About ten years ago Redding Electric Utility in Northern California attempted to divide the cost of energy from delivery. Delivery infrastructure was to be a fixed monthly fee, and energy was of course the energy used. Large customers the bill was partly based on demand charges for delivery. This meant a solar customer with a near zero kwh reading still paid close to $100 a month for the privilege of connecting to the system. This caused absolute panic in the solar suppliers and they launched this massive smear campaign threatening all the City Council in the upcoming election. It worked, they killed it.
As I tried to explain to Doomberg a couple of weeks ago, California isn't real. It's a satire demo project made by the guys who later created South Park. It wasn't supposed to leave the lab!
Thank you Energy Bad Boys for ‘shining the light’ on this issue. If you think it’s bad in sunny California, imagine how criminal it is to push for the same failed policies in Washington state. I will be posting an article about this soon.
The economics of solar power in California are surely interesting. I didn't put panels on my house to "be green". I did so because on NEM 2.0, my system pays out in 6-9 years and power sure isn't getting any cheaper around here. Under 3.0, I likely would not have installed it.
Thanks for the detailed research! At the ugly underbelly of the duck curve, daytime prices for solar are heading to zero, while electricity cost at sunset spikes further due to underinvestment in reliable power. This must imply that even at a 75% reduction, solar panel owners can currently still extract more value than their power is actually worth. Expect the incentive to fully disappear in NEM 4.0.
Nice article Mitch and Isaac. I stumble through this issue in Juice…this is far superior. I followed this issue at the CPUC because it was clearly going to be supercharged with equity BS. It didn’t disappoint! It was a hell of a fight. On one side the rich, the powerful, and the solar snake oil salesmen and their slick lawyers. On the other side the poor, the orphans, the disadvantaged and their public employee and non profit people with halting speech and bad haircuts. The rich trying to save the planet, the poor just trying to afford hot water. Epic! Loved the outcome.
Not only did the rich lose this one, California is going to institute power rates that depend on your income. Residential rates in San Diego are now 66 cents per kWh. Both SCE and PG&E have 20% rate increases coming. The poor will get poorer.
Are any solar panels made in the U.S.? China is building more coal plants to provide power to make solar panels for the rest of the world. So when you buy solar panels from China, you are worsening carbon dioxide emissions. Then, of course, there's the strip mining for rare earth minerals in solar panels and their lithium-ion batteries. Most strip mining for rare earths is done, of course, by China.
In Saskatchewan in Canada they came up with a slightly better addition where anyone can invest into utility wind and solar through the power utility and recieve money off their bills
It will still cost more than your average investment but be worth more than making a consumption buy with the same money
Hopefully this will fully replace net metering at some point
It’s the old story, regulated utilities and consumers, non utility generators, (NUG’s) avoided costs, PURPA, if you hang around long enough you will see history repeat itself so many times one can come to think of it as all new. Deregulation leads to re-regulation, leads to bifurcating the consumer’s individual electricity bill, leads to re-regulation. If a home owner is clever enough to build their own generation and island themselves off from the grid, and then be able to sell into the grid even at the fully avoided cost of a kilowatt then good for them. But that wasn’t what net metering did as this post aptly describes. Make the playing field level and suddenly the impact to a nearly fully subsidized industry is palpable. Peaking power is critical to grid stability and no one wants to pay for it, even the newer GE Frame 7 engines which can load follow to some extent need ancillary generation support. We operate at 60 hertz “unity”, not 59.5 or 60.5. Solar and wind and are no help there. Markets if left alone will determine what kind and how generation will be built and supported. Basically leveling the playing field in California is the tip of the iceberg, and the iceberg may actually be starting to invert. We can only hope.
In Ohio delivery is separate from energy on my bill, it's actually two thirds of the charge. Unfortunately it is kwh based charge. My gas bill delivery is a flat rate charge, makes much more sense. This is all because of https://energychoice.ohio.gov/
As a homeowner in So Cal, and one who has put 2 separate solar “systems” on my roof since I’ve lived in my home (since 2017) I will say that the way some of this information is presented is not only clearly very BIASED, but also some of the “facts” as presented here are incredibly misleading in some crucial ways.
