California pulls the plug on rooftop solar
pv-magazine-usa.com
pv-magazine-usa.com
First, Safeway buys in very large lots from certified suppliers, who can commit to (almost) always having carrots.
Second, those suppliers have to deliver at a loading dock, and maybe at a central location, too.
Third, Safeway pays them wholesale prices, not retail.
All of those analogies apply to selling power back to PG&E at retail prices. It's in small lots; it's undependable; it comes from many sources, not just a few; and it's priced wrongly.
Yes, PG&E can be read as Pricks Grabbing Everything, but they're what we've got.
It's not anywhere near that simple. Electric power prices change dramatically throughout the day. For example, even retail prices may more than double during peak hours, if you have time-of-day billing.
In some markets, peak demand is caused by day-time air conditioning during a few weeks in July or August. The extra generation capacity needed to cover that tiny window of time is idle the rest of the year. Those peak hours are very expensive, in real terms.
In a market with small amounts of solar, that solar is helping offset some of the most expensive electricity of the year. And I've seen power companies push their major clients to install solar so that the power companies can avoid large investments in new power generation and transmission capacity.
With net metering, power companies pay retail when wholesale electricity is most expensive. And they credit it back during the night, when wholesale power is cheaper. (The early evening window is trickier, and the hours of sunlight depend on latitude.)
But once solar capacity is sufficient to offset air conditioning, the numbers for the power company get a lot worse.
(Full disclosure: I signed a 10-year net metering contract which would barely break even in 12-15 years, in a market with little existing solar. The power company instituted separate grid fees a couple of years later, which substantially changed how the contract worked. And so my system will probably never pay for itself. Win some, lose some.)
Is that legal? Sounds like you were defrauded
They still provide net metering for the electricity that I buy, as per the contract. They just broke out a ~$35 monthly fee for grid maintenance, separate from what I pay for electricity.
Nobody forces electricty consumption.
People enter electric contracts voluntarily, but maybe you can cite code from one of the municipalities in USA.
[https://www.cailaw.org/media/files/IEL/Publications/2016/gri...]
And most municipalities will refuse to allow on-site grid independent generation, AND refuse to issue a certificate of habitability unless you have reliable power.
Practically, 99% of urban or suburban residences lack the space and other infrastructure to have a safe and effective off grid system up to the relevant codes anyway, especially when the relevant fire codes come into play.
With how weird a setup it is, most municipalities would just refuse to figure it out with you, so good luck getting through that mountain of red tape.
Rural of course, is entirely different.
https://off-grid-home.com/is-it-legal-to-disconnect-your-hom...
If highly depends on your State and also how your off-grid system works.
I suppose you hope it's relevant because, "the solar power comes just when they need it the most" ?
They don't seem to do the math quite so happily, though. Maybe it's #1 and #2:
First, Safeway buys in very large lots from certified suppliers, who can commit to (almost) always having carrots.
Second, those suppliers have to deliver at a loading dock, and maybe at a central location, too.
> SEASONAL PRICING The cost of electricity on your rate plan is lower during the cooler months from October to May, and is higher during the warmer months from June to September. For full seasonal pricing details, visit pge.com/tariffs. [0]
And here’s a an infographic [1] showing the differences between two plans for season, time of day, and baseline allowance (tiered usage).
[0] https://www.pge.com/pge_global/common/pdfs/rate-plans/rate-p... [1] https://www.pge.com/pge_global/common/pdfs/rate-plans/how-ra...
They currently charge .28-.51/kwh (yikes!)
the wholesale price for electricity in california is 3-4c/kwh
Less than $0.15 per kWh is pretty common.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/24/russia-is-pumping-less-natur...
My (very poor) understanding is that much of (all of?) power that gets sold back to the utilities goes through virtual power plant (VPP) programs like Tesla's or Swell's, where although there is a relationship between the owner of each solar installation and the utility, the VPP is the entity that sells the power to the utility.
Since we’re fairly confident we need lots of carrots to save the world!
That's worth discussing, but right now it's a regulated monopoly, entitled by law to make a "reasonable" profit, AFAIK.
But very few -- if any -- actually know what society needs.
I would say that what Society needs is to ensure a regular supply of carrots at stable prices. It's not to maximize small household carrot farming if it does not align with this goal.
There is no particular reason why solar needs to be on individual rooftops where there is no storage, no ability to make long term commitments, and no mechanism to turn it into a reliable, dependable stream of energy.
But sure, if the same households commit to maintaining their solar panels at an agreed upon capacity, and commit to purchasing enough storage to provide the agreed upon electricity despite the weather, and are able to sign long term contracts with significant financial penalties for failing to deliver the promised quantity of electricity, then yes they can be an electricity supplier to those utilities that need reliable energy suppliers in order to meet their own contractual commitments to energy users.
Battery capacity is something many households may also want to invest in, if the incentives are attractive enough. Again, no need for long term contractual commitments.
Unfortunately when it's dark in one place, it's also dark elsewhere. When it's cloudy or rainy in one place it's not made up for with extra sun elsewhere. There are also differences across seasons, with less sunlight in the winter, etc. You can average and say a state has, on average, x hours of sunlight in June, but without extremely expensive storage, the sunny days don't end up powering the grid on cloudy days, and solar in the summer doesn't get stored for use in the winter.
Electricity needs to be stable and reliable year round, and every day.
But no one wants to do that because storage is expensive, so they wave their hands and talk about "randomness evening out" or they explain "storage is a solved problem!" and then they draw something on a napkin for you.
