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Comment by sheikhnbake | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure how German power utilities work, but the US being the US, personal solar can drive up our utility costs here. Less people buying power from the utilities means they increase prices on the remaining customers.

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>Less people buying power from the utilities means they increase prices on the remaining customers.

Demand on the grid is going up.

What's driving up the cost is that all those rebates and 0% loans for solar, heat pumps, etc, etc, tax advantages for qualifying installers, etc, etc, etc, all that stuff is paid for by loading it into the transmission and distribution charges, the "cost of the wires and pipes" on your bill.

And that's all before all these new data centers start piling onto the grid.

Not sure how much this happens in practice anymore - any smart utility is going to use your solar / house battery to cover their spikes and reduce overall costs so they don’t have to keep an old dormant coal plant on the books for the Super Bowl. At least, that’s what I’d expect from my utility.

I think it's mostly for cases where people get 95% of the energy from solar but stay connected to the grid. The fixed costs of a house's connection to the grid are roughly constant, but historically utilities amortized it in their energy prices. We saw something similar in my area during the California droughts when people were "too good" at conserving water, but I guess a lot of the infra costs don't scale linearly with usage

Likely also depends on whether you get your power from a Co-op, investor-owned utility, or some other source. The IOUs will definitely want to amortize infra investment, whereas coops might be more focused on best-power-for-price for consumers, etc.

Only because profits of utilities (and nearly every company) are sacrosanct. Solar installations in US (for homes) are 6 - 10X costlier than other countries.

> Less people buying power from the utilities means they increase prices on the remaining customers.

Ergo... claims of lower electricity costs are BS, in that electricity's not getting cheaper per unit but is getting more expensive per unit for those without the ability to supplement their residence with solar/geothermal/household nuclear reactor/whatever.

No, it's just your typical distorted market. This happens in places that do net metering, where each joule you send to the grid pays for one joule drawn from the grid. This effectively vastly over-pays for local production, because it doesn't account for the costs of maintaining generating capacity or transmission. Those costs then have to be borne by the other customers instead. Utilities wouldn't offer this voluntarily. Where it exists, it's because it's legally mandated as a way of driving adoption of home solar.

The economically sensible way to do it is to pay individual produces for their power at the same rates they'd get if they were a "real" provider. This would be substantially less, so you'd have to provide much more than one joule to the grid to offset each joule consumed from it. With this, someone feeding their home solar power into the grid is still paying their share for transmission and generation, and there's no undue burden on other customers.

And also pay the local producer for the costs of (not building) transmission and distribution network, because they are producing where its needed and not thousands of miles away which requires transmission and distribution systems as well all the equipment and people that go with it. Also pay extra for creating the most resilient grid: no single point of failure, just tens of millions of producers. Also pay them at the peak rate, because most of the cost is for the peaker gas plants that only run a few hours/day, and overproduction will flatten the peak, encourage energy storage and all the good stuff.

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