This issue isn't as clearly cut as articles like this make it out to be. There are a few competing interests: the (wealthier than average) folks that own solar panels, the utility companies, and the plants.
Solar is cutting into the margins that the plants need to be profitable. So the plants increase the base rates they charge so that they remain profitable. This increase is then paid for by everyone (not just the solar owners). But it's still a net win for the solar owners, because they're the ones saving the most when rates are highest (when it's hottest, and ACs are cranked up). So effectively, doing nothing (and letting plants increase rates) acts as a net wealth transfer to those with solar panels.
This isn't in the interest of the common good. So the utilities try to soften the costs by taxing the solar owners. But then the math for the solar owners is thrown off because they anticipated saving more/making more over the life time of the panel.
And with the proliferation of battery technology, eventually the solar owners (and increasing numbers of them) may just disconnect from the grid and then the numbers really won't work.
My off the cuff solution here is that energy providers/plants/etc. need to invest in storage capacity, or eventually the economic incentives will win out and people just won't buy energy from them in states where solar + battery works.
If you are a net producer of energy, the only calculus that makes sense (unless you want to pay for access to the grid as a form of insurance) is that you get money for providing energy back to the grid. Otherwise you just disconnect and figure it out afterward.
With renewals, decentralization of energy production, and battery proliferation we're going to see some interesting market dynamics play out here soon. We probably need a general energy market accessible to producers as small as a single person all the way up to a nuclear plant. Perhaps you should be able to log in to an energy market like you do your brokerage and buy or sell energy.
> may just disconnect from the grid and then the numbers really won't work
Which works until everybody is off the grid and then collapses.
Everybody relies on the fact that the grid is ubiquitous. Street lights, traffic lights, water pumps, etc. When the grid isn't ubiquitous, you lose all manner of things we take for granted.
We've seen this before in California. Some suburbs made a point of being in unincorporated land to avoid being associated with LA. Well, they found out really quickly that their infrastructure was horribly expensive when they had to pay for it all themselves.
In other words, the grid is part of critical infrastructure. As such, it should be a governmental function supported by taxes, rather than a product invested in by private companies.
The lack of energy storage is the issue. If the utilities could pay users to deploy the energy when they needed it there wouldn’t be an issue. The problem is solar energy peaks and there is nothing that can be done with that energy because power plants take time to bring on and off line. Natural Gas is relatively quick to bring online, but it still takes time and money.
We no longer have a renewable energy production challenge. If we wanted to we could produce more than enough energy with wind and solar energy cheaply. The problem is we don’t have good affordable energy storage solutions.
1) Infrastructure cost. It costs a fixed amount to connect someone to the always-on grid. This needs be set.
2) Consumption cost. It costs a different amount to consume produced electricity.
The problem is that the panel owners are going to get very cranky (as you see in this article) when that happens because maintaining the grid is quite a bit more expensive than the production costs and they're going to lose their cost benefit.
Panel owners aren't the only group that would get cranky about unbundling. Some non-solar consumers also reap effective subsidies from bundling costs into per-unit charges. Rural customers in low density areas would have higher bills if they paid for infrastructure explicitly. So would customers in dense areas who consume only a little electricity each month but still need the infrastructure to work around the clock. Customers who live in urban or suburban areas and consume a lot of electricity would see their bills fall. Since this latter group tends to be more affluent than the previous two groups, charging each customer proportionally to their incurred costs is also likely to be perceived as unfair.
> Solar is cutting into the margins that the plants need to be profitable.
There is more supply, the utilities should be dropping their prices and excess, high cost production drop out of the market. Ofc ourse that assumes that it is a f
free market.
> So the utilities try to soften the costs by taxing the solar owners.
Oh how noble of them to look out for the little guy. There is a small chance that they are just opportunists gauging as much money as possible out of any avenue they can. Of course it would be unheard of for a big business with a practical monopoly over a basic human necessity to do such a thing.
I mean - regressive taxes are bad. And this situation is essentially a regressive tax bundled into your power bill.
Those with less means are forced to continue buying power from utilities that are faced with shrinking customer bases, and which have high, long-term costs (Building power plants ain't cheap, and the costs to amortize the initial construction can't just be waved away because "there is more supply"...)
Does that mean utilities aren't also angling to make the most of the situation? Of course not - they are businesses.
But it does mean your black and white approach isn't really useful here - unless you're fine with poor people getting fucked. Maybe you are.
You're describing a death spiral, like has happened with car insurance in some places. As the costs on those still in the market go up and the costs of getting away from it come down, you can expect more and more people to go for the exit. Which sounds great, except it eventually leaves the few who can't get out stuck with the bill for the whole thing.
