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

Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Anonymous Coward]

This should be settled by the market. It's a simple supply and demand issue. People who sunk a bunch a money into it knowing that things could change should consider it an important, if expensive, lesson on economics.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[crow]

That's absurd. This is a regulated monopoly. If the government wasn't regulating them, they would dramatically raise rates and prohibit solar altogether. When you have a monopoly, you have to regulate.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[cfalcon]

> 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

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Take away their monopoly. I live in a city that used to have two electric companies. A few years ago, the local government forced a buyout of one by the other and made it a government-owned monopoly. Since that time, costs have soared. Now citizens of the city are paying about 4 times as much as those in the county, which is supplied by a co-op.

All regulation does is get corrupted and captured. Get rid of it and let the market decide.

I, for one, would be willing to pay a little more for locally generated green energy.

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:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[meerling]

If it was a simple supply and demand issue, then they wouldn't have been getting demand pricing for supply.
Now they will be getting the same kind of pricing as other suppliers instead of purchasers.
No company will ever stay in business if they pay the same for product as they sell it for.

Re: Government should not pick winners and losers.

[jhoger]

Government should pick winners and losers when the market produces sub optimal outcomes.

Unless you replace reason with religion. In that case it could be like you said.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[meerling]

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.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Take away their monopoly.

How? What are you planning on doing?

I live in a city that used to have two electric companies. A few years ago, the local government forced a buyout of one by the other and made it a government-owned monopoly. Since that time, costs have soared. Now citizens of the city are paying about 4 times as much as those in the county, which is supplied by a co-op.

So let's see, the city's power rates are high, but the co-op's are low.

How does this prove your contention about a market?

Maybe your city just needs better regulation. Or maybe it has higher expenses for some reason, though what they could be, I don't know.

All regulation does is get corrupted and captured. Get rid of it and let the market decide.

I, for one, would be willing to pay a little more for locally generated green energy.

That seems so simple, but it turns out not to be.

I'll give you a clue why.

Electrical lines are very cheap.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[meerling]

There absolutely is a market, just because you don't see it doesn't mean it isn't there.
Here's an easy way for you to get to see it and find out more about what's going on.
Go to your local power company and talk to them. Those guys have meetings, and most of them are happy to let people observe or even participate.
Sit in on a few of them, you'll learn a lot.
You'll probably learn a lot of things you never suspected. The power company is kind of like a swan. It looks calm and placid on the surface, but below the water those feet are paddling like mad to keep that comfortable illusion going for the customers.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[TWX]

That's absurd. This is a regulated monopoly. If the government wasn't regulating them, they would dramatically raise rates and prohibit solar altogether. When you have a monopoly, you have to regulate.

They effectively have prohibited solar. If I understand what they've done correctly, they've set a ridiculously high grid-tie charge with a ridiculously-low kWh payout, such that it is impossible to even break-even.

I'm a little curious what Mr. Musk is going to do. In addition to batteries for cars, the Gigafactory was also intended to supply batteries for the Tesla Powerwall, which was intended to interface with solar systems to provide nighttime power. As I understand it the factory's construction is still in the build-the-building phase, which is far less money committed than the, "furnish the finished building with manufacturing lines and crank-up production," phase where the real expense is. I would not be surprised if the Gigafactory either never opens, or if they start looking at alternate sites on which to build the bigger, better replacement factory when battery demand exceeds the current factory's capabilities. After all, there is no reason to reward behavior like this.

Part of what's so frustrating about utility companies doing things like this is that it means they still must operate power plants that pollute, plants that could be retired if solar were widely deployed. There needs to be real consideration for forcing power generation and power distribution to split into separate companies if this kind of thing is going to become more of an issue.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[overshoot]

There absolutely is a market, just because you don't see it doesn't mean it isn't there.

The most basic characteristic of a market is that there are multiple buyers and sellers who negotiate prices by going elsewhere if they don't like what they're offered. And this applies to the situation you describe ... how?

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[CanadianMacFan]

Tell that to the folks who generate electricity by burning fossil fuels. They are using the government to fight changes to the market brought about by new technology. And if you want a completely market driven solution then we should stop subsidizing the companies that burn fossil fuels by paying for the damages caused by the pollution generated by them. Burning coal spews out Mercury, Sulfur Dioxide, and many other pollutants yet society pays to clean them up and for any health problems caused by them. We can estimate fairly well how much those costs are so that amount should be paid by those companies back to society. Yes, the price of electricity would go up but then as you said the government shouldn't be picking winners and losers.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[eyenot]

top comment

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Right. That's why your food is all tainted because regulators are captives...oh wait, no it happens because "Free enterprise" kills unless someone holds a stick over its collective heads

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Daemonik]

Oil, coal, natural gas, hydroelectric and nuclear ALL benefit from government subsidies and regulations. It's the only reason our power grid covers the majority of our nation, as it would never have been "economically" feasible otherwise. If you don't believe that, just look at high speed internet and how many areas are under served not because they can't be profitable, but because they're not profitable enough, if you have to build the infrastructure too.

This is where the government beats industry, determining social benefits that override economic ones, and championing them.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Anonymous Coward]

With a regulated monopoly there is still market forces. The role of the regulator is to ensure that the utility monopoly doesn't engage in rent seeking behavior. Forcing the utility to buy solar generated power at retail prices is a very different kind of regulation. It is a wealth transfer scheme from regular utility customers to those producing solar power and indirectly to the solar power installation and manufacturing industry. As such it is a hidden tax/subsidy scheme and was intended to incentivize solar production and installation. It cannot be expected that such a thing would last indefinitely. It is also questionable whether it is good policy since second guessing the market price of solar panels is likely to result in an inefficient allocation of resources. People will buy solar panels they probably should not have, which is exactly what happened.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Daemonik]

In far too many municipalities that "government fiat" is the only reason there's a developed power grid in the first place. Energy infrastructure is not a quick return on investment type of business, it can take decades before a profit is returned. If it weren't for "government fiat" pushing the infrastructure, energy companies would still be serving only the very richest areas. Much like how the high speed internet industry functions, covering only the parts of a city or county that guarantees fat profits, ignoring the rest.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[pjbgravely]

Why, the current scheme is to sell you excess solar to the electric company on sunny days and buy it back when the sun doesn't shine. Yes some make a profit in doing that but the real profit is making electricity yourself, not paying 13+ cents a Kw/h. With a really good low loss battery you could be off the grid completely.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[ThorGod]

If there's one thing the "free" economy system has shown time and time again - it's that capitalism creates monopolies. The industries that are not dominated by monopolies or monopolistic competition are very, very few, far in-between, and generally without advancement.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[fche]

"They effectively have prohibited solar. If I understand what they've done correctly, they've set a ridiculously high grid-tie charge with a ridiculously-low kWh payout, such that it is impossible to even break-even. "

No one owes you a break-even on a harebrained scheme. You are free to power your own house with solar. No one will prohibit it or care. But your insistence on a break-even means you're wanting someone else to subsidize your hobby.

OTOH, a deal is a deal.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Mr D from 63]

Oil, coal, natural gas, hydroelectric and nuclear ALL benefit from government subsidies and regulations. It's the only reason our power grid covers the majority of our nation, as it would never have been "economically" feasible otherwise. If you don't believe that, just look at high speed internet and how many areas are under served not because they can't be profitable, but because they're not profitable enough, if you have to build the infrastructure too.

This is where the government beats industry, determining social benefits that override economic ones, and championing them.

And another reason that ALL forms of generation get subsidized is that the government knows the lower cost, reliable and available power is key to a thriving economy. Renewables get much greater subsidies that any other source has gotten or is getting if you calculate in on a MWH generated and to be generated basis. Of course, renewables subsidies are more based on carbon reduction than cost reduction and availability/reliability.

Re: Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Government should pick winners and losers when the market produces sub optimal outcomes.

Unless you replace reason with religion. In that case it could be like you said.

To elaborate, in an ideal world the government would tax appropriately so that externalities were accounted for. You run a polluting coal plant, well we are going to charge you what we think the medical bills will be and then use that money to offset those costs. Factor in the lost work and income over a shortened lifespan, and their bill would be non trivial. In the case of Shina, well in the process of producing stuff you are poisoning the world and treating people like crap, well we have to account for that as well.

So, you can say, "Government should not pick winners and losers, provided you first level the playing field to account for externalities forced on the population.''

It doesn't have that soundbyte feel, but it is accurate..

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Ken D]

There ARE multiple buyers and sellers of wholesale electricity: https://www.eia.gov/electricit...

On a hot summer day my power company has to make a decision. Fire up their diesel generators to supply peak power at some cost to them, or buy from someone else who has either surplus power or cheaper sources of extra power that can be turned on. They track the spot prices for electricity constantly. Maybe they even sell power sometimes to other utilities because the price is sweet enough.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Anonymous Coward]

they were selling ( buying ) at the same rate customers were paying .

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Anonymous Coward]

They do owe you for an ARTIFICIAL grid tie charge. THAT isn't part of the free market.

Remember, the coal power station doesn't pay a grid tie.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[PlusFiveTroll]

>Distributed generation, as it reduces the amount of electricity that must be moved over long distances, is more efficient, and therefore cheaper

Only if generation + losses is more expensive than each small generation plant, or have you forgot what economy of scale means.

Also distributed generation is expensive because the entire grid has to be redesigned from a from the centralized generation where a few big units determine the clock of the network to a smart network that will require millions if not billions in upgrades to stabilize millions of input sources.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Anonymous Coward]

And the electricity provider has no more rights to the public property on which they deploy their electricity related equipment, and Mr. John Doe (and friends) could easily make the providers pay high prices to get a cable between A and B or build around... if that is even possible.

Instead the government forces Mr. John Doe and friends to allow that infrastructure to be built, and in exchange the electricity provider gives up something. That something is supposed to be something that benefits society in general.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually if you live in an area where the utilities have been vertically dis-integrated you get a bill that lists both an energy charge and a distribution charge. In that mode your utility retailer pays for electricity at the substation, and the distribution company gets paid for moving the power from the substation to your premises. In that model, then the rate given back should be the energy charge, as it is the same as reducing the power drawn at the substation. Where I live (in Tx) that would be about $.05 per kwh or so. (the distribution charge is $.02). Of course that means that the payout period gets longer I figured it out to be 20+ years where I live. As the president of a nearby electric coop stated rooftop solar does not make sense where I live with 15 to 30 year payouts, and likley having to replace the cells at least once in that time due to a hailstorm.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. However, this thread seems to be talking about the lack of multiple buyers/sellers of retail electricity. The user has only one choice, so they can't gain efficiencie from a market. The utility has multiple choices, so they can gain efficiencies from a market.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Anonymous Coward]

In Ca as distinct from Nv as well as other states there are multiple retailers of electricity, as well as a distribution company. So it very much depends on where you live how things work.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Anonymous Coward]

But you don't buy wholesale electricity. From the one guy you have to.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[zippthorne]

If they raise rates enough, switching to solar becomes attractive, though. Even with the time-of-day problem.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[smooth wombat]

And yet I'm required to subsidize health care for smokers, alcoholics, drug users and the obese.

Why should they be given a break, let alone a subsidy, for their harebrained lifestyle choices?

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[amiga3D]

Now they'll be selling at the same rate everyone else sells and paying at the same rate everyone else pays.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[amiga3D]

This will make batteries more important. Now it's no longer profitable to use the grid for storage.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[fche]

"And yet I'm required to subsidize health care for smokers,
alcoholics, drug users and the obese"

One solution to that conundrum is to change the laws so you're no longer required to subsidize others' health care.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[dywolf]

government should pick winners and losers when its in the public interest.
its in the public interest to eventually abandon coal and oil and use many renewables as possible.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Forget about batteries, use hydrogen and oxygen storage tanks to run fuel cells.
If you still have excess power, use that on sterling coolers to create cryogenic rocket fuel from water for "free" =)

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[smooth wombat]

Or, get the government out of people's private lives and let them decide how they want to live.

You know, personal responsibility and all that.

Re: Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, I am not an island. Your decision to smoke, drive a car, or buy power from a coal-fired plant impacts me.

Re: Government should not pick winners and losers.

[fche]

"Your decision to smoke, drive a car, or buy power from a coal-fired plant impacts me."

We're not going to get anywhere if such minuscule degrees of impact connectivity get you all atwitter.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Ol Olsoc]

This should be settled by the market. It's a simple supply and demand issue. People who sunk a bunch a money into it knowing that things could change should consider it an important, if expensive, lesson on economics.

Yes, just like nuclear power.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[mikael]

Wow. Perhaps someone could invent special flaps of metal that cover the solar panels and could automatically come down when there is heavy rain or hail. Maybe we could call them "shutters" or "grills".

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Take away their monopoly. I live in a city that used to have two electric companies. A few years ago, the local government forced a buyout of one by the other and made it a government-owned monopoly. Since that time, costs have soared. Now citizens of the city are paying about 4 times as much as those in the county, which is supplied by a co-op.

All regulation does is get corrupted and captured. Get rid of it and let the market decide.

I, for one, would be willing to pay a little more for locally generated green energy.

What city are you talking about?
If it's like the state I live in, the reason the co-op has lower prices is that the co-op has no generation, and the state's public service commission forces the company that does generation to sell to the co-op at fixed low prices. Basically, the co-ops residential users get their electricity at wholesale prices.

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.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Ol Olsoc]

No one owes you a break-even on a harebrained scheme. You are free to power your own house with solar. No one will prohibit it or care. But your insistence on a break-even means you're wanting someone else to subsidize your hobby.

OTOH, a deal is a deal.

Now write the same thing about Nuclear, Oil, Gas, and hydroelectric. You have no issue with the massive subsidies they get?

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Ol Olsoc]

And yet I'm required to subsidize health care for smokers, alcoholics, drug users and the obese.

Why should they be given a break, let alone a subsidy, for their harebrained lifestyle choices?

That's okay, We have to subsidize people with Anal-Cranial impactions.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Ol Olsoc]

This will make batteries more important. Now it's no longer profitable to use the grid for storage.

Yup - and that's actually a good thing.

While I take great issue with the hypocrisy of people who think that renewables are the work of godless commies commies, yet have no issue at all with the direct from the government to the stockholders transfer of my tax dollars for every other type of energy production, (see my other research on the issue in another post) and that the folks are pleased to have done this for political reasons as they note "regressive political income redistribution in support of a putatively progressive cause.", it is apparent that all of th eother energy subsidies are somehow a conservative principle.

