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Comment by rdtwo | Hacker News Reader

This was always a subsidy for rich people by poor people. The power generated by rooftop solar isn’t not worth 30 cents

Yep. I've always considered net metering immoral. Rich folks using poor folks for a free nighttime battery.

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.

With Buy-All Sell-All you buy all you use at retail rates and sell all you produce at wholesale rates. Buy-All Sell-All has a later breakeven point than Net Metering, where you buy what you can't produce at retail and sell back the rest at wholesale or better, which is an indirect subsidy for a resilient power grid with residential renewables with external benefits.

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.

I’m so confused, is there something that prevents the “use what you produce and sell excess at wholesale?” That seems like it would be the sanest policy. If you can’t use your own power then I think getting paid retail rates is the only fair thing since that’s how much the power is worth to you.

FWIU, Buy-All Sell-All contracts have a "termination of agreement to provide service clause" if the residential renewables are not directly attached to the grid; it's against their TOS to use your own renewable energy and sell the rest, which is probably monopolistic and anti-competitive.

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?

Perhaps there's an opportunity for a solution here: at the junction of batteries, renewables, and local [government-granted-monopoly with exclusive first-mover rights of way over and under other infrastructure] electrical-utility junction; there could be a controller that knows at least:

- 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.

That is exactly how it works in Finland.

Thanks! You gave me a whole lot of rabbit hole to head down, so maybe I shouldn't thank you :)

But that's not a problem with rooftop solar mandates, that's a problem with California's absolute refusal to fix their stupid and terrible electricity market. Electricity doesn't cost 30 cents per kilowatt hour in California because it's inherently harder to generate or sell electricity there, after all, how many solar panels and whatever other infra you want could you build just across the boarder in Nevada and sell back into California undercutting PG&E prices?

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.

The basic issue is they use volumetric pricing to cover all costs, which includes everything from transmission to wildfire mitigation. It’s a dumb system and it means that people who use more already pay more of the fixed costs than those who use little.

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’’.

When you look at it like that, it seems bad. When you look at it is as trying to get people to adopt solar, it has worked well. The government decided to accelerate solar uptake as a policy goal. They did that. Everything has winners and losers, at least this has some substantial environmental justification. Not sure how paying bankers' bonuses after the destroyed the economy helps anything, including the environment. These two things are not the same.

The problem was that you could easily have subsidized residential solar installation without creating policy that required you to play stupid rate games with PG&E that seem purposely designed to get them a portion of the value YOUR solar panels create.

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.

The entire Western empire as it's run today is a subsidy for rich people by poor people and the rest of world. But as Eurasia unites against it and dollar hegemony breaks, these technocrats just double-down on their ideology and failed ideas.

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