Bottom line everyone wants to externalize the cost of storage because it's a difficult and expensive proposition. And so the household with the rooftop solar connected directly to the grid is effectively using the grid as storage, because buying the batteries is -- surprise -- too expensive.
But the electric utilities are saying -- "unreliable power is not very valuable to us, because we need reliable power" -- that is solar plus storage. If you just give us unreliable power, we'll only pay a penny for that, but we'll pay 20 cents for reliable power. And people are getting very angry at this because they think the unreliable and reliable power should have the same price, or that unreliable power is somehow a replacement for reliable power.
That's a little different than forcing Safeway to pick them up at the wholesale distribution warehouse (at full retail price) and truck them around themselves and stack the stores themselves.
In the PG&E case, the residential rooftop solar power is delivered directly into the retail last-mile networks just like the carrots on the Safeway shelves metaphor.
However, the NEM2.0 model is still needed a tuneup. Last-mile networks still need maintenance. Suppose each neighborhood reached self sufficiency, somebody has to pay for the grid maintenance and run the whole thing.
IMHO, buyback at a discount makes sense, but NEM3.0 seems like a Christmas gift to PG&E. They get ToU, capacity fees, wholesale rates, and minimum usage fees. They asked for the sky and got it all.
The only kinda grey lining here is the incentivization of house scale battery storage thru gutting all other routes to solar profitability... Sort of like saying that police speeding ticket quotas 'encourage' alternative transit like bicycles and trains just by adding misery to driving.
In California's case the grid generation capacity was made up of nuclear (fixed base load), natural gas for dynamic load, and solar/other renewables (wind, hydro etc), and import/export.
If you look at the grid operator stats on https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html#sectio... - I find it interesting to compare days like May 10th (where solar + base load lead to exporting) vs something like Sept 1st (where solar + gas + imports was barely enough) vs today (Dec 16th, where sun is limited and we rely on natural gas + imports to fill the gap).
PG&E probably loses money on days like May 1st where a large portion of their power is acquired at retail, but makes a killing on the other two example days by selling wholesale generated/imported power at our jacked up rates.
IMHO They want to make a killing on the plentiful springtime solar surplus too. Now that they've got everything they asked for don't expect that this will reduce rates for non-solar customers - it'll go to investors.
I still think a tune-up of NEM2.0 would have been better. Other places seem to get by just fine with an 80%-90% buy-back rate vs NEM2.0's 100%.
I think it's much more important to see that situations like this are treated justly and fairly than to make sure I'm getting my cut of the corruption.
Carrots keep under refrigeration exceptionally well. They transport well. They're not like peaches, which are either in-season and fantastic, or out-of-season and thus flown in from somewhere else, really expensive, and lousy.
Good chefs know this.
You must not be an electrical engineer.
Do you think the power I generate from my solar array travels a hundred miles to some facility to then be sent back to the house next door?
Not so.
Multiple homes are connected to, and fed by, power distribution transformers. In other words, five to ten homes share the same output. Which means that excess power from one or more of those homes is fed directly to any home that needs it.
My power goes directly into my neighbor's meter. The power company charges my neighbor the full rate for my power. They pay me almost nothing. Pure fucking profit.
Of course, it would not be sensible to ask for the full rate. However, they should pay a good percentage of what they are charging for the power. Among other things, if anything breaks it is my responsibility to fix it. And, of course, I paid for the entire system. They sell my electricity at full rate with minimal costs.
Am I correct in assuming that excess generated power can't leave my local distribution network? So there are X houses in my circuit served by a dist transformer, and if we can produce more than those X houses need at that point in time, then the excess simply doesn't get "pulled" from the panels?
Theory: Transformers are bidirectional. You can drive them from either side.
For example, in testing one of the devices we manufacture we need 480 Volts AC. At each test rig we use a 480 V to 220 V transformer, drive it backwards and generate 480 VAC from 220 VAC.
Distribution transformers have primaries in the tens of thousands of volts (say, 50 kV) and 220 VAC (for residential service) outputs. The topology could be different, however each home receives a two leg service with 120 VAC per leg.
So, yes, you should be able to drive the low voltage side and end-up with high voltage on the other side.
Let's say you have ten homes on the same transformer. Each home has solar. During a holiday, all homes are empty and nearly all of the power they generate drives the transformer backwards. The power would then drive other transformers and feed homes that need it.
What I don't know is if they explicitly have devices to prevent backwards flow of power. I don't think they do. Not sure this would make any sense. I could see protection devices to prevent overload.
A neighbor here told me there was a 6-month wait to get solar & its associated metering, because PG&E doesn't have the equipment on our lines that can accept power back from the customers.
Sending humans out to fix things is costly.
From the far sidelines this appears to be a stop in a long journey where the State of California tries to simulate market-efficient price of different forms of power generation solar the slow and hard way that doesn't involve using a market. All these schemes look even more foolish than usual now that solar is allegedly the cheapest form of power, so presumably a market would just throw things up at speed.
Interesting.
That is, if your solar production for the year equals your energy consumption for the year, you pay $0 in energy costs[1].
You are still offsetting retail electricity rates with your own, cheaper, fixed cost form of electricity. You just get paid the same[2] for your excess production as any solar farm.
1 – It was going to be nonzero with an interconnection fee, but that got dropped
2 – $0.08/kWh is also higher than utility-scale power purchase agreements in CA, which are closer to $0.03/kWh
That leaves PG&E buying your excess at exactly the time of day they don't need it. And you continue to pull load at peak demand (like everybody else) so you need the grid connection.