I suppose the question is what we expect to make of the electrical grid in the future and how to pay for it. If the goal is to stop having a grid, the death spiral seems like a reasonable way to get there.
I suppose that may be the case - although I don't really see much solar specced for true off-grid use.
I think the main point is that there are some negative consequences to allowing folks to opt out of what were previously shared utilities. Intentional or not - we had a form of social contract around pricing utilities, and that contract falls apart if the wealthiest can buy their way out of future payments.
That doesn't mean I agree with the way that california (and many other states) are trying to hamfist those who buy solar into subsidizing utility companies, but it does mean there's a real conversation to be had that's not as simple as "Fuck the poor - I have mine".
It's a similar conversation to the one around gas taxes. EV owners avoid paying them, but gas taxes are primarily funding road infrastructure, which is still shared by EV owners. So we had a social contract that worked, and we have to find a replacement. That's a real discussion, and not some simple black and white "They buy EV, they pay less" talk.
My black and white approach works just fine, I am more than happy to see the poor shareholders get fucked. Take away their monopoly and allow competition. It turns out it is already happening as community choice aggregators (CCAs) are all over the place and CEOs of companies with monopolies have proven worthy of their massive salaries by driving their business into bankrupcy.
There is a reason for governments to exist beyond writing and regulating the creation of monopolies for private citizens to get rich. The costs to amortize the initial construction can't just be waved away because they paid all the money out in dividends and executive bonuses. These companies raked in money in bucketloads, agressively wrote down the construction costs and still had money left over to pay fat dividends.
OP did say poor people, not poor shareholders. Those least likely to own solar panels, i.e. those with less wealth (don't own their own houses, can't afford the capital for installation) are the ones who bear the cost of higher power plant prices.
Who spoke up for those people before the shareholders stopped getting their fat dividend? Nobody. Now that the big corporations (and their shareholders) are struggling the crys from the rooftop is "wont somebobdy think of the poor people".
How about putting back some of the excess profits from the monopoly that were taken every year till now?
I understand you're a Communist, but I suggest you:
1) Look at the disaster unfolding in China with nationally regulated prices. There's brownouts and blackouts everywhere because prices don't cover coal for their 3,0000 coal-powered electrical plants. Even foreign factories are fleeing.
If there's a climate change crisis, the root cause is those 3,000 coal plants.
2) You know damn well that utilities can't float bonds for new plants or upgrades with no paying customers. Funny you didn't mention that in your silly rants, comrade.
Utility pricing is one of the most regulated things in the country.
They don't "regulate the creation" of a monopoly for something like power - it's the definition of "natural monopoly". They regulate it so hard because capitalism DOES NOT WORK for this. Texas still tries it, and we're all seeing how well their underfunded, poorly maintained utilities blow up the second you get a slight perturbance in the natural order (ooops - hope joe blow likes his 16k power bill this month!)
Also - Even if you were to buy true off-grid solar and completely avoid the grid for your home, there is literally no way you are not taking advantage of power provided by the power companies. It's in your street lights, your cell towers, your stores, your gas stations, your schools/libraries/gov buildings. It's running the pumps for your sewers, the traffic lights for your roads, the signage at your DMV. It's EVERYWHERE - And you are using it.
So do I think this particular legislation is the right way to solve it? No - probably not. But I'm not an angry child who's unable to hold a real conversation around how we structure society.
The utility company using their scale to build their own cheap utility scale solar farms and give everyone bargain energy at sunny times? Thus making microgeneration uneconomic and restoring the communal system?
This is an interesting issue because it's something I thought would happen at some point, but I just don't see how and why it would be applied to California.
Grid-tied solar has an issue because they feed energy to the grid when the sun is shining which for a lot of northern states/Canada, does not make sense because it is unrelated to when there is actually peak demand (the evenings).
In California though, a lot of energy goes to AC, and AC is most needed when the sun is shining bright so I don't understand why it would be an issue?
Folks aren't home during peak sunshine. They're home in the evening. They may turn on the AC then to cool off the house from a day of heat accumulation. Just when the solar has tapered off.
I am fortunate enought to have a south west facing roof, not fortunate enough to have sunshine. Obviously the peak solution is just to to track the sun across the sky all day - smartflower.com
> California's annual demand peaks usually occur around 3 pm to 5 pm, when solar power output is still substantial. The reason that California's annual peak tends to be earlier than the daily peak is that California's annual peak usually occurs on hot days with large air conditioning loads, which tend to run more during midday.
True, but that's a bit like turning the problem on its head, the important part is that solar panels do help during California's peak, which wouldn't be true in most other places because the peak would be happening much after 5PM.
