On top of this, the CPUC lowered incentives for solar last year:
https://calmatters.org/environment/2023/11/california-solar-...
https://calmatters.org/environment/2023/11/california-solar-...
They wanted the state to impose a tax on people using solar panels.
https://krcrtv.com/news/chico-residents-on-possible-solar-pa...
Net metering can only form a small part of the retail market before the fixed costs of distribution get concentrated on remaining customers in a death spiral. A population that is generally less able to take advantage of tax credits (because their tax liability is not high enough), and has less access to capital in the form of homeownership or financing for the solar system.
This is analogous to the "problem" of fuel efficient car owners paying less fuel tax. Some states have added higher registration fees on hybrids and EVs to offset the "lost" revenue. Another similar situation is water utilities that encouraged efficiency through higher rates. Customers saved water and then the utility had to increase per unit rates to maintain enough baseline revenue to cover fixed expenses of maintaining the distribution network to every home.
Homeowners may get paid less than their panels cost, but rooftop solar is tremendously expensive and there is no way that it would recoup the cost at actual market prices
There are absolutely no savings from an unreliable local power source.
The climate should take precendence over everything else. Incentives for rooftop solar should increase, incentives to help lower income people should increase, electricity record profits should not be a thing.
This is entirely due to regulatory capture, not some "good will towards poor people" that the electricity industry is pushing.
Power companies have a fixed margin of 10% and a captive market.
If power costs them $1, they make $0.1. If power costs them $5, they make $0.50.
Rooftop solar costs 10X what commercial solar does. Every kw of rooftop power they buy means 10kw of commercial solar isnt built.
Unless the electricity consumption is falling faster than inflation, I'd expect the regulated-profit electric utility to be having record profits essentially all the time.
That's an argument for moving from rooftop solar subsidies into storage subsidies, because its already at the point where renewable output sometimes exceeds 100% of demand. (And the strong solar mandates will contnue to add supply without subsidy, especially—and this adds to the pile of reasons that this needs to happen—if housing construction stops being held back by zoning constraints.)
there's nothing more evil than forcing people to pay flat rate for services (electricity) that we should all be cutting back on, not using even more.