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The Groups Behind Making Distributed Solar Power Harder To Adopt
Lucas123 writes: Distributed rooftop solar is a threat not only to fossil fuel power generation, but also to the profits of monopolistic model of utilities. While the overall amount of electrical capacity represented by distributed solar power remains miniscule for now, it's quickly becoming one of leading sources of new energy deployment. As adoption grows, fossil fuel interests and utilities are succeeding in pushing anti-net metering legislation, which places surcharges on customers who deploy rooftop solar power and sell unused power back to their utility through the power grid. Other state legislation is aimed at reducing tax credits for households or businesses installing solar or allows utilities to buy back unused power at a reduced rate, while reselling it at the full retail price.
The wealthy will be able to afford electricity, and the poor will pedal to power small homemade generators.
Wow, the article has less proofreading than the summary!
It is important to vote out the corrupt politicians who take industry money and write their laws. Otherwise, it can only get worse.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Often corporations are favoured by government, but in this case it's about power station owners getting pissy that tax favours are being provided to either those who have housing with solar panels or (Musk I'm looking at you) those businesses which have made a deal to hire a person's roof to install and run those panels.
The government should not go around subsidising either big business or middle class householders.
I think solar is great - I have some panels on my camper, which is very conducive to solar type use because it's already designed to function off-grid. But let's be realistic. Let's say every home in America stuck a couple thousand watts of solar power on their roof, and wanted to sell the power into the grid (as opposed of having to store it on-site). How is that supposed to work? If no power generation is required by the power company when the sun is shining, but the full normal generation is required the instant clouds sweep over a community or at night, etc, then how is that supposed to work? None of the power generation plants can function in that "instant on / instant off" type of a mode. Particularly not nuclear. The point is, once the adoption reaches some (rather smallish) percentage, there will be some major problems and costs that will have to be addressed.
Regarding the incentives (tax credits and the like), again, once solar hits some critical mass, why would the government provide incentives? The incentives did their job, and got some number of people to adopt solar.
Nothing is stopping anyone from using solar. It's just that it may not be a profitable (as in selling electricity or getting a tax break) endeavor. So don't whine when it can't be used purely for an economical advantage.
Better known as 318230.
The current system lets the home owner use the power grid as a battery, storing excess energy for later use. And this battery is free. But it's not free - someone has to pay for the power lines, meters, and generation or storage capacity that makes it work.
Electric bills have two components, the supply cost and the delivery cost. The supply cost is what the electric company should be paying for electricity it buys from the home owner. But the electricity the home owner buys back should include the delivery cost.
In effect, the utilities are subsidizing home generation, which may make sense for now, but is not a plausible end game.
The thing is that with net metering, solar power users are effectively using the grid as a giant battery that they charge up during the day and discharge during the night.
They aren't paying for use of that battery, but the utility company is still expected to maintain it. If you're not buying electricity from them, then they are providing that service for no pay - and that's not a sustainable business model.
It's not a problem when only a microscopic percentage of users have net-metered solar power - but if a large number of people do it, then there could be a huge problem...and if there is ever more daytime solar power being generated (eg on cloudy days in winter) than is being consumed - then there will be a GIGANTIC problem to resolve - and that's going to require massive investments that they won't have.
So I do have *some* sympathy for them. They should, at some point, be allowed to charge for the service of effectively storing your power for you...although we're not remotely close to that point right now.
www.sjbaker.org
Given the time to recoup, spotty panel performance and quality, residential solar is nothing more than a novelty to make you feel good.
It will fall aside just as scientific data has sunk ethanol, plug in hybrids and EV's.
What they they be doing is admit that there are two separate features of their industry - the maintenance/connection to the grid and the supply of power. It costs a lot of money to maintain the grid as well as to supply the charge.
What they should be doing is to charge a set amount X dollars per month to connect to the grid and in addition a per kilowatt charge - that is of course smaller than the existing one. And that charge must be reasonable - based on their actual costs to maintain the grid.
These charge changes must go to ALL their customers - both those that sell power back and those that don't.
This gets rid of their only valid objection to selling power back to the grid - the cost of maintaining the grid.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
It forces utility companies to buy a product they themselves manufacture and can't resell at a profit, all the while spending money to keep the grid up and running.
I don't have a solar, but my electric bill is itemized and contains a transport cost item. It makes sense that in case of solar, you pay transport cost both ways.
The answer, as always, is to let the free market solve the problem for you. When there is excess power being generated, lower the prices to consumers and everyone is happy - producers are getting some ROI, and consumers are getting cheap electricity. On a cloudy winter day when there is high demand, you raise prices substantially and again everyone is happy - producers make even more money, and consumers will buy only as much as they need. We need to turn the electric utility into what is basically an electric auction house, uniting buys and sellers in the most efficient way possible. This should be possible to do with the technology we have in this day and age.
Letting the market set the prices is precisely what solar advocates don't want. They want to be guaranteed a 1:1 credit for their feed-in, rather than being paid wholesale spot prices for what they feed into the grid.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Time to hit them repeatedly with a clue stick.
