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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".
> 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 $4.90 a month, and the other I won't.
The actual problem here is that some of the grid cost is buried in the electricity rate. If they truly separated the two, then this problem wouldn't have existed in the first place. However, that is likely on the order of hundreds of dollars a month. For the average user the cost would be identical in the end, one line on the bill would go up and another down. However, for people who sip power, or turn it off completely (at the cottage in the winter), their bills will go way up.
You can see that most clearly with someone who ends up at a net 0 kWh usage. Even though they send power both directions over the lines, since line maintenance is paid for by a portion of the per-kWh fee, and they use net-zero, they don't pay any line maintenance.
One possibility would be to break out line maintenance into a separate fee, and charge it on gross bidirectional, rather than net volume. But then you'd need the meters to work differently. Just charging a flat monthly fee for feed-in customers is a way of approximating it for typical-sized users.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10