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Comment by spywaregorilla | Hacker News Reader

This is harder than folks give credit. Folks want to leverage their own solar power for cheap, clean power; but they still want the availability of the grid for those moments when the sun isn't shining and the batteries are dry. The grid is expensive, and these folks are trying to avoid paying their share because the pricing scheme assumes that availability is highly correlated with actual usage.

The more self reliance individual customers have, the harder it is for generation plants to stay profitable. Break equilibrium stuff by adding more solar and seeing how it gets sustainably fixed might not be a terrible idea, but it is hard.

I don't know anything about the specifics of CA.

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To be fair, it's possible to fix the pricing scheme.

I currently pay a bit over $40/month for a natural gas connection and a bit under $0.40/month (total) for the actual gas consumed by our stove top, our only gas appliance. (We'll probably go induction eventually, but it works for now.)

Of course, I don't generate gas and sell it back to the utility, but the point still stands that the electric utility could fix their pricing to correctly charge for availability and usage.

Yup, I got the exact same impression.

If this was actually above board and helpful, they wouldn't need any kind of coalition to do it, they would just build solar and sell it. But no, they are trying to do the easy part, and let the hard part fall on others.

And it doesn't help that they have requirements relating to the income of the end consumer! That's a sure sign of something that isn't useful on its own, rather they have other goals.

Yeah, the other side of the debate has legitimate points about free riders. This article dismisses them mostly by calling them names like "investor owned".

They are in fact "investor owned". As opposed to municipal utilities, which generally oppose these regressive policies.

That isn't abundantly clear in the article. They don't cite a position paper by any MUDs, and there does not seem to be anything stopping MUDs from having community solar in practice already, as SMUD does.

Even if the article doesn't articulate that, if you follow energy policy in California that becomes clear very quickly. Almost no municipal utilities supported revising Net Metering, which ended up reducing the solar energy credits for residential systems by 75%.

One reason for them being called investor owned is many people own solar systems based on leases which means you don't own the panels on your house, the company that installed them does. This is to distinguish between owned by the consumers of power vs corps.

You are talking as if this is an impasse. There are other things they can do, like fast expiring credits, or give users an ability to charge their car for free at work, when they can generate equivalent power at home, but don't let credits rollover.

This is not a consumers vs producers zero-sum issue. There are always more uses for cheap power. Desalination, agriculture, extracting water from air etc. The cheaper the energy we can produce, the better off everyone will be.

It's not an unsolvable impasse, but it's tricky. Just the technological mechanisms for your example proposals are rather hard; the economic and social problems are even harder.

> This is not a consumers vs producers zero-sum issue.

It's not zero sum, but if we externalize the entire cost of the infrastructure onto people who cannot deploy solar, it will be very inequitable; that's been the default path we've been on.

And it's going to be an issue of significant debate what exactly is equitable and good policy.

Meh. Aren't there industrial, agricultural and public customers for electricity? Already, electricity in CA is among the expensive in the country. We do want to save the planet, right?

> Meh. Aren't there industrial, agricultural and public customers for electricity?

Yes, but someone has to pay for transmission and distribution into (and out of) residential areas.

So the solution is to charge more the people who already pay for their solar? Who now only get 8$ for 300$ for any additional electricity they produce(NEM 2.0, best case, or get 4c worth of electricity for every 1$ of electricity they produce in NEM 3.0)

I don't think you're understanding my comments. I didn't defend current policy. I merely pointed out there's a big set of tradeoffs to be made and in the end it's a normative choice.

Someone has to pay for transmission and distribution in residential areas. If the choice is "residential users without solar panels bear the full cost," you end up with apartment dwellers and the poor paying for all the infrastructure. Hence, IMO you have to do something and think carefully about policy to have reasonable outcomes and avoid unnecessary complexity.

It's not zero sum, but it is a complicated social, technical, and economic problem. If we reach a good compromise, we should expect that few will be happy with it.

> The cheaper the energy we can produce, the better off everyone will be.

This is a good point. But it only holds if the benefits of the cheaper energy accrue to society in general. It does not hold if it goes entirely to the ones who have built the means of generation. Which ironically, unlikely almost every other economic situation, is the small indie consumers! The big players and the grid operators are the ones that get squeezed out and, as a result, causes harm to the majority of normal individuals.

Off the grid cabins frequently use a hybrid setup, where a (typically) propane generator refills the batteries during extreme load or whenever they dip below n%. It's handled by a smart system that can optimize for house temperature, minimum propane or electricity used, etc.

This works very well because you rarely need it and propane has a fixed, predictable cost. Unfortunately, it doesn't work in CA due to their rules about generators.

