This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I make the investment and then don't get the return. Sounds about right for the criminals at PG&E and their paid for people in office. Time to turn them into a not for profit public institution.
It’s so weird that a basic public utility is totally owned by a private company. Roads and water are maintained by the government in my county. Why not power?
Water is owned by private business on California too.
Yeah, just speaking for my county. I live in a county that has water and sewage run by a public utility. Also, the county has historically had a reputation for having really fantastic water that tastes amazing.
Power, water, internet, healthcare, education, transit, there’s a lot of things that should be public utilities or at least with a convincing public option because of the clear conflict of interest between private corporations and social benefit, but aren’t, because money controls politics.
Here in europe we're gonna have to pay the electrical company for the energy our own solar panels generate above a certain amount.
"Can we just turn them off?"
"No 😠"
That is nuts. We need to take back power from these companies.
I'm pretty sure this will break the law of thermodynamics.
One of the few laws that we haven't sorted out a way to break!
Where in Europe is this? Europe isn't a monolith, after all.
Here in the Netherlands we (currently) still have the "salderingsregeling" which is used to reimburse people for the solar they feed back into the grid, though that will eventually go away.
Paying people for solar on the roof is a bit tricky in general, and probably not sustainable long term:
In the Netherlands we now also have a "terugleveringstoeslag" where you have to pay a monthly fee based on the maximum peak power delivered to the grid over the year. At least, the bigger electrical companies already have it, the rest will soon follow. My coworker (who has way too many solar panels installed) got a letter from Essent that he had to pay 67 euros monthly starting October. So he switched companies, but he'll have to figure out something else next time.
Because they have to give that energy away in order to keep the grid stable.
Hopefully better battery storage will make this better in the future.
The aim with it is to naturally discourage people from overproducing in such overproduction times - e.g. maybe you disable your solar panels when you predict it will happen, lessening the sudden impact on the grid.
FWIW you could buy a high capacity home battery already to eliminate it yourself (charge the battery in those times), but they're still expensive.
What happens if you just......don't pay the bill?
Then you get disconnected.
I thought that was the point of paying so much for solar? To be OFF the grid?
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.
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:
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.
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.
That is not the point. Solar provides most of your power and if you need additional power you can easily get additional power from the grid. That power can come from other people that have solar connected to the grid or other sources. It allows people to not have to spend huge amounts of money on batteries while providing power for themselves and others.
PG&E was literally the villain in the real life Erin Brockovich story.
I made a post with ideas on what initiatives could be proposed here: https://fedia.io/m/VoterInitiatives/t/883352/Electric-utility-company-reform
Utilities have avoided infrastructure development such as more solar generators, rooftop solar buyback incentives.
They avoided power storage development too.
They now complain that there’s too much fluctuation between peak solar hours and have to charge the people that were taking action on their own to avoid excessive power costs to make ends meet.
People are just going to install backup batteries and then PG&E isn’t going to get anything.
EV car batteries have been used for the purpose of storing daytime-generated solar energy to power a home during the night.
If I had an expensive EV with an expensive battery in it, I would not want to be wasting my precious limited number of charge cycles on running my house.
Unless you’re talking about a home-scale project to repurpose retired EV batteries for stationary storage. I’ve only ever read about grid-scale versions of such projects.
...I’ve only ever read about grid-scale versions of such projects.
Your EV battery can now power your home, yes really. - The Washington Post
That article describes exactly what I would not want to do - subject my expensive vehicle to additional discharge/recharge cycles thereby shortening its battery’s useful life prematurely.
Lithium batteries are pretty great (except for when they catch fire and are nearly impossible to extinguish), but their performance degrades slightly with every charging cycle. You may have noticed that after a year or two your phone no longer makes it through the day without extra charging, because its total capacity is reduced.
The same thing happens with EV batteries (translating into shorter driving range) but they’re much larger and more expensive to replace. Moreover, when replaced, the old batteries are still capable of useful work with lower capacity, so it’s excessively wasteful to dump them into the hazardous e-waste stream for whatever passes as recycling.
There are companies that are collecting those used EV batteries and using them for electric grid storage, which sounds like a great way to extend their lifecycle and to acquire useful equipment at bargain basement prices. That’s what I meant about only ever seeing it at grid-scale. It would be nice if somebody sold a controller for those to be repurposed for use as energy storage for a single home, at much lower equipment cost than a brand new home battery.
