Technology

59750 readers

2850 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

193

Existing California solar customers may get blindsided with net metering cuts (pv-magazine-usa.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

67 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 months ago (1 children)

No going off-grid is a substantially larger investment than most people can afford. To be off grid you have to be able to make enough electricity even on cloudy, short winter days. That means your system must be massively oversized for your needs during most of the year. You also need adequate batteries to store energy for overnight.

Instead people get enough solar to offset some or all of the electricity they use - but on average over time. So they produce a ton during the day and then draw from grid at night.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Correct, but that also comes to the main reason why paying people for roof solar isn't sustainable in the long term.

As solar panels keeps getting cheaper, more and more people will put solar on their roof. Since they get paid / reimbursed for feeding power back into the grid. And they don't need a battery because they can just draw from the grid. This causes two problems:

During the day far more power is produced than needed, since everyone has solar on the roofs
During the night there is a lot of power draw from the grid, which cannot come from all the available roof solar.

Paying people for their roof solar is a good strategy short-term, but as more and more people have solar on the roof you cannot really keep doing that.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, this is exactly the point of the "problem" OP complains about. Charge people for overproduction, so they're encouraged to buy a home battery and contribute in the night.

Eventually home batteries will become a standard part of such installations.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

If you want to encourage purchasing of storage then contribute to making that an easier task. Charging for overproducing is spiteful and mostly encourages resentment. I wouldn't blame these people for finding a cheap way to avoid the "charge" (and if there is a law that prevents that, it is disgusting).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Sure, but it's 'free' generation capacity, and storage works far better at grid scale

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

But someone still needs to pay for that storage investment (as well as for maintaining the grid), and if noone (or nearly noone) is paying for their power then there is no money to invest in these things

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Agreed, but I don't think anyone here is arguing against split bill for generation vs grid maintenance and improvement, just that they want return on the power they put back into the grid, if for no other reason than to offset their own investment