It's a lose all around for PG&E. This change recognizes that.
https://www.puc.nh.gov/sustainable%20energy/Group%20Net%20Me...
https://www.investopedia.com/rural-electrification-act-51191...
> "At first, the plan was to give these loans to companies in order to help them build electricity infrastructure in rural areas—a plan that proved too costly. So instead, lawmakers chose a type of organization well known to farmers: the cooperative, or co-op. The idea was that if farmers could organize themselves into co-ops, the REA could distribute loans to them at very low interest rates—between 2% and 3%, depending on their state—to build electricity infrastructure."
Note that a key reason for its success was that they didn't use anything like a modern federal contracting program, i.e. paying private companies, but instead worked directly with rural co-ops (just extend that to towns and cities).
Of course, this would mean taking over the transmission infrastructure from the investor-owned utilities in California.
A reliable transmission grid does not require burying cables! It requires engineering and fault analysis and proactive spending and caring about your customers. If your distributor doesn't have reliable infrastructure, it's not because they can't afford it, it's because they don't care and don't have to fear losing you as a customer.
It's really difficult to prune, say, 50 miles of Douglas-fir that stands easily over 150-200ft and grows right next to the lines -- many of their limbs are fatter than any tree I saw in the northeast. You'd have to get a crane and block the road off, and one tree could take a good part of a day. Can't fell them either, generally speaking, as you get into all sorts of disputes and the environmentalists will send you to hell 50 different ways with lawsuits.
Nowadays it's all that plus environmental lawsuits.
Redmond can probably get redundancy, but a lot of the Sound area really doesn't have multiple routes available. If a line goes down in Gorst, it impacts a lot of people. Undergrounding is very expensive, and unless it's absolutely required, the utility comission doesn't let PSE do it unilaterally and charge to all ratepayers, it has to be approved and paid for by the affected ratepayers, but most people aren't willing to pay for it. It also isn't a panacea; underground wiring still breaks from time to time, and time to resolution is much longer; plus there's a bigger disruption during installation and new connections to underground utilities are way more expensive than connecting to above ground utilities. There's a lot of new connections as there's lots of new housing, so that's a bigger factor than a more established area.
I really don't like the concept of burying your infrastructure.
The problem is that once you've done it, you can never change the system. You're stuck with whatever you have until the gulf between what you have and what you want is so vast that it makes sense to install a new system from scratch.
Burying the lines is great, if you're confident you won't want to make any changes for the next 100 years.
I live in Newcastle, it's very consistent with the first windstorm of the year. I just assume we'll lose power but you know it's coming. Then it's good for another year. I've considered a genny or a house battery but haven't really needed it. Luckily it happens in november not when it's actually cold.
This is pretty consistent for 15 years here.
The trees here are so much bigger than indiana. my friends come in from there and are like "fuuk you weren't lying". When I took my song GF to STL who grew up here she said "Why do the trees look like short broccoli?"
Wouldn’t work in my city where tax raises have to be approved by voters and they refuse to accept a tax increase to pay to fix the water system and re-pave the roads. The city government sends fliers round explaining to people that they need to vote for it, but to no avail.
From a carbon perspective, net metering was basically paying homeowners to provide useless power to the grid (at the bottom of the duck curve) but be able to cash it in when they actually needed it around 7 pm. This meant generating useless solar power and in exchange for letting burning a ton of natural gas when you actually needed the power.
The next step is pairing solar with residential and grid scale storage. Personally, with how intermittent production can be now, the grid should be more like AWS. Allow for per minute billing and rates that fluctuate for some customers. If you can pair storage with solar (or even just storage if you could buy low sell high off the grid), that would be the next big step in the renewable revolution.
Net metering always had to die for the next step (storage) to happen. With the electric car mandate coming into 2035 so that millions of homes will own a giant battery this will eventually be even more important.
So, the characterization of paying exports for useless power and then getting it back during the 7 PM system peak isn't quite correct.
Strongly agree with you that price signals are important to impact behavior (human or system) which will result in a lower overall price for society, so long as regulators do their work (align price with cost).
It's only really seems useless during one month in the summer. During the rest of the year it looks like it would continue to have an impact. Today, for example, California never dipped below 10GW of natural gas production even while it had 13GW of solar all throughout the middle of the day. That's still an appreciable gap.
This doesn't even consider imported energy, or the potential misplaced environmental costs of any one particular source.
> The next step is pairing solar with residential and grid scale storage.
This looks to be entirely true. The state is barely cracking +/- 2GW with it's storage system, even though it has demands ranging from 25GW to 50GW. It's either that or we're at the next evolutionary step of "grid tied storage."
> Net metering always had to die for the next step (storage) to happen.
It's wonderful the compromises we get to make when 80% of the market is controlled by three entities.
> With the electric car mandate coming into 2035 so that millions of homes will own a giant battery this will eventually be even more important.
The worldwide market was 10 million in 2022, with just over 500 thousand units in the US overall. California has 17 million private vehicles and 12 million trucks. I think you'd be much better off just building stationary batteries and tying them to the grid, in particular, due to limitations of current technology and worldwide production capacity.
The dumb thing is that any electric cars made in the last 5-10 years don't have the ability to serve as energy storage. Those are just now emerging.
Tesla stands out as particularly dumb, since they also sell solar systems. Why not a solar + car bundle?
