Comment by opo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by opo | Hacker News Reader

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>…I think that's often overlooked - all talk about subsidies for solar is just for the installations. Once they are done, solar electricity costs nothing.

No, the subsidies don’t stop at installation - they often just really begin. Often wealthier households have been able to sell back their electricity to the grid at the retail rate. Providing the infrastructure and reliability of the grid is very expensive, so there is a huge difference between the wholesale costs and retail rates for delivered electricity. In CA, it was estimated that all non-solar households in CA paid an estimated extra $115 to $245 per year to cover the subsidies given to their wealthier neighbors. It was estimated that as the number of consumer solar installation increase, that increased cost would grow to between $385 and $550 per year by 2030. Ignoring all the subsidies given to install the system, that $115 per household per year adds up to a great deal of money. Money is limited and is fungible - a dollar spent subsidizing utility solar will go much, much further to decarbonizing the grid than a dollar spent subsidizing rooftop residential solar. It is understandable that anyone getting free money thinks it is good. But if the less well off people (renters, etc.) learn that they are paying a great deal more for power to subsidize wealthier residents (when that money could have gone MUCH further if spent on other solar projects) - it isn’t hard to imagine that might lower enthusiasm for government subsidizing the move away from fossil fuels. This sort of wealth transfer to the more wealthy actually hurts everyone in the long run. The goal is to decarbonize the grid - not implement some kind of a reverse Robinhood scheme.

>…You're right, I made a mistake and didn't notice the rooftop category was gone. My bad.

Yea it is unfortunate they removed that category - hopefully it will return in future versions.

>No, the subsidies don’t stop at installation - they often just really begin.[..] Often wealthier households have been able to sell back their electricity to the grid at the retail rate.

It's not a subsidy to be allowed to sell a thing you produce at market price. If taxes were used to pay a guaranteed price above market rate to solar panel owners sure, but that's not the case (generally speaking, local political absurdities may exist of course).

>Providing the infrastructure and reliability of the grid is very expensive,

There is no additional infrastructure needed to cover rooftop solar though. It's just electricity being added to an existing grid.

If someone is increasing your power bill and blaming it on some one else's solar panels, I'd say you are being scammed and I would not take such claims at face value! "Yeah you have to pay cause Jim got solar panels, so we had to uhm, you know, we had to, err, well you have to pay more anyway". ;-)

>a dollar spent subsidizing utility solar will go much, much further to decarbonizing the grid than a dollar spent subsidizing rooftop residential solar.

But this is a choice that doesn't exist. We are not talking about a bunch of money that has been collected and is being spent on people's rooftop solar instead of being spent on utility solar. There is no money except the homeowner's money that is being spent here, and they can only choose to get rooftop solar.

>This sort of wealth transfer to the more wealthy actually hurts everyone in the long run. The goal is to decarbonize the grid - not implement some kind of a reverse Robinhood scheme.

Rooftop solar decarbonizes the grid faster than anything else at the moment, since lots of people get to decide for themselves instead of waiting for politicians. It transfers no money from anyone but from the homeowners to makers of solar panels.

It also lowers the production price of electricity, which should lower the purchase price too, unless you are in the hands of corrupt politicans and utility cos.

> It's not a subsidy to be allowed to sell a thing you produce at market price.

It certainly is in this case. The market price includes transmission and distribution costs, as well as fixed costs of the generators.

Domestic PV is really gaming the rate system, avoiding costs while still benefiting from the things those costs support. If enough people do it the grid falls apart. See Pakistan where they may be getting close to this.

>Domestic PV is really gaming the rate system, avoiding costs while still benefiting from the things those costs support.

All powerlines, transformers and everything else is the same with or without solar panels. What new costs are happening because of solar that solar owners are avoiding?

Tax reductions for voluntary things is not comparable to payouts. They are method to get the rich to pay for solar so the non-rich don't have to, and in the past few years it has gotten us more carbon neutral energy than anything else. Clearly a win-win good thing.

Trying to describe it as the opposite doesn't hold up.

Edit: Utility cos that sell electricity themselves may increase prices to make up what they lose when they can't sell as much gas, nuclear, coal etc, and blame it on solar. That's not a subsidy for solar though, it's a subsidy for corporations.

The powerlines, transformers, etc. have to be paid for. These are not new costs, they're existing, ongoing costs.

Previously, these were paid for by becoming part of the per-kWh price of electricity, under the assumption that all the electricity each consumer is using goes over the grid.

