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Comment by newyankee | Hacker News Reader

In an ideal world this should incentivise more people with single family homes and capital to invest in Solar + batteries and even with tariffs I am sure the breakeven time will still be less than 10 years (also after accounting for the fact that utilities will not be paying a lot for your electricity though time of use pricing and batteries may help a bit)

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I live in the SF Bay Area. My rates have roughly doubled in about 5-6 years. I'm paying almost $0.50/kWh or more depending on what tier I'm in at the time. PG&E does NOT reward conservation or solar power usage. They say "We aren't make enough money! We need to raise your rates! We need to charge solar users to connect to the grid!" The exact same thing happens with water utility companies, when they first preach water conservation, and then complain they aren't making enough money so they have to raise rates.

PG&E wants to charge solar power users $80+/month just for the privilege of connecting to the grid even if they are fully self-powers through solar, and give new users $0 to return energy back to the grid.

The entire system is a scam, and every politician involved is a corrupt.

This is because California has so much solar that it can’t use it all during the day:

https://www.gridstatus.io/charts/curtailment?iso=caiso

From here on out, batteries are where it’s at. Overprovisioning solar helps, but the demand isn’t there and they aren’t going to pay much for it. (More utility-scale batteries would increase demand for solar somewhat, for charging them.)

Meanwhile, California needs to maintain and improve the electrical grid to lower the risk of wildfires, but more solar in the wrong places doesn’t help much with that.

Batteries are just an extension of the thinking that PV or Wind are 'cheap'. There is slight U shape in the price where an initial fraction lowers the cost, but then it just additional cost overhead. Cost shifting some of the excess solar into the evening to reduce the peak load there is fine, but then your still paying for a pile of excess backup capacity to sit around idle for those days when the sun doesn't shine, and adding more batteries beyond a certain point is the same. They just sit around idle most of the time adding to the cost. I've posted here napkin math for how much a W of solar or reliable PV actually costs and been down voted but the math is easy when you stop believing that a W from PV/Wind is the same as a W from your local Gas/Coal/Hydro/Nuke plant.

All those gas plants and batteries sitting around idle soon start dominating the cost structure because the price of their produced watts starts to go exponential.

> All those gas plants and batteries sitting around idle soon start dominating the cost structure because the price of their produced watts starts to go exponential.

When they're barely used, price per watt stops mattering. It's just a fixed cost.

If the fixed cost of an idle gas plant dominates, that's a good thing. An idle gas plant doesn't cost that much, so if the final power price is that plus 50% I'm pretty happy.

If batteries are expensive for long rare gaps then don't use batteries for those gaps. Easy.

You want to connect to a grid then you need to pay a certain percentage for upkeep regardless of the amount of electricity you use.

"The entire system is a scam, and every politician involved is a corrupt."

What an immature over simplification that means nothing. none of the examples you provided are an example of corruption

In Arizona, the power company also charges for a solar tie in. If I remember the wording correctly, it’s required if any electricity is generated on premises. So if I have a solar powered Air Conditioning unit with grid backup for the evening, I’d need to pay the tie in. That’s true, even if it has NO grid backup. Solar powered pool pump - pay the solar grid fee. Solar powered Gnome garden light? The way I read it, I’d have to pay the fee. I want to do a ton of solar projects without actually tying into the grid, but am concerned that 10 years from now, some overly enthusiastic intern is going to search Google maps for solar installs and check to see if those owners are paying the tie in fee. That’s when I’d get stuck with a retroactive back charge for the past 10 years and probably some fine. So, when a monopoly utility gets to dictate the terms of how you use your property, it’s not an immature over simplification. In AZ the power company also provides the water for the farmers. The board votes are allocated based upon acreage, which is of course dominated by the farmers. What do the farmers want? Cheap water. So they’re incentivized to ensure there are no disruption to their electricity generating capital investments, otherwise water rates would need to go up to cover those fixed costs. So, is that corrupt? Sure seems rigged in favor of those “poor” farmers who own literal square miles of land at $200k/acre here in metropolitan Phoenix. At what point would you consider it corruption?

It's an immature simplification to claim all politicians and the system are corrupt because fees are required.

The fees should be the same regardless of solar tie in or not, as it’s a grid cost (physical cables etc) And then the power companies should charge a price per kWh for power they deliver. Instead they only charge solar customers, causing an artificially high barrier to exit. They can only do this because they have monopoly power.

Because computers are so predictable and rule-driven, programmers tend to overlook that the real world is very much adversarial and unpredictable. The "normal" thing to do here is to simply play with your small solar projects and not pay the fee, because the chance that you'll ever get charged the solar tie-in fee for a solar-powered garden light is basically zero. It's not precisely zero, but it's comparable to things like a drunk driver crashing into your house and killing you - one of those little tiny risks you just have to ignore because dealing with the risk costs more than the expectation cost of the risk.

Consider that they have a finite number of people and it costs more for them to go around inspecting everyone's garden lights than their expected revenue from that, so they won't.