Batteries degrade when they are pushed to their limits, they last when used properly. The ESA has multiple reports on their testing, if you use the battery in the flat part of its discharge curve and don't cook it, they basically last forever.
The reasons they don't is because manufacturers build their devices with less than the bare minimum. 20% better performance for a device that fails and needs 100% replacement, good scam. Battery degradation should be barely noticeable.
The market has failed catastrophically.
https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Engineering_Techn...
10x. I think we should have a target of some percentage being able to be completely met by solar. Until we are literally drowning in free energy we don't know what to do with we don't have an oversupply. There are so many industries which were never electrified that need to be.
This ruling is so damn short sighted for so many reasons. Rooftop solar is the single best way to stave off upgrading the big power distribution lines, generated at the edge, used at the edge.
A year from now PGE is going to say we need XXX billions to upgrade the backbone due to increased electrification.
My central gas heater is running right now, there is no reason that a thermal reservoir couldn't have been charged during the day that I can use a 730am.
5G should have included a mandatory, public cert based low bitrate M2M network.
> Give me mobile electricity - if my solar panel is generating 5KW at home, give me the same electricity for free
Genius! Decouple transit from consumption fully. Greatly increase, mandate even, the points of consumption.
I'd like to see people charge at work, and drive the energy they need overnight back home with them.
I’m building a house about 15mins outside downtown Los Angeles. It’s on empty land on a public street. There is no power to the property. LADWP is requiring us to move/install 3 poles, and upgrade the transformer. Probably around $75k cost to us. Has to be their people doing the work.
The Bureau of Street Lighting is also going to require us to move another pole that just has their street light on it with low voltage to it.
I’ve been trying so hard to tell them all to get F’d and just install solar and a bunch of batteries instead. But they’ve told me it’s illegal to that (something about freezing to death).
Oh and we have to widen the road ourselves too!
The whole thing is insane. So they’ve basically created a system where we have no choice but to pay for the utilities failing infrastructure.
Brilliant.
Not where I live.
> a simple diesel or natural gas generator is a far cheaper method of getting power during an outage.
Not self-sustainable. The goal is completely self-contained energy generation. Dependence on externally sourced fuels fails the requirements.
(I know the answer is yes, because the answer to this kind of question is always yes...)
We nearly all have choices. We can pound our heads on the desk until we bleed.
It is about power. The individual building a house has no power. The local government has lots of power.
Local governments (and the associated utility companies) here in New Zealand are notorious for dreadfully bad planning and mindless bureaucracy. It sounds like it is the same there
In a free society one would think having 'property rights' would enable one to build on owned land and that public infrastructure would be paid out of public funds also known as taxes. If the property taxes aren't adequate to pay for utility infrastructure, that's a legislative problem.
LA doesn't seem to be failing, though. I mean, I get that regulation is unfair, and surely they're doing suboptimal things like every bureaucracy. Yet, the lights are on, the toilets are flushing and the ambulances are arriving.
I don't see how demanding the third largest metropolis on the continent switch to a "hook it up or don't, your call" policy is going to do anything but make things much, much worse.
Basically: your argument is predicated on the idea that you personally don't need to do these things because everyone else already did and you don't need the incremental advantages. But give everyone that choice, and no streets will be lit, no roads will be paved, and power and sewage will be plumbed only to neighborhoods that will collectively pay for it. That's the way it works in most of the developing world, and it sucks. No freeloading. If you want to live in the urban core of Los Angeles you need to be willing to live like your fellow Angelenos.
Around here, PG&E wanted to charge us $10K to remove a poll and move an existing transformer to an existing poll (and would take years to "engineer" the solution and schedule the work, despite it being a few hours of work for one crew).
No idea what a residential transformer goes for, but I guarantee it's not a significant fraction of the $75K bill.
It is also insane that they are moving polls and not burying the lines.
I thought they were forcing you to run some election polls.
Yeah. Completely new feeder. From what I saw it wasn't a ton of work, maybe a few hours, but hours nonetheless.
For non-metro, utilities should allow micro grids if they are using mostly renewable power. Microgrids can be significantly more reliable when the grid alternative requires long HV lines without redundancy. And from a fire perspective, distributed generation is a huge win -- ever with a grid interconnection for winter, you can de-energize during peak fire risk and run off PV and batteries.
How about this instead: the property developer should pay, we can have a "building code" that sets standards for all residential constructions and disallow building any new housing that doesn't meet it. That way the costs are borne not by the individual home purchaser but by the investor class speculating on new housing development.
Which is exactly what the upthread poster is doing! They aren't an "individual" as commonly understood (i.e. someone who just wants a home to live in). They bought an empty/undeveloped piece of land and want to put a home there. Well, someone has to pay for that home to be of acceptable quality, who do you suggest?
1) pass the (excessive) costs on to the property sales price
or:
2) not speculate (and not build the house)
The OP has chosen one of the possible ways to have a home to live, you either buy an existing one or buy a plot of land and build a new one on it.
Are there other ways that you can suggest?
Poles, transformers, roads? That's what people pay taxes for. The government should deal with it.
I have done a bunch of construction work in Los Angeles county, including designing and building my own solar array. The only way I can describe the process, rules and the people involved is using words such as "surreal", "brutal", "nonsensical", "damaging", "expensive", "frustrating" and more. I cannot say anything positive about it. Nothing we do in this domain is designed to help people complete projects efficiently and at reasonable a cost.
If I can help it, I am never investing another dime in Los Angeles county. Even better, we have been planning a move out of California. This also means taking our businesses and employees out of this place. It's a mess.
