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Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

Yet another fantastic example of regulatory capture. When the last round of net-metering rules changes was up for public comment last fall, I joined the live stream of the proceedings, and called in and commented as well. I listened to a good 2 hours of comments, and every single one of them was vehemently against the changes. (Well, aside from one comment that was mostly off-topic; the caller used the time to rant about the lack of nuclear power.)

Of course, the commissioners still voted for the changes, and they've been in force since mid-April of this year (and I'm no longer considering rooftop solar due to the poor deal available now). I fully expect these changes to pass as well.

How do we get these clowns out of office? Seems our governor is hesitant to get involved at all.

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I have seriously been considering trying to start a petition to make the CPUC a voted office again.

If you look at where the CPUC members end up after their time “protecting the public” you wouldn’t wrong to be infuriated. In fact they have not denied a rate increase in the last 25+ years. They rubber stamp everything for the utilities so they can get their 200k+ jobs with them after!

Looking PG&E's net profit margin for the past 5 years, it looks like the rate increases are not large enough-- In fact they've lost money.

https://investor.pgecorp.com/financials/sec-filings/default....

Did I miss something? 2018-2021 were losses due to massive lawsuits from burning down large portions of the state, but 2022 was their highest net in the last decade. Besides, PG&E has some of the highest rates in the country. If they aren't profitable, lack of revenue probably isn't the issue.

You, the other commenters on the call, and the people replying to you are all wrong. I really wish people would bother actually learning about these issues before jumping to uninformed rants about government corruption or Citizens United or whatever.

Net metering is/was acceptable when solar was a tiny oddity, but at any kind of scale it's a horrible idea. At best it's a regressive tax on the poor, and at worst it's a doom loop that can kill the grid completely. Utilities have massive fixed costs, which have to be distributed over all rate-payers; when wealthy people install solar and get paid back at retail prices, those fixed costs remain the same and power rates have to go up on everybody else not fortunate enough to drop $20K on rooftop solar panels.

The reason you were blown off on the call is because a representative democracy is supposed to represent all voters, including the ones who are harmed by net metering, who- being on average poorer- probably don't have the leisure time to show up on a call and argue on their own behalf. This is why "local community meetings" are antithetical to democracy: they amplify the voices of people with tons of spare time to show up and yell at community meetings, which is an utterly unrepresentative segment of the general public.

Those same wealthy folks will install a battery component (just because they can) and will pay their own cost to produce have about the same effect as retail consumption/production. Tying fixed costs (infrastructure) to variable costs (power production) will always favor one group or another. Low consumers infrastructure costs are subsidized by higher consumers. It costs just as much to provide the grid access for 1 KWh/day as it does for 100 KWh/day.

That is Citizens United in action: soft money corruption, and probably hard money corruption these days.

Rooftop solar is a "socialist" solution to power. Noncentralized, empowers the end user, undermines large corporations, bypasses government control of power. Oh wait, that's ACTUALLY almost purely libertarian, but of course it's going to be branded as hippy socialism to undermine it politically.

Republicans should (ideologically) be falling over themselves to get rooftop solar pushed out. As if ideology means anything.

We’re talking about California here, which is functionally a single-party state, and that party is not the Republican Party.

Unfortunately California democrats can hardly be considered liberal, much less socialist. The neo-liberal ideology seems to be nearly as corporatist as the most die hard republicans.

>...Rooftop solar is a "socialist" solution to power. Noncentralized, empowers the end user, undermines large corporations, bypasses government control of power. Oh wait, that's ACTUALLY almost purely libertarian, but of course it's going to be branded as hippy socialism to undermine it politically.

I don't think I have ever heard of anyone outlawing rooftop solar. The problem with rooftop solar is that it is very expensive compared to utility grade solar.

>…Rooftop solar photovoltaic installations on residential buildings have the highest unsubsidized levelized costs of energy generation in the United States. If not for federal and state subsidies, rooftop solar PV would come with a price tag between 147 and 221 U.S. dollars per megawatt hour.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/493797/estimated-leveliz...

If we want to subsidize a renewable energy source, why should we subsidize rooftop solar when we could subsidize utility grade solar or wind? Money is fungible and not unlimited - a dollar that goes to subsidize residential rooftop solar is a dollar that would go much, much further if it was used to subsidize utility grade solar or wind. Rooftop solar subsidies are also unusual in that much of the subsidy is often paid by less well-off households to subsidize their wealthier neighbors - sort of a reverse Robinhood scheme.

I would like my lunch and eat it too:

- I agree grid solar is far cheaper, and it should be aggressively pursued.

- but home solar is weirdly expensive, almost regulatory capture-ish. There's no way utilities should be getting panels that cheap but the rooftop stuff is so expensive.

IMO rooftop solar is simply another path to reduced carbon that should be equally emphasized: you should get solar power anywhere and everywhere it can be placed. The economics will sort them out as solar panels go through the next cost improvement and technology waves (perovskite+silicon, bigger factories, etc).

Rooftop/home solar reduces the grid infrastructure impact of EVs. It aligns with air conditioning / heating peaks on hot days to alleviate brownouts. If you have a disaster that brings down grid power for days, it provides a usable power base for people to survive. If you have home solar + an EV, your household can survive gasoline supply outages in addition to grid power outages.

But I'm a quote-Lazard-LCOE all over the place (btw 150$/kwhr is the low end of nuclear power costs), so obviously home solar needs to be improved. I simply don't see how grid can be one-sixth the cost of home solar. The panels are basically the same. The inverter may be a bit more expensive. I don't think that even includes storage.

Something stinks.

> Citizens United in action

Are there PACs that specialize on CUPC policy? If not, Citizens is likely irrelevant.

It's utterly ridiculous.

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