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> Since I easily generate more electricity that I will ever use (see above for why policies drove us to an installation larger that necessary) my household has no incentive to conserve at all.

... so? You're generating energy from the sun. Feel free to use it all. We don't conserve energy for fun, we conserve it to protect the environment.

You comment makes sense if I was not hooked up to the grid. But I am. So, if my family conserves, that energy we save offsets someone else’s coal-generated energy and helps the environment. But I have zero incentive to so do because of layers of bad policies.

Yeah, in the current market you're correct, but we should be concentrating on creating an excess of cheap power (carbon free of course) rather than conserving.

why not both? they literally ALREADY HAVE the excess of cheap power AND can conserve. This is a push for action on policy and incentives

But why conserve? If they find a use for that excess power then they could better their life or the lives of others.

Yes, exactly this. Iff there is more than enough free solar (or nuclear) energy, then our goal should be to maximize energy used per capita and minimize energy only for specific activities, because energy is a proxy for utility.

But isn’t that extremely far from current reality? I mean is there really free energy? And even solar, wind and nuclear is not without environmental and economical impact. Shouldn’t we focus on trying to optimize our energy use and to try to do as much utility as possible with as little energy as possible?

It'd be interesting to know the "true" price of that energy. That is, what the utility would pay you for what you feed back into the grid vs. acquiring that energy from another source. Essentially impossible to calculate given all the regulations and subsidies, but my guess is that it would be quite low relative to your metered rate, and thus the actual "offset" of carbon-based fuels is small.

In the UK, one company gives different buy and sell prices every half hour based on live market rates. [1] You can see that the 'buy back' rate is only about half of the sell rate most of the time.

This is still pretty distorted, because many taxes and distribution fees charged on electricity sold are not refunded on electricity bought back.

[1]: https://www.energy-stats.uk/octopus-agile-outgoing-export-lo...

The big problem is timing, if your neighbour's solar panels were at peak output in the night and yours in the day, the credit system works.

That's not just a problem with being hooked up to the grid so you can altruistically use less of your own energy and donate the rest to other people.

It's also a problem for billing Dave Rosenthal appropriately. Assuming he turns on lights at night, he's not using his own energy. No amount of solar generation will let you use power when the sun isn't shining. So he's not reducing the demand for (say) coal at night.

But because he's being billed wrong, rolling over daytime power he doesn't use as if it were the nighttime power he does use, people still think he is.

grid batteries do exactly this

> E.g. I am heating my garage with an electric heater because it costs me zero.

There's very few situations in which pushing electrons through a resistor is the best use of the electrons. Why not build a BOINC farm for the winter or something? You put 1000W through a heater, you get 1000W thermal. You push 1000W through a collection of computers that are old and more or less free, you get... still 1000W thermal, plus compute.

If you ask in the right places, you can get some older computers that don't work for people anymore nearly free - think about 1st-5th gen Intel Core stuff, random spinning hard drives, inefficient old 80+ Bronze PSUs, etc. For heat, they all work just fine, and do something productive in the process.

If I have surplus electricity, I heat my (solar, off-grid) office in the winter exactly this way - on some random old 4th/5th/6th gen Intel stuff I got cheap to use in this way. I used to run climateprediction.net stuff, but they're out of work, so I mostly throw cycles at World Community Grid during daylight hours.

Heating is not just room temperature. For who prefer radiant heating, resistor heater is easier option. Possibly heat pump based radiant heater is available but temperature is not high as resistor.

I assume one heating their garage on "I have more power than I know what to do with!" resistive heating isn't bothering with radiant heat.

>To completely disincentivize any actual conservation

If you are running off of 100% solar that isn't a net negative impact to the environment to use more power in nearly every case.

Don't forget the embodied energy of the overbuilt solar system!

I had, thanks for reminding me.

There are two environmental costs to this setup.

The first is that if he weren't frivolously moving electrons through his heater, there would be more to feed to the grid for other people. So there is an opportunity cost of reducing CO2-generating energy production elsewhere.

The second is that he installed a much bigger array than optimal, due to regulatory requirements, and that too has up-front environmental consequence. Since he's burning off that excess electricity rather than feeding it to the grid, there's really no redeeming value to an array that's too big.

True. Thanks for that.