I'll be happy to take advantage of new battery technology. I'll be happy to get myself off the grid.

I'm certain that good conservative principles will give me a tax break because why should I have to pay for energy subsidies I'm not using.

Oh.... wait...

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[cfalcon]

But it's in ALL of their self interest to pretend that they can't use solar power generated, so as to make more money. It's interesting that a few places have the ability for companies to compete, but whether power you generate midday can credit you at night is absolutely something that the government needs to make happen, or it will never.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[MobyDisk]

Remember, the coal power station doesn't pay a grid tie.

Is that true? Are you sure? That seems strange. One of the objections to remote power stations is the cost of building power lines to them. But here you are saying they don't pay for those lines. I'm confused.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[cfalcon]

I'm not totally convinced of that, but I am mostly convinced of it.

There was a time when there were multiple competing power grids. Naturally, they ran everything that they could differently. Would a standards winner have emerged, given time? I think it's unfair to say no, but it's possible.

The point I'm making is that when you are dealing with utility style monopolies, it's reasonable to expect the government to address their grievances in much greater detail than in other industries. Utilities are mostly shielded from market forces, and absolutely shielded from startups with disruptive tech. When you have a problem with the way they are doing something, you MUST go to the government, as they are the ones setting all the rules that are played by.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[blindseer]

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.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[blindseer]

We can estimate fairly well how much those costs are so that amount should be paid by those companies back to society.

The coal companies pay that back to society by keeping prices low. Think of how many people would die from starvation, freezing, or what not if they did not have cheap and reliable electricity. Conceivably we could compute for that too. If we did so I suspect we'd find out we are not paying the coal burners enough.

Shut up already about the "cost to society" that coal power produces. If it weren't for coal power you'd be cooking a rat on a spit over a charcoal fire instead of being cozy in front of your computer while sipping on overpriced coffee.

Re: Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, the above poster wants personal responsibility.

That means they have to microscopically identify all of their personal actions that impact me.

Each and every one of them.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Ol Olsoc]

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.

Re: Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Then oil and coal should not be subsidized by the government either

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[KGIII]

Just as a hunch, I bet mdnuclear is an alt for the pro-solar poster who goes by mdsolar. Your post made me think of that for some reason. Probably all the mentions of the subsidies - I bet that's his alt. Maybe now he'll be pro nuke.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[anon mouse-cow-aard]

Economy of scale can drive costs down, and the same time it drives down competition, and makes the entire network less robust and reliable because of fewer reliable power sources. You have Hoover dam. Can you scale out hoover dam to get enough electricity for the entire country from Hydro? No. What are the other options? Most other central generation schemes involve nuclear or fossil fuels. While these methods may produce a lower cost grid at this time, this is because there are unpriced externalities: No price on carbon dumped in the atmosphere, or for facilities like Yucca Mountain. I'm all for market pricing, but markets need to reflect the real cost to all of us, and not subsidize certain technologies, as has been the case with these other technologies for many decades.

So long term, those other sources are likely going to have to go away or their costs will increase substantially, so redesigning the grid to deal with truly sustainable generation methods, like wind and solar, is going to need to be done sooner or later. If you are running a public utility, for the public good, you do not want to be prolonging environmental degradation by subsidizing incumbents at the expense of those who are doing the right thing for everyone's future.

In a Smart Grid world, Hoover Dam would sell at the price Hoover Dam wants to charge, and the price from Solar City at the price they want to charge... When you run out of cheap power, you buy the expensive stuff. When nuclear plants start paying for rent for 50,000 years of storage of their waste, and gas plants include carbon sequestration in their operations, perhaps their properly priced production cost will end up as 20 cents/KWh. Add in grid storage, and perhaps people will buy hoover dam power cheap at night, and use it during the day, when they need it. A lot of improvement becomes plausible (perhaps not easy, but at least plausible) with a smart grid.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Dog-Cow]

Are you also going to invent perfect weather forecasting and free maintenance on these automatic shutters?

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[bluegutang]

Actually, it seems that most of Nevada's electricity comes from burning natural gas, with only ~4% from hydroelectric. "Other renewables", which presumably means solar, already provide three times as much power as hydroelectric.

Re: Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Liberals are always bleating about negative externalities while conveniently forgetting the positive ones, which tend to be at least an order of magnitude bigger.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[freedom_surfer]

Hopefully you aren't having children so you don't have skin in the game. Or better yet, so we don't make Idiocracy a futurist documentary....

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Is that true?"

Yes.

"Are you sure?"

Yes.

"That seems strange."

So?

"One of the objections to remote power stations is the cost of building power lines to them. But here you are saying they don't pay for those lines."

Do they lease them? No.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Anonymous Coward]

"And yet I'm required to subsidize health care for smokers,
alcoholics, drug users and the obese"

One solution to that conundrum is to change the laws so you're no longer required to subsidize others' health care.

Oh, if we can all apparently pick and choose, then opt me out of the "Adventures in the MidEast", Ethanol subsidies and the enforcement of "Intellectual Property" laws subsidies too.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[peragrin]

That decision ends up with sick and dying people on the street.

Are you so cheap that you wouldn't help a dying child who is laying on the street? After all it was the kids choice.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't need perfect weather forecasting. You merely need a weather observation network and see where that weather is happening now and coming toward you.

Or merely a sensor to denote when the blinds should be drawn.

Duh.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[fche]

It took only twenty seconds of flipping through your misi-net reference to find a glaring flaw in the calculations. Namely, those "incentives" or what you call "subsidies" are on the whole not subsidies at all. There are tax credits, regulatory effects ("gains realized by energy businesses when they are exempt from federal requirements that raise costs or limit prices", etc.).

A lot of it is BS, and >>90% is stuff other than "subsidy", i.e., a payment to someone. Whoa, it even says so on page 9:

"F. Disbursements
This category involves direct financial subsidies such as grants. Since 1950, direct federal grants and subsidies have played a very small role in energy policy, accounting for â"$6 billion, a negligible fraction of total incentives."

See that word, negligible? In your own source? Grok it.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[amiga3D]

I see your point but I think solar off the grid power is going to be a force down the road. It's inevitable. The only reason it's not now is that batteries are so expensive. Even so it will happen. I see more and more panels going up. I intend to start on my own system later this year. I think energy independence is a beautiful thing.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[mikael]

These systems already exist - used for protecting rugs, carpets and furniture on sundecks. Just needs a water/wind sensor and an electric motor:

http://mil.ufl.edu/4924/projec...

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or possibly someone who got tired of mdsolar.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Ol Olsoc]

It took only twenty seconds of flipping through your misi-net reference to find a glaring flaw in the calculations. Namely, those "incentives" or what you call "subsidies" are on the whole not subsidies at all. There are tax credits,

And some are written on green paper, some on white and a few others in purple ink.

Money is not money in your world, eh?

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[mattwarden]

That's what he just said

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[mattwarden]

It is not the utility's fault solar doesn't break even. It just doesn't break even in practice at market wholesale rates. I know someone is going to reply with some math equation that assumes inverters last for 15 years without degradation, panels last for 25 years without degradation, maintenance costs are $0, costs for delivery of power during non-surplus periods are $0, temperature loss is zero, configuration error is zero, damage is zero, the panels are always completely clean, etc etc etc, but it's just absurd.

I have solar panels. I did not buy solar panels to break even. I knew at the time of purchasing that the marketing spreadsheets solar companies use to calculate your ROI are bullshit.

It has always been strange to watch people who don't have solar argue that it has a positive ROI or break even. And that's only trumped by the people who do have solar but don't actually pay attention to actual generation data and the relationship to their bill.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[fche]

Money taken from someone and paid to you is different from money you earned and kept.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[mattwarden]

The fact that you believe this is profitable shows you have no idea what you're talking about. And mentioning adding a battery to the mix shows you have never run the numbers on the cost to do this. By the way you are describing the system I have.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[mattwarden]

He is pointing out that the paper is intentionally misleading in how it uses the term subsidy.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[CanadianMacFan]

So shut down coal and use the money that subsidizes that to subsidize cleaner ways to generate electricity like geothermal, wind, various forms of solar, and even nuclear which don't harm the environment or cause medical problems for people through normal operation. Clean coal is green-washing on an epic proportion. It will require vast amounts more energy to capture CO2 from emissions requiring the burning of even more coal. Never mind how destructive coal mining is in the US.

I doubt that I would be cooking a rat over a charcoal fire since I'm at a computer typing this. I live in a province that uses no coal to generate electricity and we are doing just fine. In fact there are times that we have so much base load generation that we are paying some states to take it from us. It's not a great situation but goes to show that we don't need any of that stinking coal. It's time to get rid of it. Now if we could just get rid of the natural gas generators too.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[mattwarden]

Yes and the point is that this is not specific to Texas or any other state that separates the charges. The costs are separate costs naturally in the market and in some states combine them. But the delivery cost is still there. So giving 100% credit at the combined kWh cost for excess power is not sustainable.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[smooth wombat]

Depends. If they were a drug user, alcoholic or smoker, you are correct. They made their lifestyle choice so they should have to live with it. Why is it my responsibility to help them when for decades there have been warnings about the dangers of smoking, doing drugs and yes, alcoholism.

Obviously the kid knew more than the experts because they chose to ignore well-settled science.

If you like, we can use a similar spurious example: some people choose not to go to college and end up making minimum wage their entire life. Why is it my responsibility to give them my money because of the choice they made?

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[mattwarden]

I am pretty sure this only makes sense if hail or high winds are common in your area. Otherwise panels are pretty damn cheap compared to the total system cost, so just replace if damaged

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[mattwarden]

Are you suggesting it is profitable to store in batteries?

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[mattwarden]

Going off grid is so expensive that the most important part of planning such a system is figuring out how to cut your energy usage way way down. That should tell you something.

By the way, I have a hybrid grid tie and battery system with about 4 days of autonomy with my normal daily usage. Even then there are 4 household items that are not on the circuit backed up with batteries: air conditioning, dishwasher, oven, and electric dryer. If I had electric heat that would be on there too. If I wanted to add these to my backed up circuit, it would dramatically increase the cost on an already very expensive system.

I don't think most people understand the scale at which batteries must improve for off grid to be viable.

Since you said you are looking at a system of your own, let me know if you have any questions. There is a lot of bullshit in this space and honestly the solar installers you talk to do not know as much as you might expect. They told me a lot of things I later determined for myself were simply not correct (and I don't think they were intentionally trying to mislead; they were just wrong).

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Grampa John]

As others have pointed out, our government is already picking winners and losers, through a wide range of subsidies to the fossil-fuel industry, including allowing them to externalize much of their cost onto the rest of us. But more importantly, in a place like Las Vegas, solar electricity is worth much more than its wholesale value because of its impact on peak capacity. Much of the cost of delivering energy through the electric grid is the cost of the grid, not the cost of the energy. This is especially true in a place like Las Vegas where much of the power is hydroelectric. The grid and all its components must be sized to handle the highest anticipated demand, which in the southwest occurs on hot, sunny days. But that's very close to when solar output peaks (peak solar output depends on the orientation of the panels, peak demand typically occurs around mid-afternoon). Solar energy goes into the grid close to the point of consumption. From the standpoint of the grid, it effectively reduces overall peak demand. It's common for capacity cost to be higher than energy cost, depending on the regional mix of generating resources. So at a minimum, solar producers should be paid for the service they provide in reducing overall peak demand. That value can easily be double the wholesale price.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[mattwarden]

You are mostly correct but they are not only buying the excess power. They are also buying the REC which is then sold.

Re: Government should not pick winners and losers.

[mattwarden]

Making government the arbiter of compensation for externalities has its own significant negative side effects

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[mattwarden]

That is a terrible analogy. There are many alternatives to wired high speed internet, including cell, satellite, dial up, etc. Wired broadband is not a necessity. In contrast the alternatives to wired electricity delivery are few and partial, to the extent that I would argue they are not alternatives in the minds of most market participants.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[mattwarden]

The problem with that is someone must decide what is in the public's interest. If left alone the market can accommodate a diverse set of opinions, viewpoints, value judgments, etc. Your suggestion means only a limited set of opinions, viewpoints, value judgments, etc. are represented in cases where someone decides it's in the public's interest. That works as long as nobody disagrees with that decision. But if someone does, then you have created a situation where wealth is destroyed.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[pjbgravely]

No, I have never run the numbers, where I live there are 53 sunny days a year on average. My point was that this change in prices should not effect the building of a battery plant. This will cause more people to want to store there own power instead of buying it back at a higher price at night. The GP said the change would make the plant useless.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[mikael]

If it's possible to make Gorilla glass for smartphones, wouldn't that work for solar panels? Perhaps someday, it will be possible to make solar panels as thin as plastic.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[mattwarden]

They are already very tough. Remember they were built to power satellites where any damage basically bricks the entire satellite as maintenance of any kind is not feasible

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Anonymous Coward]

It took only twenty seconds of flipping through your misi-net reference to find a glaring flaw in the calculations. Namely, those "incentives" or what you call "subsidies" are on the whole not subsidies at all. There are tax credits, regulatory effects ("gains realized by energy businesses when they are exempt from federal requirements that raise costs or limit prices", etc.).

Wow, everything else aside, are you saying tax credits don't count as a subsidy?

A lot of it is BS, and >>90% is stuff other than "subsidy", i.e., a payment to someone. Whoa, it even says so on page 9:

Yeah, their definition of subsidy includes more than blind cash hand-outs...

But seriously, you're claiming a tax credit is not a subsidy?

Ok, there go BILLIONS in renewable subsidies because they aren't literal payments to somebody.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[amiga3D]

I've been researching the thing for over a year now. I'm aware the costs for a full up off grid system are pretty hefty, around the price you'd pay for a nice new car. I plan to start a little smaller than that and build on it. Batteries are definitely the biggest investment. I so wish that Musk or someone else would come up with a way to cut that by at least 50 percent. I see all this money being spent on solar panel research when to me it should be spent on battery research.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Anonymous Coward]

In that case, the tax credits and loan guarantees that were never called are removed from the renewables tab.

