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Gambling State Says the Solar Gamble Is Over
New submitter mdnuclear writes: In a strange echo of the depressed oil economy SolarCity recently announced a layoff of a quarter of its workforce as the apparent result of the Nevada PUC's decision to phase solar net-metering customers down from retail to wholesale per kWh. A scathing editorial in the WSJ last December took both solar leasing companies and their financial underwriters to task, calling net metering a "regressive political income redistribution in support of a putatively progressive cause."
Wednesday the PUC fronted a possible compromise, 'grandfathering' existing net metering customers to their current rates to create a third caste of energy consumers, those who had been in the right place at the right time — for awhile. One who had paid $22k into solar lamented, "I'm not happy; my wife isn't happy, we could have done something else with that money." Like many who leave Vegas, perhaps they should have. But this begs the real question... are net-metering schemes ultimately 'right' or 'wrong' for the grid?
Wednesday the PUC fronted a possible compromise, 'grandfathering' existing net metering customers to their current rates to create a third caste of energy consumers, those who had been in the right place at the right time — for awhile. One who had paid $22k into solar lamented, "I'm not happy; my wife isn't happy, we could have done something else with that money." Like many who leave Vegas, perhaps they should have. But this begs the real question... are net-metering schemes ultimately 'right' or 'wrong' for the grid?
Wholesale peaker rate is different than wholesale baseload rate.
The best price of all is for wholesale on peak dispatchable (on demand) power. Which solar isn't.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
> This should be settled by the market.
wat
Ok, so the issue here is that, by government fiat, there's only ONE supplier- a utility. This means that there's no "market" at this level. You get power from one guy.
It's in the interest of that one guy for you NOT have solar panels. That reduces the money that they can make off of you. So as you'd expect, they've pushed back at every level- utilities have claimed that there's no safe way to have a hookup, that they can't possibly use the energy you can put back on the grid, etc. Whatever they can to make solar not profitable.
"Retail net metering" generally means that if you pay X for a kilowatt hour, then if you make a kilowatt hour you don't use at noon (say because you are at work), and are putting the power back on the network, then when you need a kilowatt later that day, that you were credited X, and now you spend X. You were credited the RETAIL cost of it, and then when you used the kilowatt hour later, you spend the RETAIL cost of it- and ended up even.
With lesser standards- such as wholesale- the power you don't use is only fractionally credited to you. So
The argument was that you were supplying the electricity right at the point of consumption (it just flows to your neighbor), hence you aren't incurring all of the transmission costs of typical retail power.
That argument doesnt hold water. Even local neighborhood infrastructure has a significant cost. When excess solar is available from one home is probably when it is least needed in nearby homes, and solar itself still depends on support from the greater generation/transmission system to be economically viable to begin with as battery storage is still cost prohibitve.
There is no market solution to this problem, right now. Pehaps smart grids will be able to address that someday, but right now, it's just who lobbies the regulator better. Given the reality that a monopoly grid currently in place, and is necessary, and given a monopoly, it must be regulated, and that regulation will perforce shape the market, the choice before people is what shape of market do you want? Distributed generation, as it reduces the amount of electricity that must be moved over long distances, is more efficient, and therefore cheaper, and so if we are going to fail in any direction it should be in favour of reducing costs for everyone. On that basis, a feed-in tarriff that encourages distributed generation is better for everyone except the incumbent electric generation and distribution organizations, as it reduces the amount of electricity they sell and ship.
It still lowers the total power that needs to be generated, and 'daytime' is still the point of highest demand. If they're not having to worry about neighborhoods(remember, more retired people means more power use during the day by retirees), they can concentrate on businesses more.
I'm going to agree with others - net metering doesn't scale beyond a point. Nevada has NOT hit that point by any reasonable measure, they'd still need 10X the solar installs for that.
Hawaii has hit that point. I think they're looking into time of use billing (which requires smart meters), and it's quite likely that night time power in Hawaii is going to end up more expensive than daytime due to the amount of solar. The electric company is having to adjust/update their distribution centers to allow backfeeding from them, because a few neighborhoods can actually go negative now.
Which can actually make batteries(which have been dropping cost too), and other storage solutions viable. When electricity is cheap/free, make sure your hot water tank is 'topped off'. Heck, have a cold water tank for what little AC homes there need, and chill that at that point. Etc...
I don't read AC A human right
It's possible, but will require a hundred kwh of batteries to power your AC though the night during monsoon season in AZ
Subsidy Comparison
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/3/21/1372244/-New-data-on-energy-subsidies-from-EIA
It's funny when people mention subsidies.
This tells a BIG story. If everyone here who whines about fossil fuel and nuclear subsidies followed that link, they'd have to start whining about something else. The real money column is the last one, Subsidies per MWh. From it we learn that rate/taxpayers in 2010 contributed $935.64 for each solar MWh produced while coal received only $0.74. Any time you see two things equivalent in any way with a 'cost' ratio of 1,264:1, you need to ask, what the hell is going on.
