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California strikes another blow against rooftop solar
(www.latimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
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United States | News & Politics
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The article doesn't explain this, so I will. Anyone with solar panels who is still tied to the grid is still reliant on the grid. Any time they are not actively generating, they are pulling from the grid. Electricity costs are only partially generation; much of the cost is distribution infrastructure. People with enough solar to run their electric meter at a net negative are not paying their share of that infrastructure, and that cost goes to anyone else. People with solar panels are wealthier than those without due to the fact that you have to own a home to take advantage. Essentially, home solar subsidies are a wealth transfer from the poor to the rich. There are more equitable ways to make climate goals. It's the same problem with subsidizing electric cars.
How does the billing work over there? Here in NZ, we pay a line charge and a unit rate, and power companies will buy power from rooftop solar at a lower rate than what they sell it for.
The buy price is typically half what they sell for.
Asking the right questions over here. This is pretty clearly a billing method problem - mixing infrastructure maintenance charges in with electrical generation charges so that people who use more electricity pay more for infrastructure maintenance, which seemed like a fair way of doing things in a time before cheap, decentralized power generation.
I'm no industry expert, but it seems like maintenance costs are tied to the potential to deliver electricity rather than the actual delivery - systems need to be sized for peak load. So a fix for the billing problem might be to remove the cost of maintenance from the cost of generation, adding a line item to customer's bills to cover infrastructure maintenance, and for the size of that charge to be proportional to the potential peak load that customer places on the grid rather than their actual usage.
That's basically what this ruling is trying to accomplish if you read what they actually said. The way it works right now is like if you could grow a bunch of tomatoes over the summer and drop your extra off at the grocery store, and then when the winter comes around, you just went and grabbed the same amount off their shelves. It's disregarding the fact that tomatoes cost more in the winter cause they have to be imported or hothouse grown.
Every form of generation has a cost per kwh generated and a startup time. It's pretty much an inverse relationship. Fastest (and probably most expensive) is probably discharging batteries, slowest is probably nuclear. Things like solar and wind, you just get when you get, so in order to provide uniform service, they need to be coupled with something that can relatively quickly provide energy on demand, which unfortunately means gas, typically.
This new ruling is basically trying to incentivize people to use more of the solar power they generate, which reduces the amount of on-demand energy generation necessary. There's a lot of untapped potential for how we can adjust time of use, and that's going to be a big part of adjusting to a more renewables-based energy system. For example, water heaters that only run when there is excess power (they hold heat for a long time), hvac that overshoots your desired temperature rather than running 24/7 to ping-pong around a set point by a degree, and appliances that can be timed.
This particular proposal is trying to end the mandate for the utility to purchase electricity from rooftop solar owners at times when there is no demand for it and no existing infrastructure for storing it.
To cover the expense of having purchased goods they can't sell, the utility needs to increase their rates, and that cost increase hits people who don't own solar panels harder than it hits those who do. That makes installing solar panels more financially appealing to people who can afford them, but it also increases costs for the people least able to pay.
And it seems like the utilities are pretty attached to the idea of keeping maintenance fees proportional to actual usage. If I'm reading the article correctly, there was an earlier proposal to require rooftop solar owners to sell 100% of what they produce, and buy 100% of what they use, presumably with a % surcharge for maintenance attached to the purchase. Assuming the utility would pay the current market rate for solar power at the time it was produced, it could be a fair system that would adjust itself automatically based on market forces so the government would not need to update pricing regulations every time a new gas or nuke plant is added to the grid.
Circling back around to the initial point though, we wouldn't have this problem if more storage infrastructure were built, allowing the utilities to sell the solar power they're currently mandated to buy. I suspect that energy storage via home appliance usage patterns will only cover part of our storage needs.