That's a lot.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[HornWumpus]

There is a huge difference between satellite solar panels, which have a lot of thought put into a degrading but not failing design and roof top solar panels, which are cells soldered to a bus or wiring harness covered in glass and framed in aluminium.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[mattwarden]

Maybe a bmw 7-series or something. Going fully off grid without dramatically reducing your energy usage will cost you 75k-100k. Perhaps more depending on where you live and how much energy you use at different times of the year. The problem with fully off grid is that you have to build the entire system for peak usage, which you may only need for a couple weeks in the summer or winter. And that's not 1 day of peak usage, because the highest usage times of the year are also not very efficient for PV (peak winter=little sun, peak summer=high temp).

Of course nobody does that because it's insanely expensive. It's cheaper to convert all lighting to DC LED, replace all appliances to DC and/or their most efficient models, run fans instead of A/C, convert heating systems to gas/propane/wood/pellet, etc. etc. etc.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[mattwarden]

oops i managed to mix multiple thoughts in my point about it not being 1 day of peak usage. What I intended to say was that in the winter where you can have no sun for multiple days, you need to have enough battery storage to support that peak usage for that number of days.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Ol Olsoc]

Um - Let me get this straight. Since some intrepid Slashdotters beileve that it is dishonest to call a tax break a subsidy, let's put that to the test.

An oil company gets a tax break - That's not a subsidy in your world.

I put up a solar electricity generating system abd get a tax break, as has happened in the past. Whaddya think? Exact same situation, So is my tax break a subsidy? I earned my money, I'm keeping it instead of paying it to someone. I get this situation via a tax break. As I recall,

I call that a subsidy. You can wordsmith it all you like. It's a subsidy. The Government is giving you in one form or another, money it has collected.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[amiga3D]

Yeah, I was thinking running a propane powered generator for back up power. Been pricing Industrial batteries too. Yep....it's a load of cash. Still, it looks like they're determined to kill coal and if that happens I look for electrical prices to climb drastically. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[MobyDisk]

Perhaps my confusion is the definition of "grid tie." I think the clarifying question might be "what is the difference between the fees paid by a power supplier and a resident?"

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[sxpert]

compare China and their constant contaminated by anything and everything baby formula problem

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[sxpert]

I guess the Co-op is buying the electricity as the exact same rate as anyone from the generator...
looks like the company serving the city is making 350% profit selling the electricity... question is, what do they do with all that money that the co-op doesn't seem to really need ?

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[sxpert]

they only used part of the available ground there, and have plans on expanding the factory at least 5-fold

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[sxpert]

you mean, fool cells ?
batteries are actually much more efficient that what you propose

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[sxpert]

agreed, the companies making profits on the tobacco and alcohol the person consumes should be made responsible for that person's health issues contracted from having consumed those products...

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[fche]

"So is my tax break a subsidy?"

No, not if it's a tax break.
But many solar installations are tied to the grid, and the owner receives an inflated - subsidized! - feed-in-tariff for the electricity their system generates.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[Anonymous Coward]

"So is my tax break a subsidy?"

No, not if it's a tax break.
But many solar installations are tied to the grid, and the owner receives an inflated - subsidized! - feed-in-tariff for the electricity their system generates.

The Feed-In Tariff, whatever it may be, isn't your problem now though.

Your problem is the subsidy numbers you're complaining about don't distinguish a tax break from a feed-in-tariff.

That thought took less than 2 seconds.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[adhdengineer]

Or tax the problem so that the solution is paid for (or more than paid for in the case of smoking in the UK and it's cost to the NHS)

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[anyGould]

He is pointing out that the paper is intentionally misleading in how it uses the term subsidy.

No, I think it has it right. A subsidy is "a sum of money granted by the government or a public body to assist an industry or business so that the price of a commodity or service may remain low or competitive". Any time the government cuts them a break (whether by just handing them the money, or choosing not to tax them at the regular rate, or choosing not to apply regulations to them.. that's all subsidies.

And I'm not horribly opposed to the concept (the power grid is kind of necessary, after all). But those dollars should be accounted for and compared to their profits. In particular, if a companie's profits > their subsidies, some questions should be asked.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[mattwarden]

No, it is misleading, and your response doesn't address my point. If I subsidize the purchase of a car by paying $10k of it, that is different than giving $10k to a car manufacturer or care sales lot. It's not a question of the form of the $10k.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[mattwarden]

Generator is much cheaper option than batteries. In hindsight I wonder whether I should have done that instead. One installer I talked to tried to talk me into that direction. I ended up paying about 2.5x more (not counting the cost of the propane) for a battery solution, and the only thing I can really point to as an incremental benefit is that they get recharged for free. But I bet if I factored in the replacement cycle, I wouldn't like the results.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[anyGould]

Well, unless you're "the government or a public body", then you'd be correct - you're not a subsidy.

But assuming that you are the gov'mint here, there isn't really a difference between you paying for $10K worth of cars from Don's Dealership, and you giving Don 10K upfront. You've still given Don 10K, and presumably I got a slightly cheaper car. (To answer what I expect to be the obvious rebuttal - that paying for part of the car reduces the price - you only need to look at private universities for examples where the cost mysteriously rises by roughly the amount of the subsidy. There's no guarantee either way, barring regulations, of making sure that the subsidy money isn't ending up in Don's pocket rather than indirectly going into ours. Even if you give me the money directly, if it's a known that buying a car gives me an $X subsidy, that's incentive for you to raise your prices to capture part of that 'free' money.

Re:Government should not pick winners and losers.

[mattwarden]

Um, yes there is a difference. If Joe buys a $30k car with a $10k subsidy, that has very different behavioral influence than if the subsidy went to Joe's dealer and is spread across all of the dealer's costs and may or may not shot up in any consumer based pricing. And the latter is exactly what tax credits and other shit do. So, no, you are not correct.

Why retail?

[Richard_at_work]

Why should you be paid retail for generation? That totally ignores the part the grid takes in handling your energy...

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:Why retail?

[PPH]

What about the spinning reserve that the power company has to maintain in the event your solar panels or wind generator drop off line?

Re:Why retail?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about the coal they don't burn, or the gas, or the...

You can go "What about" all day.

Re:Why retail?

[mellon]

In principle they have to maintain less, so it's a win. In practice, it's early days for new generation mechanisms like solar, despite the rather terrifying amount of capacity that we now have. When everybody has panels, we'll have to have some way to pay for the grid, so obviously net metering _by itself_ doesn't scale, and particularly in states with lots of sunny days, this kind of adjustment was inevitable.

Re:Why retail?

[Mr D from 63]

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.

Re:Why retail?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most electric companies have an interconnect fee. Something like $20-30/month even if you use no power. One would think that would cover it.

Re:Why retail?

[Spazmania]

Yes, exactly. The folks who sized solar generation to meet *their* needs aren't harmed by this change. The only ones harmed are the ones who thought they'd get rich quick on an artificial market.

Re:Why retail?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should you be paid retail for generation? That totally ignores the part the grid takes in handling your energy...

Because the excess energy you are producing is dumped onto the grid and the electric company pays $0 to produce it, but somebody else pays them for it? In addition, it allows the utility to reduce its production of electricity which saves it fuel costs and service cost on the equipment.

Now, if you want to treat the home producer as a wholesaler of electric power, that is fine. Then, when their usage strips their capacity to produce, they get to purchase the electricity at wholesale prices, too. Of course the utilities don't want that, because, for instance, at night, they will only be getting wholesale prices instead of retail, too. But, you can't have it both ways. Either the consumer generator is either a consumer or a wholesaler. You can't be both and their electricity should be priced accordingly.

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...

Re:Why retail?

[eyenot]

"Probably" was a pretty bad term to rely on in an argument you're making that someone else's argument doesn't "hold water".

"Probably" to whom, when? You're talking about the middle of the day, when most power companies have determined is the best time to charge the most for power, because that's when the most is actually being used--

wait a minute, have you ever even paid your own power bill? You're not ... 14, are you?

Re:Why retail?

[eyenot]

Um... by generating power on your side of some transformer, you are reducing the load on that side, plain and simple.

Re:Why retail?

[eyenot]

if you want to treat the home producer as a wholesaler of electric power,

No, that's not it. The parent is trying to treat power distribution as a chain of delivery of something like goods. This is the mentality that has been allowed to creep in on power regulation like a toothless hollar-dwellar getting people worked up in a meeting of the galactic federation: "hey it's just as expensive to put your solar generated power on the back of a track, fill it with gas, and ship it all willy nilly up and down da countryside as it is for the energy company ta have ta do it!"

Parent obviously doesn't realize the obvious (as you pointed out), that the generated power reduces load and that that reduction will disseminate back up the grid.

Until we get to the point in time where the power company has to start building at the plant to handle back surge from all the millions of solar panel using consumers, it's not any kind of cost for the power company.

Re:Why retail?

[eyenot]

They wouldn't have *had* to build to handle power coming back if the entire system had been allowed to naturally turn into a power circuit instead of an out and back again distribution network. So, they kind of brought that expense down on themselves.

Re:Why retail?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it would be more fair to pay them the real-time market rate for energy rather than retail. That is what a generator would earn. You would want a budget plan, to smooth out the fluctuations over the year.

Re:Why retail?

[Mr D from 63]

They wouldn't have *had* to build to handle power coming back if the entire system had been allowed to naturally turn into a power circuit instead of an out and back again distribution network.

That makes absolutely no sense at all.

Re:Why retail?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Hawaii has a whole lot of unique circumstances, being an isolated island chain in the middle of the ocean.

They can't even dump their excess power to another island in most cases.

But given the expenses of importing oil, and their own location, a designed solar system would work well.

They could find batteries more viable, even hydrogen cracking.

But HEPCO won't do any of it, because they don't want to throw off their profit stream.

Re:Why retail?

[Mr D from 63]

And, in the middle of the day, ask yourself, where is most of that power being consumed? In the home or in commercial properties, industry, and businesses? Most people size their residential solar to handle their own usage, but they have excess during the day when they are not at home, and their neighbors are not at home.

Probably is perfectly appropriate when we are talking about overall behavior, as there are always exceptions when talking individual homes.

Re:Why retail?

[wisnoskij]

No, the argument is that in general society wants to get away from fossil fuel usage and solar just is not ready to compete on even terms with fossil fuels (so the only solution is to give solar a artificial advantage). No serious person ever made the argument that paying retail was actually fair.

Re:Why retail?

[Anonymous Coward]

It would have to be increased.

Re:Why retail?

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

Plus they have a giant geological energy producer they could tap to make electricity if they really want to. Their only making 30 MW at the moment, but with multiple volcanoes there's no reason they couldn't go 100% geothermal. Well, other than the fact that some natives seem to get really mad about technological progress on their island that is.

Re:Why retail?

[angel'o'sphere]

What about the spinning reserve that the power company has to maintain in the event your solar panels^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H coal plants or wind generator^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H or nuclear plants drop off line?

FTFY ... there is no difference in spining reserves unless you are reaching 50% or more coverage by renewables. And then, they are likely geographically so much distributed that, there is no need for increasing spinning reserves either. A no brainer.

Re:Why retail?

[Firethorn]

You have to remember that Hawaii is actually a number of islands. The most inhabited one, as per the last official study, is actually a pretty bad candidate for geothermal power - while they could certainly install it, it'd have to go too deep. That being said, we've developed a LOT of new drilling technology in the last decade or so with the fracking and deep wells and such, so re-doing the math might make it make more sense today.

The 30MW station is on a different island, which is much less inhabited, and they don't really need solar because the plant takes care of their baseload needs, more or less.

There is also talk about running a underwater power-line between the two islands, but that's a rather large expense for not enough potential gain at the current time.

Re: Why retail?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have people stopped using air conditioners in Nevada, or why is it likely that nobody needs electricity generated when the sun shines?

Re:Why retail?

[Anonymous Coward]

Using real numbers resolves "what about" rather quickly. Solar and wind offer a slight reduction in fossil fuel consumption at extraordinary cost, but that is all. Nowhere have they actually replaced a substantial quantity of fossil fuels; they only drive prices through the roof, while the dishonest collect the subsidies.

Re:Why retail?

[rekoil]

I'd be in support for wholesale pricing on generation, or an infrastructure fee to cover the costs of transmission. The problem here is that the Nevada PUC is allowing both.

Re:Why retail?

[FirstOne]

How about the 20% grid loss(I^2R) the utility doesn't incure when generating power at peak load, compared to locally generated power which incures almost no losses??

Re:Why retail?

[jcbarlow]

Not correct. At least where I live my electric bill includes a separate fee that is supposed cover the effort expended to deliver the power from it's source to my home. Then on top of that I pay still more for the power itself. I understand that a regulated monopoly utility should be paid for what it does. I don't see why it should also get a retail markup on the power. This is equivalent to UPS charging their normal shipping fee and then adding a 20% markup to the price of the goods they deliver.

Re:Why retail?

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, you have no answer to the very real problem that, without some sort of battery in between the grid and the renewable generation system, solar and wind do not provide a steady and reliable stream of electricity.

Solar and wind are doomed to fail without two key components.
1) A storage medium to provide a consistent and clean feed back to the grid.
2) Communication between that storage medium and the power company, so that the power company will actually know when your system is able / unable to provide consistent and clean power.

Re:Why retail?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's only one rule: please don't post drunk or stupid. It appears you violated both it one fell swoop.

Re:Why retail?

[cfalcon]

I mean, if you ask them, sure. In practice, if you had that much solar power, you'd be reducing the total need for THEIR infrastructure. Given that it's an infrastructure fee, and in this hypothetical they need less infrastructure, it could go either way. Maybe have a third party do the analysis, eh? Someone not known to the power companies.

Re:Why retail?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's fine but can we calculate the cost please?

Right now I'm torn on building a solar installation because the price for kWh sent back up to the grid vary in value from "same as input kWh" to "negative value due to transmission expense", Either I'm being paid for those watts up or I'm being charged for those watts up. Make your minds up, what does it really cost? Can you measure it?

I'm not unreasonable and I do believe the power companies need to make money on infrastructure to maintain it.

The alternative is to go completely off-grid or to go no backflow to the grid. That's "fuck you" and "fuck you" respectively.

Re:Why retail?

