needed.

This CNBC article is 10x better. Thx

Agreed with ksec that this article is much better than the original submission—thanks! But the article says that the plan is to reduce payments to those who contribute to the grid, not to charge contributors. Are these conflicting reports, or just different spins of the same underlying facts?

different parts of same suggestion. it's both reduce payments and charge for installed solar capacity

99% of deployed solar systems in California are stupid. They don't have any battery storage and they don't operate during a power outage. The problem is they're using the wrong kind of transfer switch system. The ones that allow grid, generator, batteries, and solar are more useful than the grid-dependent ones that were deployed. If NEM 3 is another grid-dependent "solution" that doesn't work during a power outage, then it continues to not be in the interests of the customer.

Not to mention the problem of absorbing all those small intermittent sources in the grid without buffering. Without storage, grid tie system are not removing high carbon emitters, but in the contrary displacing nuclear and hydro low emission base load while promoting dispatchable high emission natural gas turbines

Despite all the heat in the discussions this is something that was unavoidable. Grid tie is not a scalable idea as it is today, everyone who have minimal knowledge of the physics of AC generation and distribution kind of new that the day when grid tie systems without storage would have to pay their fair cost at least to the system.

They’re charging ~ 100% the price of generation for distribution (and time shifting/storage) of the excess power, and they’re doing it regardless of whether you have your own energy storage.

On top of that, there’s a separate part of the proposal that forces houses on the solar rate to pay more for peak hour energy than non-solar customers.

Assuming that’s actually what it costs to maintain the grid, it’s getting to the point where we may as well just abandon the power grid.

If you want to be connected to the grid, someone's gotta pay to update it and maintain it. Maybe this pricing in particular sucks, or the consumer-pays approach sucks, but "no one pays" isn't feasible, either.

The customer is already connected and paying for grid maintenance. This is a BS gotcha capitalism cash grab that ruins the economics of residential solar deployment.

It is not maintenance. An AC grid is a complex beast that needs to continuously match power consumption with power generation. When you add an intermittent source like solar that has its peak production about noon you’re displacing baseline generation in favor of dispatchable sources like natural gas. Besides, the operator is forced to buy your energy paying a price a lot higher most of the time, and indeed at some periods in the day the power generated by your solar system has negative economic value, and yet the company is forced to buy it from you at almost consumer distribution prices instead of buying the same power cheaper in the spot market from some baseline generation facility.

Poor them. I don't see an argument for anything, only shill defenses of a gamed bureaucracy that brought us such hits as rolling blackouts for Enron and town-leveling forest fires.

Right. If you live in CT right now, for example, you’re probably paying more in delivery charges (i.e. grid upkeep and repairs) than you are for your actual power.

If grid-connected solar is going to be a big thing, there needs to be a reasonable apportionment of those costs.

Rate payers who invested in solar will now lose money on their installations. And, it may end-up costing them more in gotcha capitalism fees than the pittance they can sell back would cover.

I wouldn't doubt there are vested interests like Warren Buffett, big oil, and for-profit utilities influencing the CPUC to kill solar in CA.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com