Power bills usually charge separate for energy usage and distribution. The energy usage is a net charge with net metering. From what I have heard, distribution is still based on total energy taken out of the grid, not net.
What net metering does do, if it's to be scalable, is increase the need for a variable energy cost throughout the day. 1Wh at noon is cheaper than 1Wh at midnight if everyone installs solar, so expecting to buy power back at an equal rate at night is just silly.
The Greed Behind Making Distributed Solar Power Harder To Adopt ... there, fixed it for you.
Okay, I'm going to have to critique the article a bit. Please note that I live in Alaska and almost purchased solar panels myself - it's just that the distributor I looked at purchasing the panels from made break-even assumptions that not even I could swallow. It definitely doesn't make sense to pay somebody to install them up here.
Anyways - very first paragraph, 'ensure utility companies pay for unused power that is routed back into the power grid - a practice known as net metering'. To my knowledge ALL power companies are willing to pay for the power returned to the grid. However, they often want to pay utility rates for it, not retail. To put it another way, let's say you're a biodiesel producer in your spare time, and every so often you have some surplus. Do you expect the local biodiesel station to purchase your fuel* for the pump price? Or are they going to want to pay the price they get it from their distributor for?
Now, the actual situation is quite a bit more complicated- electricity isn't really stored, and the marginal cost per watt during peak times can be quite a bit higher than what you're charged as a home customer, without time cost considerations. Electricity costs tend to be a bit higher during the day, so the argument has been that panels tend to displace expensive power, not cheap power. But as market penetration increases, it can change the paradigm that utilities operate under, and unlike most industries, if it's doing it's job the power company IS looking 40 years ahead.
The argument is that grid-tie solar users are often close to even production, and due to net metering aren't paying the maintenance costs of the wire they're using, while still not being a significant contributor to the grid. They effectively use the grid as a giant battery.
So, while the answer for any given solar install is 'complex', on average net metering is a subsidy. Whether it's a worthy subsidy, that's up to individuals to decide.
The problem with rooftop solar being 'on par with prices for common fossil-fuel power generation in just two years' is that we may face a situation where power becomes MORE EXPENSIVE during the night(and late evenings when people are still up). Again, are we talking about utility, IE right at the plant, or retail, after it's traveled through potentially hundreds of miles of power line? Because the former is around $.02/kwh, the latter more like $.08. Browsing the citing document, not only are they using retail, but they're not predicting the price drop he predicts. They're predicting it'll drop below standard retail prices. Which includes grid maintenance.
Disconnecting from the grid is possible(in most areas), but it substantially increases costs to the solar installer to put in a battery bank and often even a generator. Operating the generator is obviously, much more expensive than buying power from the electric company.
If made into law, the Kansas legislation would allow utilities to pay solar customers using net metering less than the retail rate of electricity. In turn, utilities could use the excess electricity that customers were turning back to them and sell it at the retail rate.
So... Like how a regular business operates? I know, lose a little on each sale, but we'll make it up on volume!
Anyways, I support more solar power, but we have to realize that we'd see some drastic changes if it ever exceeds 20% of electricity generation here in the States. It's not anywhere near that yet, but like I said, the power companies are looking ahead. Heck, we might face a future where daytime power is much 'cheaper' than night time, and there's a big push for people to charge their vehicles at work. Of course, that means all those home panels will be producing electricity that has to transition the grid... Please note that I'm looking 10-20+ years into the future here.
As a bigger fan of electric vehicles, I can't help but imagine a system where 'retired' EV batteries are used to make homes, if not entirely self-sufficient, at least only really dependent upon a 'neighborhood grid'.
*Let's say you're good at it and it's identical to their normal product.
I don't read AC A human right
Also, the centralized grid system is an outdated liability. Decentralization is a good thing. Utilities rage on about decentralization hurting grid stability, but they've got better stability in Denmark & Germany where they use more decentralized renewables. In the US we have centralized plants that fail during extreme weather events when they're most needed, like heat waves or unseasonable ice storms.
Now is the time to start planning for the future. Fossil fuels incentives, subsidies, and tax credits outweigh solar & wind 10 to 1. We need to stop investing in century old technology, and start investing in energy infrastructure that will serve us better in the future. It's clear which way things are moving. The smart utilities are embracing slow change & planning for it now. The ones that are dragging their feet should be taken behind the barn and shot dead for everyone's good.
With distributed power the only thing you should need to pay for is the hook up and infrastructure costs, which should remain stable as more people hook up.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
You should not have to pay transport costs for the power you produce, because that power doesn't have to run back to the power plant and then back out. Most likely your neighbors are using that power, and the power loss is minimal. I could see a few dollars charge for general upkeep, but it shouldn't a percentage of what you produce because that is irrelevant. I could see adding some cost for additional data infrastructure so that panels can talk to the plant and the plant can potentially throttle panels to even out demand swings, but there's got to be a better solution.
