Providing zero-interest loans to improve efficiency and reduce demand (e.g., rooftop solar) seems like a net win: homeowners can lower their operating costs and utilities can minimize peak demand.
They say “they have to maintain the generating and transmission capacity anyway” but there is a mismatch here - they are happy to charge another customer full-price for it, despite the fact that customer will be local and thus they don’t need the transmission capacity during peak when solar is putting out it’s max and everyone is blasting the AC. Also actually they are usually charging the other customer a premium for “green energy”.
Entrenched monopolist uses market and state power to keep competitors out, even if it means reduced quality of service.
Even if, at a federal level, you straight up gave the things away, places like Texas would outright ban them or require contractual terms that made them effectively impossible to install, like different billing rates (large charges for any returned capacity, rather than credit) or just forbidding them in any home that is publicly interconnected (which is usually a requirement for having a mortgage). They straight-up will not allow rooftop solar to succeed under any circumstance, conservatives are politically and emotionally invested in making sure it fails, just like they blamed renewables when the gas power plants froze last year. And they are too entrenched with gerrymandering to ever get out of office, no matter what they do. It is a de-facto one-party state despite democrats consistently returning near 50% in elections.
Samsung moving there is going to be a problem for them, all these disruptions are terrible, not just the outright brownouts but also fabs are extremely sensitive to power quality, small surges or drops will screw up wafers and reduce output quality too. But none of this is a surprise, if you move a business to Texas, and you are some type of commercial or industrial operation that depends on electricity, you really get what you deserve.
I feel bad for the people though.
Basically, we mooch off the grid. We're supposedly freeloaders, using the grid as our giant battery - only when we need it, and we're not paying to maintain the grid*.
This argument was new to me. The state I live in doesn't credit me 1:1 per kWh, per se.
Each kWh of power I pay for has 3 components; when added together, consumers pay a rate per kWh anywhere from 7-15cents. Each credit of power I produce can only offset 2 of the 3 components (like 95% of the cost)
Tldr - it sounds like some utility providers do not require solar owners to pay for transmission costs, or break their bill up in such a way that the credit can only be applied toward the power, but not the transmission.
Net metering sounds like a topic that needs to be defined. Some states definition of net metering could be very advantageous to solar owners, while other states have reasonable net metering rules that still incentivize residential solar.
I can only assume that they hate it only because those dirty hippies love it.
Solar subsidies have paid off in helping build demand and now solar gear is really cheap and the cost is split on the labor to install it (creating local jobs).
I'm going to guess that your folks consume Fox Entertainment programming? They are rather consistent in denigrating renewable energy: https://www.businessinsider.com/fact-check-fox-personalities...
This topic has unfortunately been highly politicized and I can only assume it's because the petro ruling class does not want to let go of their monetary pipeline and buys influence in the political realm to maintain it.