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Comment by flgb | Hacker News Reader

VPPs are actually a treatment for this issue. By recognizing the value of these new customer-owned systems can provide back to the electricity system, we can give people a reason to stay connected and to contribute back to the common resource.

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PG&E makes it so onerous to be connected to the grid that it'll absolutely take something like this for me to stay connected. But I don't belong to the Tesla ecosystem, so this is clearly not the answer for me.

Literally every building north of Ventura is connected to pg&e’s grid. It can’t be all that onerous if it’s universal.

Try replacing a panel. They make what ought to be routine work, hard. Only in the last couple years has it become cheaper to say screw it and not take their BS and go off grid instead. One of my neighbors already did that instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars with PG&E.

You mean upgrading your service, not upgrading your panel. Anyway I don't see how being charged for capacity becomes "onerous". Taking a home that needed a main service upgrade off-grid instead would also cost a huge amount of money.

Nope. I mean replacing a panel. It's precisely what I said, after all.

Hire a licensed electrician, most seasoned pros will know how to fight this misapplication of regulation, especially if your just doing a like for like swap.

There is no recourse. So have said all three electricians who I have consulted. The PG&E project coordinator makes a decision and that's it.

Different private utilities and PUDs act differently.

There is one PUD here in the Puget Sound region that all the electricians groan about, as their lineman often attempt to go well beyond what their authority permits, claiming everything needs to be brought up to code in like for like swaps, which is truly a beyond the pail demand.

That's exactly how replacing a fire hazard panel would cost me $80k. Random PG&E person decides it's not a like-for-like replacement (despite both being ordinary 200 amp panels) and therefore the underground feeder needs to be replaced (PG&E Green Book has changed guidance in the last fifty years, after all). And since that's on the utility side of the meter, only the utility can do that work, and at ridiculously inflated rates.

No thanks. For now I'm leaving the fire hazard panel. And sometime next year I'm just cutting the cord entirely.

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