The specifics in CA are, the utilities want rich customers to subsidize the grid costs for poor customers. That is, you will pay for your grid connection based on your income, not usage.

If they go through with that I am going to feel so cheated. I live in a 1br apartment, in a dense city, using 2kwh a day, and they want me to subsidize people who literally own property??

IMO the grid connection cost should be based on the value of the property and billed to the property owner, not based on the income of each connection and billed to each person renting an apartment.

You already do, sorry to tell you. If you live in coastal, urban California you already pay way higher marginal costs to cover the baseline usage of people who live in the interior of California, regardless of whether those people are insanely rich or not.

Yes well I'm going to be paying approximately $1 per kWh consumed if my provider's pricing plan is approved.

Which is ridiculous.

At the top tier margin, not on average, I assume.

Not sure what you mean. There is a fixed cost involved, and then a flat variable rate for kWh consumed. If I halve my usage from 60kWh/month to 30kWh/month, I would still be stuck paying $57/month (which is almost double my current bill, and averages to almost $2/kWh).

Basically I will be forced to pay at least $50/month ($600/year) for a hookup in an area where electricity has been built out for a century+.

There are something like 100,000 units in the same situation, so my provider will be raking in $60m/year for a grid that is already built, just for my city alone.

The grid has maintenance costs, especially in California, where there is a lot of deferred maintenance that needs to be done. Distribution costs (which don't really scale with usage) are about 50% of the average monthly bill. Is the grid worth $50/month to you? It certainly is to me, and a $30-50/mo grid bill would be in line with the monthly connection costs for Gas and Water, which don't use the silly usage-only billing method that Electric does.

I don't use gas except for the stove, so if they charged me anymore than $10/month for gas I'd tell them to get away from me with their toxic waste. Currently I pay about $5/month there.

I don't pay for water, it is grouped by the building. Which is exactly what I'm suggesting for electricity -- multi unit buildings should have a single connection cost, not one per tenant.

Sigh, my new construction townhome has a gas stove, and gas heater for ⅓ of it, and a luxurious fireplace

I'd rather have an induction stove, a second heat pump, and an infrared fireplace in my only mildly cold se climate.

I pay $360 a year in base charges, and not even in February, when effectively trying to make it worth it does my usage exceed the base charge.

Then the are another 900 townhomes just like me. Yay for perverted utilities markets.

Ah, I see what you are saying. That wasn't really what I was even getting at though. Because of the tier/baseline system, even the marginal rate you pay per joule is way higher in coastal California, to subsidize interior California. That's before we even start looking at the fixed charges.

> harder it is for generation plants to stay profitable

Why should I be sympathetic to the profits of some random company?

Let the market figure it out. Suppressing community solar is suppressing the free market. It's not right.

If it would be up to free market, you would be paying for supplying electricity from your solar panels to the grid during day (because there is nowhere to store it) and paying for feeding electricity of the grid during the night (because somebody must make it)

That's odd, because traditionally, daytime generation is the hardest for utilities to keep up with, especially with factories (induction motors), offices, and residential HVACs - all of which are used less outside the day shift (before sunset).

So much so that many time of use programs are most expensive from 10am-7pm (DST)

Nobody would pay to supply to the grid. If it came to that, panels would have an automatic shutoff, or some device that burns off excess electricity by doing pointless work.

It is called negative prices and it is actual problem

https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/eu-must-address...

You should be sympathetic to the random company because it keeps the lights on for millions of people. If a handful of people have the ability to say "I've taken care of ME, so I'm not going to engage with society anymore", then they may put an impractically large burden on their neighbor who lacks the capital to build their own solar. You should also be sympathetic to the fact that the folks with their own solar still want to be attached to the grid without paying for its upkeep and that's not fair.

You absolutely, 100%, do not want free market economics on power! This is a necessity that has a huge capital cost meaning you are often given only a single company that can supply you with energy. You do NOT want that to be a free market. You want the government to protect your rates, which they do.

They aren't "suppressing" them. They don't like that community solar wants to skim the easy parts, and let the grid handle the hard, expensive, parts.

The investor owned utilities generally make money off transmission, thus they prefer large solar farms that are generally far away and located in ecologically sensitive areas.

The sun does not shine at night, even in California. Summer is often accompanied by a loss of wind power. Energy sources that can be regulated are direly needed, depending on location, countries tgat decarbonized use either hydropower, geothermal or nuclear plants as a backup. Batteries are still too expensive for the needs of an industrial society, plus you have to replace them often.

While the sun does not shine at night in California, the energy usage of HVACs (the top consumer in the average house) is also about ¼ the need of in the daytime.

Hot water usage (2nd highest amp draw) is also reduced shortly after sunset.

Laundry dryers (3rd highest amp draw) is also typically reduced during the night.

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