Most businesses leaving California report growing losses after they leave. A lot of them fail.
As it turns out, the problem was never California. The problem was that they just couldn't cut it in a competitive environment that doesn't coddle business owners.
These kinds of comments usually come from people who know nothing about running a non-trivial business.
Simple example: Only business owners/operators know about the city of Los Angeles Business Property tax.
What is it?
Most people would guess it's like the property taxes assessed on homes. Not so. Not even close.
This is a tax the city imposes on any business operating in or through the county. If you so much as drive through the county you have to pay it.
What do they tax?
Your desks, chairs, printers, computers, workbenches, tools, paper shredder, equipment (for example, all the machinery in a CNC shop). They even tax tenant improvements. If you lease a commercial space, paint the walls and perhaps build a few divider walls, they tax that. If you have cubiles, they will take the dividers. Etc.
"Business property", for lack of a better description, refers to all objects owned by the business, including things like the garbage cans under every desk.
Imagine paying taxes on your desks and computers to the city of Los Angeles FOREVER.
Surreal? Yeah.
Real? Absolutely.
Fucking crazy? Without a doubt.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Where do you think businesses get this city tax money from? Well, they add it to their cost equation and the prices they charge are adjusted incrementally in order to maintain the profit margin they might need to conduct business, R&D, grow, have a financial cushion (you know, pandemics and shit), etc.
If costs go up, prices go up.
If prices go up, you become less competitive with lower cost-basis geographies.
If you are less competitive with other geographies due to your underlying cost structure, buyers will migrate to providers in those regions.
That could be nationally or international.
When buyers migrate, you struggle to survive, might have to downsize or just move to those locations.
In the long run, jobs are lost and businesses leave.
Look what they are doing now in CA with regards to rooftop solar. They are going to kill off the entire industry.
> Most businesses leaving California report growing losses after they leave.
Stop watching CNN brother. You are in the Matrix. This is patently false. I know so many who have left and thrived in places like Arizona and Texas that I have probably lost count. Lots of these have taken valuable talent with them.
In our case, most of our business is international or aerospace-related. So long as we are in the US, it really doesn't matter where we are. You can't manufacture shit here in California anyway, the underlying costs are very high. The difference in cost structure for suppliers we have here and in other states is hard to comprehend unless you are ready to understand and accept the fact that imposing high taxes and high regulatory costs on businesses, in the long run, is highly destructive. Most people don't have a good sense of what business looks like under the hood, so, no, I don't expect most to truly understand this.
You might want to read this:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adammillsap/2021/08/27/business...
and this:
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/12/15/california-pulls-the-...
Watch this:
What's Behind California's 'Business Exodus'
They blamed taxes, moved to Texas or some other "low tax" state, and discovered the problem wasn't the taxes. It was their business. Most of them aren't around anymore, having gone bankrupt or been swallowed up by better run businesses.
It sounds like your business has a fundamental problem with its execution. It's immediately apparent from you blaming "underlying costs", and what you really mean is that California doesn't coddle businesses with tax incentives or free money. (See, for example, your rooftop solar complaint, where you really mean the days of easy money for solar installers is going away now that there is a sufficient market that they no longer need government subsidies.)
California has been the world's 4-6th largest economy for several decades. If taxes were as killer as you said they were, it would have flamed out decades ago.
Low tax jurisdictions have low taxes because they need to have low taxes in order to have any chance at competing with properly run economies like CA and NY. Midwestern states don't give out massive government subsidies out of the goodness of their hearts, they do it because the labor force is incompetent and they need to give out massive subsidies to get companies to put up with the huge inefficiencies of a poorly educated workforce that doesn't believe in science.
It looks like your business will learn all this the hard way.
If it was there business that was the case before they left CA. If they leave CA because they think lower taxes alone will help them, they are dead businesses walking. Moving won't help them at all.
> It's immediately apparent from you blaming "underlying costs"
Sure. Sure.
You are focusing on taxes. There's so much more to the issue than just taxes. In fact, I would say lower taxes is just gravy. The structural issues in CA are very serious. If you really want to understand, watch the video I linked. That's just a starting point, BTW.
> for example, your rooftop solar complaint
I guess you don't understand solar either.
Here's a bit of useful advice:
Take your own money. Start a non-trivial business in CA and learn about business reality.
At the same time, take your own money, install a solar system on your home and then learn about the realities of solar as well.
My favorite saying, often attributed to Mark Twain: A man holding a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.
Most people think they "know", when they really don't. This is seen all the time on HN and other online forums where people love to voice strong opinions on everything, whether they know anything about it or not. It would be funny, except when people have the right to vote on things they truly aren't qualified to understand. It would be like me voting on issues of medical science. Not qualified. At least I am honest enough to understand and admit this.
I clearly know more about running a business than you in the state is California.
If you're truly having this much trouble running your business in CA I suggest reaching out to your local chamber of commerce for support.
My client base of successful California companies exceeded the value of the companies fleeing California by about several hundred billion dollars. Post-COVID, the CA companies are even more valuable than the ones that fled California when they couldn't cut it in a competitive capitalist environment. But yes, you're right that companies that took government handouts from other states to leave CA are surviving off those governments handouts.
However, you're just embarrassing yourself. You've been whining on HN about your company leaving California for a few years now, it's pretty clear that at this point your company has evaluated that option and determined it was actually a stupid thing to do. It's like Elon Musk's "first order thinking": leaving California sounds great on paper until you actually look at the numbers and discover that it doesn't solve anything and actually makes things worse.