...and the solar panels would help better if placed optimally - in the open with no residential shade trees or neighboring houses; grouped for efficient maintenance and electrical conversion; on the ground where they could be adjusted as needed for time of year.
Residential roofs are about the worst place to put a solar panel imaginable.
It's not just a matter of 'solar is good'. A rational system generates the power it needs on the grid that needs it when its needed. Solar does none of that.
And it seems obvious that a mishmash of solar panels on thousands of roofs pointed in random directions, is nowhere as efficient as a large solar farm.
I've always thought of rooftop solar as 'energy theatre'.
> And it seems obvious that a mishmash of solar panels on thousands of roofs pointed in random directions, is nowhere as efficient as a large solar farm.
I don't think that's obvious at all. Solar farms either use up expensive land, or have to be located so far away that transmission costs could be a significant percentage. Solar roofs get both land and structural support for free, thye're located much closer to where the electricity is needed, and can be engineered to double as a roof surface that you needed anyway. They also aren't "pointed in random directions": installers carefully analyze each roof to determine what sides/angles are worth putting panels on.
> A rational system generates the power it needs on the grid that needs it when its needed.
Solar fundamentally can't always generate the power when it's needed, regardless of where you put the solar panels. That said, solar does a particularly good job of powering air conditioning loads: for that solar roofs both put the power where it's needed, and when it's needed.
Transmission costs are no longer a significant percentage.
Solar roofs are not getting anything 'for free'. Its a dangerous job; perhaps now the most dangerous of all (according to insurance estimates).
Roofs aren't engineered to support industrial installations at all. And indeed the coincidental accident of construction can leave them with little or no optimum roof space.
33 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 72.2 ms ] threadSolar is cutting into the margins that the plants need to be profitable. So the plants increase the base rates they charge so that they remain profitable. This increase is then paid for by everyone (not just the solar owners). But it's still a net win for the solar owners, because they're the ones saving the most when rates are highest (when it's hottest, and ACs are cranked up). So effectively, doing nothing (and letting plants increase rates) acts as a net wealth transfer to those with solar panels.
This isn't in the interest of the common good. So the utilities try to soften the costs by taxing the solar owners. But then the math for the solar owners is thrown off because they anticipated saving more/making more over the life time of the panel.
I don't know what the right answer is.
My off the cuff solution here is that energy providers/plants/etc. need to invest in storage capacity, or eventually the economic incentives will win out and people just won't buy energy from them in states where solar + battery works.
If you are a net producer of energy, the only calculus that makes sense (unless you want to pay for access to the grid as a form of insurance) is that you get money for providing energy back to the grid. Otherwise you just disconnect and figure it out afterward.
With renewals, decentralization of energy production, and battery proliferation we're going to see some interesting market dynamics play out here soon. We probably need a general energy market accessible to producers as small as a single person all the way up to a nuclear plant. Perhaps you should be able to log in to an energy market like you do your brokerage and buy or sell energy.
Which works until everybody is off the grid and then collapses.
Everybody relies on the fact that the grid is ubiquitous. Street lights, traffic lights, water pumps, etc. When the grid isn't ubiquitous, you lose all manner of things we take for granted.
We've seen this before in California. Some suburbs made a point of being in unincorporated land to avoid being associated with LA. Well, they found out really quickly that their infrastructure was horribly expensive when they had to pay for it all themselves.
We no longer have a renewable energy production challenge. If we wanted to we could produce more than enough energy with wind and solar energy cheaply. The problem is we don’t have good affordable energy storage solutions.
You have to unbundle the two different costs:
1) Infrastructure cost. It costs a fixed amount to connect someone to the always-on grid. This needs be set.
2) Consumption cost. It costs a different amount to consume produced electricity.
The problem is that the panel owners are going to get very cranky (as you see in this article) when that happens because maintaining the grid is quite a bit more expensive than the production costs and they're going to lose their cost benefit.
There is more supply, the utilities should be dropping their prices and excess, high cost production drop out of the market. Ofc ourse that assumes that it is a f free market.
> So the utilities try to soften the costs by taxing the solar owners.
Oh how noble of them to look out for the little guy. There is a small chance that they are just opportunists gauging as much money as possible out of any avenue they can. Of course it would be unheard of for a big business with a practical monopoly over a basic human necessity to do such a thing.
Those with less means are forced to continue buying power from utilities that are faced with shrinking customer bases, and which have high, long-term costs (Building power plants ain't cheap, and the costs to amortize the initial construction can't just be waved away because "there is more supply"...)
Does that mean utilities aren't also angling to make the most of the situation? Of course not - they are businesses.
