> stop the attacks on solar installation
I've not heard of any attacks, just reductions in subsidies (tax credits, net metering). Can you share what you're referring to?
I've not heard of any attacks, just reductions in subsidies (tax credits, net metering). Can you share what you're referring to?
I understand that all kinds of energy production methods are subsidized, but if net metering lets residential solar owners get paid more for the energy they produce than solar farms would be paid, I don't see how that's anything but a subsidy.
Those power purchase agreements then makes it really easy to get loans.
> if net metering lets residential solar owners get paid more for the energy they produce than solar farms would be paid, I don't see how that's anything but a subsidy.
Paying them nothing would be even more unfair (and that's the only option available where I am at least - net metering or no household generation)
I wasn't suggesting this. The phased rollback of net metering in California (the state mentioned in my original parent comment as "attacking" solar installation) means that solar owners will still get paid, just not as much as before. I'm sorry that you live somewhere that this middle option isn't available — the two extremes are indeed less fair!
Thank you for this clarification - I thought the discussion about changes to net metering was general, not California specific. Reading [1] about the changes to net metering in California, it seems reasonable, especially as it has high solar penetration. Hopefully it will (like many things) lead the way so that load shifting becomes simpler/more economical throughout North America.
[1] https://cleantechnica.com/2023/08/18/decoding-the-changes-to...
[1] https://www.cbs8.com/article/news/local/working-for-you/sdge...
1: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-progressive-california-epipha...
1: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-progressive-california-epipha...
An analogy: your kid's preschool has an option where you can volunteer once a month and save $50/month. One day, they announce that they are going to institute a new fee that ranges from $10-100, depending on your income.
How does that new fee cause fewer people to decide to volunteer?
Break even would then be much further in to the future.
Solar is a large capital expenditure, and this change reduces the return on that investment.
To be clear, I think the income-based fee is a bad idea, but I just don't think it changes the calculus on installing solar. I have also had conversations about this specific question with a friend who has a PhD in urban planning, lives in CA, and is in the process of installing solar panels. It's possible she's wrong, but everything she says lines up with what I have read.
It sounds like you're referring to the net metering changes, which are separate from the income-based fee. That does change the calculus, obviously (which is why they grandfathered existing installs for 20 years).
The upfront cost of doing that with a propane generator is about a half that of a battery + solar system (it's about a third if you go with battery + solar + generator, which is more comparable to a grid connection).
However, the maintenance and fuel costs of the generator mean that the solar will be much cheaper (and quieter!) to operate.
If the income based pricing is $100 / month, and the net energy / base connection cost is $0 / month (assuming an exactly sized solar system), then it'll take about 200 months for the generator to pay itself off. That's 16 years, which is a bit longer than the system will last, though replacing a generator costs about half what I've assumed above.
So, there's a pretty low upper limit to the amount they can screw with these fees before it's economically (though not necessarily environmentally) rational thing for individuals to just cut the cord and let the power grid death spiral.
I moved to SoCal recently and didn't realize things like net metering even existed, so when people started to rant about these new measures I was very surprised to learn about them, and especially about people presuming these things to be "normal".
I think at first people were (reasonably) scared that net metering might go away with no grandfathering for existing installations. People had a reasonable reliance interest in maintaining at least some of their existing benefits for the payoff period of their panels.
Once it was clear that existing installations would be grandfathered, I didn't hear much ranting anymore — just people who were bummed that a subsidy was going away (or people rushing to get in under the wire).
>…Rooftop solar photovoltaic installations on residential buildings and nuclear power 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 117 and 282 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.
That's not quite right. Existing installs are grandfathered for 20 years, right? [1]
1: https://www.ecowatch.com/solar/net-metering/net-metering-3-0
Happy to have that conversation. I was replying to this language, which was not talking about new installs, or at least did not indicate so in any way:
> means that folks with solar will get socked with high monthly fees
"folks with solar" makes it sound like you're talking about people who have solar, not people who are considering putting in solar. Anyway, now that you've limited your comment to new installs, we are in agreement. There is a lower incentive for new solar installs, but IMO "lower incentives" do not amount to attacks. If other people think that it's an attack to give less free money to the purchasers of a product, they are welcome to do so (not saying you are, but others seem to think this).
