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?

Comments

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[anon mouse-cow-aard]

Great sentiment. How many utility grids can compete for customers? Five? Seven? So a cheaper grid made possible by local generation, reducing the cost of distribution because current has to move less distance competes with huge cables from Hoover Dam how exactly? oh... PUC stands for public utility commission, and there is only one grid. It is not a supply and demand issue when there is only 1 grid, and it is the public utility commission making rules that are lopsided in favour of the Hoover Dam proponents. What is power worth at the Hoover Dam ? about 2 cents/KW perhaps... but to get them to Las Vegas, it's probably going to lose half of them en route, so what does a KW cost in there? about 4 cents... why should the electric company be given power for half of their cost from other sources, why doesn't the electric company negotiate with each of the small scale producers? how is it more 'market' if the cost is set by the PUC down rather than up.

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.

Re:Why retail?

[Firethorn]

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...