solar costs keep shrinking and then you have power companies like SDGE that want to punish solar owners based on their salary and set a $125 min cost to be connected to the grid
I completely agree with your core point, which is that there need to be costs associated with impact on the grid, to make sure that there's no incentivization of freeloading in either direction. Whether utilities owe solar owners a one time payment, an ongoing payment, or should be contributing to the financing of new construction of solar panels is an open question imo.
I'm all for massive solar investments it's a great path forward but there are issues we'll have to address.
https://energyathaas.wordpress.com/2024/04/22/californias-ex...
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/maine-puc-study-values-sola...
Clearly things become very different at very high penetration. I mean, if everyone is net metering, who is consuming the excess power? Who is paying for the power plants that these people use when not providing their own power? The economics would go all to hell.
2) Many/most utilities don't pay retail rates for excess power, so there's already profit built into the arrangement with solar customers.
3) You didn't address a utility charging monthly fixed fees based on income.
2) They don't and there was a LOT of complaining about not getting paid full rates by early solar adopters.
3) I'm fine with it. The power grid is one of the natural monopolies where state operation makes more sense than the weird quasi private marketless mess we have now and progressive tax structures are normal there so I don't see as much problem with income related grid fees. Also higher income people will generally have larger grid demands meaning they need more excess capacity built in so they probably do cost more to serve.
A flat fee that accounts for all the fixed costs that the grid requires, then an additional fee based on usage. There is no magical bullet that removes that. Maintaining lines and transformers and keeping it all monitored and balanced and so on takes money.
That will make it so solar is still viable without making utilities complete money holes.
I'm hoping to see more decentralized/hyper-local power generation and storage.
With the scale we're dealing with decentralization does not work. You need to centralize for efficiency (i.e. optimize power generation and maintenance per unit of land-area). Though in this case the point is moot, since we don't have any grid-scale storage solutions for wind/solar - making them non-viable as the primary power generation regardless of price.
This is not quite true, because the vast majority of solar generation is consumed on site, avoiding the transmission and distribution costs of delivering electrons that would normally be necessary. Which is just one of a whole motley of dynamics working in favor of solar at larger scales: the arc of solar generation over a 24hr period almost perfectly coincides with actual market demand over the course of the day, with the exception of the afternoon/evening "duck curve", so it's actually relieving pressure on peaking generation.
The important fallacy here is assuming that counterbalancing for the cycles of solar generation requires new investments, when in fact it's relieving pressure on infrastructure that already exists and is already serving those exact counterbalancing purposes. This is in addition to the benefit of offsetting alternative forms of base load generation.
To be clear you are right in an important sense about a pretty fundamental thing. There is indeed a tipping point, and when we reach that tipping point of grid penetration all of the points you have raised will indeed become not merely relevant but crucial. And I forget the exact number, but my understanding is we're nowhere near that tipping point right now. I want to say around 20% of the overall grid being generated from solar power is the tipping point but I'm not sure if that's accurate.
It's kind of like the argument sometimes people want to make about taxes which is that if you overtax it is a drag on the economy, which is hypothetically true but it's true at a given tipping point and it's a tipping point that we're not anywhere near, which doesn't tend to stop the advocates from bringing it up all the time.
I don't believe this is true for a vast swath of residential solar. In spite of HN's love of remote work, a lot of homes are mostly or completely empty during the day, with energy use ramping up in the evenings as people return home.
This results in homes 'selling' electricity to the grid during the day, and buying it back in the evening and overnight.
There is also a lot of scope for demand shifting. For example, timing washer and dryer runs during the day when people are out. Or running AC during the day (even if nobody is home!) so that it doesn't have to work so hard in the evening.