Existing California solar customers may get blindsided with net metering cuts
Existing California solar customers may get blindsided with net metering cuts
Utilities have avoided infrastructure development such as more solar generators, rooftop solar buyback incentives.
They avoided power storage development too.
They now complain that there’s too much fluctuation between peak solar hours and have to charge the people that were taking action on their own to avoid excessive power costs to make ends meet.
People are just going to install backup batteries and then PG&E isn’t going to get anything.
EV car batteries have been used for the purpose of storing daytime-generated solar energy to power a home during the night.
If I had an expensive EV with an expensive battery in it, I would not want to be wasting my precious limited number of charge cycles on running my house.
Unless you’re talking about a home-scale project to repurpose retired EV batteries for stationary storage. I’ve only ever read about grid-scale versions of such projects.
This is exactly what PG&E is hoping for, yes. ⭐
It's a win-win. Those batteries are thousands of bucks.
It fully fucking misses the point, we should own the power we produce from our own fucking homes.
Shifting costs to other people is the end goal.
We are paving over the Mojave and prime ag lands to build solar instead of incentivizing people to put it on top of their homes. Also, the current PUC is hopelessly corrupted by PGE influence. Anything that could be twisted to create more profit for PGE should be construed as doing so in practice.
It doesn’t really seem like net metering is sustainable. Say for example someone generates the same amount of electricity they use, in that case they pay $0 for electricity even though the grid has to take the burden of storing the electricity until they use it later in the day.
It doesn’t really seem like net metering is sustainable.
Not sure why you think that.
Say for example someone generates the same amount of electricity they use, in that case they pay $0 for electricity even though the grid has to take the burden of storing the electricity until they use it later in the day.
The grid isn’t storing their energy - it’s sending it to other customers, meaning that non-sustainable, polluting energy sources don’t have to be generated.
The only time that’s not true is when the net load on the grid dips below zero. According to the duck curve graph from the article, it does appear to be very briefly dipping for a very brief time period each day. At that point it could make sense to store the rest, but if the grid doesn’t have storage capacity then any excess is “wasted,” but at that point the grid engages in a process known as “curtailment,” which means it rejects the excess, meaning that nobody gets credit later for energy that isn’t used now.
Also, curtailment is often not because the grid itself is over-supplied, but because specific regions are over-supplied and the grid lacks transmission lines from them to regions where demand is higher.
in that case they pay $0 for electricity
True under NEM 1.0, but NEM 2.0 also includes “non-bypassable charges” - components of pulling from the grid that cannot be offset by what they contribute. Those charges are roughly 5% as far as I can tell, meaning that if they pulled $300 worth of energy from the grid and sent back $300 worth (or more), they’d still owe $15.
Sure, but if everyone does it then it wouldn’t work (no one would be drawing excess when the solar is at peak), so that makes it not very sustainable. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, just that it can’t continue to work if adoption becomes near-universal (it doesn’t seem to be for now). I guess these non-bypassable charges will fix that, but that sounds a lot like what they are talking about (only getting paid some large percentage of the price for energy sent to the grid).
They can pay for the grid maintenance and storage if they’d like to set it up that way. NEM sort of addresses this but they’ve planned it poorly.
Ah yes, the “burden” of free energy. 🙄
No, the burden of providing free energy storage.
I make the investment and then don't get the return. Sounds about right for the criminals at PG&E and their paid for people in office. Time to turn them into a not for profit public institution.
It’s so weird that a basic public utility is totally owned by a private company. Roads and water are maintained by the government in my county. Why not power?
Water is owned by private business on California too.
Power, water, internet, healthcare, education, transit, there’s a lot of things that should be public utilities or at least with a convincing public option because of the clear conflict of interest between private corporations and social benefit, but aren’t, because money controls politics.
Here in europe we're gonna have to pay the electrical company for the energy our own solar panels generate above a certain amount.
"Can we just turn them off?"
"No 😠"
That is nuts. We need to take back power from these companies.
Where in Europe is this? Europe isn't a monolith, after all.
Here in the Netherlands we (currently) still have the "salderingsregeling" which is used to reimburse people for the solar they feed back into the grid, though that will eventually go away.
Paying people for solar on the roof is a bit tricky in general, and probably not sustainable long term:
Because they have to give that energy away in order to keep the grid stable.
Hopefully better battery storage will make this better in the future.
The aim with it is to naturally discourage people from overproducing in such overproduction times - e.g. maybe you disable your solar panels when you predict it will happen, lessening the sudden impact on the grid.
FWIW you could buy a high capacity home battery already to eliminate it yourself (charge the battery in those times), but they're still expensive.
What happens if you just......don't pay the bill?
Are they providing support for the things?
PG&E was literally the villain in the real life Erin Brockovich story.
I made a post with ideas on what initiatives could be proposed here: https://fedia.io/m/VoterInitiatives/t/883352/Electric-utility-company-reform