Well one thing you can do is try to figure out the approx. carbon output of those extra panels and buy trees to help remove an equivalent amount from the atmosphere so you can offset the carbon output. Of course you are spending money doing this and one must consider the carbon emitted in the process of earning that money. Depending on his circumstances this could be very little or none.

I don’t understand this attitude at all. Your first “cost“ is like saying there’s an opportunity cost to my purchasing bubble gum and putting it on a shelf because other people can’t chew that bubble gum and I’m not chewing it yet.

The markets and incentives are pretty screwy right now, but overbuilding solar is probably one of our best strategies at preparing for the future in the current moment. There are a number of reasons for this, in no particular order:

Batteries still need to come down in cost before they are economical for residential energy storage. But once they become cost effective, they are fairly easy to add to existing installations, where as adding additional panels is much more difficult.

EV adoption is going to mean much more demand in the future. And the nice thing about EV's is they are great for flex demand, i.e. we can charge them when the sun is out.

Electrification of homes means we need to provide enough capacity to meet demand in both the summer and winter months. Due to solar output being much lower in winter, and because solar is so cheap, it makes sense to build a large enough system to cover winter demand (it might not be the most economical decision right now for the individual, but this is the best path forward for getting to a 100% carbon free grid).

Basically, our best strategy in the current moment, with current incentives is to just massively overbuild solar. As you have discovered, this is a bit wonky in practice, especially thanks to utilities pushing back heavily on residential solar (see PG&E). In the meantime, maybe consider taking the $0.01 payout, or get a bitcoin miner, or better yet use your excess electricity to power a DIY algae farm and help remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

Solar panels have a ~20 year life and are also getting cheaper as time goes on. Maybe building mounting capacity for them is smart, but it's not necessarily smart to more panels than you will properly use. You can buy more panels later if it actually becomes smart to use them and you have a use case.

The panels are dirt cheap compared to the other costs (installation, permitting, inverters, etc...). I suspect that the installation costs and any permit modifications required during the expansion would greatly extend the ROI timeline vs just including the panels in the initial install. If you were really trying to save costs, maybe you could significantly undersize the inverter, as those tend to only last 7-8 years, and you would only suffer losses during the peak hours in the summer months when you are likely to have way more energy than needed.

More generally, overbuilding is not really going to be economical right now. We do not have the proper incentives in place for that. But from what I can tell it is our quickest/cheapest path to a sustainable grid, and that likely means we will need to adjust our consumption patterns to account for the absurd amount of excessive power we will have in peak solar months (usually late spring). This means we will need to start developing power intensive applications that can take advantage of free (and possibly negatively priced) power. So if you want to get ahead of the curve, put a massive solar system on your roof and start thinking up interesting ways to use that excess power.

This frightful story reminds me of Dan Luu's recent piece on Cocktail Party Theories [1], among other things about the "error of taking a high-level view and incorrectly assuming that things are simple". As so often, the devil lies in the details.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30185229

Rather than wasting it and never consuming what you have in the kWh bank why not just feed it into the grid? Feed in prices will change as the world moved to more solar. If you are concerned you can buys a battery to ensure you never take from the grid.

Seems like the obvious move is to get an electric car

> I don’t know what the solution is, but the problems are pretty easy to see.

In part, you should only be able to get net metering if you have a battery that the power company can control. Thus you benefit from cheaper electricity, and the power company benefits because they can control when the electricity enters the grid.

> I don’t know what the solution is, but the problems are pretty easy to see.

In theory, if you were dealing with one entity, it could be pretty easy.

But you are actually dealing with multiple entities:

- your utility’s transmission subsidiary

- your utility’s generation subsidiary

- your applicable regulatory entities

- your regional grid operator/planning organization

> Well, this is not in the interest of the utility at all (they lose money), but they still by policy get to ‘approve it’. This required a many-month (and many phone call) process of reviews, approvals, etc. which concluded in the utility activating (installing a meter for) the installation.

Your utility would much rather just say no and be done with it.

They similarly have no financial interests in operating a Kafka-esque bureaucracy that requires them to staff entire departments that are a net drain on their revenue.

But they are obligated by the state regulator to have a uniform framework and process for electricity generators (which you are now) to interconnect with their transmission network (you to their lines).

This pulls you into the category of safety, reliability, and financial requirements which are typically only applied to commercial generators.

