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Existing California solar customers may get blindsided with net metering cuts
(pv-magazine-usa.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
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And they 100% should.
I'm in the Great Republic of Texistan, and that split billing is how it works here: I pay the power delivery people $x+($0.0xkwh), and then the power generator $0.0xkwh.
The screw-you happens because the power buy back from the power company is a percentage of what I pay the REP (power company). So I get something like 85% of half the cost of a KWH back for every KWH I put back on the grid, and pay full sticker price for anything I import.
Solar is a piss-poor worthless investment here, simply because power isn't expensive enough, and the payback for surplus isn't even a McDouble at this point. Average monthly credit tends to be under $20 on a ~$130 bill. Better than nothing but the solar generation + buyback won't ever pay for the panels before they're EOL. Nevermind if I had spent $15k on batteries to go with it.
It'd be a shame to see that happen in other places that have historically done much better simply because of unsustainable costs due to well, greed and incompetence.
Depends on where you live in Texas. My solar panels cut my summer bill in half, and my winter bill is usually zero.
If my power company didn’t pay me a decent buyback amount, I’d invest in an enphase battery and offset the cost of running appliances at night.
That's fair. In ONCOR territory, the buyback offers I had last time I renewed a plan were either a fraction of what you pay but no limits on how many kwh you can sell, or what you pay your REP but capped to a comically low number of kwh a month, or the wholesale rate at the time the kwh was put back on the grid.
Essentially the options are shit, probably shit, and almost certainly shit.
I did the math on the batteries, and the solar install would have been like four times the cost it was without batteries: ~$8000 for the panels, but nearly $20k more for enough batteries to provide peak load and sufficient storage along with the added installation costs for the batteries.
Problem was/is that even at $0.13/kwh to pull from the grid, the payback time was basically a decade longer than the batteries are going to last based on how much power I actually use, so shitty buy back or find some way to burn the extra power it is, then.
(Disclaimer: prices probably have changed in the past 3 years, but probably not enough to make the math wrong.)