What is true: Californians as a whole pay wayyy too much for electricity. But yes, I know…if it bothers us THAT much, we do have alternative options for where we can live. I’m from the East Coast originally, and nearly all of my family are still over on the East Coast, so spare me the lesson about how we all get to make our own choices as to where we decide to live. I used to poo-poo folks that complained about the expenses of certain things in CA (like gas, water, electricity, property taxes, restaurants, I could go on for awhile here but won’t…) but the longer I’m here, the more it becomes apparent that our law makers in Sacramento are either complete imbeciles or they’re on the take…okay, most likely it’s both of those things if I’m being honest.
When you bring this up to climate alarmists they claim that it is ok because solar generation is clean and therefore the people who don’t have solar on their roofs are benefitting from those who do because we all have cleaner air.
This is any issue with many of government mandates, regulations, & schemes. Most products or services need early adopters to acquire the initial capital & establish demand, hoping for economic of scale-you know the trickily down economics that is hated so much. And like most government solutions the true cost of the program is never reported, however is supported by a minor of the population namely the wealthy and business class because the "cost" of socialize while the profits are privatize-the definition of fascism! In a sense support is because the cost is bared by the majority by force. We have no anti monopoly law when the government is the business partner.
Keep in mind the retail price of electricity is based on dispatchable base-load which is 24/7 grid accessibility, how on earth is Intermittent electricity, energy that is not continuously available due to external factors that cannot be controlled going to be able to fetch the same price or cost. Which is why where every renewables of dispatch, cost increase.
As the devil’s advocate I ask, shouldn’t the homeowners be allowed to recoup the cost of the infrastructure like the utilities do, especially in areas where solar is mandated? A large part of electricity cost is amortizing the cost of building the generating stations.
About ten years ago Redding Electric Utility in Northern California attempted to divide the cost of energy from delivery. Delivery infrastructure was to be a fixed monthly fee, and energy was of course the energy used. Large customers the bill was partly based on demand charges for delivery. This meant a solar customer with a near zero kwh reading still paid close to $100 a month for the privilege of connecting to the system. This caused absolute panic in the solar suppliers and they launched this massive smear campaign threatening all the City Council in the upcoming election. It worked, they killed it.
Sorry, boys but you've been had.
As I tried to explain to Doomberg a couple of weeks ago, California isn't real. It's a satire demo project made by the guys who later created South Park. It wasn't supposed to leave the lab!
Thank you Energy Bad Boys for ‘shining the light’ on this issue. If you think it’s bad in sunny California, imagine how criminal it is to push for the same failed policies in Washington state. I will be posting an article about this soon.
The economics of solar power in California are surely interesting. I didn't put panels on my house to "be green". I did so because on NEM 2.0, my system pays out in 6-9 years and power sure isn't getting any cheaper around here. Under 3.0, I likely would not have installed it.
Thanks for the detailed research! At the ugly underbelly of the duck curve, daytime prices for solar are heading to zero, while electricity cost at sunset spikes further due to underinvestment in reliable power. This must imply that even at a 75% reduction, solar panel owners can currently still extract more value than their power is actually worth. Expect the incentive to fully disappear in NEM 4.0.
Nice article Mitch and Isaac. I stumble through this issue in Juice…this is far superior. I followed this issue at the CPUC because it was clearly going to be supercharged with equity BS. It didn’t disappoint! It was a hell of a fight. On one side the rich, the powerful, and the solar snake oil salesmen and their slick lawyers. On the other side the poor, the orphans, the disadvantaged and their public employee and non profit people with halting speech and bad haircuts. The rich trying to save the planet, the poor just trying to afford hot water. Epic! Loved the outcome.
Not only did the rich lose this one, California is going to institute power rates that depend on your income. Residential rates in San Diego are now 66 cents per kWh. Both SCE and PG&E have 20% rate increases coming. The poor will get poorer.
