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Arizona Approves Grid-Connection Fees For Solar Rooftops
mdsolar writes with this excerpt from Bloomberg News: "Arizona will permit the state's largest utility to charge a monthly fee to customers who install photovoltaic panels on their roofs, in a closely watched hearing that drew about 1,000 protesters and may threaten the surging residential solar market. The Arizona Corporation Commission, which regulates utilities in the state, agreed in a 3-to-2 vote at a meeting [Thursday] in Phoenix that Arizona Public Service Co. may collect about $4.90 a month from customers with solar systems. Arizona Public is required to buy solar power from customers with rooftop panels, and the commission agreed with its argument that the policy unfairly shifts some of the utility's costs to people without panels. Imposing a fee designed to address this issue may prompt power companies in other states to follow suit, and will discourage some people from installing new systems, according to the Sierra Club."
I'm OK with a grid connection fee. It is reasonable.
However, I am not OK with some other policies that I have seen, such as no buyback for excess generation. Or, as in my case, the policy is such that regardless of how much excess generation you pump into the grid, there will NEVER be a net on the bill. The bill will always be at least ~$30 even if I pump 20MW of excess generation back into the grid.
It really pisses me off. But, luckily, the state commission just approved another rate hike that "will benefit consumers".
If you have solar panels and don't want to sell your excess back to the utility then don't . But don't try to pretend that you don't make use of the grid when you do. The public utility has been forced to buy your excess energy at above market rates thus pushing up costs to everyone. Stop crying about being treated like a wholesale power supplier.
> It's not costing them money in infrastructure; that is still being paid for by all its customers - including those using solar power
So lets say I put up exactly the number of panels that net meters me to zero on a yearly basis.
Due to night, seasonality, weather, etc, that means that what's actually going on is that I'm exporting major quantities of power during the day, and then buying from the grid those other times. So it's not like I'm not using the infrastructure just as much as the guy next to me that doesn't have panels. In fact, I'm using it more.
Yet because my bill is zero, I'm paying less than him as a function of maintaining the grid. It shouldn't be that way, but it is.
The contrary argument is equally interesting. Let's say I don't put up that many panels, but just one of them. That produces about the same amount of power that my fridge uses daily. So in fact, there is exactly zero difference between putting up a panel, and buying a new energy star fridge. Both of those will have the exact same effect on my total use of the grid. Yet in one I will now be charged $4.90 a month, and the other I won't.
The actual problem here is that some of the grid cost is buried in the electricity rate. If they truly separated the two, then this problem wouldn't have existed in the first place. However, that is likely on the order of hundreds of dollars a month. For the average user the cost would be identical in the end, one line on the bill would go up and another down. However, for people who sip power, or turn it off completely (at the cottage in the winter), their bills will go way up.
the fee which is paid for by your neighbors whom are paying for the power the utility bought at wholesale from you the solar producer, and the ultility marks up 500%? Plus the additional $8 a month "customer fee" for the pleasure of being hooked to the grid? Oh and plus the massive subsidies given to the utilities by the government? Those poor utilities certainly can not afford to upgrade their infrastructure without feeding at the government trough.
That isn't possible here, because to share power among the members of the coop, you need electric transmission lines, and towers to hold them up, which means you need land, right-of-way, etc. You can only get that with the government's blessing, and they've already given that blessing to the local power utility monopoly. They're not going to give it to someone else, because the whole point of a utility monopoly is that you only need one set of infrastructure because it's infeasible to have dozens of sets of transmission lines running all over, so you give one company a monopoly for this, and have them regulated by the government so they don't go nuts with their monopoly. The government can't give other companies the same rights because then they'd be admitting they're doing a poor job in their capacity as regulators.
You can see that most clearly with someone who ends up at a net 0 kWh usage. Even though they send power both directions over the lines, since line maintenance is paid for by a portion of the per-kWh fee, and they use net-zero, they don't pay any line maintenance.
One possibility would be to break out line maintenance into a separate fee, and charge it on gross bidirectional, rather than net volume. But then you'd need the meters to work differently. Just charging a flat monthly fee for feed-in customers is a way of approximating it for typical-sized users.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Maybe US power companies are more generous than Canadian ones, but I can tell you the big reason I haven't gone solar is because I wouldn't get out of those fees. I pay 8c/kwh (sounds reasonably cheap) yet 400kwh/month seems to work out to over $100 (interesting math...) basically the bill is full of connection fees, distribution fees, administrative fees, generation fees, etc. which are all separate from the cost of electricity of 8c/kwh.
End result is that although I could net meter and reduce my liability on that 8c/kwh, even getting it down to zero wouldn't drop my bill by enough to be worth it. The only way it would actually make sense to go solar around here would be to also go off grid, which adds a lot of expense and kills any incentive.
As for this $4 fee... last I heard, our electric company had a program where you could buy solar sells from them and net-meter, their admin fee (on top of everything else) was over $30/month... so I don't see why people complain about $4!
People in the 'States scream about Big Government...
Oddly enough in most of Europe, with their big government that actually regulates industry, you see MORE competition in broadband, in cell service. Weird. Almost like businesses get too huge, start monopolistic practices, and NEED to be wacked with a stick once in a while.
Remember folks, there's a world outside the USA, and it works pretty well for a lot of things. Our culture/economy/law is not a universal Truth for the world.
Obviously you have never taken a look at the California ISO website during the summer, which gives real information on demand and production. as opposed to rants of solar fanboys writing for Wikipedia. Peak production from solar occurs at 12 noon, peak demand occurs at 6PM. Solar does help with energy production during the hottest part of the days but is no help when demand is highest and thus does nothing to reduce the need for spinning reserves.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.