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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'
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