The primary things the utility (both transmission and generation) wants to avoid is backfeeding and islanding — the former is dangerous to linemen, the latter is dangerous to your neighbors’ equipment.

> However, the payout is hilariously low (like $0.01/kWh) so of course everyone chooses the bank.

The payout for generation is negotiated by three entities: the regional grid operator which is committing to purchasing capacity, the utility’s transmission operator which charges to interconnect and deliver your power, and the state regulator who has the FINAL say on rates.

Additionally, your utility along with every other utility in America is engaged in demand management programs.

The TL;DR version is utilities pay tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to vendors over the span of a multi-year contract to REDUCE electric demand.

This typically manifests itself to retail customers the form of free Nest thermostats, time of use programs, and subsidized appliance efficiency upgrades (or rebates).

If they could redirect this money to small generators like yourself and have the same impact, they would drop their demand management programs in a heartbeat (and the regulatory obligations that come with it).

I wrote this on my phone, so I can’t easily list references, but I did use a number of searchable terms that will lead you in the right direction.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't get how any of that translates to a defense of the utilities' overall behavior. (Though I appreciate the context -- thanks!)

Why can't they like, suggest to the relevant authorities, that it be refactored along more logical lines, where solar power generators have the appropriate checks for safety (before feeding into the grid), and are paid a significant fraction of the value their power adds to the network?

I don't expect them to be Remy-Danton-grade workaholic lobbyist heroes. But if they recognize that there are perverse incentives, why aren't they pushing, however gently and tepidly, for natural fixes to the misalignment of incentives?

If you were in a startup that had fundamentally screwed up incentives that prevented the optimal solution, you (like most here) would probably at least start writing the document that outlines what the system should look like, and push a little towards its implementation.

So where is that document? Why is their first reaction to create this passive-aggressive Kafkaesque barrier to integrating solar, knowing that it slows down solar roll-out and our efforts to decarbonize?

Why can't they answer the criticisms as, "oh, yeah -- you're preaching to the choir here. This is how we'd prefer it work, but we can't get the others to agree."

If they actually do that, then I accept that they may be operating in the least bad option. If not, they are making the problem worse, and do merit the criticisms levied at them here.

> Maybe it's just me, but I don't get how any of that translates to a defense of the utilities' overall behavior.

It's not a defense of utilities, it's more about shining a light on regulatory actions.

I referenced the regulatory parts several times because that's the largest factor of what they can and cannot do. For example, in most states, an electric utility must first seek regulatory approval to raise prices even for emergency infrastructure repairs.

> Why can't they like, suggest to the relevant authorities, that it be refactored along more logical lines, where solar power generators have the appropriate checks for safety (before feeding into the grid), and are paid a significant fraction of the value their power adds to the network?

The resulting Kafka-esque bits were what regional grid operators and regulators jointly required _a long time ago_ as part of the transition to a "deregulated" electricity market (e.g. this was not enacted in response to solar).

Those bits effectively add up to "make sure your power source(s) meet these bullet points before connecting them to the grid because we don't want unreliable power... or we'll fine you heavily for non-compliance and/or revoke your authority to operate in our territory".

If you, as a private commercial entity wanted to build a large-scale solar farm (or what's more typical nowadays: a cogeneration plant), you would probably go through the exact same process you went through with maybe a handful of extra steps, but not many more.

> But if they recognize that there are perverse incentives, why aren't they pushing, however gently and tepidly, for natural fixes to the misalignment of incentives?

For a more detailed example that's relevant to your area, take a look at ERCOT's interconnection guide[1] and a review document from UT Law about the current status and legal barriers to greater adoption of renewable energy in ERCOT territory[2].

Yes, it would be ideal if the the regulators could make a carve out for non-commercial, small-scale generators and allow it at cost or a state fund to draw from (e.g. if you're the only one in your neighborhood doing net metering, then someone has to bear the cost of say, pole-mounted capacitor banks: you, the state, the utility, or some combination thereof).

> If you were in a startup that had fundamentally screwed up incentives that prevented the optimal solution, you (like most here) would probably at least start writing the document that outlines what the system should look like, and push a little towards its implementation.

There are a slew of investors who want things relaxed so they can enter these markets.

