I make the investment and then don’t get the return. Sounds about right for the criminals at PG&E and their paid for people in office. Time to turn them into a not for profit public institution.
It’s so weird that a basic public utility is totally owned by a private company. Roads and water are maintained by the government in my county. Why not power?
Water is owned by private business on California too.
Yeah, just speaking for my county. I live in a county that has water and sewage run by a public utility. Also, the county has historically had a reputation for having really fantastic water that tastes amazing.
Power, water, internet, healthcare, education, transit, there’s a lot of things that should be public utilities or at least with a convincing public option because of the clear conflict of interest between private corporations and social benefit, but aren’t, because money controls politics.
Here in europe we’re gonna have to pay the electrical company for the energy our own solar panels generate above a certain amount.
“Can we just turn them off?”
“No 😠”
That is nuts. We need to take back power from these companies.
I’m pretty sure this will break the law of thermodynamics.
One of the few laws that we haven’t sorted out a way to break!
Where in Europe is this? Europe isn’t a monolith, after all.
Here in the Netherlands we (currently) still have the “salderingsregeling” which is used to reimburse people for the solar they feed back into the grid, though that will eventually go away.Paying people for solar on the roof is a bit tricky in general, and probably not sustainable long term:
- The money to maintain the grid has to come from somewhere, and if a lot of people have a bill of zero euros or a negative amount, that system kind of breaks down.
- The grid has a maximum capacity (especially in residential neighbourhoods) so you cannot pump an infinite amount of power back into the grid. If many houses in a neighbourhood have solar the grid simply cannot cope.
In the Netherlands we now also have a “terugleveringstoeslag” where you have to pay a monthly fee based on the maximum peak power delivered to the grid over the year. At least, the bigger electrical companies already have it, the rest will soon follow. My coworker (who has way too many solar panels installed) got a letter from Essent that he had to pay 67 euros monthly starting October. So he switched companies, but he’ll have to figure out something else next time.
Because they have to give that energy away in order to keep the grid stable.
Hopefully better battery storage will make this better in the future.
The aim with it is to naturally discourage people from overproducing in such overproduction times - e.g. maybe you disable your solar panels when you predict it will happen, lessening the sudden impact on the grid.
FWIW you could buy a high capacity home battery already to eliminate it yourself (charge the battery in those times), but they’re still expensive.
What happens if you just…don’t pay the bill?
Then you get disconnected.
I thought that was the point of paying so much for solar? To be OFF the grid?
No going off-grid is a substantially larger investment than most people can afford. To be off grid you have to be able to make enough electricity even on cloudy, short winter days. That means your system must be massively oversized for your needs during most of the year. You also need adequate batteries to store energy for overnight.
Instead people get enough solar to offset some or all of the electricity they use - but on average over time. So they produce a ton during the day and then draw from grid at night.
Correct, but that also comes to the main reason why paying people for roof solar isn’t sustainable in the long term.
As solar panels keeps getting cheaper, more and more people will put solar on their roof. Since they get paid / reimbursed for feeding power back into the grid. And they don’t need a battery because they can just draw from the grid. This causes two problems:
- During the day far more power is produced than needed, since everyone has solar on the roofs
- During the night there is a lot of power draw from the grid, which cannot come from all the available roof solar.
Paying people for their roof solar is a good strategy short-term, but as more and more people have solar on the roof you cannot really keep doing that.
Yeah, this is exactly the point of the “problem” OP complains about. Charge people for overproduction, so they’re encouraged to buy a home battery and contribute in the night.
Eventually home batteries will become a standard part of such installations.
Sure, but it’s ‘free’ generation capacity, and storage works far better at grid scale
That is not the point. Solar provides most of your power and if you need additional power you can easily get additional power from the grid. That power can come from other people that have solar connected to the grid or other sources. It allows people to not have to spend huge amounts of money on batteries while providing power for themselves and others.
Are they providing support for the things?
They provide no support for the solar. If I have problems I have to go to my solar installer.
Well that’s fucked.
PG&E was literally the villain in the real life Erin Brockovich story.
I made a post with ideas on what initiatives could be proposed here: https://fedia.io/m/VoterInitiatives/t/883352/Electric-utility-company-reform
Utilities have avoided infrastructure development such as more solar generators, rooftop solar buyback incentives.
They avoided power storage development too.
They now complain that there’s too much fluctuation between peak solar hours and have to charge the people that were taking action on their own to avoid excessive power costs to make ends meet.
Daamn how can one plan so poorly….
They had money rolling in for decades, why would you need a plan?
Maybe to keep on rolling 🤔
Fred Durst never made a plan in his damn life
Daamno
People are just going to install backup batteries and then PG&E isn’t going to get anything.
EV car batteries have been used for the purpose of storing daytime-generated solar energy to power a home during the night.
If I had an expensive EV with an expensive battery in it, I would not want to be wasting my precious limited number of charge cycles on running my house.
Unless you’re talking about a home-scale project to repurpose retired EV batteries for stationary storage. I’ve only ever read about grid-scale versions of such projects.
…I’ve only ever read about grid-scale versions of such projects.
Your EV battery can now power your home, yes really. - The Washington Post
That article describes exactly what I would not want to do - subject my expensive vehicle to additional discharge/recharge cycles thereby shortening its battery’s useful life prematurely.