There will be many more used EV batteries available in the next several years as the first wave of widely adopted electric vehicles ages out, and the oversupply should drive down their costs further.
That said, being able to use a vehicle battery as an emergency backup during a storm event is a wonderful side benefit. It’s just no substitute for a full time home battery (that’s actually connected during the day when the panels are producing, instead of being parked at work away from your house).
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.
We already pay a grid connect fee and on top of that we purchased over 10k in hardware and we make it so their needs to be less grid upgrades and we provide our excess power for 8 cents a kw for NO hardware cost to them. Sounds like they are getting a nice deal. But of course that is not nice enough for PG&E they want it all.
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.
There are over 400,000 drivers in California who currently have decals - many of them bought their clean air vehicle to speed up their commute so losing that privilege is a big deal.
A Tesla driver says, " It is frustrating. Like I said the main reason for the decision is driving in Bay Area traffic."
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.
They do that now.
For pge the distribution fees are 5x the actual generation fees, because while you can get power from other companies, pge owns all the lines and milks them dry.
You’ve articulated well a lot of good points, but you’re missing a few key considerations. One elephant in the room is that the Investor Owned Utilities (which cover the vast majority of accounts in California) are abusing their monopoly powers as much as possible (including regulatory capture). That is sadly inextricably linked with the resentment felt by their solar customers, even as it is also felt by all of their non-solar customers.
You’re talking about the kind of tradeoffs that make sense in an ideal system, pricing things according to what they actually cost to provide. But the IOUs price things at “how much can we get the CPUC to allow us to charge?” And they love to stoke class warfare politically when it suits their business purposes. It’s just one more area where the actual problem is the billionaires (or just call it capitalism) against the 99% but they keep the water too muddy for most people to see it.
I believe it’s also still generally either illegal or at least infeasible to disconnect from the grid entirely in most of urban and suburban California, because it’s tied to occupancy permitting. I think the best hope of ending the madness does lie in that direction though. Solar customers tend to be much wealthier than non solar customers, which in aggregate means many of them will have the means to go full battery off grid as the pricing disparity continues to grow. This loss of legally-mandated captive market is the only chance to force monopolies to behave better.
Sounds good, but it essentially means you would then have to buy and maintain the method of power generation and delivery back to a company to sell it to someone else. I totally get remaining grid connected is important, but those grid connected systems are supplying a whole lot of power back to the grid. Perhaps if you generate more than you use, the power company should pay you to maintain your generators and infrastructure.
Transparent pricing and not itemized billing could help a lot (and allow for better application of fees based on use case).
We are paving over the Mojave and prime ag lands to build solar instead of incentivizing people to put it on top of their homes. Also, the current PUC is hopelessly corrupted by PGE influence. Anything that could be twisted to create more profit for PGE should be construed as doing so in practice.
It doesn’t really seem like net metering is sustainable. Say for example someone generates the same amount of electricity they use, in that case they pay $0 for electricity even though the grid has to take the burden of storing the electricity until they use it later in the day.
It doesn’t really seem like net metering is sustainable.
Not sure why you think that.
Say for example someone generates the same amount of electricity they use, in that case they pay $0 for electricity even though the grid has to take the burden of storing the electricity until they use it later in the day.
The grid isn’t storing their energy - it’s sending it to other customers, meaning that non-sustainable, polluting energy sources don’t have to be generated.
The only time that’s not true is when the net load on the grid dips below zero. According to the duck curve graph from the article, it does appear to be very briefly dipping for a very brief time period each day. At that point it could make sense to store the rest, but if the grid doesn’t have storage capacity then any excess is “wasted,” but at that point the grid engages in a process known as “curtailment,” which means it rejects the excess, meaning that nobody gets credit later for energy that isn’t used now.
Also, curtailment is often not because the grid itself is over-supplied, but because specific regions are over-supplied and the grid lacks transmission lines from them to regions where demand is higher.
in that case they pay $0 for electricity
True under NEM 1.0, but NEM 2.0 also includes “non-bypassable charges” - components of pulling from the grid that cannot be offset by what they contribute. Those charges are roughly 5% as far as I can tell, meaning that if they pulled $300 worth of energy from the grid and sent back $300 worth (or more), they’d still owe $15.
