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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."
Anything that generates electricity that is not a huge power plant is a threat to the electric company. They will do whatever they can to mitigate that threat. They do not want to become an entity in a world where everyone has generating capacity at their own homes, and they simply maintain a network or wires to share surplus amongst them and top them off at peak load times.
The utility spent $3.7 million to promote its argument, compared with about $330,000 spent by the solar industry, according to documents filed with the commission.
Fuck these crooks. $3.7M buys a lot of infrastructure improvement.
Oldest trick in the book. Ask for the moon ($50/month insanity) and cry when they hand you a sterling silver platter instead.
I sincerely hope cheap high density batteries come out in the next decade that will make grid tie completely moot point if all you want is energy at night.
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".
The cost of delivering power has two components: fixed costs (say, power lines to the home) and variable costs (say, of producing the power) The current system was to bundle the fixed costs into the variable ones, and just chage proportional to consumption. Since those selling back power to the grid still need to pay for the fixed costs, this principle of this change seems right. Better execution would have been to add the fixed cost to everyone and make a corresponding reduction to the marginal (per KWh) tariff, at which point those with and without solar panels would be treated equally.
There is a cost of spinning reserve and grid stability maintenance. Why shouldn't those who need it or negatively impact it pay for it? The real cost should probably be even more, depending on the size of the installation. Its only $4.95/mo.
According to the information I find about Arizona net metering, the power you generate offsets your bill (at retail rates) until your bill is zero; after that you are paid wholesale for any excess:
"Net metering is accomplished using a single bi-directional meter. Any customer net excess generation (NEG) will be carried over to the customer's next bill at the utility's retail rate, as a kilowatt-hour (kWh) credit. Any NEG remaining at the customer’s last monthly bill in a calendar year will be paid to the customer, via check or billing credit, at the utility’s avoided cost payment. "
If this is really true, then the utility is making a profit reselling the power you generate. So what's the basis for this fee they want to charge?
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Not true.
The power company openly welcomes almost any generation on the grid. That power becomes a supplier. However the utility's most important goal is reliable power which solar notoriously difficult to provide.
Then there is the cost of supporting the transmission of electricity. Generation companies pay that as a fee, why shouldn't individuals. As a customer, I love the power company paying me for excess generation but as a utility worker, why should the utility pay retail cost for power (when the maintenance cost is high) and they can buy it cheaper elsewhere.
This isn't really an argument for the individual customers but for these groups (like cited in the original article) who provide you with 'low upfront costs' where you get almost little in return. Their solar panels, their federal tax incentives, generating on your rooftop for a small relief in power you buy from them. Funny how they are charging the homeowner a 'maintenance' fee already. They've been gaming the system and simply want to protect their profits.
> 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.
In the USA most don't get a second meter, they use what's called 'net metering'. IE if you generate, say, 500 kwh in a month and use 600, you only pay for 100 kwh, even if you only used 100 kwh during the time your panels were generating significant power and used the other 500 at night and such. If your install is big enough that you go negative(spin the meter backwards), you get paid.
While 'spinning reserve' can be a problem, the bigger expense right now is that homes with solar panels are effectively getting out of would be line maintenance expenses. It costs money to keep the distribution lines and equipment up, and they're still using said lines.
They're effectively being paid retail for the power they produce.
I don't read AC A human right
You have no clue what you are talking about. Arizona utility companies pay a wholesale rate to solar homeowners for the electricity they generate. During on peak hours my utility pays me a few cents per kWh and resells that for, depending on the time of use plan the other customer has chosen, possibly 10 times that amount. They do not pay me retail for my excess generation, and they always zero out the balance in April before the hot months start so that my credited kWh balance doesn't offset my usage in those months that my demand exceeds the capacity of my system.
This is all very well and good, but does it scale? Suppose every single house and business the grid served had enough capacity to go net zero. That is, they generate their entire day's budget of power, including nighttime use, using their panels. This means that on sunny days, the power has to get stored, because by definition everybody is generating more than the total they need during daylight hours. Or else it just goes to a resistor bank or something.
And then on cloudy days, and at night, the energy has to come either from grid-tied storage, or from non-solar generators (one would like for that to be wind, but it's not a perfect solution at the moment). And of course there is a very substantial cost to actually maintaining the grid. So in this scenario, the cost of the non-solar generation capacity and the grid has to be paid for by someone; if everybody who is connected to the grid is paying zero, or slightly less, then the money has to come from somewhere, and that's going to be the power company.
Of course, that's one extreme; the other is no site-generated power. You can draw a graph; on the left zero net-zero sites, on the right, 100% net zero sites. For some part of the left-hand side of the chart, solar is making the power company's life easier, because demand for power is higher during the day than at night. For some part past that, solar is neutral—it doesn't particularly benefit the company, but it's not a negative either—they are able to sell the power, assuming they are paying a fair price for it. And then at some point on the right, there is no longer sufficient revenue to pay for the grid and the non-solar generating capacity needed to run all those net-zero houses when the sun isn't out either because it's cloudy or nighttime. Now the money to pay for the grid has to come from people who are net zero.
And somewhere before that happens, to the right side of the graph, the money that pays for the non-solar generating capacity and the grid will all be coming from people who don't have solar, even though the people who have solar also benefit both from the grid and the non-solar generation.
So when you talk about "usefulness to the grid," it's important to keep this graph in mind. At some points on the graph, that term is meaningful. At other points on the graph, it isn't. And it is absolutely unfair for users who do not have solar to subsidize users who do—in general, users without solar will be poor, and users with will be affluent, so you have a reverse subsidy.
Andrea and I have solar on our roof, and we're happy to have it, and we get a subsidy, which apparently works out well for Green Mountain Power at the moment. I'm happy that's the case, because at the moment our excess generating capacity actually benefits other users of the grid. But when the point comes where the grid exists largely to spread out the power and provide night capacity, that will no longer be the case, and it would be shameful if I were to ask for the subsidy to continue at that point, paid for largely by people less fortunate than I am, or by running the power company that maintains the grid I depend on into the ground.
IF you are relying on the grid for power when the sun isn't shinning you are NOT net zero
Good grief man, at least look up the definition of "net metering" before posting on the subject. the "net" part refers to the net balance over the billing period, what it's doing at any particular moment is irrelevant, they are measuring your overall consumption/production. The sign of the net figure tells you if you get a bill or a cheque.
According to others in Arizona you get wholesale price for the electricity you sell to the grid, but the price should not be included in the calculation of the net balance, that should be +/-kwh used per billing period. If you use Xkwh and generate Xkwh then the bill should be zero + the service cost for the grid, all retail users of the grid should pay the same universal service fee since grids do not grow by themselves.
As for all the hand wringing about clouds. ALL forms of power generation are "unreliable", to get the advertised power from 6 coal plants you will need to build 7 of them since one will always be down for 2 months per year for regular maintenance. Also as much a solar power fluctuates, coal doesn't. So you will also need gas turbines or a hydro dam for 2-6 hours a day to service the peak periods without brownouts. Also you will be producing too much electricity during the off-peak period, you can't simply "turn down" a coal plant anymore than you can "turn up" the wind and sunshine.. Coal plants MUST deal with the daily demand curve in exactly the same way solar and wind MUST deal with it, pump water uphill into a hydro dam, build a bunch of gas turbines, or over build the wind/solar farms and spread them over geographically diverse locations..
We have built the planets energy infrastructure (including the grid) around coal fired generation, coal has just as many problems as other forms of generation wrt matching the demand curve of a modern city. If you take into account the detrimental health and environment qualities of coal it is much more expensive than renewables.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.