But it does mean your black and white approach isn't really useful here - unless you're fine with poor people getting fucked. Maybe you are.
I suppose the question is what we expect to make of the electrical grid in the future and how to pay for it. If the goal is to stop having a grid, the death spiral seems like a reasonable way to get there.
I think the main point is that there are some negative consequences to allowing folks to opt out of what were previously shared utilities. Intentional or not - we had a form of social contract around pricing utilities, and that contract falls apart if the wealthiest can buy their way out of future payments.
That doesn't mean I agree with the way that california (and many other states) are trying to hamfist those who buy solar into subsidizing utility companies, but it does mean there's a real conversation to be had that's not as simple as "Fuck the poor - I have mine".
It's a similar conversation to the one around gas taxes. EV owners avoid paying them, but gas taxes are primarily funding road infrastructure, which is still shared by EV owners. So we had a social contract that worked, and we have to find a replacement. That's a real discussion, and not some simple black and white "They buy EV, they pay less" talk.
There is a reason for governments to exist beyond writing and regulating the creation of monopolies for private citizens to get rich. The costs to amortize the initial construction can't just be waved away because they paid all the money out in dividends and executive bonuses. These companies raked in money in bucketloads, agressively wrote down the construction costs and still had money left over to pay fat dividends.
How about putting back some of the excess profits from the monopoly that were taken every year till now?
I understand you're a Communist, but I suggest you:
1) Look at the disaster unfolding in China with nationally regulated prices. There's brownouts and blackouts everywhere because prices don't cover coal for their 3,0000 coal-powered electrical plants. Even foreign factories are fleeing.
If there's a climate change crisis, the root cause is those 3,000 coal plants.
2) You know damn well that utilities can't float bonds for new plants or upgrades with no paying customers. Funny you didn't mention that in your silly rants, comrade.
They don't "regulate the creation" of a monopoly for something like power - it's the definition of "natural monopoly". They regulate it so hard because capitalism DOES NOT WORK for this. Texas still tries it, and we're all seeing how well their underfunded, poorly maintained utilities blow up the second you get a slight perturbance in the natural order (ooops - hope joe blow likes his 16k power bill this month!)
Also - Even if you were to buy true off-grid solar and completely avoid the grid for your home, there is literally no way you are not taking advantage of power provided by the power companies. It's in your street lights, your cell towers, your stores, your gas stations, your schools/libraries/gov buildings. It's running the pumps for your sewers, the traffic lights for your roads, the signage at your DMV. It's EVERYWHERE - And you are using it.
So do I think this particular legislation is the right way to solve it? No - probably not. But I'm not an angry child who's unable to hold a real conversation around how we structure society.
Grid-tied solar has an issue because they feed energy to the grid when the sun is shining which for a lot of northern states/Canada, does not make sense because it is unrelated to when there is actually peak demand (the evenings).
In California though, a lot of energy goes to AC, and AC is most needed when the sun is shining bright so I don't understand why it would be an issue?
They are trading peak power generation for peak usefulness.
> California's annual demand peaks usually occur around 3 pm to 5 pm, when solar power output is still substantial. The reason that California's annual peak tends to be earlier than the daily peak is that California's annual peak usually occurs on hot days with large air conditioning loads, which tend to run more during midday.
TLDR: The overall peak is between 3 and 5PM.
At 2PM your solar panels are producing about half of what they could.
Residential roofs are about the worst place to put a solar panel imaginable.
Work-from-home is certainly changing that. Not to mention stay-at-home parents, etc.
And it seems obvious that a mishmash of solar panels on thousands of roofs pointed in random directions, is nowhere as efficient as a large solar farm.
I've always thought of rooftop solar as 'energy theatre'.
I don't think that's obvious at all. Solar farms either use up expensive land, or have to be located so far away that transmission costs could be a significant percentage. Solar roofs get both land and structural support for free, thye're located much closer to where the electricity is needed, and can be engineered to double as a roof surface that you needed anyway. They also aren't "pointed in random directions": installers carefully analyze each roof to determine what sides/angles are worth putting panels on.
> A rational system generates the power it needs on the grid that needs it when its needed.
Solar fundamentally can't always generate the power when it's needed, regardless of where you put the solar panels. That said, solar does a particularly good job of powering air conditioning loads: for that solar roofs both put the power where it's needed, and when it's needed.
And it turns light into electricity instead of heat like a similar-colored roof would.
Solar roofs are not getting anything 'for free'. Its a dangerous job; perhaps now the most dangerous of all (according to insurance estimates).
Roofs aren't engineered to support industrial installations at all. And indeed the coincidental accident of construction can leave them with little or no optimum roof space.