Sure, but if everyone does it then it wouldn’t work (no one would be drawing excess when the solar is at peak), so that makes it not very sustainable. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, just that it can’t continue to work if adoption becomes near-universal (it doesn’t seem to be for now). I guess these non-bypassable charges will fix that, but that sounds a lot like what they are talking about (only getting paid some large percentage of the price for energy sent to the grid).
Everything you're saying is wrong.
We only have a stable grid now because the hottest days produce the most solar to power ac. Our grid would have collapsed otherwise .
In the past we had huge demand swings during the course of a single day, as factories and offices burned power, then people went home to cook food and run their laundry.
Solar helped that greatly, coupled with fracking gas which allowed us to plant ge90 turbines everywhere for nothing and have we extremely dispatchable power for load following.
Especially since bulbs went led and now might generation is much more manageable.
But mentally defective utilities can't do the sane thing and write an API so that EV's can coordinate charging to balance load.
The problem with utilities is that they're stuffed to the gills with the idiot relatives of politicians who couldn't get jobs anywhere else.
I didn’t say net metering isn’t useful now, I said it wouldn’t work if a large majority of people did it. I don’t see how what you said contradicts that.
Sure, but if everyone does it then it wouldn’t work (no one would be drawing excess when the solar is at peak)
If everyone did it then electric companies could prioritize investing in batteries and capacitors and further reduce their reliance on fossil fuels.
If everyone did it, then even without extra storage capacity, net metering would still work. You don’t get credits for generating energy, just for sending it to the grid. All they have to do is the same thing they already do - curtailment.
Finally, it’s impossible for everyone to be on net metering because NEM 3.0 doesn’t have net metering and NEM 1.0 and 2.0 are only available if you’re grandfathered in.
If oversupply were really a concern, then you’d think the prices during oversupply would reflect that, dropping to basically nothing. They don’t. If they did, then EVs could be charged for super cheap when solar power was flooding the grid.
that sounds a lot like what they are talking about
What they’re talking about is revoking the law that grandfathered people into NEM 1.0 and 2.0 contracts. Keep in mind, the people who purchased solar under NEM 1.0 and 2.0 did so under the presumption that they would be able to stay on it for at least 20 years (because that was codified in law).000
only getting paid some large percentage of the price for energy sent to the grid
NEM 3.0 reduces the way credits are calculated to, on average, 25% of what they were before, and that are not the same as the retail rate.
https://aurorasolar.com/blog/explaining-and-modeling-californias-net-billing-tariff-nem-3-0/ has some examples. At the same time that electricity from the grid costs $0.44/kWh, solar sent to the grid only returns a $0.05/kWh credit.
5 cents is not a large percentage of 44 cents.
If your neighbor has solar and you charge your EV in the middle of a sunny day when your neighbor is at work, you’re probably using your neighbor’s electricity to do so. That’s gonna cost you $15 and net your neighbor a $1.71 credit.
Under NEM 1.0 and 2.0, if you import from and export to the grid in the same hour, those amounts are netted, even before NBCs come into effect. But under NEM 3.0, you could get billed for importing in the same hour even if you exported far more than you used. If you imported 1 kWh from the grid, you’d need to export 9 kWh to break even.
Again, this doesn’t make sense. Someone is paying $0.44/kWh for the energy you exported, but you’re only getting $0.05 credit for it.
If your solar system has storage, you can strategically export energy to the grid when the compensation is higher. That’s something you can consider when installing your solar system… but that’s not true for the people who are grandfathered into NEM 1.0 and 2.0, who knew they were grandfathered in by law.
And from what I’ve heard, even that doesn’t actually help that much, because the credits don’t apply to the largest part of the bill - they apply to “generation,” not to “delivery.” I haven’t found a reliable source confirming that, but if true it just adds insult to injury - if you pay the added cost to install an intelligent storage system and configure it to return money to the grid when their costs are highest, you get a credit equal to the cost you helped them avoid, but then the credit’s actually only usable on a small portion of your bill. If the calculations are based on avoided cost, you should get those credits even if it means the electric company is paying you.
They can pay for the grid maintenance and storage if they’d like to set it up that way. NEM sort of addresses this but they’ve planned it poorly.