X
They aren't paying for use of that battery, but the utility company is still expected to maintain it. If you're not buying electricity from them, then they are providing that service for no pay - and that's not a sustainable business model.
Oh no, that isn't the case.
Even in places that bill by net metering, the home owner still pays for the use of the grid during that time. Some states charge a fixed fee per month, others charge a "tax" per kilowatt-hour for the power that the homeowner puts back on the grid. Maybe both.
FYI: This varies by state. I live in Maryland, and they also do things as you suggest. I think some states still use the model where the "power company" and the "utility company" are the same, and they just charge per kilowatt-hour. Inevitably that will have to change everywhere.
(Maybe one day internet will be the same way.)
You're just a different color of the rich screwing the poor. You want the poor people to have to pay a higher electricity cost so that you can get your power subisidized. Poor people, renting, don't have an option for rooftop solar. So, your plan will jack up their rates, making them pay for both the power they consume as well as paying you for the delta between wholesale and retail cost. Go kill yourself.
It does not make sense for solar. It would make sense to have a set fee for solar. Why? The price you pay without solar is based on the power being generated somewhere most likely very far away and then transported to your house. Now, with home generation, you are selling directly to your neighbor. There is very little loss and very little infrastructure required. The solar producers should have to pay some form of set fee to maintain the infrastructure, but charging them by the KWh is an unnecessary disincentive to participate. A lot of this is the cost of having a monopoly. You can't just start a neighborhood power distribution company, and if you tried 'sharing' your electricity with your neighbors I imagine you'd have unhappy officials stopping by.
X
The instalation of rooftop solar panels was growing quickly in Spain over the past few years. With up to 5 sun-hours available in many areas the investment was more than justified.
But as soon as parity in the home photovoltaic generation cost was reached over a year ago, Spain taxed the Sun, making anyone that dares to generate and consume their own electricity pay up to 0.09 euros/kWh consumed and produced by their own equipment in their own home, and not only solar but also wind geothermal or any other source.
The penalty for not registering (and paying) is considered a very serious offense with ridiculously outrageous fines and they can cut your home supply from the net.
You can guess that nobody installs rooftop solar panels anymore around here wasting perfectly good kWh of free sun.
They could itemize the bill and say: This is for usage and this is for being connected to the network, allowed access or whatever term they'll use.
If they did that, then they'd have to disclose how cheap energy really is, and how little they invest in infrastructure.
I'm seeing all these comments basically saying, why should consumers get to sell even a sliver of a portion of the electricity they generate with distributed PV systems back to the utilities at retail rates?
Well, the government is hoping to promote adoption of a promising new technology. And, help me if I've got my facts wrong. Doesn't the government provide subsidies and tax breaks to fossil fuel producers? Hmmm. What's good for the goose?
Yes, at some point, we'll have to reduce incentives for deploying distributed rooftop solar when it becomes a real challenger to fossil fuel power generation, but right now, distributed solar power represents less than one-half of one percent of all power generated in the U.S. In capacity terms, solar power is still in the crib, and as with so many new technologies, the government is attempting to help it grow by giving is a teeny advantage. Sort of like giving away free land to settlers, except in this case, it's not free. You're just able to sell excess power back to the utility, who BTW, can then sell it at full retail price. So it's not really a detriment to the utilities.
So I do have *some* sympathy for them. They should, at some point, be allowed to charge for the service of effectively storing your power for you...although we're not remotely close to that point right now.
Indeed, but I think that utility companies are some of the most forward thinking - looking 20 and 40 years ahead. And Hawaii has gotten to the point that some of their switching stations could see more power coming in than going out, so they've been having to modify things.
Hawaii is a special case though, so it's good to examine to help determine how things might go.
I don't read AC A human right
Well hardly any non engineer pays attention to harmonics on the power
grid caused by wavering power sources like wind and solar. Harmonics
in your 100 watt stereo are anoying. On a 1GWatt power grid they
are a big problem. The cost of compensating for this flutter has been
estimated from "way to much" to "completely of the scale" if you try
to run the grid on these power sources. The big questions are at what point
will the grid fail and how soon are we going to reach it!
It makes sense that in case of solar, you pay transport cost both ways.
While it'd be a nice racket, I don't think that companies like UPS would get away with charging both the retailer and the purchaser for transport costs.
Buyer pays transport. Seller only gets the base price. For home installs, that means that the homeowner pays base+transport for any electricity he pulls from the grid, but the utility only pays base for any he puts onto the grid.
I don't read AC A human right
People are combining two different acts when going solar, a) getting off of fossil fuels, and b) generating their own power that the big energy companies don't control. Energy companies are not necessarily against a), but b) is anathema to them, and therefore they are doing everything they can to block the adoption of solar. In my opinion, the primary goal of going solar is to curb the effects of climate change. Comparatively I don't really care if I'm grid-independent or able to sell my excess power back, etc. Therefore this got me thinking, and I was shocked to have this very pro-utility conclusion: I would be happy if legislation was passed that outlawed individual ownership of personal solar installations, and mandated big utilities to install, operate, and maintain them instead. I would continue sending a check each month as I have been for my power like before, and my bill might even go up 10-30%.
