This is funny and very scary too. This power provider is sitting right there for hours a day. We no longer need direct sunlight to power up. Pollution? What pollution?
Why don’t these guys just start or buy their own solar power company? They can afford it, and if it costs money for the first few years, they can afford that too.
Energy companies have two main expenses; infrastructure and power generation. Traditionally, both expenses were recouped via a per kW/hr charge to consumers. This largely worked out because everyone got their power from the energy company.
As solar started becoming more popular, and especially as solar started feeding energy back into the grid, energy companies could reduce their expenditure in power generation but still had the same infrastructure expenditures. With less kW/hrs to bill from, it started to break the economics of being an energy company.
What a lot of these bills are attempting to do is decouple infrastructure expenses from power generation expenses in a way such that everyone is paying their fair share for what they use.
My understanding, here on the west coast and correct me if I am wrong, is that if you generate excess power via solar/wind/whatever, and if you sell the excess back to the utility, the price you receive from the utility is much less than what you pay for when drawing juice from the grid. Again, correct me if I am wrong.
In the UK, there is a regulated ‘feed in tariff’ for selling power back to the grid. I haven’t done a price comparison, but I imagine it’s different to standard usage tariff - That doesn’t mean it must be unprofitable - this should all just be part of the math that one does when setting out to install local power generation.
The utility is getting juice from a customer and paying less for that juice than when the customer needs their generated juice, yes?
You are wrong. Look up “net metering.” You don’t say where on the west coast you are, but this article explains the situation in California. The way net metering works is illustrated by this example: Say you draw 1000 kWh a month from the electric company on cloudy days and during the evening and night. But during the day you generate 600 kWh more than you need and return it to the electric company. You only have to pay the electric company for 400 kWh. In essence, when you are sending electricity to the grid, your meter turns backwards.
43 states implement some form of net metering. The states vary on how they treat customers who generate more electricity than they produce in a month or year.
The net effect is that utilities are forced to buy back energy generated by their customers at the full retail price. Not even solar advocates deny that this is a subsidy to solar power. The argument is whether the benefits of this policy justify the costs.
Traditionally, costs of operating and maintaining the grid have been bundled into the per-kWh charge for electricity. With net metering, these costs are essentially being refunded to the customers who feed electricity back into the network, leaving the other customers to pay for them.
Like I said, I don’t know - I haven’t done the comparison, but maybe you’re right - either way, it’s something that the customer enters into with eyes open. If it’s not a sweet enough deal, you just don’t do it.
Frankly it doesn’t sound all that odious to me.
The utility adds cost to each kWh to cover infrastructure. They take that cost out when you sell back a kWh.
They could just charge a monthly household connection fee so you would be hooked into the grid and then drop the kWh fee accordingly and it should come out, on average, to the rate they buy it back at.
Yeah, that big electrical line coming into your house is going to have to be there no matter which direction the electricity flow.
And another problem, Maintenance. Its pretty easy for the electrical company to shut off power to say a small town by simply shutting down a substation. With all these people feeding electricity back they now need to go to each individual source to shut them down if say they want to work on a downed power line.
If they shut down that substation, each individual solar system will detect the loss of grid power and shut down.
The solar panel here makes more than we use, in total, but we still have to pay a bill. They ought to make a law that you don’t have to pay for as much as you make.
(The rate paid to us for making electricity ,naturally thats at day time , is not as high as the peak price we pay for electricity in the evening… so the evening usage eats up the credit for solar production at daytime … )
Do you have a cite for that happening? I find it hard to believe that the current amount of solar generated by individual consumers affected the profits or gross income of any electricity provider in any substantial way.
I don’t think you can justify that statement in light of the Arizona bill that was proposed.
So let’s take a couple current customers, neither of which use solar. Customer A uses electricity for lights, refrigerator, TV… (and none of the big electricity uses) and has a current bill of $30/month. Customer B is all electric with big amounts of electricity used for heating, air conditioning, water heater, stove… and is spends $250/month. So what happens when we adopt your proposal? Customer A’s bill increases to $100/month while Customer B’s bill drops to $175/month…
Some of us disagree that it is good public policy to put these massive price increases on Customer A.
The utility doesn’t store power and neither do you. There’s no big battery field at the power plant because it’s not cost efficient. Since you capture on it your solar panel during the daytime, when rates are low, and you use more of it during peak demand times at night, of course you should be paying for it.
Again, you can’t store electricity cost efficiently. All that power being collected from the solar customers is not during peak demand hours. So it is worth less, than when those same customers need more power after the sun goes down.
It has always been my understanding that peak demands were during the day, when business and air conditioning demands were the greatest. In fact, the only time I had demand pricing for electricity, rates fell after 7pm. Is that no longer true?
It wasn’t a proposal. It was a demonstration that the issue in the OP is not as offensive as it might seem.
Not to mention that without doing the math you have no idea how the bills would change and you just assumed a conclusion.
But lets say you right. Some might disagree that the price for customer A should increase, but some might say customer B shouldn’t have to subsidize customer A’s infrastructure costs.
Separating out the infrastructure and energy costs would be fair. It would hurt some people relative to what they’re paying right now, certainly, but one could argue that those people (which probably includes myself) aren’t currently paying their fair share.
Specifically targeting the customers who have low usage because they have solar installations, however, is not fair. It’s stupid, short-sighted, and malicious.