Also, real-world risk and reward are dynamic. When the Deutschlandticket came out in Germany, almost everyone in Berlin bought one, so now they very rarely check tickets on trains - the expected gain is near-zero because almost everyone has a ticket for almost every train now. But if people start exploiting that by riding without a ticket, the gain will go up and after a time lag, they'll notice and start checking tickets more often.

Target, the store, is known to not arrest shoplifters until they exceed the felony threshold, at which time they arrest and prosecute the shoplifters.

If a solar tie in fee is $100/month, and a “customer” is using their garden lights for 1 year, it’s only $1200 to find them and issue a fine (assuming the fine is simply equal to the avoided tie in fees). Probably not worth it for the power company. But… after 10 years, the tie in fees would be $12k - certainly profitable for an intern to do some Google image searches, if they can find just 100 violators, that’s $1.2M. In 10 years, it’s not going to be an intern doing this, it’s going to be some AI agent tasked with optimizing revenue generation, and their costs approach zero.

Failing to fulfil a contract, even assuming they can make such an argument, is not a crime.

I suspect I’ve accepted some terms or conditions which obligates me to pay them these fees if they find I ever generated my own power. Again, this is only possible because they have monopoly power, which is not adequately checked by the regulators, who are all likely captured to some degree. Thinking otherwise makes you naive.

So separate the interconnect fee from the energy unit price.

> PG&E wants to charge solar power users $80+/month just for the privilege of connecting to the grid even if they are fully self-powers through solar

If you're "fully self-powered through solar" just disconnect from the grid.

If you're using the grid as a battery where you feed power into it at 4PM and draw power from it at 4AM, that costs money.

This. 100%. The ability to draw 200Amps from the grid at no notice, 24x7 has real value, and costs real money to provide. If you want that ability, you should pay for it.

We really need to separate the reliability and grid maintenance costs from the usage costs. Bundling them together worked when electricity was a true monopoly, but it isn't that anymore.

  If you're "fully self-powered through solar" just disconnect from the grid.

That's likely illegal.

Somehow I doubt walking out to your breaker box and throwing the main switch is illegal.

I can't see any prosecution or charge resulting from never throwing it back on again, a day off is OK, so is a week, ...

Where there might be a problem is refusing to pay any connection charge for the X-monthly bill that now shows 0 units consumed.

Sounds like they'd need to throw the breaker and cancel any existing contract.

  I can't see any prosecution or charge resulting from never throwing it back on again, a day off is OK, so is a week, ...

Who said anything about prosecution or charge? A building inspector will happily red tag your residence and the sheriffs will happily escort you out. Easy peasy.

In California it's going to vary city by city but there are typically interconnect requirements for single family homes and ADUs. You're welcome to go full sovereign citizen and the city or county is welcome to deem your house uninhabitable and use force to evict you.

> A building inspector will happily red tag your residence

For what? For not having power connected?

Are people not allowed to have (say) propane only homes in California?

Are you able to cite any relevant law here that requires a building to be connected to a power grid?

> For not having power connected?

Yes.

And folks in Florida. And Arizona. And Colorado. And wherever else. Building codes and HOAs exist and absolutely have their own standards for habitability. It's not that hard to turn up news articles of folks who run afoul of this.

In California it is/was the energy code that required connection to the grid. In Arizona where a house could easily reach unsafe temperatures without working A/C there's almost certainly a safety aspect to requiring a grid connection.

Man, Californians have it rough.

Weird.

I guess I'm glad I don't live in the US, I've built, bought, sold, renovated, and helped out others renovating a number of times in the past four decades and never run into such restrictions.

> In Arizona where a house could easily reach unsafe temperatures without working A/C there's almost certainly a safety aspect to requiring a grid connection.

Odd, given one doesn't follow from the other; you can have working A/C without a grid connection .. and it's better to build to the environment than waste power in any case .. the Pilbara easily matches Arizona temperatures and people have lived there for millennia w/out A/C - in more recent times rammed earth walls and high roofs with wide verandahs work to beat the heat w/out draining power.

   the Pilbara easily matches Arizona temperatures

That's a bit apples to oranges. Pilbara is sparsely populated, Arizona's had much larger urban centers since the 70s. Karratha (the largest city in Pilbara) has a population of about 17,000. Phoenix? About 1.6 million. Phoenix also sees hotter summers with daily average max temps around 45 versus 35 or lower for Karratha. A couple years ago Phoenix saw daily highs of over 43 for a month straight.

Arizona also famously prohibits collecting rain water. It's an unforgiving environment, and while there were people who lived there in pre-Columbian times they didn't do so in large cities.

Awww, look at you comparing temps on the cool coastal fringes of the Pilbara.

The interior gets hotter, Marble Bar for example.

> Pilbara is sparsely populated, Arizona's had much larger urban centers since the 70s

I fail to see how this is relevant to the design of individual buildings and the choices regarding passive Vs active cooling.

> A couple years ago Phoenix saw daily highs of over 43 for a month straight.