It's very rare in LA for someone to build a house in an otherwise undeveloped area of an incorporated part of LA.
So you're basically just arguing against a system that was set up and optimized for the most common case.
We ended up putting the poles in ourselves for 10% the price, so there is hope.
The delivery charge is intended to pay for the actual electrical lines and maintenance, the point of issue here (providing a connection to the grid).
If the issue is that a net-metered household isn't paying enough for the electrical lines, simply don't net-meter that part of the bill. Charge the full delivery charge per kWh drawn from the grid, without subtracting the amount sold back to the grid.
Agreed that monopolies need to be regulated by the state. In PA my electricity went up over 300% in the first 6 years it was deregulated, and the company's profits were record quaters from 2008 - 2017.
The alternative is publicly-owned utilities, like munis or coops. Typically the publicly-owned utilities have materially lower electricity rates.
You mean, like Silicon Valley Power (Santa Clara) or Los Angeles Department of Water and Power?
Both of which charge a fraction of PG&E does, and have more reliable power, and offer better customer service (SVP's website is around 1000x better than PG&E's), and more transparent billing, and more assistance to needy customers.
https://www.abc10.com/article/news/local/abc10-originals/pge...
https://www.abc10.com/article/news/investigations/gavin-news...
We go on streets?
How do you handle booting an incompetent government. You can't even force liquidation. You can't fire anyone. The only thing you can do is force the issue on the Governor but booting him is close to impossible.
Am I reading that right? People who already had their system in place get to keep the old rate forever?
This at least gives new purchasers some degree of confidence that they’ll be able to rely on the present pricing when costing out an install.
That's when you go on to mandate that all newly-built homes include solar.
Interested to read other's experience.
My parents are building outside of Adelaide and they've decided to go off grid (solar + battery + backup generator). Their expected payback period is (iirc) 8 years, with a 10 year warranty on the batteries and a 25 year warranty on the panels. They're expecting to have to run the generator once a year or so.
From what I hear SA is one of the best places in the country to generate. Optimal temperature for the panels plus lots of sunlight. 8 years seems like nothing with the genny and battery. We tried but couldn't make the numbers work with any kind of decent backup, this was 3 years ago.
Cheers for the info!
[0] http://www.caiso.com/Documents/Feb12-2021-OpeningBrief-DCRT-...
If you're on the grid, the grid operator has to have enough energy production capacity to give you whatever power you need on demand, up to some peak limit. At the highest demand parts of the day and year, they have to resort to weaker plants, basically plants that don't come online except at the highest demand times. They cost a similar amount as any other power generating plant, but only get used 20 or 10 to 5% of the time, which means power from them is phenomenally expensive as their capital costs have to be paid off somehow even though they don't get used much.
This is a huge fraction of total costs for a grid operator, and it only gets worse as solar becomes a bigger part of the grid. For every kW of solar, the operator needs ~1kW of natural gas plants sitting around ready to turn on at a moment's notice.
In CA during the day usually we have too much power, and our wholesale prices can actually go negative ie they pay people to take generators offline as there's too much being made, and that's because that's peak solar production times. Then in the evening all the solar goes away but if anything demand goes up, so now they have to spin up all these natural gas plants to power people's homes at enormous expense.
The way we pay for electricity is by kWh mostly because it's been historically a reasonable enough way to allocate costs and it's easy. But solar is different. Without storage, the entire grid has to be available at all times even though it's getting less use during the day and certain parts of the year. Then net metering means the solar people give the operator electricity it really doesn't want or need during the day and get to cash in their credit during the high demand, extremely expensive parts the day while, on balance, pay ~ nothing for the system on which they are reliant and foist the costs of maintaining the grid onto everyone who is too broke to have solar on their house.
So the capital outlay from the grid operator and power plants is ~ identical for a house that has solar but no batteries as compared to one without solar panels at all. But now the solar power person would use net metering so they have to pay basically nothing for the system even though they're radically reliant on it. So, on balance, there really is a very large cost with no real benefit to the utility.
People should have to pay for the costs they impose on the grid / everyone else, and that's more or less what this new price structure does. It pays much less in credits during the day when the marginal unit of solar power is basically worthless and adds a per kW of installed solar monthly fee to pay for the capital costs of maintaining the generators those solar customers still need around for when the sun goes down. That's fair! iirc it has some reductions in this latter cost depending on how much storage you have, as is appropriate.
Sure, this system does not really handle overloaded local grids and grid upgrades, but we pay through the nose for general grid access anyway. Paying the right price for every kWh just feels natural. It also automagically makes people take more or less correct decisions on batteries and when to produce.
After visiting PG&E rate page, I cannot believe that Sacramento, CA is already pushing 50 cents kilowatt per hour.
I pity the fools who live there (as I once did).
https://www.pge.com/pge_global/common/pdfs/rate-plans/how-ra...
Neither of these events is rare, but it’s worth noting that we NorCal suckers aren’t paying this much for all of our electricity.
I guess the people who bet on centralized subsidies probably want some middle ground. But California saw it was mostly going to private companies engineered to take advantage of [current subsidy] and anything half-way would just continue pumping money into greenco instead of the future? And they decided to cut and run and bet on raw energy/climate outcomes instead of whats best for greenco?
Only when the whole group needs power take from the grid.
Technically, this would simply involve a ~200 amp cable down the street and one electricity meter for the group. No smartness is needed at all - electricity will always flow naturally in whatever direction saves the group the most money.