Currently, that battle is being fought (and won) by entities known as distributed generators. These tend to comprise of the folks who are selling PV systems to homeowners for $0 down in turn for you leasing it to them but the giant caveat is they keep 100% of the credits/revenue from net metering. (Think of SolarCity, etc)

And to address the primary hurdles with the startup approach are:

1. Regulators like large entities to deal with and enforce regulations, not several entities. They will push back to make their lives easier.

2. If you ask a large company (or group of investors) to fight on your behalf, they are going to fight for what benefits them not necessarily you.

There are consequences to going rogue in a regulated industry. Specifically, going against the grain is what caused Uber to be disallowed from operating its ride share services in Austin for some time.

1: https://www.ercot.com/services/rq/integration

2: https://utcle.org/elibrary/download/practice_area_id/32/a/51...

> The resulting Kafka-esque bits were what regional grid operators and regulators jointly required _a long time ago_ as part of the transition to a "deregulated" electricity market (e.g. this was not enacted in response to solar).

That’s not the part I was referring to as Kafkaesque. I meant the part where the OP had to go though an obscured workflow and wait over months to receive slow replies just to get the process moving to be paid for their solar contribution.

If it was a long time because that was an inherent difficulty of complying with necessary safety regulations, I would not call it Kafkaesque. But here, it’s where there are obvious attempts to scare off all but the most diligent, just to get the super-watered-down version of being paid.

Ditto for stuff like “you can only trade energy within the same time bands because we have no concept of a conversion factor between different time bands”.

> I meant the part where the OP had to go though an obscured workflow and wait over months to receive slow replies just to get the process moving to be paid for their solar contribution.

This is the same workflow that commercial entities go through but employ an army of lawyers as expensive lubrication to keep the process moving.

> If it was a long time because that was an inherent difficulty of complying with necessary safety regulations...

Forgive me if I'm wrong here, but I think you're classifying regulations as primarily for safety reasons. The important part here is regulations determine not only safety, but who can participate, what are the required qualifications[1], who gets paid, and what they get paid[2].

> But here, it’s where there are obvious attempts to scare off all but the most diligent...

Yes, the regulations are fully meant to scare off anyone who isn't diligent (or the word they would prefer is "compliant").

> ...just to get the super-watered-down version of being paid.

This might be a bit of hyperbole, but it's probably because the end goal is to eliminate net metering[3].

The telecom industry went through the exact same thing in the late '90s, early '00s. Its version of net metering is called "reciprocal compensation" (based on call flows). Regulators and incumbent lawyers worked in tandem to chip away at this until the rates were so low it didn't matter.

> Ditto for stuff like “you can only trade energy within the same time bands because we have no concept of a conversion factor between different time bands”.

Hoo boy, look at page 4 and 5 of that TX PUC document[3] where the regulators make a decision to disallow the utilities from using meters that would allow for net metering due to time bands.

1: https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/UT/htm/UT.37.htm

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing

3: https://www.puc.texas.gov/agency/rulesnlaws/subrules/electri...

> This is the same workflow that commercial entities go through but employ an army of lawyers as expensive lubrication to keep the process moving.

And? How does that make it any more defensible in the context of the point I was making there? What is that replying to?

> Forgive me if I'm wrong here, but I think you're classifying regulations as primarily for safety reasons.

No, I was referring back to your own claim[1] that some of them are for that reason:

>>> The primary things the utility (both transmission and generation) wants to avoid is backfeeding and islanding — the former is dangerous to linemen, the latter is dangerous to your neighbors’ equipment.

And then using that in a hypothetical to clarify what I would vs would not count as Kafkaesque processes intended to scare off solar users (vs satisfy an inherent domain constraint).

I don’t know what, once read in context, would give a different impression.

> This might be a bit of hyperbole, but it's probably because the end goal is to eliminate net metering[3].

Yes? That was my point all along? That rather than make token efforts to get the incentives in alignment, they’re just stubbornly fighting things that would benefit solar because “sigh, more work [as things currently stand]”.

> Yes, the regulations are fully meant to scare off anyone who isn't diligent (or the word they would prefer is "compliant").

You’re mixing two separate issues there. Yes, we want people to comply with regulations. No, we don’t want to trick people into not selling their solar because they failed to keep calling and escalating their tickets to an agency that ghosts them. I was referring to the latter, and for some reason you’re redefining the point to refer to the former, and then acting like I don’t understand why we’d want people who can follow regulations.

