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Comment by rtkwe | Hacker News Reader

I don't think utility companies are entirely wrong to charge some flat rate for being connected to the grid, there are fixed costs with each customer and solar homes are not actually independent from the grid even if they're net neutral their night time power has to come from somewhere. Even if we get to enough residential solar to completely power the grid from solar and charge enough storage to last overnight there's still the costs associated with storing that power overnight we can't get around.

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The trouble with this logic is that public utility commissions across the country have measured the impact that solar has on the grid, and found that not only does it not impose a cost, but it confers a benefit, in some studies up to 33 cents per kilowatt hour.

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 think the utilities are moving very early with their flat rate charges but I don't think they're wrong in the long term that a flat rate will be required to fund the grid in the future. I'm thinking about the point where a large majority of customers have sufficient solar generation to cover their entire energy usage for the day on average, those people still need generation or storage of power during the night when solar doesn't work so somewhere they'll need to continue paying for power generation or storage during the night. This is probably doable with time based rates instead but we'll have to see and even then we'll probably need some flat rate to account for people with local storage because they also exist as a cost to service.

So as I mentioned in my previous comment, public utilities commissions across the country have all run their own independent studies of the value of bringing solar on the grid measured against its costs and generally found it to be a net positive rather than a negative. Those studies encompass things that you're talking about such time base rates, cost of mobilizing peaking and base load production, efficiencies from consuming power on site instead of having to send it through the transmission and distribution system, etc

I'm not talking about now. I thought I made that clear enough but I'm talking about in the future with extremely high levels of solar self sufficient customers. All of those need power during the night so absent huge grid storage you'll need nuclear or hydro to provide reliable night time power all of which costs money.

I'm all for massive solar investments it's a great path forward but there are issues we'll have to address.

Source please? I'm aware of the large costs in the opposite direction due to the freeloading you mention:

https://energyathaas.wordpress.com/2024/04/22/californias-ex...

This is from the Maine PUC, other PUCs across the country do their own studies. Maine is on the high side, but all but one PUC that I'm aware of have calculated positive values.

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/maine-puc-study-values-sola...

That link is from 2015, so I suspect it's talking about benefits at very low penetration.

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.

I think we'll have to go to floating rates for bought power to solve that. If there really is no where for the power to go the price of power from solar should fall to zero or below. The economics of your night load plants/storage gets tricky then though because you're losing time when you would currently be making money to solar but they still need to exist to provide power during the night or when there's bad weather all day and you don't get much solar power.

No one wants to hear it, but this is the case. We need to revamp how we charge for electricity.

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.

1) Those fixed costs go down with more distributed generation. No need for large solar farms in a different zip code if many customers have it on their roof.

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.

1) They go down but not to zero. Consider a hypothetical person with excess solar and a large power bank, they still cost money to serve and build reserve capacity for when events require them to pull from the grid.

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.

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