[Teancum]

The largest problem with mass adoption of solar power is not the stuff happening with a few solar panels but what happens when you have whole neighborhoods with that infrastructure? There are some neighborhoods now in California with so many solar panels that the back flow from the neighborhoods is going into the larger grid... sometimes in ways that the grid was simply not equipped to handle in the first place. In other words.... that substation will need to be upgraded regardless in part because of the solar panels.

Another huge problem with both solar and wind is that they also don't deal with base load issues. Solar is nice for peak demand, but you still need that base load availability when all else isn't available like in the evenings or in calm weather. Battery farms and generating hydrogen can partially solve that problem, but definitely at a loss of energy and significantly added cost to the utilities. Other crazy ideas including pumping water into tanks or reservoirs as an energy storage system in its own right.

Nuclear & coal power are particularly attractive precisely because they can provide that base load power which can be running all of the time even with other sources are not available. Hydro power is on the other hand really useful in peak load situations as turbines can be opened up and generating electricity on demand or turned off with the energy represented in the water behind the dam stored for when it is needed. Most of the renewable energy sources don't have either of those benefits and sort of fall between with solar power having a slight advantage in areas with a whole lot of air conditioning.... as they generate electricity at high amounts precisely when power consumption is needed the most.... sort of.

My point is that solar power connections definitely have cost which goes far beyond just the immediate residential connections to the power grid, and it is overly simplistic to think that large scale adoption of solar power can be done for little additional cost to the utility. If it happens on a very small and localized level with a very low percentage of the customers using solar power.... your assumption is correct. On the other hand, what good is that solar power generation if only a couple homes out of hundreds are solar powered? All that does is make a couple of snotty people with egos feel good about themselves and in some ways makes things worse if you really do care about the environment.

Re:Why retail?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Why should you be paid retail for generation? That totally ignores the part the grid takes in handling your energy...

You also pay a monthly "be connected to the grid" fee, which pays your share of the ongoing expenses of maintaining the grid, along with a one-shot "get connected to the grid" fee, often amounting to thousands of dollars, which literally pays for installing the infrastructure - poles, drop transformer, etc - to bring the grid to you.

When the contractor building my rural retirement house connected it to the grid, without my orders, I paid many thousands - money I'd intended for a solar system. Part of that was half the price of the existing transformer that I now shared with my next-door neighbor, who had paid the whole price and was now rebated half of it.)

Re:Why retail?

[Anonymous Coward]

PMJ real time prices (http://www.pjm.com/markets-and-operations/interregional-map.aspx) - what is the worst that happens, peak pricing stays below $500 MWH during a hot summer day ?

Re:Why retail?

[Cyberax]

No, it doesn't lower the total power that needs to be generated. As a utility, you have to plan to be able to generate 100% of the peak capacity without solar input. This requires expensive peaking production contracts.

Then there's a question of reliability - grids are not really designed to feed power between branches. Grid-connected generators (including solar panels) also often require installation of emergency shutoff switches and upgrades to local transformers.

Re:Why retail?

[Firethorn]

As a utility, you have to plan to be able to generate 100% of the peak capacity without solar input.

Do you have a citation on this? I'm guessing that you don't. They do have to plan on losing any given planet, but given it's distributed nature and the way solar panels work, in order for an area you'd need such weird weather that it would be highly predictable. Yes, it costs a little money, but surprising little.

Grid-connected generators (including solar panels) also often require installation of emergency shutoff switches and upgrades to local transformers.

Emergency shutoff switches are required for line worker protection, so they can ensure that the lines are dead before working on them. All of the common inverters will automatically avoid backfeeding power to the grid when grid power itself is absent. Many electric companies also require a manual switch, which isn't that hard to install.

The transformers are actually fine, it's some of the other devices that need upgrades. Solar power can actually slow the need for upgrading transformers by lowering anticipated peak power demand.

Re:Why retail?

[Cyberax]

Do you have a citation on this? I'm guessing that you don't. They do have to plan on losing any given planet, but given it's distributed nature and the way solar panels work, in order for an area you'd need such weird weather that it would be highly predictable. Yes, it costs a little money, but surprising little.

What? Do you even understand what you're talking about? Utilities generally do not operate in geographically large areas, a typical utility serves a part of a single state. And getting all of the generation knocked out by clouds happens pretty much always.

So yes, utilities have to plan for the worst. They have to either have own peak generation capability (like gas turbines) or buy electricity from neighbor grids. And on-demand guaranteed power is the most expensive kind.

Emergency shutoff switches are required for line worker protection, so they can ensure that the lines are dead before working on them.

Not only. A short circuit with backfeed power is a really fun stuff.

All of the common inverters will automatically avoid backfeeding power to the grid when grid power itself is absent. Many electric companies also require a manual switch, which isn't that hard to install.

A lot of these switches just sense the grid power. Guess what happens if your neighbors also have solar? You can get your own floating mini-grid. It won't float for long, but during that time it can ruin all kinds of power electronics.

So yes, solar power is hard if you want to feed it back to utilities. Right now it's usually so expensive that it makes no sense to invest in it.

Re:Why retail?

[thegarbz]

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.

The counter argument is that the grid is built into the cost of electricity supply. If you reduce your electricity bill by getting paid retail rates then you don't pay for the grid equipment, why should it exist for you then when the sun doesn't shine.

As for the expense, no not at all. What solar does is cause wilder swings in minute to minute power demands forcing major control system upgrades at a lot of generation stations, it back feeds a grid which can be devastating for transformers, causes grid imbalance if you're generating on single phase like most users are and they aren't very evenly distributed etc.

So premature upgrade cost, capital upgrade costs (yes they likely are upgrading a substation BECAUSE of solar not the other way around), and management / maintenance costs.

And this is long before you get to reduced profit side of things which no one really wants. There is NOTHING GOOD about solar from an energy producer / grid maintainer's point of view. Nothing at all.

Re:Why retail?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, if you want to treat the home producer as a wholesaler of electric power, that is fine. Then, when their usage strips their capacity to produce, they get to purchase the electricity at wholesale prices, too.

Umm, no. That's not how anything works. Nobody writes contracts like that.

Re:Why retail?

[Solandri]

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...

Hawaii generates electricity by burning oil which has to be brought over by cargo ship. Consequently, they have the most expensive electricity in the U.S. 34 cents/kWh vs a national average of 9.84 cents/kWh.

That's what makes solar economically viable and so common there - not because solar is cheap/free, but because competing electricity sources are so expensive.

Re:Why retail?

[martinfb]

Not necessarily. The power company here, PECo, charges a separate distribution rate for grid maintenance. Getting retail for what you generate as feedback surplus does, however, seem inappropriate. What about a rate based somewhere between wholesale and retail; perhaps tiered by capacity that is surplus? All users still need to pay for the grid!

Re:Why retail?

[mattwarden]

Your statement about common inverters is very misleading. Yes the inverters avoid feeding the grid when the grid is down for worker safety. But they do this by shutting off. Your home does not get solar power when the grid is down if you have a direct grid tie system.

Re:Why retail?

[mattwarden]

Congrats. You have joined the very large group of people in this thread who have no idea what they are talking about. You cannot size solar to meet your needs irrespective of net metering because your usage curve looks very different, sometimes almost exactly opposite, of the solar generation curve. You must have a battery of some sort. For most people that is the grid itself with net metering. So, no, this will hurt everyone, including people who sized solar for their needs only.

Re:Why retail?

[FirstOne]

With distributed Solar, the Power co's. infrastructure is going to have a longer service lifetime, maybe 2x, 3x longer. I.E. The infrastructures peak power disapation periods(&losses) are reduced significantly. Thus everything is going to last longer.

Same goes for gas turbine peaking units.

As for GW, and DOD subsidies in the US, each kWh of fossil fuel based generation should be priced @ least 1$ per kWh. That's what future generations will incure (for all non-renewable forms energy generation), if we don't transistion to 100% renewable in the near future.

Future AGW costs, loss of land & infrastructure to sea level increase, 50T$ to 500T$ for just for the USA. Tack on crop losses, wars, insect infestations(bark beatle?), dislocations, refugee compensation, carbon sequestration, etc. Humanity is instore for a very nasty future, if we don't kick our carbon habit real fast.

This post generated using back yard generated solar power.

Re:Why retail?

[Anonymous Coward]

When excess solar is available, the neighbour without solar wants power for his air conditioning.

Now, these people who can no longer sell power 'for retail price' should simply make a deal with a neighbour about selling them the power directly. At any price between retail and wholesale both profits from this. Just run a cable to the neighbour - he gets less billable on his meter.

Re:Why retail?

[uninformedLuddite]

My wife and I are completely off-grid. We haven't had a power bill in probably 13 years now. It's great.

Re:Why retail?

[uninformedLuddite]

Your home does not get solar power when the grid is down if you have a direct grid tie system.

We have been off grid for over a decade and I hadn't really looked into the setup of grid tied stuff as it has never been relevant to us. When I discovered that grid tied solar systems didn't work during a grid outage I was a little shocked. I guess there are good reasons for this but it still seems a little weird.

Re:Why retail?

[mattwarden]

I agree with you. It's pretty surprising. It may be for good reason and it may be an outdated regulation.

Re:Why retail?

[PPH]

What about the spinning reserve that the power company has to maintain in the event your coal plants or nuclear plants drop off line?

Already figured into the difference between wholesale and retail energy prices.

they are likely geographically so much distributed that, there is no need for increasing spinning reserves either.

Geography doesn't enter into the reliability of coal/hydro/nuclear. Not like it does when its overcast or calm over a wide region. And then the diversity provided by renewable resources sufficiently remote to be available undermines arguments about system losses and feeding your neighbors' loads. The sun might be shining hundreds of miles away. But counting that as a reserve needs to consider the same line losses that other centralized sources incur.

Re:Why retail?

[HornWumpus]

Who are you to start making rules.

Going to ruin /.

Re:Why retail?

[Spazmania]

If you do a grid tie, you size your solar plant to meet the load at some percentile along your daily demand curve and leave out the expensive batteries with the limited lifespan. Sure, you can size to a higher percentile so that less electricity comes from the power company. I don't see how you figure that entitles you to sell the excess to the power company at a higher than market rate.

Re:Why retail?

[anyGould]

Why should you be paid retail for generation? That totally ignores the part the grid takes in handling your energy...

Because that's what the going rate for electricity is?

I can see the argument for it being cheaper than retail (to account for power grid and such), but at wholesale you're effectively just another generator for the electric company (who will pocket the margin for themselves for no additional work).

The upside is that I can see the power companies suddenly becoming *very* enthusiastic about private solar if it becomes "free" power that they can charge someone else mark-up on.

Re:Why retail?

[mattwarden]

I'm pretty sure you just agreed with my point. I didn't say anyone should expect to sell excess power at a higher than wholesale rate. What I said was that you are wrong when you said that nobody is harmed by this if they sized their system for their own usage. As you note, you must use the grid as your battery, or you must have batteries yourself. If you are using the grid as your battery, then lowering the sell price harms them.

Re:Why retail?

[petermgreen]

I would imagine the main reason is complexity which leads to cost though from some googling it seems poorly written regulations may be an issue in some places.

Most grid-tie systems are built to be installed just like a load would be installed, you add a breaker in your panel, wire up the panels to the inverter and the inverter to the breaker and turn things on. Depending on your locality there may also be a bit of beuracracy but it's typically fairly minimal.

A system that can go into an "intentional island" state is more complex. There now needs to be a contactor to seperate the load and inverter from the grid in the event of grid failure. The inverter control system needs to support both islanded and grid-tie modes and the process for switching between those modes needs to be carefully designed to prevent back-feeding. There is also the problem that even on a bright sunny day the peak load of a household may well be higher than the solar panels can supply. These problems can be managed but it all adds cost.

From some googling (e.g. I found http://www2.buildinggreen.com/... ) it seems that such systems do exist but they are the exception not the rule.

Re:Why retail?

[Anonymous Coward]

Batteries need not be expensive and short-lived. I use a deep freezer as one battery and a hot water tank as another. Cheap, effective and long-lasting.

Re:Why retail?

[Firethorn]

But they do this by shutting off. Your home does not get solar power when the grid is down if you have a direct grid tie system.

The majority of them, yes. But there are hybrid battery systems that won't shut down, and there are even ones that will continue to provide a limited amount of power in a system a lot like an automatic transfer switch. They're relatively new.

As such, my not mentioning them shutting off is acceptable, because while a back-feed prevention system is pretty much universal, how they do it varies.

Re:Why retail?

[angel'o'sphere]

Already figured into the difference between wholesale and retail energy prices.
Interesting. You don't grasp that for the spinning reserve it does not matter at all what 'kind of plant it "backs up".

l say a mix

[Anonymous Coward]

If the generated solar gets used within the local residential area, then they should get a bit under retail rates. If if has to be backfed through transformers, etc (a suburbian area with only some houses on solar can turn into net generators due to the low power draw while no one was home), then retail rates.

That would likely be too complex though. I agree that retail rates should be good, or donated into a kitty for people in poverty or something. The power company makes bank at buying at retail rates right at the point of consumption (and forcing that rate by law seems non-beneficial), but I never thought that solar panels as be an income generating source for a house really made sense either...

Re:l say a mix

[Anonymous Coward]

> I never thought that solar panels as be an income generating source for a house really made sense either

This is not about income generation, for most people the power bill still wouldn't have gone below 0.
This is about how much it should cost people when they supply 1 kWh and then later take out 1 kWh again.
In cases where there is very little solar power, all the supplied power will go directly to the neighbours, at almost no cost. Why should the power company essentially be paid 10 cent per kWh for doing nothing? That is the argument for paying "net" prices.
If people now only get wholesale prices a possible effect is that everyone now has to install batteries. That is a good thing in areas where everyone already has solar. But in other areas, it is a completely pointless waste of energy, money, raw materials and effort.
It is a very good question whether the government should support something that
1) Makes solar less attractive
2) Results in pointless waste of resource
with the only reason being very questionable arguments that the power companies want to be paid more for something.
As they have a monopoly, it is more than justified to ask if a pricing structure hits the right spot between society's common good and their right to profit.
I am fairly sure paying wholesale price does not. Though full net price probably wasn't quite right either.

You gambled on the government

[Anonymous Coward]

The government was giving you other people's money, and now they're not. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.

"Right"

[Anonymous Coward]

What do I win?

