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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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

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