Bureaucratically, moving power from one house to another requires so much paperwork the incumbent provider will never let you do it.
PG&E might be shite, but the hand-wavy dismissal of modern electric infrastructure is overlooking something that is a real benefit to society, and that infrastructure has real costs to keep it running.
You can pay people to install cables, and you can get insurance. We're talking about a lot of money to save and pay for it.
> PG&E might be shite, but the hand-wavy dismissal of modern electric infrastructure is overlooking something that is a real benefit to society, and that infrastructure has real costs to keep it running.
The real point here is that if you moved the meter slightly there could be a huge change in price, and that seems weird!
For smaller conduit (like, 200 amp) you just need a standard conduit, with the cable running through it, and a couple inches of slack on either end. How do you think they run power to detached garages, sheds, ADUs etc in people's backyards?
I can totally see rich neighborhoods putting in additional solar, a private battery + diesel backup and disconnecting from the grid, just like they probably already have their own well and sometimes even septic. If the payback is anywhere near 10 years that is a no-brainer.
edit: I just checked archive.is and it's...there? under what circumstances do I get redirected to that nsfw meme?
For your specific example, the straightforward thing would be to rejigger your water heater to use a variable amount of power, rather than the on-off of 5.5kW or nothing.
There are certainly some savings to be had but I don't see it being that much unless some kind of battery is involved.
Maybe the future model is a small substation with battery for the whole community using some cheap-at-scale battery tech to store local community's solar and wind.
Then some net-billing system where you pay market price of electricity only if you use more than you store, with any profit from that going towards maintenance
Seems silly to put solar panels on rooftops in California until we have totally filled the I-8/10/15/40 corridors with massive utility scale plants stretching a couple miles in both directions from the highway.
Solar panel production and installation has limited capacity so shouldn’t we prefer the desert climate multiplier to get 4x the energy? Take that panel off your roof and send it to the Mojave! The grid losses are negligible in comparison
Everything is out of stock, earliest deliveries are weeks, sometimes months away depending on what you are looking for and suppliers that do still have some stock are playing favorites with their long term customers (which makes sense, from their perspective).
I ended up buying two NOS inverters and one brand new one that was a bit larger than what I really needed (three separate sets of panels, 42 in all). One of them arrived damaged and I had the option to return it for a full refund or take a 50% discount, I took the discount because I knew I wasn't going to be able to find another one.
Even second hand gear is priced through the roof.
That's exactly the goal here: make grid export uneconomical so you need to pair solar with a storage system that banks your afternoon excess into self-consumption once the sun goes down and the duck curve kicks into peak territory.
> The utility-backed concept suggests poorer Californians are paying higher utility rates to pay for lost profits that utilities endure in order to pay solar owner for delivering clean energy to the grid.
If every Californian reduced their electricity usage by half, PG&E would just double the rate and probably come up with a couple additional fees to tack on as well.
A good example is Quebec, they nationalized all the electric corporations in the 1960s and it became a government monopoly.
http://www.hydroquebec.com/history-electricity-in-quebec/tim...
So if PG&E had massive three gorges and itaipu dams they too could offer cut rate electricity just Like Paraguay too has cheap electricity.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/business/pge-bankruptcy-n...
https://www.eastbaydsa.org/campaigns/pge/
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/wildfires-californ...
https://calmatters.org/politics/2020/02/what-happens-if-cali...
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1182562176667512833.html
https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/04/28/pge-revenue-profit-ri...
The most important part is the network infrastructure (power lines, transformers, substations) is a natural monopoly so it needs to be owned by the state. Regulation and incentives keep failing when corporate ownership of the network infrastructure is tried. In New Zealand the national grid https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Transpower_New_Zealand is a “state owned enterprise”, while local low voltage networks and power metering is owned by each local government.
The idea is to use corporate (profit motivated) ownership for generators and retail metered billing to end consumers, but design the market to be competitive for multiple generation companies (don’t allow one generator to have a monopoly in any area) and for consumer choice of who bills them.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_electricity_market has a good high-level overview of how everything is configured, and also refers to some of the failures of the regulations. It refers to a disputed study that consumers are overpaying by ~33%, so in theory bills could be reduced with nationalisation. . . although I personally would expect a government department to be more than 33% inefficient, so I don’t think electricity consumers win either way.
But to the point: a U.S. state can't nationalize a private company. It simply lacks that power. The closest it can get is buying a private company, or creating a public agency or public-private partnership, all of which California has done before.
Or build its own competition. Quite a few califonia cities run their own utilities; Palo Alto started and ran its own phone company (sold to Pac Bell in the late 50s) and cable system (foolishly and destructively sold to crapcast in the '00s) but runs its own water, electricity, and gas system. Several counties run their own utility systems, often in cooperation.
However the high speed rail project suggests that this is not the time for California to enter into such projects. A century ago progressivism flourished, building water, road, and other crucial infrastructure that we still depend on. But the "revolution" of the late 70s and 80s cut away all the maintenance and support for further such projects in the name of ideology.
Eminent domain is in both the US constitution and the California state constitution. You usually have to provide compensation of course, but they made a list of exceptions that includes utilities: https://law.justia.com/constitution/california/article-i/sec...
The closest I can find is eminent domain which they can use to obtain privately owned land, but nothing that gives them the power to do what you're describing. Can you point me in the right direction?
As a last resort, eminent domain offering fair market enterprise value and an orderly transfer of control.
Is the idea that the secured creditors need the subsidy too?