I decided I would tolerate this because utilities would stop blocking solar and go ahead and install it on every roof in America. They wouldn't go bankrupt as the need for fossil fuels waned, and I wouldn't have to worry about the solar panels on my roof. We would meet and exceed any goals for carbon reduction in a matter of years, and with no big utilities going bankrupt. I honestly would be all for it, let the utilities continue to control me, we've got to address climate change NOW.
And I'm a democrat!
...have passed revisions to their net metering policies that would included fixed monthly surcharges for residences and businesses that install solar to make it less competitive with conventional forms energy.
Well, that's not a biased statement at all, is it? I don't know all of the details of who wants want law passed to do who knows what, but I think there is a legitimate argument to be made for a fixed monthly charge.
A standard, non-solar customer is hooked up to the grid, and uses 100% of the power companies power 100% of the time. The power company knows this, so they are able to figured out what to charge the customer for things like power generation, transmission, distribution, etc.
Along comes a solar user, and they use 50% of the power company's power 50% of the time. BUT, they want to be hooked up and able to use the power company 100% of the time, so the power company still has to maintain the same infrastructure, but now they are getting less from the customer. Sure, they are saving on not having to generate the power for them sometimes, but the transmission and distribution cost are rolled into the cost of your generated power.
Look at it this way. Say they were earning $10mil a month from their customers, and $5mil was generation costs and $5mil was distribution costs. Suddenly, half of their customers go solar, cutting the amount of power generated by 20%. Now they made $8mil. Their generation cost was $4mil, leaving $4mil for distribution maintenance. But they still have $5mil worth of maintenance because all of their customers still are hooked up to the same system. How do you make up that $1mil shortfall?
To be fair, maybe the power company just needs to split the bill so that every household pays a fixed infrastructure charge, regardless of how much you use, and then tack on the cost of your actual usage.
charging them by the KWh is an unnecessary disincentive to participate
As long as it's a realistic charge, I don't see the problem. If there's very little loss, and the neighbour wants the power, the charge can be small.
A lot of this is the cost of having a monopoly
Where I live, there's no monopoly. There are plenty of power companies to choose from.
Thanks, I prefer a heated house in the winter at night.
Distributed rooftop solar is only a threat to fossil fuel power generation in select areas of the country.
Derp.
You would be doing other things to reduce the wage gap and fund welfare properly, and the whine you have would be unnecessary.
It's not like NOT using net metering will mean that the poor will be better off. The electric company is making more profit off asymetric metering, an d they won't put it back in as reduced charges, so your "complaint" is that since you can't un-stiff the poor, you're damn well going to stiff the non-poor.
Fund welfare with your taxes, LET tax rates increase, and THEN you can claim you were worried for the plight of the poor.
Otherwise your complaint is more like hiding behind a human shield of "think of the poor!!!" homilies.
Actually, it'll help industry as well, assuming it's cheap enough. While they normally get their electricity cheaper than households, they can often install solar power cheaper due to quantity scaling.
As for the reliability of output - if you have storage it's reliable enough, and induction heating is only one of many industries.
I never said baseload would go away, just that pumped storage isn't a 'free' solution.
I don't read AC A human right
...is that HOAs are just as big if not a bigger impediment to solar as many ban them from their communities.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Let's get real. The only sustainable approach to energy is renewable energy *by definition*. The whole argument about power intermittency is a red herring. Storage when needed will include via home batteries, plugged in EV batteries, utilities, etc. If you look at the levels of CO2 that we are allowed without killing off the human race, that level is 600lbs/CO2/person/year as clearly stated (buried) in the IPCC report authored by the world's leading scientists (we're currently at about 35,000 per capita). If utilities want to be relevant *at all* in the future, they need to quit dragging their feet. Those utilities already make money from rooftop solar because it generates power during the peak high cost period and it displaces very expensive capacity expansion at central generators. It's very cost effective. But they are scared so increasingly we see some trying to sabotage net metering etc. It's a losing game on their part. As renewables become more widespread, it will require some grid investments but in general the grid is *oversized* for what we need because more power will be generated near the point of consumption instead of sent long distances. The wind potential of the center of the country is an exception to that observation. We need grid investment there in order to ship that power to the East Coast. But the fact is that we're moving from a decreasing cost central monopoly model to a linear cost distributed purely competitive model for energy. All those old-school slow moving monopoly businesses are going to resist because they have a lot to lose. And incidentally if you think about how you most effectively get to our future state, a big part of that is moving to very well insulated homes and using a lot of solar hot water and other techniques to cut most of our current wasteful energy consumption. We also need a bit of imagination. Why do we need huge refrigerators full of outdated food? Can't that be closer to just in time inventory like business? Why do the fridge doors open and dump all the cold air out instead of using a liftable counter to get to the fridge? And why doesn't the freezer have an ice compartment that uses computer controls to keep the fridge and freezer at reasonable levels during periods of intermittent power (like overnight?). We're supposed to be innovators and doers. Let's act like it
I seems to me that a good "break even" point for solar would be air-conditioning/cooling. The need for cooling is directly comparable to the heat of the day,which is fairly closely tied to sunlight. AC is also a pretty big source of grid drain and/or larger power bills in the summer months.
