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:Why retail?

[Anonymous Coward]

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. You're also likely reducing power company expense -- our local substation can't handle our neighborhood's power draw, and we used to complain about flickering lights...until 3 people on the block got solar, and no no lights flicker and the pwoer company didn't have to upgrade the substation.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Ol Olsoc]

Well your 'little more' is x4.23 as much. Instead of selling at the market price for supplying power at 2.6, they were selling it at the customer purchasing price of 11. Now they are being dropped back down to normal supply pricing. It was inevitable. Those kinds of premiums are only temporary to jump start an industry. Once they get large enough, the premium is removed and they then have to compete with everybody else in the market. After all, a market that makes nothing can't afford maintenance and other costs and collapses.

You mean like nuclear power? http://www.ucsusa.org/sites/de...

Or petroleum? Or NatGas? Or Hydroelectric?

From another article:

http://www.misi-net.com/publications/NEI-1011.pdf

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/...

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 th others is hypocricy at t's finest.