NFL teams are franchises of the NFL, and owners of the other teams have to agree to ownership changes of each franchise. It's also not true that he suddenly "got wind of" anything, he'd been planning to move the team for 7-8 years and had very public spats with the city for years over it. He didn't tell the city ahead of time about the move because they had been at war with each other for many years.
NYC took control of the subways by capping fares which bankrupted the private operators.
This is commonly practiced in various city and county services: fire and police services, ambulance, public transit (virtually all extant bus and rail services began as privately-owned companies), school bussing, schools, childcare, parks and recreation, utilities (water, rubbish, electricity, gas, Internet, sewerage, ...), etc.
There's a long history of this, in California and elsewhere.
The Wikipedia article unfortunately doesn't dive much into the details of mechanism though it does point out numerous instances and issues.
That's how.
So no, that's not how.
However, lets say that California couldn't seize PG&Es assets directly (transmission lines, etc.) - that doesn't really matter as California can force PG&E's hand, given that they could easily put them out of business.
California is in control, it just doesn't have the political capital to do what's needed.
PG&E is privately funded but effectively managed by the state.
The main reason is that a power company defends its existence by generating and delivering as much power as possible.
If everyone had on-site generation and batteries, PG&E would barely be required, and if they were to bill too much, users would just disconnect from the grid entirely (some battery systems can already work without a grid).
To defend their existence, they need to do everything possible to stop homeowners not needing their service. And discouraging rooftop solar is part of that.
I suspect that a power company could concentrate on them and still turn a profit, if 90% of detached houses stop buying electricity from it and disconnect. (But the latter requires a lot of batteries installed.)
I bet the electrical grid operator's margins are much thinner in residential neighborhoods, sometimes maybe even negative.
They could scale the cost of emitting carbon so that PG&E's total revenue was still reasonable.
Once the grid emissions started to approach zero, this pricing scheme would collapse. I'm OK with letting future politicians replace it at that time.
Honestly my hope was that metering like this would be an incentive to build said storage but it is not. In the end the grid/utility operators are crying missed profits and lobbying government to step in "or they will become bankrupt". It's a sad state of affairs, these utilities make money hand over fist but not doing the investments they are supposed to do.
CA power and water utilities were abusive before. This not only takes that to a new level, but this move is antithetical to California's entire righteous environmental posture. Not to mention that the utility's excuse is vague, unsubstantiated bullshit.
CA invents new ways to perpetrate hypocrisy.
California slashes rates paid for household solar contributions back to the grid.
First we upgraded our HVAC, the old one was inefficient.
Well now our power bill is < $100/month because the new blowers are so frugal.
Ironically we now can't make solar pay, because it would take decades longer in payback than any solar system is expected to last!
The fix is super simple. Just meter by the minute and pay out current wholesale electric rates as you send to the grid. When you buy, you pay retail for delivery depending on the instantaneous market.
Don't want to buy at potentially high rates during evening peak? Sounds like you need to invest in a battery system.
If you want to pretend you are a micro power plant, you should get paid as one.
What you describe sounds like Buy-All Sell-All, except you're allowed to use and store what you produce before paying retail rates for electricity purchased from the service provider.
Is it anti-competitive to deny residential renewable energy producers the right to use the clean energy they invested in producing if they want to purchase electricity?
Another exclusive monopoly contract: if you buy water from me, you can't use the water you capture yourself.
Net metering in the United States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_metering_in_the_United_Sta...
Net metering > "Post-net metering" successor tariffs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_metering#Post-net_metering...
We want there to be renewable residential energy. Subsidizing renewable energy will hasten adoption. We should subsidize residential renewable energy if we want there to be more renewable energy.
If we make the break-even point later in time, residential renewable energy will be less lucrative.
Is it legal to have a cutover so that it's possible to use one's own renewable energy when the power's out, given an exclusive Buy-All Sell-All agreement?
- 1a) when the grid is down
- 1b) when the grid wants the customer to slowly increase load e.g. after the power has been out
- 1c) when it's safe to send more electricity to the grid e.g. at retail or wholesale or intraday rates
- 2a) how full are the local batteries
- 2b) the current and projected local load && how much of that can be throttled down
- 2ba) how full and heated the hot water tank(s) are
- 2bb) the current and projected external and internal air temperature and humidity
- 2bba) the current and projected internal air temperature and humidity, per e.g. bath fans and attic fans with or without in-wall-controllers with humidistats
- 2bc) projected electrical needs for cooking, baking, microwaving (typically at 100W*15amps=1500W or more)
- 2c) how many volts at how many amps the local renewables are producing
But IIUC, Buy-All Sell-All service provision agreements threaten termination of service if the customer/competitor does anything but sell all locally produced electricity to the grid by direct connection, so an emergency cut-over that charges your batteries off your solar panels instead of the grid (e.g. when the grid is down) is forbidden.
Florida did a similar thing, writing legislation that made it stupidly cheap for large energy companies to buy your rooftop solar power and flip it for a huge markup. These laws are just a gift to current market leaders for seemingly no reason, other than graft.
I don't have eyes into the specifics, but it's just always seemed like California state politicians have a vested interest in keeping money, both state and consumer, flowing into PG&E.
Irony is that if you shut down your solar panels and go on vacation, PG&E gets essentially nothing. But if you’re at home and producing and paying in (there is a minimum monthly fee under NEM 2.0 today) you’re responsible for an unfair ‘cost shift’’.
Edit: Looks like the 8% per kilowatt-hour tax was already rejected.