If one could make an efficient solar AC system that would fit on most homes, that would be a fairly saleable product IMHO.
Figure out what the real transport cost is, and split it between the consumers and producers. It's not that hard to come up with a fair system.
When the nuke plant is offline, you need enough backup to make up the gigawatts difference in a matter of minutes, and backup power plants to cover the shortfall whilst the power station is offline, potentially for months.
Yet somehow this problem never gets mentioned by you, does it. Indeed you and others like you complain when a nuke plant is down and reported here on slashdot, that this is just a hack job to villify nuclear power.
Yet your kind are the reason why those stories need to be made as often as they are: you don't believe that variability exists with anything other than solar and wind.
You DO know that *DEMAND* varies too, right? And pretty closely with the daylight cycle, therefore variations in supply match variations in demand and you need LESS backup storage.
Within a decade or so the cost of in home batteries will likely come down enough that it will be practical to produce and store your own electricity and tell the utilities to get screwed, especially in the southern US.
My neighbors who've deployed solar panels on their roofs do it by leasing from a PV distributor. They're not shoveling out $20,000 to have it installed. It's typically free, and then you pay a fixed rate that's generally a little lower than your typical retail electricity rates. So it's NOT the rich deploying distributed solar.
2) Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't our government give subsidies and tax breaks to those altruistic generators of fossil fuels to which you so warmly refer to as "acting in the interests of the little guy"? (Spit a little Diet Pepsi out of my mouth with that one).
3) Utilities get to sell any power returned through the grid at full-blown retail rates. Yeah, they're not facing bankruptcy... just yet.
4) Distributed solar represents what... less than 1% of all energy generated? I think PG&E will survive the assault for at least another week or two.
Syngas or biogas is something people should look at seriously. It is an easy way to get people on biofuel without genetic engineering or cultivating weird strains of algae.
You can burn wood, leaves, crop dross, grass clippings, etc. About sixty pounds of biomass will provide about enough power for three residential homes for a day. And that potentially can include lots of waste heat that can be used to heat homes and water further increasing efficiency. What is more, some systems can even provide refinery type products such as gasoline, diesel, and heavier byproducts such as tar etc.
Here someone will say "but what about the environment"... well, a lot of biomass is going to be burned or decompose regardless. And that is going to release its carbon either way. A rotting tree gives up its CO2 just like a burning tree. Also assuming you're not using fossil fuels in this process or are just using net less... the process is effectively carbon neutral.
I think we can all agree that corn ethanol is a stupid bio fuel. Consider that we could be burning literal garbage, scrap wood, saw dust, farm dross... and from all of that we could produce power that is net zero CO2. At the same time, we can produce Syngas, biogas, etc from the process which can be stored and independently burned in modified internal combustion engines. And that fuel is again... basically or literally carbon neutral.
The fuel can be sourced from anywhere. Your backyard... where ever. Obviously this is quite useless for more people living in urban conditions but they can use nuclear power if they really want to go green. Otherwise... good luck.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I clicked the link to read the comments, an automatic advertisement:
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I did a screen capture for my collection articles with interesting accompanying auto-ads. One of these include article about Russian missile buildup included ad, "Meet Russian Beauties" (hey, I thought I disabled ads)
mfwright@batnet.com
I don't have a solar, but my electric bill is itemized and contains a transport cost item. It makes sense that in case of solar, you pay transport cost both ways.
Do the big generators supplying electricity to the utility pay transport costs? I don't think so. They just get paid wholesale price for the electricity they supply to the grid. At most someone with solar producing excess power should be charged for a two-way meter and the incoming electricity transport cost. They should be paid wholesale prices for the excess power they produce.
What that means is that whatever the market sets the price at to buy by the consumer, the consumer can sell back to the utility.
one price to one price.
1:1
at the moment, the utilities want something like a 10:1 price advantage. You think THAT'S fair??
Peaking power plants generate electricity at a cost of around $0.07/kWh. If you are getting paid anything more than that for solar power, you are getting a direct subsidy.
If the next one is just as corrupt, kick THEM out. If the one after that is just as corrupt, kick THEM out too. And DO NOT just vote for the one with the right label, vote twenty-third party.
A corrupt politician with no power has no ability to profit from their corruption. Therefore they'll move on to other things than politics to be corrupt in if you deny them power by voting the bastards out all the time.
And if the politician can't stay in long enough to push through a buddy bill, then they can be as bribed as they like, the companies bribing them won't see a red cent for their efforts.
Churn the fuckers.
