Look at the proposals of the past few years to see it. These proposals say things like helping under served communities or combating wealth inequality, but similar to “Save the children” bills, the titles rarely have any relevance to the content. Every proposal has been about nothing other than protecting and increasing utility company profits.
From my view as a consumer and constituent, the government has failed. The simple fact that we allow for profit companies to manage and profit from essential utilities is ridiculous. That we are allowing these companies to write laws that increase their profits at the expensive of society and the environment is a tragedy.
Simply put, sdge, pge, and friends, need to be non profits run by the government. CA state should nationalize these companies and reduce profits to zero while actually promoting roof top solar.
https://signaturesolar.com/complete-all-in-one-off-grid-sola...
Worse… they have no incentive to disconnect you since the connection costs zero and they are guaranteed revenue.
I remember when Gray Davis got recalled. The prevailing opinion was that (dramatically) increasing vehicle registration costs pushed that over the finish line.
The fact that they've managed to keep virtually all of the outrage directed at the utility companies is an amazing PR success for the Governor.
Further, an inspection by the local government inspector wasn't sufficient. See, you've also got to get the electric company to inspect the system as well, and they'll demand things not spec'd in the state/national code...or they won't allow the system to be connected.
This shit is even going on at the grid level. Our regional electrical grid organization admits that their approval process for grid-scale solar or wind connects can take a decade. They insist that much planning is needed for "reliability."
You mean more than it does by mandating it on all new single- and multi-family dwellings?
Residential generation is 0.06$/kwh. Residential storage is 0.20$/kwh.
My power from the utility is 0.53$/kwh.
If you look at power price increases in CA, you get a pretty good ROI today going solar+battery. But amortized battery prices are going to drop by 75% in the next 5 years (e.g. lifecycle improvement + cost reductions). If you have the capital, it’s going to be a no brained to go residential solar provided you are allowed to disconnect from the grid.
During peak solar, California have so much power that it is exported [0]. But you can't turn off natural gas generators, because they're slower to ramp up and down. With so much solar, gas has to be able to quickly ramp up to meet peak power. This is a problem they call the duck curve [1].
California doesn't need more solar, it needs more batteries. That's why the residential power buyback plan changed to incentivize batteries rather than just allowing 1:1 rates (new NEM 3.0). You probably got solar panels before that, as that changed just this year. With the old NEM2 1:1 rates, you're using the grid as a free battery during the night.
[0] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr...
You and some number of your neighbors are connected to a transformer, some number of those transformers are connected to a larger transformer, and so on up the chain until you have an actual large grid.
The CA legislature actually required that a change be made with AB 327. The details were ultimately up to CPUC, but CPUC was attempting to meet the broad goals of the legislature in making this change.
Additional power produced during times of peak solar insolation is not very useful to the grid because of all the existing solar and is most useful during the late afternoon and early evening when demand is high but solar output is low. Maintaining the grid costs money independent of the cost of electricity generation and under the old rules solar customers were effectively subsidized by non-solar customers. Since non-solar customers are on average poorer than solar customers (owning your home is generally a per-requisite after all) this amounted to a regressive transfer.
EDIT: Fixed wording in sentence about customer cross-subsidy
(Almost) every utility should do this. It more accurately reflects the real cost structure of grid maintenance, which doesn't depend on how much energy you use so much as on your peak usage during peak hours. In a world where home solar installations are common it's especially important, since you don't want people relying on the grid for backup power during period of low sun without paying anything to maintain that infrastructure. That's unsustainable in the long term.
If you feel very strongly about politics in California, you know, run for an elected office.