That occurs roughly every five years or so in interior (not coastal) Pilbara locations.

This year a W.Australian wheatbelt town much further south (cooler, and not in the Pilbara) saw a month of ~ 40 temperatures peaking at 45 .. a month of over 40 in the interior is expected yearly.

> It's an unforgiving environment, and while there were people who lived there in pre-Columbian times they didn't do so in large cities.

Much like the Pilbara, save for the "pre-Columbian" marker - before European colonization people lived in all parts of Australia, including the Pilbara, the Tanimi, and other desert regions, for tens of thousands of years.

I'm sitting here in Texas paying apg&e an average rate last month of .141. And I thought that was high because a while back it was .11. And its probably mostly all renewable energy since we have windmills as far as the eye can see all around us and wind that never seems to stop.

PG&E is passing the cost of wildfire upgrades to customers. I'm not sure if they're hitting risky areas harder than low-risk areas, but my bill makes it look like I'm subsidizing people's cabins.

The only way this might end is few rebellious folks with large enough properties will start going totally off grid. It does not look unrealistic tbh but a lot depends on how tariffs and Solar installation costs in US evolve (expectation is for them to be a lot lower but not happening due to installation red tape and other reasons).

If I was in such a situation where I lived in a Sunny enough place and had my property of such a size I would rather trade 95% uptime for being totally off grid and have some sort of emergency system for the 5% when it may not work.

I am actually surprised that the ultra libertarian and independent folks of Southern USA have not yet realised that they can get truly independent by making their own energy and powering their own vehicle

> PG&E wants to charge solar power users $80+/month just for the privilege of connecting to the grid

Sounds low to me. What would the payment be on a multi-day (week?) capacity battery for your power draw if you financed it over it's useful lifetime?

Relatively wealthy homeowners using the grid as a subsidized battery are going to actually have to pay a proper amount for the privilege or the grid simply breaks.

That said, I am all for people being able to disconnect entirely from the grid if they so choose. But this means literally cutting the wires to your home. I don't agree with places that effectively outlaw this.

But if you want to be grid-tied, then you need to be paying for its upkeep and the amount of "idle" power generation on standby 24x7 in case you end up needing it with zero notice due to the sun not shining or your equipment failing. The only thing you should be saving money on is fuel costs, which is a fraction of the total price per kWh.

Backup power is expensive. The grid being so reliable for so long has made everyone forget this fact it seems.

Backup power isn't expensive. Just don't use a battery for it, use a generator a generator. You can get one cheaply for a thousand bucks that should last you 20 years. I would expect the power company to have some better economies of scale.

You can disconnect from the grid but just like having a lawyer on retainer cost something so does having the power company on retainer.

It's why cloud servers cost so much more than your own on-prem solution, and on-demand offices more than your own.

And if you want an engineer on call it's gonna cost you. If you work in software, think about it, how much would you charge for a job where they could call you anytime and expect you to start work.

Why would an ideal world have electricity become so expensive that individuals have to construct their own power stations? I have better things to do with my time. I don’t want a society where we are designing incentives such that individuals to have to build and maintain all their own infrastructure.

An ideal world doesn't look like land owners building moats.

I work in energy/home automation. I'm burnt out.

We don't live in an ideal world though but in a world run by the incentives of the capital/asset owning class.

> In an ideal world this should incentivise...

> An ideal world...

> We don't live in an ideal world though...

Yes. That was thoroughly established in the original comment and my reply. Have you come to look for an argument? Or to show off how pragmatic you are? What's your point besides "shit sucks?" If that's your point, I'm glad to commiserate. Shit sucks.

>Have you come to look for an argument?

Nope I just gave my opinion, but judging from your spiteful reply it's clearly you looking for an argument but I won't bite.

What's the target market of your business? I'm doing a DIY solar setup, plus a bunch of liberty-respecting automation, and often lament that there aren't better ways to make such things serviceable by contractors (when I'm gone, etc). It feels like every commercial offering I've seen is for extremely rich people's "dream houses", deploying expensive niche-commercial solutions in a very top-down manner (lots of homeruns of narrow-purpose cables to multiple racks in a centralized control room, etc).

> What's the target market of your business?

> It feels like every commercial offering I've seen is for extremely rich people's "dream houses"

You nailed it! I don't want to say much more because I do enjoy my scant little paycheck to build the moat SAAS

Man that's some environmentalist centralist government planner thinking: mess up your energy policy so badly that prices rise like crazy and it starts making sense for people to switch to way more expensive ways to convert energy.

Is this supposed to be positive?

Its only more expensive in US, because of the government.

An ideal world the same companies who are heavily benefiting from subsidizing the American people would pay the lion share of this and then some.

Instead, they get to offshore jobs or bring in H1Bs to further their bottom line.

I looked at that, then the conservatives decided to subsidise electricity consumption to great acclaim, and that threw off the ROI and I bought an oil boiler and decided to not bother with rooftop solar as the time for return more than doubled. Thanks Boris, Yu confirmed that the market would be manipulated.

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