Have a gander at Electricity generation map of the US as of October 15 [XLS]. If you're practical like me you'll have to imagine those green wind blobs are a fifth the size shown, and the yellow solar blobs a third to better judge their intermittent and actual contribution to the human race. For solar (and we are mostly talking utility scale solar I know) this triples the cost ratio to coal to ~3,792:1. And posing that solar produces at 100% for a third of the day is generous.
So in terms of subsidies, is solar worth almost four thousand times as much as coal? Would you be willing to pay 4k as much for it? In certain sense... in 2010 you were. Good thing it was someone else's money. Or was it.
Fuck subsidizing each solar or wind MWh for thousands, or even hundreds, of that same hour's subsidy of coal.
The real clear winner in 2010 was nuclear, at $3.10/MWh produced. Imagine saving the planet from CO2 and coal or weaning us off of natural gas so it can do more chemically productive things for merely 4 times the subsidy than is presently granted coal. If I quoted that same figure for solar you'd be drooling. Someone somewhere is torturing numbers to make the same claim for solar and wind, I can hear their screams.
But never mind my arbitrary 'value' estimates. I consider any energy source that is not running at 100% 24/7 to be a grievous waste of human potential, a financial ruin and (to scale) most likely an environmental disaster waiting to happen.
Proponents of micro-gridding claim that if the grid evolves into a cornucopia of local energy sources, the win will be that utility companies will need to contribute less and spend less. But what is truly less? Does that mean that if current generated capacity is roughly equal to Summer or Winter peak, they could ever really shut down a plant? Not really.
Does it mean that the economics of building plants and stringing transmission lines in the first place, which are amortized over many years based on predictable factors NOT wishful flim-flam such as some guess of consumer uptake of solar toys... will improve in any way? Nope, things will get worse.
I seem to go further than anyone else around here, honestly considering this initiative to push tiny intermittent bits of energy into the grid as a threat to our country's stability and survival because it is a distracting and ultimately useless crap-solution to serious problems. One such problem is, what will happen when a series of massive Winter storms fragments the grid, shuts rail and renders every wind turbine and solar panel it touches, useless?
Could those subsidies and money real people spent on some 'pays for itself in 10 years' go-green plan have been better spent? If you went with the grid-sucking/spitting plans that the solar leasing companies push, absolutely. If you put in some extra money to actually power your home from what you produce you might win the battle if the grid goes down for any reason. But you'll be surrounded on all sides by poor people in th
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
The amount of subsidies, on kWh produced basis, is tiny compared to solar. The coal subsidies, assuming they even exist, look huge because they produce 30% or more of our electricity. Same for nuclear and natural gas as they also each produce roughly 30% of our electricity. That last 10% that is not produced by oil, coal, and nuclear is largely from wind. The fraction of a percent of the electricity that solar power produces gets them HUGE subsidies.
Several comments on this thread pointed out that solar energy gets 1000x the amount of subsidies that coal gets based on kWh produced.
I have no issue with the subsidies that nuclear, oil, gas, and hydroelectric get because those subsidies are miniscule compared to solar. I will agree that all energy subsidies must end, but solar subsidies are on a whole different level than the others.
Stop complaining about how much oil get subsidized, IMHO, it makes you look like a fool.
Here you go spunky. My research from another post. Some of it is based on a reply to another person, so hte beginning will be a little redundant.
You mean like nuclear power? http://www.ucsusa.org/sites/de... [ucsusa.org]
Or petroleum? Or NatGas? Or Hydroelectric?
From another article:
http://www.misi-net.com/public...
On energy incentives, and an tl;dr version from Wikipedia:
A 2011 study by the consulting firm Management Information Services, Inc. (MISI) estimated the total historical federal subsidies for various energy sources over the years 1950–2010. The study found that oil, natural gas, and coal received $369 billion, $121 billion, and $104 billion (2010 dollars), respectively, or 70% of total energy subsidies over that period.
The percentage is higher for renewables, which given the much smaller percentage of use, and of course the fact that renewables wasn't even on the map during that time. cite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Corn based Ethanol production and the Alcohol credit for the FET is subsidized to the tune of almost 17 billion a year, renewable is 5 billion.
My point is that it's all subsidized. That the government subsidizes new power production isn't anathema to me in principle, but it would seem that the well established technologies shouldn't be getting subsidies. If you need to be subsidizing oil, natural gas, or coal for 60 plus years, they should be abandoned, right?. Or perhaps something else at play? Regardless, calling this "regressive political income redistribution in support of a putatively progressive cause." while apparently finding all of the others just fine is hypocricy at t's finest.
Back to the present:
I don't really care if you find subsidies for all of the other energy sources just fine, while the 5 billion per year for all of renewables a thing to difficult to suffer. It merely shows your politics, It's like the free market Republicans working to ban Tesla dealerships in their states.
But the numbers speak for themselves.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.