Are any solar panels made in the U.S.? China is building more coal plants to provide power to make solar panels for the rest of the world. So when you buy solar panels from China, you are worsening carbon dioxide emissions. Then, of course, there's the strip mining for rare earth minerals in solar panels and their lithium-ion batteries. Most strip mining for rare earths is done, of course, by China.
In Saskatchewan in Canada they came up with a slightly better addition where anyone can invest into utility wind and solar through the power utility and recieve money off their bills
It will still cost more than your average investment but be worth more than making a consumption buy with the same money
Hopefully this will fully replace net metering at some point
It’s the old story, regulated utilities and consumers, non utility generators, (NUG’s) avoided costs, PURPA, if you hang around long enough you will see history repeat itself so many times one can come to think of it as all new. Deregulation leads to re-regulation, leads to bifurcating the consumer’s individual electricity bill, leads to re-regulation. If a home owner is clever enough to build their own generation and island themselves off from the grid, and then be able to sell into the grid even at the fully avoided cost of a kilowatt then good for them. But that wasn’t what net metering did as this post aptly describes. Make the playing field level and suddenly the impact to a nearly fully subsidized industry is palpable. Peaking power is critical to grid stability and no one wants to pay for it, even the newer GE Frame 7 engines which can load follow to some extent need ancillary generation support. We operate at 60 hertz “unity”, not 59.5 or 60.5. Solar and wind and are no help there. Markets if left alone will determine what kind and how generation will be built and supported. Basically leveling the playing field in California is the tip of the iceberg, and the iceberg may actually be starting to invert. We can only hope.
In Ohio delivery is separate from energy on my bill, it's actually two thirds of the charge. Unfortunately it is kwh based charge. My gas bill delivery is a flat rate charge, makes much more sense. This is all because of https://energychoice.ohio.gov/
As a homeowner in So Cal, and one who has put 2 separate solar “systems” on my roof since I’ve lived in my home (since 2017) I will say that the way some of this information is presented is not only clearly very BIASED, but also some of the “facts” as presented here are incredibly misleading in some crucial ways.
What is true: Californians as a whole pay wayyy too much for electricity. But yes, I know…if it bothers us THAT much, we do have alternative options for where we can live. I’m from the East Coast originally, and nearly all of my family are still over on the East Coast, so spare me the lesson about how we all get to make our own choices as to where we decide to live. I used to poo-poo folks that complained about the expenses of certain things in CA (like gas, water, electricity, property taxes, restaurants, I could go on for awhile here but won’t…) but the longer I’m here, the more it becomes apparent that our law makers in Sacramento are either complete imbeciles or they’re on the take…okay, most likely it’s both of those things if I’m being honest.
When you bring this up to climate alarmists they claim that it is ok because solar generation is clean and therefore the people who don’t have solar on their roofs are benefitting from those who do because we all have cleaner air.
So what do Idaho and Texas do differently? The map doesn't seem to explain it.
Great piece. PUC policy design is such an important battle ground - everything from net metering to EV tariffs to capacity markets
This is any issue with many of government mandates, regulations, & schemes. Most products or services need early adopters to acquire the initial capital & establish demand, hoping for economic of scale-you know the trickily down economics that is hated so much. And like most government solutions the true cost of the program is never reported, however is supported by a minor of the population namely the wealthy and business class because the "cost" of socialize while the profits are privatize-the definition of fascism! In a sense support is because the cost is bared by the majority by force. We have no anti monopoly law when the government is the business partner.
Keep in mind the retail price of electricity is based on dispatchable base-load which is 24/7 grid accessibility, how on earth is Intermittent electricity, energy that is not continuously available due to external factors that cannot be controlled going to be able to fetch the same price or cost. Which is why where every renewables of dispatch, cost increase.
As the devil’s advocate I ask, shouldn’t the homeowners be allowed to recoup the cost of the infrastructure like the utilities do, especially in areas where solar is mandated? A large part of electricity cost is amortizing the cost of building the generating stations.