They waited until there was a lot of solar adoption in the state, and then pulled the rug on solar owners under the guise of “making sure everyone pays their fair share”
I live in Belgium. I was doing some electrical work in my home recently. On the 29th of May, I noticed two out of three phases were close to 250V instead of the intended 230V. This is the limit where inverters of solar installations switch themselves of; it indicates more solar power was being produced than could be absorbed by the grid.
It turns out the day-ahead electricity market prices on that day were negative for 8 hours. As I noticed with my voltage meter, such price signals are trying to tell us something. Shielding market participants from those signals (e.g. by net metering) will cause real technical problems.
I already try to be part of the solution by charging my EV around solar noon, even tough I don't have solar panels. And I will switch to dynamic hourly pricing soon. But one person voluntarily acting on price signals is not going to be enough.
With 50 panels on my property (a good 12.5 KW of generating capacity based on the nameplate power of one inverter and the peak capacity provided by the other) I probably am on the large size for a domestic installation. But you don't install solar power for peak capacity, you install it for average days and not so average days when you're going to need every Watt produced. And on those days (when power is scarce) you'll find that you are still consuming from the grid. That's the only issue with solar: when you need it most it isn't there. And so everybody gets to be happy: less CO2 emitted, fewer fossil fuel tonnage burned as if there is no tomorrow and some cash back for those that invested in solar. In the long run everybody wins, in the short term some parties may have to review their spreadsheets. But those traditional suppliers definitely aren't losing money, in fact they made out like bandits over the last year or two.
This is specified by the EN 50160 standard: https://www.se.com/ww/library/SCHNEIDER_ELECTRIC/SE_LOCAL/AP...
The range you specified sounds like the US tolerances.
Older appliances typically had a whole raft of supply voltages to choose from 100, 110, 115, 120, 200, 220, 240 and sometimes even 127 and 245 and I'm pretty sure I've seen even weirder ones (150, 185 iirc). Now it's just 120 or 240 for regular consumer gear. BTW, brownouts are more of a risk than overvoltage, with brownouts a powersupply that autoranges might accidentally pick the lower voltage and then when the brownout ends magic smoke comes out.
"just as valuable" - no
Reducing the price that the utility pays for solar KWs makes economic sense.
Most expensive marginal source. More cheap solar shifts over that margin.
There is not such thing as 'extra juice', all that happens is that some panels are not generating. After all, if there were 'extra juice' that would imply forced consumption or some kind of giant sink load to take excess power. Neither of these happen, it's financial until some lower bound and then it gets technical.
The lower the impedance of the local grid the more margin there is for such adjustments to take place, if you are on a high impedance subnet in an otherwise low impedance grid chances are that your inverter(s) will shut down well before the grid itself has maxed out.
Solar prices have been falling rapidly, so the value of a kWh of energy generated via solar has also been falling in competitive power generation markets.
Imagine a situation where everyone has rooftop solar, enough that, under net metering, they pay no fees. What happens? The power company goes under and now you don't have a grid. Which every one of those solar users _still needs_. There is _value_ in being able to buy power when you want it and produce it when you don't, and that value should be paid for.
I think what I said was in line with that video's conclusions, which seemed to be arguing for continued net metering in the eastern half of the country, and used CA as an example of when the current policy hits its limits.
The price can go negative, and it does.
This is not difficult to understand. What's your roadblock here?
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. There's no way that our governments are going to put all possible resources into a centralized renewable grid, so we should also incentivize private individuals to invest while we are waiting for our politicians and power companies to get on board.
As other have said, people taking the bait changed the economics, and that forced the switch. To be fair, it was foreseeable.
Here in Australia we have the worlds highest rooftop solar take up. Feed-in rates are plummeting like a stone. It's not hard to see why - most days when the sun is shining brightly, the wholesale price of electricity is negative. Look at SA here at midday (the picture will change tomorrow): https://aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-elec...
We do have plans here that expose you to that wholesale price. If you export electricity when the price is negative, you pay the grid.
Ironically, at the same time this over supply is happening all states that mainly use coal have been hit by a price rise this month. I got mine today. In 22 days, the price of my electricity is going up 45%. That mainly caused by renewables (and particularly solar) making the old coal plants uneconomical. They used to be able to sell power 24 hours a day. Now since they can't ramp down quickly they have to pay the grid to export their excess power during the day. I don't know whether that's the cause, but right now we have gigawatt coal plants shutting down years earlier than they said they would five years ago. Which is how we get a 45% price rise.
So we are in this situation where feed-in tariffs are worth nothing, electricity prices are going through the roof, we are throwing away a ton of electricity we can't use during the day and solar installs are slowing down.
The solution is storage, of course. Batteries were hard to justify price wise a few days ago. But after this 45% price rise changed that. Again it's a double whammy, but in reverse this time. Remember during the day the price goes negative. That means the grid pays you to charge your battery. I would not be surprised if for a while, the return on a battery will be higher than installing solar panels.
Which means the next phase of the renewable change over has hit us with a vengeance in Australia. It's the invisible hand of the market finally directing investment where it's needed most I guess. It arrived a little late, and it's not so much a hand as a fist. We would have been better off building storage a few years ago. And again, that was foreseeable. Indeed it was foreseen by numerous published articles. But who reads learned engineering articles on future electricity tariffs? Not your average noob looking purchase roof-top solar apparent and if the people hawking solar panel installs read them, they didn't mention it.
So here we are. We wanted an energy transition. Now we've got one, ready or not.