Props to Mr mdnuclear

[penguinoid]

Ha ha, suck it mdsolar.

I knew something was up

[rsilvergun]

here in Arizona when I started seeing these ads on youtube with a bunch of old people talking about something scary, ending with a passionate plea to vote for such and such law, which turned out to be a law that let the power companies stop paying for the electricity folks with solar panels put back into the grid.

The whole "net metering" debate is just the power companies fighting solar. As time goes on it'll make electricity _too_ cheap. The reason we have public utilities is that businesses are in the business of making money; so for anything more important than a twinkie you're going to get price gouged sooner or later...

Re:I knew something was up

[rgbatduke]

No worries. With the Great Global Warming Conspiracy in place, power companies have already been raising rates and gouging people for years and anticipated being able to do so for decades. Solar simply bites into that with net metering.

But it is nothing like the bite that is going to happen if any of the three or four companies or major projects that claim to be on the verge of fusion energy turn out to be correct within the allotted timeframe. Or, better yet, if two or three companies solve it slightly differently at once, so there isn't even a window of real patent-monopoly free from competition.

Of course that is also going to more or less kill solar in its tracks unless/until they can get prices down to order of $0.10/watt/decade of operation. That will break even with fusion, maybe, possibly -- the difference between free but unreliable "fuel" in the case of solar vs almost free and reliable fuel in the case of fusion, with both of them costing order of $100 million/GW for the generation facility, a quantity that is recoverable at current retail rates in a matter of days of operating at capacity (power companies charge order of a billion dollars for ten hours of the electricity produced by a gigawatt plant).

If Lockheed-Martin's semi-sized megawatt plant works, we might even see the real demise of the electrical grid and giant regulated monopolies, over time. Communities could buy off-the-shelf generation in a modular way and plug it into a municipal grid and pay for it on a co-op basis.

In the meantime, all measures taken to combat carbon dioxide raise the cost of electricity. All things that raise the cost of electricity increase the profits of the government regulated monopolies that sell it, that are usually permitted only a more or less fixed marginal profit. They'll make electricity using squirrels in cages if that's what the public mandates, as long as they get a fixed MARGINAL profit on the final retail price.

rgb

Re:I knew something was up

[vandelais]

That's a big twinkie.

Re:I knew something was up

[Anonymous Coward]

The Twinkie got price gouged by their Union until the business failed, just fyi.

Re:I knew something was up

[CrimsonAvenger]

(power companies charge order of a billion dollars for ten hours of the electricity produced by a gigawatt plant).

Umm, no.

A gigawatt plant produces 10,000,000 KWhr in ten hours. We'd have to be paying about $100 per KWhr for this to be true.

And I don't know about you, but my electric bill isn't $30,000 per month....

Re:I knew something was up

[rgbatduke]

Oops? Forgot the "kilo"...

Never mind.

        rgb

Time-of-day metering

[crow]

Sure, drop the rate back to wholesale for the buy-back of net metering, but then price it based on the spot market at that time, not the overall rate. The prices are highest during the day, so net metering for solar would likely pay more than the retail rate if the utilities had to pay for it based on the time.

Overall, utilities are saving money from solar--they're reducing what they have to pay to support peak demand, and now they're coming back and trying to suck more money out of their customers.

This is a money grab by the utilities, plain and simple. This has nothing to do with fairness.

Re:Time-of-day metering

[HornWumpus]

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.

Re:Time-of-day metering

[blindseer]

Spot electricity prices are typically higher during the day but that is not always so. Imagine a situation where a large number of people on a local grid had grid tied solar. On a cool sunny day it is conceivable for the spot electricity price to go negative. Would the people with the solar panels be then expected to pay the utility for taking their electricity? Perhaps the utility should have the choice to simply not buy their electricity at that time.

As the laws are typically written for rooftop solar the utility must, *MUST*, purchase the electricity from the homeowner at the retail rate. This is awesome for early adopters, and perhaps even for the utility. The problem arises when the number of rooftop solar customers exceed what the utility can handle. Too much solar power and the electric grid is now "running backwards" along some runs, the grid is not designed for that. An electric utility certainly can make an electric grid to handle rooftop solar but then the people with the rooftop solar are no longer "customers" in the traditional sense, they are producers. As producers they should be no different from other producers. Failing that then the economics start to break down, people with rooftop solar could conceivably be paid for the privilege of getting back-up power from the utility. Too many people doing this and the utility will have to raise prices. The income from the utility to the rooftop solar people goes up and the people that cannot have rooftop solar, apartment dwellers (typically the poorer people) and industry see their rates go up.

Solar subsidies like paying rooftop solar producers retail rates is a wealth redistribution from the poor to the wealthy. It's time for it to stop.

Solar power is now a mature technology, we don't need subsidies to encourage adaption anymore. Solar makes sense on its own, we don't need to prop it up with government mandates and subsidies. Solar subsidies are now just corporate welfare and regressive taxation.

Re:Time-of-day metering

[Mr D from 63]

Solar subsidies like paying rooftop solar producers retail rates is a wealth redistribution from the poor to the wealthy. It's time for it to stop.

We are essentially paying part of the power bills for those people who are in a position to install solar and take advantage of all the financial help. I have always felt the best thing to do is take all that solar incentive money and use it to buy solar panels for schools. Then the schools get the financial benefit, we still get solar panels installed, and those that want solar in their homes will still install it (if it is as good a deal as the solar industry claims).

Re:Time-of-day metering

[angel'o'sphere]

The best price of all is for wholesale on peak dispatchable (on demand) power. Which solar isn't.

The spot market dos not care if the 2GW you are about to sell the next 2h are produced by a dispatchable plant or not. The price is the same.

Re:Time-of-day metering

[Anonymous Coward]

In my state it is net metering, but with a catch. Each year I'd pay the difference in power generated vs power used. And, there's a cap on how much I can be paid. Done on an annual basis, all the cyclical effects on price tend to average out. And the cap keeps me from installing a solar plant on my roof that's 2x what I need and turning it into a profit center. I generate what I need, averaged over the year. Most of it is generated in the summer, during the day, when the demand is highest, so the power company benefits from a lot of extra capacity. The whole wholesale / retail thing is a load of crap. When was the last time you bought something at retail, but the store would only give you wholesale in return credits?

Re:Time-of-day metering

[Anonymous Coward]

then the people with the rooftop solar are no longer "customers" in the traditional sense, they are producers

Perhaps you've stumbled upon a solution for Nevada solar adopters, to band together and form their own energy utility company. The current utility will have to give up their natural monopoly and allow any consumer to choose which energy company they'd like to be their power provider.

Re:Time-of-day metering

[Anonymous Coward]

Nuclear isn't dispatchable either: you're either producing it or not, and the lead time is DAYS.

Coal isn't dispatchable either: you're either producing it or not, and the lead time is MANY HOURS.

Oil and gas isn't dispatchable either: you're either producing it or not, and the lead time is a few HOURS.

Spinning reserve is dispatchable, but it's massively expensive unless it's renewable. If it's solar or wind, IT IS ALWAYS SPINNING. So you just BUILD MORE OF IT. It doesn't matter if it's expensive to overbuild capacity, but it is still cheaper than building spinning reserve for your grid network WHATEVER IT COMPRISES.

Re:Time-of-day metering

[mattwarden]

The retail rate for GENERATION yes. This is less than the headline number you pay per kWh, which includes delivery

Re:Time-of-day metering

[mattwarden]

Who gets the money from the generated power? Don't you basically end up with putting the government directly in the power plant business?

Re:Time-of-day metering

[Mr D from 63]

Let the schools have it. For a good part of the year the schools are in use during solar peaks anyhow (unlike homes), and during the summer they conserve as best they can, so they could pad their budgets a bit on top of the power savings.

Start with low income area, struggling schools first.

Re:Time-of-day metering

[mattwarden]

Decent idea. Possibly politically risky ("these kids need books and Mayor Dingbat is blowing the money on Chinese solar panels")

Re:Time-of-day metering

[HornWumpus]

Which is why load following is a separate charge. Electric market is weird. Power goes one place, but 'capacity' goes another. This reflects all the wheeling etc that goes on in the market/grid, capacity is usually more local, reflecting actual available transmission.

Some plants make 90% of their money by regulating area ramp rate and almost nothing on power.

I knew of one smaller plant that ran full time at a 90 degree phase angle to correct for all the early dimmers and switching power supplies, with their crazy power factors. That particular mess should be resolving with newer consumer hardware. Markets know how to adjust for this, they are called 'long term contracts for system stability'. All kinds of mischief goes on there as well. Daylight is helping.

The hour ahead market has very little to do with operations. It sets the link flows. Effects if links are marginal so it has real financial impact. But operations just keeps the machines spinning. Just for example: Do you think they care who paid for the power when a link trips and they have to dump the reflected surge into 'the resistor'? That's for accountants to argue about in the subsequent weeks or months.

mdnuclear: BEST NAME EVER!

[CajunArson]

Thank you for having a username that trolls "mdsolar" and his arrogant and obviously bought & paid for trolling.

Re:mdnuclear: BEST NAME EVER!

[Burz]

Thank you for having a username that trolls "mdsolar" and his arrogant and obviously bought & paid for trolling.

Yes, the name pairs well with the link to Rupert Murdoch's WSJ editorial page. That's like using Fox News as a reference on a solar story.

Re:mdnuclear: BEST NAME EVER!

[Burz]

And some commentary on the quality of Forbes' science reporting... http://blogs.agu.org/wildwilds...

Plan B

[overshoot]

If utilities don't do retail metering, consumers can get similar results by pooling their loads. Solar cogeneration is short-term steady while most domestic loads are intermittent, which means that over an hour a consumer might be a net provider to the grid but get charged amost as much as without cogeneration.

On the other hand, a buyers' co-op smooths out the load variations and approaches the effects of net retail metering. Which is appropriate, because (unlike wholesale rates) cogeneration does not put extra load on the grid.

If utilities don't adapt to these realities in a more realistic way than offering wholesale (i.e. solar plant) rates to cogeneration providers, they're likely to see a lot of pressure for cities and especially smaller towns taking over last-mile electrical distribution to get the same effect.

This last is not completely hypothetical; at least one Sunbelt town (mine) is moving in that direction.

Re:Plan B

[eyenot]

I think there might still be some municipalities wherein if two properties share their own independent distribution line, then the power supplied by that distribution has to be isolated from the grid entirely. So you would find two people with solar panels willing to maybe run a line between their back patios but not to the rest of their house.

Re:Plan B

[Solandri]

If utilities don't do retail metering, consumers can get similar results by pooling their loads.

If you are using the electricity at the same place the solar panels are generating it, you are by definition unaffected by this decision. You are not selling the electricity back to the grid, you are using it before it even hits the grid, and thus you are unaffected by decisions which affect how much you get for selling electricity back to the grid.

If you are selling the electricity through the grid, then you should be getting the wholesale rate. Don't think of the power utility as one company, think of it as two - one which generates electricity, and one which distributes electricity.

• The wholesale price is what the company which generates electricity gets paid to compensate for the cost to generate electricity.
• The distribution company gets a distribution price, which pays for building and maintaining the power grid.
• The retail price is wholesale + distribution (+ profit, but that's regulated in most states via a public utilities commission to a fixed percent).

If you generate your own electricity and sell it through the grid, someone still has to pay for distribution. The person who uses your electricity pays retail price. The distribution company subtracts their distribution fee. So you end up getting (retail price) - (distribution price). Which is the wholesale price. There's also the profit margin which needs to be resolved, but as I stated it's regulated in most states to a small fixed percent of the total so won't affect things much.

Expecting to get retail price for the electricity you generate is like a farmer expecting to get all the money a supermarket charges for his produce they sell. That leaves nothing to pay for transportation, distribution, and preservation costs for the food as it makes its way from the farmer to the final buyer. The only reason it ever happened with electricity is because the utilities weren't initially equipped to deal with it, and so as quick and dirty fix they just they made the meter run backwards if you were sending electricity back to the grid. Now that they have smart meters in place which can accurately tabulate electricity flowing in and out separately, it's possible to accurately pay you the wholesale rate.

Re:Plan B

[mattwarden]

I don't understand your suggestion. The pool will over-generate by a lot for peak hours (for solar generation not usage) and under-generate by a lot during off-peak. I don't see how this solves anything except for maybe AC units kicking on at different intervals.

Re:Plan B

[overshoot]

Most nontrivial electrical loads are intermittent: refrigerators, stoves, heating, air conditioning, clothes dryers, etc.

Ideally a homeowner would provision to meet his average load during peak load times, but due to the fact that his short-term peak is greater than the average, he would be paying retail for the peaks and getting wholesale for the valleys.

That's an opportunity for arbitrage: pool the loads of a neighborhood and the peaks and valleys get smaller relative to the average, thus saving money.

Re:Plan B

[mattwarden]

Refrigerators and stoves are not a problem. Air conditioning and heat is a problem. Your solution would need to time share when AC/heat could kick on within pool participants. And it only matters for about 4 hours each day when solar generation is large enough, unless you use a battery or use the grid as a battery.

This might come back to bite the utilities

[markus]

The more the utilities push towards charging decentralized solar, the more it becomes attractive to get battery banks and to completely go off the grid. Technology isn't quite there yet. Batteries are still too expensive, capacities are too low, and they need replacement too frequently. But the trend is definitely in the right direction. In a few years, it'll make sense for many current home owners to install batteries and disconnect from the grid altogether.

Why would you want to pay a monthly interconnection-fee, if you don't really need the grid and if you can't sell excess energy.

Re:This might come back to bite the utilities

[MrKrillls]

Not only will it come back to bite utilities, but as energy costs rise, it will come back to bite short sighted utility commissions, politicians with their heads in the sand about energy and carbon and climate, and phony "news" sources proclaiming same too. too.

Re:This might come back to bite the utilities

[Anonymous Coward]

Tesla is already working on it with the Tesla Powerwall which is too expensive currently but once production ramps up and the economies of scale kick in, it might cut it down a lot.

I know if I ever got solar power, among the first things I would be pitching in to buy would be enough battery power to last a few days off them entirely so I could charge them and remain off the grid 100% from that point on. So I could go off the solar and when the weather got bad, I could go off the battery entirely even if the solar wasn't able to recharge them for a bit.