But with solar, consumers can largely (but not entirely) self-power, and use the grid only rarely. They are benefiting from the presence of the transmission/distribution infrastructure (and the power sources feeding it) but aren't paying the same amount for it.

>The powerlines, transformers, etc. have to be paid for. These are not new costs, they're existing, ongoing costs.

That's true but powerlines exist to transport high voltage power from power plants to consumers far away, and transformers convert that to usable voltages.

Residential solar does not require any such powerlines or transformers, because the low-voltage power is consumed locally, where it's produced.

There was a story here recently about balcony solar installations in Germany. Basically a small solar panel adds power to your house through the house's existing wiring.

Rooftop solar works the same way, but is large enough that sometimes your surplus can be consumed by your neighbor as well, and when more people get solar it expands to the next neighborhood, and so on.

This is handled by the utilities already, since the effect of adding solar to your house is basically the same as if you stop using your stove or stop charging your car.

So it's kind of perfect initially - no new technical solutions are needed and no heavy investments since it just works with existing infrastructure.

Of course this becomes a problem eventually and will require storage solutions first of all and eventually also high voltage transmission. But not yet.

The real problem here is that large corporations live from the profits of selling electricity. They will protect that profit at all costs, so when demand drops - due to solar or anything else - they will increase the prices.

Note that they are not necessarily using that profit to properly maintain any infrastructure:

https://www.wattstrialfirm.com/powerful-results/historic-13-...

> Residential solar does not require any such powerlines or transformers, because the low-voltage power is consumed locally, where it's produced.

Of course it does. If it didn't, the residential solar user would just disconnect from the grid entirely.

The point here is that even if one uses the grid rarely, one is still depending on it being there. And that dependency means one is still exploiting things with fixed costs.

Large solar rollouts will force changes to rate structures, for example charging even residential users for the maximum power they use (or could use) rather than the total energy they consume. With such rates the financial benefit to the consumer of residential solar becomes much lower or nonexistent.

>The point here is that even if one uses the grid rarely, one is still depending on it being there. And that dependency means one is still exploiting things with fixed costs

Obviously the grid is needed and anyone using it should pay. But equally obviously, you should not have to pay when you are NOT using it! And residential solar is not using it.

Also obviously, we should not have to pay more than what is required to maintain the grid, in order to protect the profits of power companies that are being squeezed by free electricity. If they are increasing the prices due to solar, they should be held accountable for the actual reasons why.

We are deviating from the topic, I just wanted to protest against the notion that there is something wrong or sinister about encouraging rooftop solar. It's one of the best things that have happened in the efforts to reduce emissions, perhaps second only to the large-scale deployment of electric cars.

What is wrong is pretending that the current rate structure is from some natural law, rather than contingent on the structure of the grid and how consumers are using it.

I've seen this repeatedly when net metering is scaled back. This is represented as some nefarious and unfair change when it is nothing of the sort.

>...It's not a subsidy to be allowed to sell a thing you produce at market price.

The market price is not the retail price. Does a grocery store buys produce from a supplier at the price they sell it to the consumer? Of course not. The wholesale price for power in CA is variable but generally around 4 cents a kilowatt wile the retail price that customers pay is generally 30 cents and above. If the market price for power is 4 cents, and a supplier can effectively sell their power for 30 cents, they are not selling it at the market price. If consumer solar producers were treated as every other supplier of electricity and were paid at the same rates, then there would be no subsidy.

>...If someone is increasing your power bill and blaming it on some one else's solar panels, I'd say you are being scammed

No, that is the reality of how net metering works. That $115 to $245 cost estimate paid by every other household in CA was from the CA PUC. They have made some changes to this going forward, but the current beneficiaries are still grandfathered in.

>...But this is a choice that doesn't exist. We are not talking about a bunch of money that has been collected and is being spent on people's rooftop solar instead of being spent on utility solar.

This was a choice that was made by politicians and this is money that is being spent every day. The CA legislature and PUC could have said that household rates will increase by $115 a year and the money will be used to build out grid solar and storage - if that had been done there would be MUCH more solar power and grid storage being produced. You just need to look at the LCOE for utility and consumer rooftop solar to see the cost differences. The LCOE difference grid batteries vs home batteries is also dramatic.

>There is no money except the homeowner's money that is being spent here, and they can only choose to get rooftop solar. ... It transfers no money from anyone but from the homeowners to makers of solar panels.

If every household's electricity rates go up by $115 a year, then every household is spending an additional $115. If someone is paying an extra $115 a year, it doesn't make sense to tell them they are not paying extra.

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