The issues start if too many people do net metering. Imagine everyone has a solar roof and reaches net-zero electricity. You can still maintain the infrastructure with base fees, but the electricity company still has to run power plants in the morning and evening when demand outstrips solar supply, and for baseload in the night. And during the day there's now an oversupply of electricity that they somehow have to sell.
In commercial electricity generation many countries have a kind of spot market for electricity, where prices are determined by demand (down to the minute) and available supply. Prices can go close to zero if lots of solar and wind capacity is available, or far above the price charged to consumer for capacity to cover the evening peak. If we changed consumer prices to more accurately reflected this "true" market price (plus markup for the grid operator), with prices changing by the minute, net metering would be pretty fair. But so far there's little desire to dump all that complexity on regular consumers.
In theory yes, but the grid has not used properly scoped base fees to pay for infrastructure. Delivery costs of power are more than half the total cost; to get to a base+generation model, you'd probably see monthly connection fees for Electricity in the $100+ range for many Americans.
I always laughed about the pricing structure of the business ISP that I worked at. We charged $1000 to install your service, then $1000 per month (without a contract). This was a financial game; we would lose money if you cancelled after your first month. I always thought the pricing should be $15,000 to install, and then $5 per month. That's closer to what the actual costs are. But instead of you going to the bank to get a loan to pay the $15,000, we hid that for you. It made more people sign up, and we had a better source of funding than bank loans. But, at the end of the day, we would have been out of business if a bunch of people signed up and didn't pay. If that happened, I imagine the pricing would have changed to reflect actual costs.
That pole is carrying the power for, say, 100 people.
Half of them use a below-average amount of electricity. If you stick them with a $100/month fixed fee, they don't need a large solar/battery system to get off the grid entirely, so you've made that economical and that's what they do.
Now you have the same number of poles and half as many customers, so the fixed fee rises to $200/month, and more customers do the same thing. This is not going to a great place.
Meanwhile there is a rural road somewhere that only has two things on it. One is a large commercial operation and the other is somebody's house. Putting up poles along that road is going to cost $100,000, but the commercial operation is content to pay the entire amount because their alternative is buying land somewhere that it costs significantly more than $100,000 more. The house on the same road is not content to pay half of that and will just use their $50,000 to install a solar/battery system and have quite a bit left over, even though a model where they only pay for usage would get them to sign up, and the power company is installing the poles either way.
The problem we're looking at is that if you charge a fixed fee for a grid connection, low users opt out of the grid, and then the fixed fee goes up and creates a new set of low users. But if you charge for distribution per kWh, everybody installs local solar generation because it's cheaper than any generation method that has a significant distribution fee as part of the cost per kWh, which in turn raises the distribution component of the price per kWh even more. Under the first option, a large proportion of rural and suburban customers aren't going to want a grid connection at all. Under the second option, they'll take the grid connection but then only use it if local generation isn't available (i.e. it's cloudy) and the grid price per kWh at those times will be quite high. But that's plausibly the better of the two alternatives, because a grid connection with a high price per kWh will generally be better than losing power at those times, or having enough local storage/generation to prevent that from ever happening even in rare circumstances.
A third option is to charge everyone the fixed fee for the power grid and force them to take a grid connection even if that isn't economical, but that's even worse. You've essentially created a head tax with no way to avoid it even if you can't afford it, because you can't cancel your service and you can't pay less by reducing consumption.
Meanwhile if four of the eight people near your house decide to disconnect from the grid because the fixed fee is too high, you still have to cover the cost of that pole with half as many people, some of whom might then decide that the higher fixed fee is too much and disconnect too, etc.
Negative prices aren't uncommon during quiet periods in the summer.
If a customer is permitted to buy as much electricity as they want at a fixed price while also being able to sell as much as they can at a different time at a fixed price, it seems like there's an obvious subsidy happening anytime they sell electricity at other than when the wholesale price is the highest or buy other than when the wholesale price is lowest. (In areas with an excess of solar generation capacity, these distortions become quite large.)
(I'm still all for these subsidies on the balance of factors; we just shouldn't pretend that they're not subsidies.)
And if the grid itself is saturated, that means it isn't big enough.
> I've not heard of any attacks, just reductions in subsidies. Can you share what you're referring to?
I do appreciate a softball.
https://duckduckgo.com/?va=c&t=he&q=political+attacks+on+sol...