> Hoo boy, look at page 4 and 5 of that TX PUC document[3] where the regulators make a decision to disallow the utilities from using meters that would allow for net metering due to time bands.

I’m not sure what that means since it’s not a coherent claim, as I understand the original issue, which was whether you can apply credit for power supplied in one time to power drawn at a different time *on your bill.

So “crediting you for your power contribution” is an accounting-level concept, not a hardware-level concept. You trade energy at one time for energy at another time via accounting; you don’t need special meters for it beyond their ability to know when the power passed through. (Unless you’re saying that they prohibited meters with any awareness of time, which is doubtful since they still would need to use billing periods.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30195749

> And? How does that make it any more defensible in the context of the point I was making there? What is that replying to?

> Yes? That was my point all along? That rather than make token efforts to get the incentives in alignment, they’re just stubbornly fighting things that would benefit solar because “sigh, more work [as things currently stand]”.

It's not defensible. I'm stating what exists today and it's uniform for GiantPowerMegaco who wants to bring on megawatts of capacity or the Doe who just wants to light up a few panels on their roof.

My overall points have been a) this is entrenched for a long time and b) the utilities are not the primary ones making the rules. Regular people may be noticing the friction now due to increased touch points via solar, but it's not in response to solar.

They did not calcify overnight. No, that doesn't make it right but it does make it harder to change. So things that are long entrenched but need change usually get the "sigh, more work" response and lots of push back.

> No, I was referring back to your own claim[1] that some of them are for that reason

> ...you’re redefining the point to refer to the former, and then acting like I don’t understand why we’d want people who can follow regulations.

I'm not redefining the point but I should have referenced that I was reacting to the callout of safety but the other aspects play into it just as much.

It's not my intention to imply you don't want people who can follow regulations -- it's more about clarifying that if one has to play in a regulated space you accept the whole pie and all its hangups, literal or figurative. Or not participate until the pie becomes more palatable.

The reason I mention law firms that operate in this space is they are generally ranked for their experience and ability to navigate around these confusing, slow, or non-existent responses from these agencies.

> “Crediting you for your power contribution” is an accounting-level concept, not a hardware-level concept. you don’t need special meters for it beyond their ability to know when the power passed through.

I guess my personal hangup here is on not allowing meters to rollback or "reverse".

The portion of the document I referenced is where the PUC says you cannot use a rollback meter for net metering but must instead use a meters specifically capable of measuring in-flow and out-flow.

They go on to state the reason for measuring out-flow is to determine when the energy was made available to calculate the wholesale market price at that given point in time.

> This typically manifests itself to retail customers the form of free Nest thermostats, time of use programs, and subsidized appliance efficiency upgrades (or rebates).

> If they could redirect this money to small generators like yourself and have the same impact, they would drop their demand management programs in a heartbeat

The catch is that the power from small solar generators isn't as valuable as demand management loads, because solar generators aren't controllable - the grid has to just absorb the power they put out regardless of whether it needs it.

Now, if every solar installation had its own battery system that could provide power back to the grid on demand, that would be an equivalent service. And in fact in many places (Vermont [1], parts of California[2]) there are programs starting or in development to do exactly that: buy energy back from residential batteries.

1. https://greenmountainpower.com/rebates-programs/home-energy-...

2. https://ebce.org/resilient-home/

At some point if not already batteries are cheaper than grid upgrades

Having recently installed a battery, I'd say they are definitely not cheaper. There is no way that residential battery storage can match the cost per kWh of utility scale storage.

$10k or so per house vs digging up endless amount of streets?

At much less per house you can build massive utility scale storage, like pumped hydro.

However, these are complementary technologies, serving different time and scale of energy storage and duration. Home batteries aren't realistically going to solve storage on the weeks to season timeframe. They function on the order of hours to a couple days, and during local distribution outages.

Batteries normalise the peaks.

Building grid scale storage still means grid itself needs to be updated for the increasing loads and spikes.

And I'm talking here smart batteries - controlled by grid owner. How it's not default (including solar, cars and other high load devices) it's a bit of a puzzler. Sure it's like 5 minutes of inconvenience for the owner, but saves trillions of dollars.