Re:This might come back to bite the utilities

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the risk that something will go wrong and leave you without power for a month is unacceptably high ?.

Being on-grid effectively insures against that risk for MOST consumers - being on a spur line 20k's from any other consumer, and well yes, you may as well go off-grid.

Re:This might come back to bite the utilities

[Anonymous Coward]

Nonsense. You'd have MUCH bigger problems to worry about than not having power for a month if the sun went out.

Re:This might come back to bite the utilities

[mattwarden]

You are right in direction but I think off in magnitude. Battery systems are getting better but we have s long long way to go before people can operate their normal lives off grid at a price per kWh at or below the utility company. And it is inevitable but I think we are 20+ years out.

Re:This might come back to bite the utilities

[Anonymous Coward]

ha ha ha ha, please stop, it hurts.

powerwall won't last a day never mind 2 or more.

and they only output 2kw, so good luck running anything that needs power. a single kettle is about the limit!!!

Forbes continues to not like Ablock

[Anonymous Coward]

And I continue to refuse to turn it off.

I guess we could have icons to show what articles links to adblock unfriendly sites.. would be a time saver as we could just move on to the next article.

Re:Forbes continues to not like Ablock

[overshoot]

OT (but yeah, it doesn't matter if you block or not -- they still won't serve me. Maybe because their malware doesn't run on Linux.)

That's NOT the real question.

[mpoulton]

The "real question" is not whether net metering is good or bad. Of course it's good, and it will continue to become more common as solar (and even wind) micro-generation technology improves. It will get an even bigger boost if EV technology with bidirectional charging and large storage batteries become more popular, as Tesla would like them to. The dispute here isn't over net metering itself. The issue is all about the MONEY of net metering. Who pays what, and how? Before net metering, utility rates were set based on a fixed connection fee to pay for certain fixed infrastructure costs, plus an energy charge per kWh to gover generation costs. For large commercial users, the fixed fee was set as a "demand charge" based on peak consumption (since that determines how hefty the grid needs to be to serve the customer). For residential users, the demand charge is usually just a flat fee per month for the connection. In practice the demand/connection fee is not enough to actually cover the fixed costs of the system, and a lot of that expense is rolled into the energy rates. That doesn't matter in a world without net metering - it makes no difference to the utility whether they get their money per kWh or per month, as long as they get the money. Net metering screws this all up. A net-metered user may have zero net consumption in a month, while still requiring the same infrastructure as a user without net metering. As a result, the demand or connection charge needs to be greatly increased to make up for the lost kWh revenue.

The problem is that the adjustment of rates to accommodate net metering has been a hugely political process with every party trying to screw everyone else to the max. Solar companies want their customers to see huge financial benefits to justify their prices, so they lobby for net metering rates that strongly favor their customers: low monthly charges (ideally the same as for non-net-metered customers), with reimbursement for net metered power at the full retail rate (i.e. 1kWh sold back to the power company nets you the same money you would pay to buy the 1kWh from the power company). This makes solar look like a great investment. The problem is that is really does screw the power company. Since utilities are typically government-controlled monopolies, that means it actually screws the non-solar customers who will all be forced to pay for the net-meter-users' share of infrastructure. Not quite fair. On the other hand, though, we have utility companies trying to get the solar power as cheaply as possible while still collecting full reimbursement for infrastructure costs. They want to treat net-metered customers like power plants: charge them for all the infrastructure costs, and only buy their power at "wholesale" rates that are far less than what the consumer pays for power going the other direction on the same wires. This is also not fair, and screws the people who want to invest in solar by artificially depressing the value of their power. The solution must lie somewhere in-between. Utility rates and their basic method of allocating them will need to change, and it will take honest politicians not bought off by solar companies or utilities to reach a compromise that is fair for everyone. Fat chance of that happening any time soon.

Re:That's NOT the real question.

[Noah Haders]

In practice the demand/connection fee is not enough to actually cover the fixed costs of the system, and a lot of that expense is rolled into the energy rates.

In CA the electron prices are straight pass thru from the powerplants.

Re: That's NOT the real question.

[Anonymous Coward]

"A net-metered user may have zero net consumption in a month, while still requiring the same infrastructure as a user without net metering"
and here's the funny part.
if the official sanctioned source of electricity has a tank of oil that is certfied to last one month and then if we add sooar net-metered users then the same oil tank might last ... two months.

Re:That's NOT the real question.

[Teancum]

> In CA the electron prices are straight pass thru from the powerplants.

The first time I read that, I thought you said "In CA, the election prices area straight pass thru..."

as if somehow government bribery has taken on a whole new level of weirdness. I have no doubt that lobbying money from energy producers plays a huge role in this too.

how is this even hard?

[eyenot]

You should receive compensation from the power company when you manage to generate surplus to return to the grid, and the value should be equal to the cost of power *at that time*.

All of this is a thinly veiled attempt to use solar-power customers as beasts of burden to turn a profit. Seeing that the most vocal support comes in the form of this convoluted, politicized argument about transfer of wealth to the wealthy, I don't doubt at all that this mentality was planted in the local communities by agents of the power companies in question.

I've seen the politics of electric power generation go sour time and time again. In Florida back in the late 90's, some people were told that they would not receive money nor even company credit for their power generation, but instead would receive "eco-vouchers" that ostensibly could be used at participating retailers and services instead of cash. One use of the eco-vouchers was to purchase football stadium tickets. I think there was a proposal to make them exchangeable on the tollways (which Florida is famous for making into a side-industry). This is in a region where it's regular practice for power companies to charge a minimum rate ($200 per month in Lake Worth, FL) no matter how little power the customer uses.

You simply can't trust the energy companies, and we've seen this again, and again, and again.

There's not really enough excess / spare resource left in the world for yet another fresh generation of Americans to be taught the same lesson, especially when things have been so blitzkrieged these last two decades that the previous generation has barely been able to keep the lesson intact.

There's no time left for "let's wait and see".

If there's anything decisive that can be done on behalf of the consumers (who now, in their new role, are producers as well) then it needs to be done now.

Re:how is this even hard?

[UnknownSoldier]

Simple answer:

Greed destroys common sense (along with respect and fairness.)

Something is always up.

[eyenot]

I see net metering as a purposefully over-complicated scheme with a few minor selling points but an all-too-familiar drawback: the added complication allows for all kinds of back-and-forth fenagling, kow-towing, and piles upon piles of legalese to build up. After awhile it will get just as bad as financial securities, savings and loans, and the real estate market in terms of the various ways sneaky language is slipped into the rule set of various regulatory systems interconnected in the network of information that comprises the entire scheme, allowing sudden and surprising financial dambreaks that leave entire regions drained dry -- and all along it will be sold in the form of various political movements "for the common good". In light of how things are already going this way all because of the introduction of the net metering scheme, I say scrap the growing chimera before it emerges from the womb as a defense budget addendum.

Re:Something is always up.

[Firethorn]

I see net metering as a purposefully over-complicated scheme with a few minor selling points but an all-too-familiar drawback:

If you see net metering as 'over-complicated', I'd hate to think of what you think of 'carbon trading' schemes.

At least to the Consumer, net metering is actually about the most simple system.
Net metering:
Uses: 1000 kWh. Generated 800 kWh. Electric Bill: 200 kWh@12 cents each.
Nevada rough example:
Used:1000 kWh.
Generated: 800kWh.
Internally used: 500 kWh
Sold: 300 kWh @ 6 cents (example amount)
Bought: 500 kWh @ 12 cents

That being said, given current generation profiles, solar panels aren't displacing 'wholesale' electricity yet, they're displacing electricity that's more expensive than that, so paying wholesale would be a large profit to the company, while net makes 'net zero' installs economical for solar installers.

Under Nevada's scheme, I'd probably survey my house and figure out when I use the least electricity and size my solar install to that so I sell as little solar as possible.

Re:Something is always up.

[thinkwaitfast]

piles upon piles of legalese to build up

When I installed my solar, I looked at what sort of incentives that I could get. It would have paid a good chunk of it but after seeing all of the 'legalese ' and who owned what, I decided to go it alone.

Now a few years later, my system is 100% paid off (ie, already paid for itself), all mine, making free electricity and don't have to bother with any companies. And since I built up a good base system, I can add quite a few more panels without any additional cost. In the years since I set up my system, the price of solar panels have fallen to a less than one year payback time

Re:Something is always up.

[Ken D]

Net metering, as someone else said, is the simplest scheme.

With 'old-fashioned' meters, you get net metering for free. The spinners spin forward when you use electricity and they spin backwards when you generate electricity, leaving the meter to show you the net amount of power you used. simple.

To do other than this requires the fancy smart meters that can tell whether or not you are consuming or generating electricity, and can meter them separately.

Re:Something is always up.

[sjames]

It would also be worth looking at shifting demand. Set things up to run the dishwasher etc during peak solar production. Pre-cool the house and the fridge. Then size based on that.

Re:Something is always up.

[Firethorn]

A good point. A relatively small amount of battery, just to charge at minimum demand/max production points, might also make sense.

Re:Something is always up.

[Teancum]

How have the older components in your system held up over the years? The largest concern I've had so far with installing a solar power system at my house is a worry that by the time I get a payback from installing the system, the equipment will be ready for replacement.

Then again, I live in a colder climate city with not so much sunshine so there are a few other variables including the need to have a system that can handle temperature extremes from 40 C to - 40 C along with snow and ice removal issues too. It is still something I'm considering.

Re:Something is always up.

[mattwarden]

I'm sorry but I have a really hard time believing your system has paid for itself in a few years. What kind of system is this? And what is your secret?

Re:Something is always up.

[mattwarden]

On-paper life of inverters is 10-12 years. That's the weak point when it comes to maintenance, unless you have hail or wind damage or some other accident

Re:Something is always up.

[sjames]

Yes. It makes sense to at least leave room to add batteries later once you have measurements to see how much they can capture.

It raises the question

[Anonymous Coward]

It does not beg the question; that means something else.

subsidies

[arobatino]

Someone reading the WSJ editorial might get the impression that fossil fuel subsidies don't exist. Sure, get rid of the subsidies. ALL of them.

Re:subsidies

[Solandri]

Getting rid of all subsidies would have little to no impact on fossil fuel costs, while it would be devastating for renewables. Fossil fuel subsidies are large only because a huge amount of fossil fuels are burned compared to other sources. On a per kWh basis, the subsidy for renewables is 25x that for fossil fuels. The subsidy for solar is 1600x that for fossil fuels.

Time to buy some batteries

[h33t l4x0r]

There's a simple solution, just use all the power you generate.

Re:Time to buy some batteries

[thinkwaitfast]

It's possible, but will require a hundred kwh of batteries to power your AC though the night during monsoon season in AZ

Re:Time to buy some batteries

[h33t l4x0r]

I'm not saying don't use the grid, I'm saying don't sell to it. If the proposal is, I sell them something for 3 cents and then buy it back from them 6 hours later for 11 cents, then no thanks, I'll just hold onto it. You only need enough batteries for your daytime surplus.

Re:Time to buy some batteries

[mattwarden]

You are overlooking a number of things. What you are saying is true only if you burn your excess every night. For about 4 months, I am selling a ton to the grid because it's winter and my heat and water heater are propane. I would need a ton of batteries to store all of that for the summer when I go net buy (by a lot)

Also systems are not set up like you imply. Technically it is possible to configure charge controllers to only charge with power from your panels, but I don't know anyone with a grid tied system who does this. The batteries are kept charged with power, and that power comes from the PV if it's generating enough or the grid if the PV isn't

Th battery life is measured in cycles. Your plan cycles the battery every day. Effectively you will be treating your batteries like you are completely off grid. This is going to be expensive and I don't know why you wouldn't just sell the excess, even if you think the rate is unfair, unless it's just out of principle

What do they mean by regressive?

[damn_registrars]

I can't view the whole article (paywalled) so I'm curious to know the meaning of the summary quote:

regressive political income redistribution in support of a putatively progressive cause.

In Americans politics, "progressive" and "regressive" are usually taken as antonyms, hence the quote would suggest that the supposed income redistribution was going to the wealthy. However, progressive taxation is understood to mean a (purely hypothetical state in this country) taxation system where the effective rate on the wealthiest people is highest and the rate on the poorest is lowest. These seem to be opposing ideas - so which was is the article claiming the income redistribution was going? There are endless examples of the government sponsoring redistribution of money towards the wealthy in the form of various government tax cuts and subsidies, so it would seem that is the most likely case here.

Re:What do they mean by regressive?

[arobatino]

You can view WSJ articles (up to 5 per day) by googling the title ("Nevada's Solar Flare" in this case) and clicking on the WSJ link. It's also possible to bypass the paywall permanently.

Re:What do they mean by regressive?

[Anonymous Coward]

That quote is very simple to interpret: It means you should be playing bullshit bingo instead of taking the person saying it seriously.

Re:What do they mean by regressive?

[dywolf]

just typical WSJ editorial word salad.

Re:What do they mean by regressive?

[110010001000]

It was regressive. The rich people bought solar panels which were subsidized by the government. The poor pay taxes which subsidize the rich buying the panels. A regressive tax is one that taxes the poorer people more than the richer people. The cause was progressive because it was supported by "progressive" people: rich, typically white people. Thats the argument anyway.

Re:What do they mean by regressive?

[Anonymous Coward]

My interpretation is that the "putative progressive cause" is the growth of solar power as a fraction of total power production. The method of achieving this has been a subsidy that essentially redistributes wealth towards the wealthy, which is at odds with the reasoning behind progressive taxation (which happens to share a name with and is sometimes supported by the progressive movement)

Depends on how you measure "*their" needs."

[overshoot]

The folks who sized solar generation to meet *their* needs aren't harmed by this change.

If you mean "minimum load" then, yes, they're ahead because they never send any to the grid in the first place. If you men "their average load," not so -- they're paying for the extra KW when the air conditioning kicks on and getting back a fraction when the AC is off.So in the course of an hour, they're behind by quite a bit.

Re:Depends on how you measure "*their" needs."

[Mr D from 63]

If you mean "minimum load" then, yes, they're ahead because they never send any to the grid in the first place. If you men "their average load," not so -- they're paying for the extra KW when the air conditioning kicks on and getting back a fraction when the AC is off.So in the course of an hour, they're behind by quite a bit.