No one ever owed power companies their daily bread.
Net metering is proof of fair and free trade.
If they can't produce at a profit, then hike the prices to make their outdated business model work.
It will force even more people to roof top energy and bring in a new era of technological power generation innovation.
They and their trolling minions have no right to go around saying stop the world we want to get off
as a way of milking the public for the failings of their own business models.
The only thing that actually 'makes sense', is going "off-grid". All this talk of tying back into it is not relevant. All it entails is various forms of bandaids which in the strictest sense are simply unnecessary (as well as giving the utilities more control over you) if you are simply not connected to the electric utilty to begin with. That is the entire essence of solar power. The term is OFF-GRID.
Net metering doesn't force the utility to provide a service without getting compensated for it. Here in Maryland, I'm billed for the transport costs to move the power BOTH to or FROM my residence. So I have to cover a cost of my generated solar power getting pushed back out over their lines.
As I also pointed out, if the utilities were more forward-thinking and less resistant to change, they'd embrace PV solar as a useful addition to their overall system. There are pretty large losses involved in transporting power long distances to customers from the central power generation plant. That's why you see those big structures surrounded by chain link fence. They contain transformers needed to step up the voltage to compensate for resistive losses going over miles of copper wire on the poles.
If they've got people scattered about with small solar power generation capabilities on their roofs, they can purchase and immediately resell excess power generated there and avoid the big transmission losses.
I completely agree that this stuff requires some coordination with the utility company, for best results. As it is, you can't even get a solar system up and running without filling out a lot of paperwork, undergoing an inspection, and waiting for an approval from the utility though. So the ball is in their court in this respect. (They DO have first-hand knowledge of exactly where the solar systems will go online and how much power they're capable of generating.)
Most likely, what will happen is when particular neighborhoods reach a certain saturation level of solar installation, the power company will have to say - "Sorry... We won't approve any more new systems here with more than X amount of generation capacity because we've got all we need for this geographic area."
The thing is that with net metering, solar power users are effectively using the grid as a giant battery that they charge up during the day and discharge during the night.
The grid is not a battery, it is a generation system only. The power plants must stay hot for when solar/wind power drops.
There is no decommissioning of plants or even shutting them down, they have to pick up the slack far too fast.
Do you understand the difference between "retail" and "wholesale" prices?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Most power companies I have dealt with separate their services into two components:
An 'access charge' that is for the poles and wires; and
A 'consumption' charge which is for the power I use.
If I turn every electrical device in my house off (say when I'm on holidays) my consumption is zero, but the power company gets paid.
If your power company does not do this - it' will probably start doing it soon. Its an easy way for them to protect themselves from such a financial risk, and they can blame their ageing infrastructure for your increased access charges.
Get rid of the incentives. All they do is complicate the situation and distort the market economics.
Solar should stand or fall on its own merits. Incentives and net metering just creates a a hocus-pocus accounting situation where the people who have the panels installed don't pay the true cost of owning them, they shift it to the taxpayer in the form of tax credits and rebates and to other utility customers in the form of overpriced electricity.
I'm sure there are many who will argue that solar is a social good and should be subsidized by the government and utilities, but you can't take altruism to the bank. I'd like to know how many residential solar installs would exist if people weren't shown spreadsheets showing their solar install paid for itself with net metering and rebates. I'll bet a significant number of people wouldn't have bothered if it only meant offsetting the power they actually used during the day AND they didn't get rebates.
I actually think eliminating the net metering requirement would actually be a better incentive for power storage technologies, as the excess generation capacity would be something valuable that panel owners would want to keep. Realistically, the panels themselves aren't where we need incentives for new technologies, its the storage.
Retail price is what the retailer pays for getting electricity in and wholesale price is what generators are paid for for their production of power.
Now, do you know what solar panels do with grid tie? That's right: they produce electricity and therefore become a generator producing power.
So, please, tell me if I have the definition of retail and wholesale wrong or why you thought that question needed to be asked, because there's fuck all there about why solar panel owners don't want the market price for their production.
And don't say "retail includes the cost of keeping the infrastructure going, wholesale doesn't" because if that were all of it, then power generators don't pay for the upkeep of the power infrastructure. Maybe the answer is to charge wholesalers for upkeep, if that is true.
But that STILL doesn't make it that solar panel owners do not want to let the market price be what they get for their electricity excess. So I'm still at a loss as to why you brought it up.
Where I live there is a monopoly. Most cities only have one company that provides electricity. FYI the electric can sell the power that goes back into the grid. They are not losing any money.
Actually it's not because we have an electrical grid which can transport energy around the country. You might want to do some research before posting.
People are combining two different acts when going solar, a) getting off of fossil fuels, and b) generating their own power that the big energy companies don't control. Energy companies are not necessarily against a), but b) is anathema to them, and therefore they are doing everything they can to block the adoption of solar.
