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Comment by throwawayacc3 | Hacker News Reader

They also launder their corruption through "woke washing". A great example being a study by PG&E's utility-backed front that made the claim that increasing rates of solar panel installations on houses will raise costs that get shouldered by poor BIPOCs [0]. That means the state should pass net metering changes that greatly favor PG&E, and if you're against them, you're a racist. They got what they wanted.

[0] https://calssa.org/blog/2021/6/5/debunking-the-cost-shift-de...

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Regardless of the racism argument, it seems obvious to me that NEM 2.0 is forcing those who can't afford a solar system to purchase overpriced power from those who can.

I wish we'd just charge/pay people the instantaneous market rate of power. And at noon on a sunny summer day in California, the market rate should be pretty close to zero. Nowadays, the grid needs more storage and peaking generation than it does more solar panels, so we should stop artificially incentivizing rooftop solar panels.

Fun fact, you can do this in Australia and see/pay the instantaneous cost of energy. At noon it often goes negative. So you can get paid to consume!

Edit - link to the dashboard

https://aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-elec...

So I'm wiring up 200A of resistive heaters and trying to net my monthly power usage by making Australia even hotter (insofarasmuchas that's possible) with 48kW of space heaters. Seems fun.

I remember asking a friend - how should solar panels face the sun to get the maximum efficiency?

(I was thinking there must be a way to get the maximum number of kwh out of a day)

He said "You don't orient the panels for the sun, you orient them for PG&E!"

in other words, dump kwh and face them where the sun is at 3 pm onwards

(guess they used regulatory-capture to soak everyone again so even that doesn't matter)

"It seems obvious to me that investor-owned utilities were forcing those who can't afford to own and operate a natural-gas power plant to purchase overpriced power from those who can..."

Are you sure it's just that as more solar comes online, less natural gas gets burned and so profits for the investor-owned utility drop, while the price for electricity remains the same?

I doubt that commercial generators are making anywhere close to 22 cents a kilowatt hour at noon on a sunny summer day. They'll turn on their gas turbines later in the day when solar output has dropped and the instantaneous market rate increases.

Homeowners should be paid lots of money if they can produce power at peak demand times, incentivizing the installation of storage. This is what it will take if we really want to turn down the natural gas generators.

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.

Wasn’t one of the companies in Texas doing that, which is how people ended up with bills in the thousands?

https://theconversation.com/amp/whats-behind-15-000-electric...

I want to program my electric car to charge whenever the instantaneous market rate is below $0.10/kwH. If the instantaneous market rate of power goes above $1/kwH, I want my air conditioner to shut off. If everyone else did the same thing, the price would never get much above that.

Shielding people from the realities of supply and demand is what leads to overconsumption. Give them tools to control their consumption based on true market rates and everything will sort itself out.

Off topic: There was an ad that tried to make fun of green energy by having the Eiffel Tower converted to a wind turbine. The ad stated that even that will not be enough. I believe the company was Shell. Does anyone have a link to that ad?

Your link is from a trade association made up of Solar power interests. How is that any less biased?

You can’t look at bias vs non-bias (it would be nice, but capitalism makes it almost impossible to be unbiased).

Instead you have to look at the power disparity between sides, and whether you trust the values of each group.

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