They are way ahead of where they'd be if they had to use batteries to store their power instead of depending on the grid, which make the whole approach viable to start with.

thank jeezbus

[Anonymous Coward]

that will stop all the evil liberals in Vegas stealing all the suns energy!!

You need Just enough.

[Anonymous Coward]

To run the AC and Heater. With battery at night also.
Dont worry to sell excess.

Cut from the grid entirely If you can afford to.

Fuck the greedy conglomerates.

Citation Needed

[Anonymous Coward]

I CONSTANTLY see references such as yours to "fossil fuel subsidies". But no one ever says what they are for, how much, provides links, nothing.

Can you point me to a resource that clearly lays out what subsidies it is that you are referring to?

Re:Citation Needed

[arobatino]

Energy subsidies (discusses both fossil and renewable)

Re:Citation Needed

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the link. I'm still reading up on the references, but one interesting bit jumped out at me....

In 2013 U.S. renewable energy subsidy dollars were more than double that of fossil fuel subsidy dollars. Considering the much smaller scale of renewables, their subsidies seem disproportionately high.

I agree with your first post, they should get rid of all of the subsidies.

Re:Citation Needed

[Anonymous Coward]

In 2013 U.S. renewable energy subsidy dollars were more than double that of fossil fuel subsidy dollars. Considering the much smaller scale of renewables, their subsidies seem disproportionately high.

Based on what?

That line doesn't jump out at me, and the mentions of 2013 are not clearly indicating your claim. OTOH, I can see how the introductory paragraphs are quite a bit confusing, referring to OECD on one hand, globally on another.

You'll need to be more specific. Especially since so many numbers are conflicted. For example, the health costs of burning coal, if not taxed directly to coal, is that a subsidy? What about the rates of coal leases? How much of a subsidy is the Nuclear Industry's cost-limit cap on litigation?

Re:Citation Needed

[Anonymous Coward]

Subsidy Comparison

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/3/21/1372244/-New-data-on-energy-subsidies-from-EIA

Re:Citation Needed

[Anonymous Coward]

That strongly depends on what you calculate.
Do you calculate all the money spent on hospitals that need to treat all the people getting health issues due to fossil fuels as a subsidy or not?
All the houses and windows getting more dirty because of burning fuels, is every time a window is cleaned a partial subsidy of fossil?
Not even going into the climate thing.
I still agree on the subsidy. But I also think that the German greens were not as crazy as they sounded to most when they said that realistically fossil fuels need to be taxed to around $3/l to properly represent what they actual cost. Things being priced at their real cost is kind of a requirement for markets to work, but it's one that has been broken for decades for fossil fuels.

Re:Citation Needed

[TheRealHocusLocus]

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

Re:Citation Needed

[dywolf]

not all subsidies are cash in kind.
most renewable subsidies are still in the upfront costs area because they dont have anywhere near the existing buildout that the fossil fuels industry has.

most oil/gas/goal subsidies at this point are in the form of tax credits and breaks.

Re:Citation Needed

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Well, the rest of your post aside, that alone is silly.

Human beings don't run 24/7, human beings don't want to run 24/7, and when it comes down to it, there's good evidence that we do like to sleep in a somewhat regular pattern that is impacted by season events.

Hate to have to tell you this, but demand is not fixed and constant, but follows certain predictable peaks. Even if human activity was somehow shoehorned into your plan though, we have a problem.

Lots of things vary considerably as to when they're done, and how much work is involved, and how much of energy is required. We don't need the same amount of cooling at night, we don't need to process certain agricultural products year round, and so on and so forth.

I get it, you put something in bold, but that doesn't make it less a pile of horseshit.

Re:Citation Needed

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course Nuclear power does not pay for its own catastrophe insurance.
That is provided as a hidden subsidy from the state. I live in Japan, and I'm
paying the cost of Fukushima in taxes. It bankrupted the power company and
the government is now picking up the entire bill, hundreds of billions of dollars,
and they dont even know the final cost.

No subsidies?? OK, no nuclear stations must ever be constructed without 100%
private catastrophe insurance. And the companies providing said insurance would
be able to demonstrate they have the assets to pay for any disaster. There will not
be any more built if this happened, which is the whole point...

Ironically, in Japan, the real reason we dont need nuclear power is because there is
a huge amount of unutilized geothermal. Unused because of politics, not technology.

Re:Citation Needed

[TheRealHocusLocus]

Of course Nuclear power does not pay for its own catastrophe insurance. That is provided as a hidden subsidy from the state. I live in Japan, and I'm paying the cost of Fukushima in taxes. It bankrupted the power company and the government is now picking up the entire bill, hundreds of billions of dollars, and they dont even know the final cost.

Japan has made mistakes along with any other developed country, but choosing to build out nuclear power was not a mistake. From 1973 onwards these nuclear plants grew to produce ~30% of Japan's electricity overall, and nuclear power made its rapid growth of industry possible. Japan is resource-poor and must import all of its oil and most of its coal. If it were not for nuclear energy you would not see the thriving metropolis today where Japanese-owned businesses manufacture and export. Japan would have been more a people-resource country and foreign corporations would have set up there, owning everything, compensating for the expense of powering those factories in part by granting low wages. Energy IS wealth, and every bit of nuclear energy Japan has produced, along with the energy that did not have to be expended to purchase and import fuel, has made every nuclear plant more precious even than those in the United States. We in the states have always had enough coal whether we use it or not, and coal is what has built our country. Japan has been built (in major part) by nuclear energy. I salute you!

But Japan made a few mistakes with Fukushima. Tragically silly mistakes like putting generators in the basement without water-tight doors, and failing to open the louvers to vent the hydrogen from the buildings which was barely radioactive and would not have harmed anyone.

But the biggest mistake Japan made was giving in to fear and hysteria, and shutting down all nuclear plants in 2012, as if decades of 'free' energy, accident-free operation and prosperity suddenly meant absolutely nothing, and as if Japan's entire nuclear fleet was being and had always been operated by idiots. I think you (collectively) misjudged their character and professional ability and owe them all an apology. In the United States we investigated the causes of Three Mile Island and took steps to ensure scenarios like that would not happen again, but we did not hysterically shut them all down in the following months, though some people wanted to do that. We did not listen to those people, though the US did enter a 'dark age' of madness as nuclear technology has been sidelined,and the delusion that wind and solar could power the world has taken hold. Meanwhile our nuclear plants have been running. Time (and an incredible amount of safe, clean energy) has shown that it was the correct decision. It wasn't even much of a gamble, nuclear energy had already shown itself to be beneficial and well managed.

Japan continues to pay for that mistake, importing around ¥3.8-4 trillion ($40 billion) in fuel to make up for the idle nuclear plants in addition to the amount being spent to clean up and the not so small amounts being directly paid to evacuees of Fukushima Prefecture. Time alone and a great deal of post-accident analysis will tell whether those evacuations were really necessary, and whether compensating 'radiation refugees' to an incredibly greater extent than 'tsunami refugees' was a wise decision. I'm not trying to be condescending in pointing these things out, it's just that they are crucial in coming to grips with the tragedy. I believe Japan has acted in hysteria and the risks of nuclear energy have been grossly overstated by the press. It has been a time of madness! That is true in Japan as it is in the United States.

Please check out the writings of Leslie Corrice at Hiroshima Syndrome . I would have chosen a different name for the site but no matter, the man is a brilliant writ

Re:Citation Needed

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not trying to be condescending in pointing these things out, it's just that they are crucial in coming to grips with the tragedy.

If you need to come to grips with the tragedy, you need to ask one question you haven't.

Cui bono?

Somebody spent years downplaying the risks of their decision, and blinding themselves to rather obvious concerns, and if there wasn't a gain from it, I'd be surprised.

Similarly, somebody is raking in some cash from these more recent actions.

Because handling nuclear power safely? You will have eyes on you, and they won't let you cheap out.

It's not the environmentalists who pad their wallets. It's not the Greens. It's somebody else.

Because when someone pays, somebody else can easily gain.

You need to focus your ire in the right place.

The same applies to the US. The all-powerful liberals and their environmental lobby? Have to fight tooth and nail for anything, yet somehow they're keeping this wondrous source of cheap, clean power down?

Maybe those claims when the "power could be too cheap to measure" conceal the truth.

It's not hysteria you have to worry about. Hysteria is fear. Fear is understandable. Greed, now, greed is a sin.

It's the fees, not just the rates

[Fencepost]

The two sets of changes are a gradual drop in per-KwH from 11 cents to 2.6 cents along with an increase in the charge for connecting to the grid, going from $12.75/month to $38.51/month.

If either one of those wasn't changing or was changing less then it might be feasible to at least break even; I suspect that the combination is actually designed to ensure that it costs more to feed power to the grid than you can possibly get back financially unless you have a huge (and thus expensive) solar array.

The biggest question now for me would be whether that $38.51/month charge applies even if you're set up to never feed energy back to the grid - if so, then this was absolutely set up to screw anyone with solar. If you can have solar for your own use (e.g. to cover your own AC/heating during the day) and just use the grid as backup, then it may still be feasible - particularly if cost-effective energy storage options become available. Depending on how things were set up, those options might not even need to be very efficient - heating or cooling of thermal masses for overnight temperature control for example.

Or, if you have electricity that you'll have to pay to send to the grid then it's effectively free to use it on other things. How much do Bitcoin mining rigs cost? Or incandescent-lit signs that say "F*ck The PUC"?

Re:It's the fees, not just the rates

[ShooterNeo]

2.6 cents, eh. That is less than the generators who make the power are getting paid, is it not?

Plow The Grid Under

[JimSadler]

The best idea is to cut the cord and make all of your won power. Solar, wind, as well as the occasional generator feeding a decent battery bank can provide power for cautious users. What we expect from power companies is total commitment to getting away from burning fossil fuels.

Re:Plow The Grid Under

[Anonymous Coward]

You can, but is just quite a bit more expensive than using the grid, so it is only a workable solution for ideological people with enough money to do it. That isn't going to be that big of a percentage of the population.

Have you ever looked at an electric bill for a sol

[hmbJeff]

Even if you have solar, and even if you use zero net KWH of energy, your bill is still full of a bunch of different charges that you cannot avoid. These various fixed and distribution-based charges are what pay for the grid infrastructure. Solar only lets you avoid (some of) the supply charges, I.e. the charges for the actual KWH. I have several neighbors with efficient homes and solar arrays who generate all their net energy and even send extra energy back to the grid, but they still have to pay nearly $17 per month in these unavoidable fees. That's fair--they pay for the benefits of having the grid to buy from and sell to as needed. But please can you shills for the power company lobby stop pretending that solar folks are not paying their share of grid expenses.

Ideological sleight of hand.

[aussersterne]

The market is not a natural entity, it exists because government creates and enforces the conditions to enable it to exist.

Picking a market is *still* the government picking winners and losers. It is picking whomever does well when the market does well under the market conditions that the government preserves.

Governments pick. That's what they do. What's why they were created in the first place. The only question is who gets picked.

Sabatoge

[transami]

This is done on purpose. It's nothing new. They give a steep subsidy to get the players all excited and people buying in and then they crash the subsidies all at once. It tanks the market and turns people off for decades to come.

Solution to the net-metering "problem"

[MisplacedLonghorn]

I am not an expert on the technical details involved, but a solution seems plain enough. Allow those of us who generate enough electricity for our own needs to get off the grid completely. Fine, you don't want to pay me for my "free power" you didn't have to build power plants to provide, so let me opt out. I'll install a bank of Tesla backup batteries in my garage and take my chances.

Re:Solution to the net-metering "problem"

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, just call the electric company and cancel your service? Electricity is opt-in, at lease in most places. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-grid

Re:Solution to the net-metering "problem"

[fustakrakich]

Well, the idea of being hooked up to a 'grid', especially a global one, is that excess production can be used by somebody.

Re: Solution to the net-metering "problem"

[MisplacedLonghorn]

Due to state law my solar is wired into the grid and I cannot disconnect them.

Re: Solution to the net-metering "problem"

[MisplacedLonghorn]

Totally cool with that if they are willing to make it cost effective.

Re: Solution to the net-metering "problem"

[fustakrakich]

It's an ancient idea..

Cost effectiveness is totally dependent on the observer.

Re: Solution to the net-metering "problem"

[PPH]

Due to state law

Isn't that due to the contract you entered into for net metering and installation subsidies? And now that the utility has reneged on their part, can't you get out of yours?

Re: Solution to the net-metering "problem"

[MisplacedLonghorn]

Just to be clear, Austin Energy has not reneged on anything. I simply want to be able to opt-out if/when the economics don't make sense.

Re: Solution to the net-metering "problem"

[PPH]

I guess I'd have to see the language of the actual law that obliges you to install PV panels and connect them to the grid with no compensation or agreement for payment at certain rates.

GOOD

[Anonymous Coward]

The odds were stacked in SolaShitty's favor anyways. It was a scam like Windows and you were just leasing it.

It's not wholesale though

[Anonymous Coward]

Because spot prices are higher, and THAT isn't being paid, is it. And when they buy, it's not wholesale prices (as per commercial buyer), is it.

This is just a hoax to prop up the well connected power companies against competition.

Wholesale price is fine. If it is spot price

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

I think it is fair to pay the solar customers wholesale price when they feed the grid, But it should be wholesale price in the spot market at the time. Most solar customers generate excess energy at the peak summer heat, that is exactly the time the spot electricity price spikes, These solar panels are reducing the peak load of the utilities and the need to buy high priced electricity in the spot market.

So if the utilities want wholesale price they should pay spot market price. Electronics is cheap, we can create a complete log of when and how much the solar panels fed the grid.

power circuit, network, etc...

[Firethorn]

Uh... You might want to explain what you're talking about more, because it is a power circuit, and I'm not sure what you mean by an 'out and back again' distribution network.

Transformers work both ways, but there's other regulatory equipment that needs to be designed with two-way flow in mind in order to work correctly, and previously that wasn't a design requirement. It required solar reaching 30% to start having that problem show up though, and from what I've read, the upgrades to enable bidirectional flow aren't actually that expensive - the engineering to make sure you got everything was more work than what actually needed changing.

Saying they brought that down upon themselves, considering the age of such systems, would be like saying home builders back in the '60s were negligent in not running conduit for data lines.