Power companies buy power from other power companies all the time. It's positively routine for them. What they aren't used to doing is buying it from a large number of small generators. They are just used to buying it from other similarly sized power companies. It has nothing to do with control and everything to do with cost to service those vendors. It costs more to deal with multiple vendors than it does one. It also costs more to buy from a small generator that is no where near minimum efficient scale.
I would be happy if legislation was passed that outlawed individual ownership of personal solar installations, and mandated big utilities to install, operate, and maintain them instead. I would continue sending a check each month as I have been for my power like before, and my bill might even go up 10-30%.
I think if I want to buy a personal solar installation I should have every right to do so and both you and the power company can piss off if you don't like it. Furthermore there already are private sector companies doing basically what you are proposing. They install the solar array on your house and rent it to you and they sell the power to you and any excess to the power company. You get a modest discount and they make some money in the process. Wouldn't be surprising to see power companies get into the business as well at some point if the business model proves viable.
I honestly would be all for it, let the utilities continue to control me, we've got to address climate change NOW.
Ahh, I get it. You (mistakenly) think that the power companies would be on board with this despite the fact that it would not be economically sane for them to do it. I agree that climate change is a real and present danger but your argument is both politically a non-starter and economically impossible to justify.
Let's look at a distributed or as I like to call it, federated model and compare.
Generated locally, not 50-250 miles away. Good.
When lines are down on the other side of the city, it doesn't impact me. Good.
Terrorists have more places to attack to do any real harm. Don't tell me you WANT to support terrorism?
Plus, think of all the kids that will have power if it is distributed and not hoarded by a power company?
Oh ... and this applies to email, social networks, websites, DNS, fuel cells, beef, eggs, vegetables, fruits, honey, pretty much everything humans need to live. Distributed is better than centralized.
I can't speak to your utility company, but each of the two electricity utilities that I've purchased service from have charged me a monthly fee for the privilege of being connected to its grid. Nor did that utility company pay to connect my house to that grid: I did. Even if I generate an excess, the utility is still compensated for the maintenance of the grid.
Enter, Solar.
It provides power exactly when the demand peaks. If solar meets the peak power demand, the spot price for electricity will fall. For brief period an Australian utility had to sell power at *negative* prices at the peak! There was so much solar power feeding into the grid, they had to pay people to take their power, lest their generators overheat and burn.
The amount of solar electricity created might be small in terms of energy produced. But when it comes to profits, this probably cuts deep into the profits of the utilities.
Eventually the utilities will reduce their peak capacity to create an artificial shortage and trade. The net metered roof top solar energy is bought back at wholesale prices by law. They typically get sold instantly in the spot market at peak prices. The utilities are making tons of money on the net metering, all their talk about roof top solar being free loading is just bull shit.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
But we do pay a customer fee just to be hooked up to the grid and maintain the grid. And the rate to work that off by over-generating goes down to the 4 cent amount. Where I get 13 cents for power I generate and then use later.
But, they still get enough money from me to maintain the grid. They just don't like it that I have reduced the amount of coal profits and transport profits they are getting.
"It makes sense that in case of solar, you pay transport cost both ways."
Why does this makes sense? If the role of the consumer/producer is reversed, then so should be the charges. After Citizen-United, corporations are people, so the reverse must also apply. Why should I as a corporation have any less rights than another corporation? Why should industry sponsored politicians make it illegal for me to benefit from my energy production and at the same time make it a requirement that I should doubly subsidize another corporation for theirs?
Think of it as the price per electron, since without electrons moving from one place to another there is no electricity.
The more you use, the more you pay. Rates should be set by law on a per electron basis, with those receiving paying those who are producing. There is no reason to permit some users to forced to pay more per electron than others. Why should users be forced to pay to make some other user's per electron cost cheaper at their expense, simply because some producers can provide fatter campaign contributions than others?
It is very hard to find suitable sites for pumped storage. Here is an old example: Storm King Mountain.
You should also read the feasibility analysis of pumped storage by Tom Murphy, a physics professor at UCSD
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Why do I have to pay more for a book, when I order it from Amazon.com, than Amazon pays for that book?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I think you replied to the wrong person. That line was quoted from the post I replied to.
If you believe this, you should be vehemently against so-called net neutrality. That FCC pile of garbage will take a large stinky dump all over the internet. However, I bet few who post here can see the similarity. That's why you'll always be idiots.
$7 a month to have the grid used as a battery for a 10KW array? that's peanuts. The $ amount of electricity that array is saving the owner dwarfs this. I think someone needs to reimburse the power companies so they can maintain the lines. Of course it's $7 today and who knows what it will be 10 years from now when rooftop solar is more than %1 of the power grid. But for less than $100/year is NOT a disincentive for a 10k solar system.
I've long watched this website. I am fairly certain that average slashdotter (median or mean) possesses a higher intellect on the important scales: [computational, logistic, moral]. But you are emotionally retarded. This is what is holding you back. As soon as you make an argument that includes the word "cost" you need to realize your argument is invalid.
