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Utilities Fight Back Against Solar Energy

Posted by timothy on from the this-again dept.

JoeyRox writes "The exponential growth of rooftop solar adoption has utilities concerned about their financial future. Efficiency gains and cost reductions has brought the price of solar energy to within parity of traditional power generation in states like California and Hawaii. HECO, an electric utility in Hawaii, has started notifying new solar adopters that they will not be allowed to connect to the utility's power grid, citing safety concerns of electric circuits becoming oversaturated from the rapid adoption of solar power on the island. Residents claim it's not about safety but about the utility fighting to protect its profits." We mentioned earlier the connection fee recently approved in Arizona. Do you have a solar system? If not (or if so, for that matter), does this make you think twice about it?

3 of 579 comments (clear)

  1. There must be a very good reason... by benjfowler · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't understand why the utilities simply don't build out their grids to accept feed-in from customers' solar rigs, and then split their pricing structure into 1) grid access, and 2) net power supplied? Or is this too simple?

    1. Re:There must be a very good reason... by Nerdfest · · Score: 5, Insightful

      More accurately, it's going up because of corrupt government and bad management.

    2. Re: There must be a very good reason... by Dr+Max · · Score: 5, Insightful

      We do that in australia by letting anyone with solar generation jack up the network voltage in order to backfeed. It's causing massive problems (mostly around retirement homes) because the network is operating at around 270v in the middle of the day, in a suburb with lots of solar (should be about 240v). Thats the other thing, we don't need all this extra power in the middle of the day, we need it at 6 oclock at night when everyone turns on the big screens and ovens. It's not a good soloution, and thats a big part of why you cant get a good price on solar generation any more (used to be 44cents per kwh, now its 8cents per kwh). We need a new long life battery technology to use solar properly if you ask me.

      --
      Rocket Surgeon.