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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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I mean, the existing scheme is economically-problematic, because it means that non-solar-generation users are subsidizing solar-generation-users grid connections.
The utilities have two separate set of costs, one from providing the grid connection, and the other from providing power over it.
Traditionally, because the two were linked for practical purposes, utilities just generated their revenue from charging a fee based on electricity use.
But they became decoupled when home solar power generation became more-common. That caused people who were doing solar power generation to not just not pay for electricity being provided -- which is fine, they're providing that -- but also to not pay the costs of keeping the grid available, which is not. Under the traditional billing system, those grid maintenance costs were transferred to people -- who statistically are poorer, another point of contention -- weren't doing home solar power generation.
Having a grid connection provides value to solar generation users. It means reliability, and ability to scale up use on demand. It costs something to provide that. And the folks who are incurring the cost and benefiting from it should pay those costs.
And yeah, I agree that it makes solar less-advantageous, and some rooftop solar users got sold a bill of goods by rooftop solar installers who promised that their rooftop solar would make more economic sense than it did, because they could exploit that billing inefficiency. But the point is, it was a bad policy, and rooftop solar installers had no ability to guarantee that it would continue.
If you've got rooftop solar, you can still avoid paying for the electricity that you're generating rather than pulling from the grid. You just have to pay your share of the grid maintenance cost. Or, if you really don't need that connectivity and you legitimately feel that you're better off off-grid -- which I suspect is probably not the case for most people -- you can just cut off from the grid, rely entirely on your local generation capacity of whatever sort. The only thing you can't do is have grid access and have non-solar-rooftop generation customers subsidize that grid access.
Could easily just charge separate lines on the bill, just like they do for everything else.
1 - $0.0x c/KWh for line maintenance - this charges on both incoming and outgoing power.
2 - $0.xx c/KWh for power usage - this charges only on the incoming side.
3 - $xx flat fee every month for administration of your account.
Charge what things cost and it won't matter how your use your energy.
edit: formatting
I agree -- that decoupling of fees is what's happening and is what the article is complaining about.
EDIT: I'd also add I kind of feel like this pattern is turning into something of a chronic problem for California. The same sort of thing happened with EVs getting to ignore carpool rules.
California tells people that if they buy an EV, they can ignore carpool rules and use the carpool lane without carpooling. Advocates get this past voters by billing it as being "green".
EV companies sell a relatively-costly product, implying that the policy will continue ad-infinitum. They can charge a premium because they're giving special road access bundled with the vehicle. This is lucrative for EV manufacturers; they're actually profiting by selling access to a state service that they aren't paying for.
Well-to-do people do the math and figure out that while the car costs more, it's a pretty cheap deal for your own road. They buy the car.
California announces that the policy is going to expire. People who paid more and had an expectation of never-ending special road access are angry.
https://abc7news.com/california-clean-air-vehicle-decals-for-carpool-lane-access-likely-expiring-2025/14604142/
If the carpool stickers had come with a 20 year guarantee then nobody could reasonably be upset about the rules changing later because “forever” turned out to be too good to be true. This would be like solar, except that they want to change the rules later anyway.
If they simply left the original EV carpool stickers grandfathered but stopped giving out new ones, people who missed their chance would be upset. But the program would have worked exactly as intended, to incentivize early adoption of EVs by giving out a priceless benefit. It should never have gone on as long as it did, but government reacts slowly.