Distributed rooftop solar is a threat not only to fossil fuel power generation, but also to the profits of monopolistic model of utilities. While the overall amount of electrical capacity represented by distributed solar power remains miniscule for now, it's quickly becoming one of leading sources of new energy deployment.
Weary of formula rally cries like "[nice thing associated with friendly eco-concious entrepreneurs that we all want] is a threat to [not so nice Large Corporate Thing that everyone should agree is bad]" I've decided someone has to take a stand. To put a human face on it,
I feel personally threatened by rooftop solar net-metering initiatives.
They are really out to get me.
I.
I buy my electricity from the City, who makes bulk grid purchases.
There is also a competing Co-op which does the same.
Anything that affects their bottom line affects mine also.
They are overpaying for wind (ultimately everyone is) but fortunately it is mostly coal+gas energy.
What would I be willing to pay to re-tool so a few hipsters can play kWh games?
Zero. I do not believe in free Federal Unicorn money either.
II.
I am poor. I rent. I pay the utilities. My landlord is not interested.
I am most people. End of section.
III.
I like or resonant grid. We built it and it works! It was made for few major sources and many sinks.
Power plants and distribution networks are complicated.
Customer premises equipment is simple. Mine, and my neighbors'. I like it that way.
If the grid is happy, I'm happy. Subsynchronous resonance makes the grid unhappy.
Fixing this for good involves overlapping loops of HVDC spanning the continent. That is a good idea.
It will cost trillions of dollars.
But until we accomplish it I do not like subsynchronous resonance.
I feel personally threatened by people who want to jump the gun and do "this little dirty thing" (wind farm) or "that dumb thing" (rooftop solar peak surplus wasted) just because some people want to do something right now and that is what they want to do, even though it is not the 'right' thing to do first.
Fixing the grid is not even the first thing to do. We need a reliable non-fossil 24x7 base load source.
Carbon neutral preferred but in the context of survival, not strictly necessary.
I feel personally threatened by people who gloss over the 'survival' part because they imagine the planet will blow up if it is not done with (specifically) wind and solar.
IV.
People feel helpless at the thought of monopolistic utilities.
They are just being silly.
Sometimes so-called monopolism (so-called because it is more complex than that) is an evil conspiracy.
Sometimes, as in grid energy, it is simply the best way to make energy in bulk and distribute it for least cost.
It is why we need more female engineers.
These days, that is my best answer for everything because my daughter will be attending college soon.
Hint hint, sweetie.
Still feeling personally threatened by rooftop solar net-metering initiatives.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Sorry, but your imagined fairy tale of how the world works is wrong, sorry to disappoint you.
Any fucker with solar panels not taking themselves of the grid completely by installing backup is a fucking scum bag, forcing the poorer in society to subsidies them.
The west should require net-metering of all utilities and allow single sites to return up to 10% more than they use . the real problem is that most net-metering are simple trades, which is the wrong solution.
.15/kWh.
OTOH, if you sell wind in the middle of night, then you might only get .02/kWh.
Note that this will encourage storage. And if I were utility, I would move away from coal or on-demand systems and instead invest into storage combined with nukes, maybe Nat gas.
instead, watts sold back to the utilities should be sold as just electricity and not with grid costs in there. OTOH, when the consumer draws electricity, it should include electricity AND grid ( delivery costs ).
but by the same token, the electricity being sold back to the utility should be timed based. Basically, you should be paid for the electricity what the utility would pay their highest pay for that time slice. So, if you sell at say 7pm, then, you will get paid highest money, which might be as high as
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The real problem with net metering is how Fixed Costs are billed. To be "fair" to the poor, some of the costs that should be the same on every residential bill (the cost of the delivery infrastructure) or at least in very broad low-use/high-use category are instead billed as part of the electricity used. When someone sells electricity back to the grid they're getting paid back part of the fixed costs that the should still owe so it's a double negative.
Everyone connected to the power grid should pay a fixed part of the fixed costs regardless of electricity used. Then there would be no real argument not to allow net metering.
There are legitimate costs that net power arrangements are avoiding. Solar can never be free as long as it is connected to the grid.
Power is divided into two main costs. Electricity production and electricity distribution. It is reasonable to expect that a solar house should pay to use that power distribution system (grid) which has a significant cost of maintenance. It is also reasonable to expect that everyone who wants to have backup power or power when the sun goes down should pay something towards keeping a power producing plant online. These costs CAN be extracted from market rates, but the current system of nearly free electricity costs is not sustainable.
Using of the solar energy is very economically and it’s benefit! I think that it’s the inexhaustible spring, which is necessary to use correctly!) There is a cool site http://trantr.com/category/ind..., where we can read about new technologies and see different companies, which work in given industry! Now we must new ways of the development and exploitation of reserves! Inquired about it, because only we can do this world better! :)
Also on my bill, the transport cost is not that big. I'd be happy paying that as a fee to remain connected for night-time power.
Yes, that fee might go up. But having it listed as a separate line item is educational and helps make fairer deals for the consumer, I think.