Comment by herewego | Hacker News Reader

Comment by herewego | Hacker News Reader

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You are stating a common misconception. That being that solar owners should be paying for anything other than the cost to push power into the distribution grid. The grid fees solar owners pay account for that. They should not be paid for supplying power at wholesale rates bc that assumes a wholesale power flow model, which is not physically applicable to solar owners who support the local distribution grid. If you look at the portion of the grid that a solar owner interacts with, how their power flows through it, the efficiencies of supplying that power locally are clear and should be at retail + distribution fees only. It’s the solar owners that are actually (marginally) subsidizing the non-solar owners in reality.

The utilities and ISO’s do not argue against this. They want to eliminate NEM 2.0 in favor of NEM 3.0 bc the difference in rates are to then be provided by alternative incentives such as battery pay-for-performance programs.

Disclaimer: I own an energy company that does C&I and Residential energy aggregation and participates in wholesale market energy supply and incentive programs.

Do you have a source for "The grid fees solar owners pay account for that"?

If you look into e.g. PG&E's financials, their expenses are dominated by operation and maintenance of the grid, not what they pay for electricity.

You appear to be claiming that the grid fees cover this cost entirely, but they're not high, e.g. $15/mo on some plans.

You're obviously very knowledgeable about the space, but I suspect you may be talking your book a bit here.

I'm not sure I understand how what you say contradicts what the previous poster said? Can you elaborate? I think the point implied in the previous comment was that pushing into a grid locally is much cheaper for the grid operator than distributing power from a far away power plant?

It's not an outright contradiction, just an explanation of why I doubt their claim. I am not myself making a claim.

Given that they are correcting a "common misconception", I think it's entirely appropriate to ask for a source.

My reimbursement for solar production takes about 6% for transmissions fees. I'm not sure which cost you are worried about but I make infrastructure payments. I don't think the electricity I produce travels more the 200 feet to my neighbors houses.

Well, my question would be whether retail minus 6% would be the prevailing rate in a free market with healthy competition, or is it a subsidy?

I'm not against subsidies. Germany pushing solar well before it made financial sense, enabling the economies of scale we see today, was one of the greatest wins of public policy in the 21st century. I paid a lot of tax when I lived there and was happy to contribute in some small way to that effort.

But subsidies risk turning into middle class welfare, continuing long after they make sense from a public policy point of view because interest groups form that don't want to give them up.

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