Which wholesale price?

[Anonymous Coward]

Depending upon the season the whole sale price of electricity can fluctuate wildly. It can sometimes be over $10/kwh. Are they suggesting that solar homeowners will get the fluctuating wholesale price for their exported power? No, no they are not. They will only get the lowest wholesale price. (Mostly about 4c/kwh where I am)

Just goes to show. . .

[smooth wombat]

the Republican governor of Nevada doesn't want his citizens to have good paying jobs. Keep 'em down with menial jobs at the casinos.

Net metering is no longer necessary

[fustakrakich]

Or soon it will be. Electricity is now too easy to produce. There is no longer a need to meter it. A flat infrastructure fee will work as well as anything, or something based on the ratio of consumption to production.

Sure, s/he...

[Bartles]

"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."

...paid 22k, but how much did s/he recieve in tax credits, grants, and rebates?

PV is a net benefit to the grid

[rhubarb42]

The review, from the Environment America Research and Policy Center, looked at 11 previous studies of net metering’s effects on both the grid and on society as a whole, all of which found that owners of grid-connected solar arrays offered net benefits to the electricity system, including reduced environmental compliance costs, reduced costs in capital investments, and in avoided energy costs. In particular, the studies determined the median value of solar power as being “nearly 17 cents per unit,” which contrasts with the US average retail electricity rate of about 12 cents per kWh, which means that not only has solar net metering not been harmful to markets, but that utilities have actually been underpaying for the use of this solar electricity. “The solar studies reviewed in this report confirm that huge amounts of solar have already been developed without paying the full value that solar brings. Not only does that mean that solar customers have likely been subsidizing non-solar customers and the utility, but that over the long term, continued development of solar promises downward pressure on electric rates for all.” – Karl Rábago, Executive Director of the Pace Energy and Climate Center In addition to the more obvious solar benefits, such as avoided energy costs and reduced capital investment costs, the review also pointed to distributed solar as being important in grid resiliency and in helping to stabilize electricity prices by mitigating some of the fluctuation in fossil fuel prices, thereby reducing financial risks and saving money for all grid users. The review also makes a great case for the increased and widened adoption of net metering policies in order to keep up the momentum of solar growth in the US. “Net metering is a critical tool to ensure fair compensation for owners of solar energy systems and to continue to fuel the growth of solar energy. Public officials should support and strengthen net metering as sound public policy to stimulate private investment and job growth, and to encourage utilities to diversify and strengthen the grid.” – Shining Rewards The document suggests that states should “lift arbitrary caps” on net metering in fast-growing solar markets, should include environmental and societal benefits when evaluating the benefits and costs of net metering programs, “consider the simplicity of net metering” when looking at programs that will compensate customers for their solar production, and “ensure that all people can take advantage of net metering policies” with virtual net metering programs for homes that aren’t able to install solar. “While some utilities claim they’re subsidizing solar panel owners, our report shows the opposite is probably true. If anything, utilities should be paying people who go solar more, not less.” – Rob Sargent, co-author of the report, and senior program director at Environment America

Stop it

[paiute]

That is not 'begging the question'

Re:Stop it

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes it is. You stop it.

Retry: Re:Why retail?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

(Stupid Lenovo touchpad just hit "submit" before I was done. Fortunately, it did it when the first part of the post was pretty clean. Reposing with the rest - unless it does it again B-b )

Why should you be paid retail for generation? That totally ignores the part the grid takes in handling your energy...

You also pay a monthly "be connected to the grid" fee, which pays your share of the ongoing expenses of maintaining the grid, along with a one-shot "get connected to the grid" fee, often amounting to thousands of dollars, which literally pays for installing the infrastructure - poles, drop transformer, etc - to bring the grid to you.

(When the contractor building my rural retirement house connected it to the grid, without my orders, I paid many thousands - money I'd intended for a solar system. Part of that was half the price of the existing transformer that I now shared with my next-door neighbor, who had paid the whole price and was now rebated half of it.)

Utilities are very good at dividing the service into appropriate chunks and billing you reasonably fairly for what you actually use. The bulk of the background costs are already covered (with the standard profit margin), so sellers to the grid are not so much the parasites you might think.

Net metering was a cheap hack - based on the common, low-end, pre-"smart" mechanical meters, which ran equally well forward and backward. It doesn't account for the losses in transmission - but (as was mentioned elsewhere) in the case of distributed generation the power doesn't travel very far, so the losses are far lower than those for power shipped from major power plants to widely distributed residences (and since much of those losses are proportional to the square of the currents, local generation reduces them more than in proportion). Billing a rate that doesn't vary by time of day is ALSO a hack based on those meters: Solar and wind tend to produce surplus power when it's expensive and have a shortage when it's cheap, so net metering (when few enough are using it to not substantially affect grid management) is actually a good deal for the power companies.

Having said that: With arbitrarily capable smart meters available a truly fair pricing scheme would involve some offset between the "buy" and "sell" prices - but the "buy at wholesale" level is far too low.

Utilities, though sometimes privately owned, are generally regulated monopolies with pricing schemes imposed by governments in the interests of their citizens. Attempting to apply free market arguments to them is disingenuous. We're dealing with Fascism, not Capitalism, here.

There are no fossil fuel subsidies....

[Anonymous Coward]

except in Bernie Sanders' head. The fossil fuels industries get MANY loopholes in the tax codes, which let them keep more of their own money (like nearly every industry with enough money to buy politicians) and I am totally opposed to the "swiss cheese" tax code we currently have. It is, however, a counter-productive myth of the political left that "Big Oil" gets big taxpayer handouts and that this is some evil conspiracy against "green" energy. ALL big rich companies and industries get access to tons of tax breaks which either do not apply to the little guys, or which the little guys without staffs of accountants and lawyers cannot find and figure out how to use. Left-wing politicians know full-well that the tax codes being used by "big oil" are the same ones used by the likes of Apple, and that many on the left were involved in creating ans maintaining them, but they also know that their base voters are too dumb to notice. It's very much like political hucksters on the right who campaign against abortion in every election cycle, knowing it stirs-up a part of their base... and then every year in Washington they vote to fully fund the actual cash subsidies of Planned Parenthood. The voters are presumed too ignorant by the folks in DC in BOTH PARTIES to see and stop the deceitful use of these (and many other left- or right-leaning) "hot button" issues.

A subsidy is when government gives somebody someone else's money, generally to make an inefficient and expensive thing appear to be efficient and affordable - and the "green" energy firms are awash in subisdies. Tax breaks and loopholes may well be evil and corrupt but they are only allowing a person or business to keep his or its own money. The former is a wealth transfer at gunpoint AKA "armed robbery" (just TRY resisting and see how long it takes for the feds to show up with guns...) but the latter is a reduced taking and does not involve threats or force; the difference is stark and vital, no matter that the final numbers on a balance sheet might be the same.

There are several facts that need to be faced and that both sides of the fossil fuels arguments need to face:

1. The sad truth is that none of the current generation of so-called renewables is even fractionally as practical, affordable, and efficient as fossil fuels even though all the renewables only exist because of a mountain of actual subsidies. If these things were TRULY better, they would naturally conquer the market just as the automobile replaced the horse-and-buggy without any need for a federal mandate. A truly better solution arrived and the public chose it.

2. The current scheme of taxation is completely corrupted. Congress started-off by creating a temporary 2% income tax on the "Super rich" to pay for a war... and after many decades of promising to reduce and simplify taxes, the tax code is now more pages than the Bible and 99% of it is loopholes and special rules that were inserted by politicians "on the take".... oh, and the super-rich like Apple, Google, GE, Warren Buffet, etc pay a tiny portion of their income, but millions of middle class Americans pay a significant part of their income every year. The code needs scrapping, and all loopholes, and yes subsidies, need to be eliminated to restore the efficiencies of the marketplace.

3. For many basic reasons like cost, availability, portability, scalability, etc much of the human population of the globe will be dependent upon fossil fuels for at least another century (probably much longer unless fusion can cross the always-moving "only 30 years away" line. As a result, any move to things like solar, win, biofuels, etc will NOT actually free the world from wars and other geopolitical concerns in the middle east. The US, for example, could be entirely "energy independent" and yet still have vital allies who are NOT, or even see nations who are neither allies nor enemies who are still tied to oil and whose fights over it can drag others in. Example: US foreign policy has, for decades, been affected by the fact that we have allies who are quite dependent upon Russian gas.

screw them

[bigtreeman]

Same situation down under.
Our feed in has dropped to 6c/kWh, doesn't even cover GST.
But the rouges are on selling our clean energy at 24c/kWh.
Makes the decision to install batteries a no brainer.

And for balance can we see...

[Anonymous Coward]

the similarly unbiased reports from Shell, Exxon, etc?

Daily Kos is as valid a source of truth as the ramblings of Chairman Mao. Using them as a source of info is on par with using "Russia Today" for unbiased reporting on Mr Putin.

Daily Kos articles are as convincing to anybody who is not voting for Bernie Sanders as an article by Rush Limbaugh would be to a Kos reader. People on ALL sides of politics need to learn to identify the difference between propaganda and hard news.

Intellectual sleight of hand.

[Anonymous Coward]

a PROPER marketplace with a PROPER government is NOT operated as you describe. YOU are describing the traditionally corrupted marketplace of nations with either monarchies or a permanent career class of corrupt politicians and bureaucrats.

A proper government only is involved in the marketplace to assure the soundness of the transactions. It's job is to enforce contract law, stamp-out fraud, squash involuntary transactions (mobsters forcing people to buy things), i.e. make sure the maretplace is essentially "safe" and fair. This was the role of the US federal government as established by its founders. Since the 1930s, however, the US government has insisted that its power and responsibility to make sure the trade between the states is "regular" gives it the power to pick-and-choose winners and control everything from the light bulbs you can buy to the mileage of the cars that can be sold and the rules that apply to the corn a farmer grows on his own land to feed his own family.

Given that most people in the world have been living in corrupted marketplaces with massive government interference, it's not hard to see why you made your mistake but the ubiquitous corruption should never be mistaken for the definition of what is "normal". The fact that millions of politicians, royals, and nameless government minions all over the globe insist that their proper role is to run your life and save you from yourself or from the real world......that doesn't make it so. They are all protecting their power and their careers and are continually inventing new arguments for why you should let them have more control of your life.

Re:Intellectual sleight of hand.

[aussersterne]

See what you just did there?

"a PROPER marketplace with a PROPER government is NOT..."

No, no, I have it all wrong, you say.

"government...is involved in the marketplace to assure the soundness of the transactions...enforce contract law, stamp-out fraud, squash involuntary transactions...make sure the marketplace is essentially 'safe' and fair..."

Gosh, then you restate exactly what I said. Markets exist because governments create the conditions for their existence. You list a few conditions that you believe are essentially right for markets, but these are not natural laws, they are your value statements about what makes a "good" market, presumably one likely to benefit you. Even the values have to be defined and are culturally bound. Sound transactions. Enforcement of laws. Fraud. Involuntary transactions. Safe. Fair.

These, too, are social quantities, socially defined. What do you think governing bodies do all day as they debate? They argue about what these things mean and how they ought to be encoded as policy. And however they're encoded, someone is getting their way and someone else is not.

By the time you have a market, governments (read: societies) have already picked winners.

"Safe" is not a natural quantity that can be measured. Neither is "fair." All are matters of social deliberation and social construction. All are arguments won (or lost) by someone. All are winners already picked.

Claiming that your own preferences are somehow objective and right doesn't make it so. Nature doesn't make markets. People do.

Utilities are the gamblers. Ultimately solar wins.

[lfp98]

The utilities may have won a short-term victory, but starting a war against solar is a mistake, because ultimately the utilities need solar customers more than solar customers need them. Batteries, cogeneration engines, natural-gas fuel cells - all are rapidly developing. Within 10 years in sunny states it will be quite possible and even affordable to go off-grid entirely, especially when compared to punitively high fixed fees. Then the utilities will be left with the same expensive grid to maintain on an even smaller revenue base, because solar former customers won't be paying anything at all, not even the fixed fee. Any arguments about "fairness" have to take into account the considerable environmental costs of fossil-fuel consumption, which probably already exceed the actual cost of the fuel itself. In the meantime, at least the early adopters (who in general paid much more for their systems) ought to be grandfathered. The whole point of the net metering program was to expand the market and bring down the price of solar installations. In that sense the program was a spectacular success, and the early adopters who made it possible deserve to be rewarded.

"Beg the question"

[Anonymous Coward]

does not mean what you think it does:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

A quarter of it's NEVADA workforce

[kwerle]

SolarCity has bout 16,000 employees. 550 is a quarter of it's Nevada workforce. The article itself is poorly worded.

(yes, I work for SolarCity)

power is cheap

[Anonymous Coward]

This has always been the problem with self power generation, regardless of the source. The traditional model is to prorate the costs of generating and transmitting (infrastructure) based upon the amount of electricity used. Of course infrastructure, the power lines, and generating plant, is not accounted for in net metering. If you want power at night or on cloudy-windless days then you need that community infrastructure, and you need to pay for it by some mechanism.

Many power companies break out fuel costs and infrastructure on your bill. This is a good place to start for pricing. Base the price of solar on the power company's fuel costs plus some modest percent for the solar panel infrastructure. For example I currently pay about 14 cents per KWH. Five cents of that is fuel. Is it not unreasonable for the power company to pay five cents plus a small amount (guessing a penny) for power conditioning? This leaves the rest to go to power company infrastructure.

Best deal?

[ebvwfbw]

So how do you get the best deal, don't use solar city or the others?

Hawaii's Expensive

[Firethorn]

Oh, I'm well aware of WHY electricity is so expensive in Hawaii, I just didn't want to expand and keep expanding my post. Yes, it's a special case.

I'll also note that, at least to me, 'cheap' is a relative measure, IE 'less expensive than other available options'.

'Free' would be an 'effective' measure - IE demand is low, supply is high, and the electric company pays jack.

Islanding

[Firethorn]

From some googling (e.g. I found http://www2.buildinggreen.com/... [buildinggreen.com] ) it seems that such systems do exist but they are the exception not the rule.

You are correct. However, I felt that if I mentioned that they did it by shutting down until they got a power signal again, people would have brought that up as incorrect.