Lithium batteries are pretty great (except for when they catch fire and are nearly impossible to extinguish), but their performance degrades slightly with every charging cycle. You may have noticed that after a year or two your phone no longer makes it through the day without extra charging, because its total capacity is reduced.
The same thing happens with EV batteries (translating into shorter driving range) but they’re much larger and more expensive to replace. Moreover, when replaced, the old batteries are still capable of useful work with lower capacity, so it’s excessively wasteful to dump them into the hazardous e-waste stream for whatever passes as recycling.
There are companies that are collecting those used EV batteries and using them for electric grid storage, which sounds like a great way to extend their lifecycle and to acquire useful equipment at bargain basement prices. That’s what I meant about only ever seeing it at grid-scale. It would be nice if somebody sold a controller for those to be repurposed for use as energy storage for a single home, at much lower equipment cost than a brand new home battery.
There will be many more used EV batteries available in the next several years as the first wave of widely adopted electric vehicles ages out, and the oversupply should drive down their costs further.
That said, being able to use a vehicle battery as an emergency backup during a storm event is a wonderful side benefit. It’s just no substitute for a full time home battery (that’s actually connected during the day when the panels are producing, instead of being parked at work away from your house).
This is exactly what PG&E is hoping for, yes. ⭐
It’s a win-win. Those batteries are thousands of bucks.
It fully fucking misses the point, we should own the power we produce from our own fucking homes.
Shifting costs to other people is the end goal.
We are paving over the Mojave and prime ag lands to build solar instead of incentivizing people to put it on top of their homes. Also, the current PUC is hopelessly corrupted by PGE influence. Anything that could be twisted to create more profit for PGE should be construed as doing so in practice.
It doesn’t really seem like net metering is sustainable. Say for example someone generates the same amount of electricity they use, in that case they pay $0 for electricity even though the grid has to take the burden of storing the electricity until they use it later in the day.
It doesn’t really seem like net metering is sustainable.
Not sure why you think that.
Say for example someone generates the same amount of electricity they use, in that case they pay $0 for electricity even though the grid has to take the burden of storing the electricity until they use it later in the day.
The grid isn’t storing their energy - it’s sending it to other customers, meaning that non-sustainable, polluting energy sources don’t have to be generated.
The only time that’s not true is when the net load on the grid dips below zero. According to the duck curve graph from the article, it does appear to be very briefly dipping for a very brief time period each day. At that point it could make sense to store the rest, but if the grid doesn’t have storage capacity then any excess is “wasted,” but at that point the grid engages in a process known as “curtailment,” which means it rejects the excess, meaning that nobody gets credit later for energy that isn’t used now.
Also, curtailment is often not because the grid itself is over-supplied, but because specific regions are over-supplied and the grid lacks transmission lines from them to regions where demand is higher.
in that case they pay $0 for electricity
True under NEM 1.0, but NEM 2.0 also includes “non-bypassable charges” - components of pulling from the grid that cannot be offset by what they contribute. Those charges are roughly 5% as far as I can tell, meaning that if they pulled $300 worth of energy from the grid and sent back $300 worth (or more), they’d still owe $15.
Sure, but if everyone does it then it wouldn’t work (no one would be drawing excess when the solar is at peak), so that makes it not very sustainable. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, just that it can’t continue to work if adoption becomes near-universal (it doesn’t seem to be for now). I guess these non-bypassable charges will fix that, but that sounds a lot like what they are talking about (only getting paid some large percentage of the price for energy sent to the grid).
Everything you’re saying is wrong.
We only have a stable grid now because the hottest days produce the most solar to power ac. Our grid would have collapsed otherwise .
In the past we had huge demand swings during the course of a single day, as factories and offices burned power, then people went home to cook food and run their laundry.
Solar helped that greatly, coupled with fracking gas which allowed us to plant ge90 turbines everywhere for nothing and have we extremely dispatchable power for load following.
Especially since bulbs went led and now might generation is much more manageable.
But mentally defective utilities can’t do the sane thing and write an API so that EV’s can coordinate charging to balance load.
The problem with utilities is that they’re stuffed to the gills with the idiot relatives of politicians who couldn’t get jobs anywhere else.
I didn’t say net metering isn’t useful now, I said it wouldn’t work if a large majority of people did it. I don’t see how what you said contradicts that.
They literally changed the time of day charges so power is a fraction of the cost during the daytime when solar is available.
All they’d have to change is to make the ToD follow solar output if they wanted to keep NEM going.
But that’s not what they want, they own the lines, and they want to TAKE every penny they can.
We need to break PGE, sell their lines to regional providers, it’s a curse on california.
Sure, but if everyone does it then it wouldn’t work (no one would be drawing excess when the solar is at peak)
If everyone did it then electric companies could prioritize investing in batteries and capacitors and further reduce their reliance on fossil fuels.
If everyone did it, then even without extra storage capacity, net metering would still work. You don’t get credits for generating energy, just for sending it to the grid. All they have to do is the same thing they already do - curtailment.
Finally, it’s impossible for everyone to be on net metering because NEM 3.0 doesn’t have net metering and NEM 1.0 and 2.0 are only available if you’re grandfathered in.
If oversupply were really a concern, then you’d think the prices during oversupply would reflect that, dropping to basically nothing. They don’t. If they did, then EVs could be charged for super cheap when solar power was flooding the grid.
that sounds a lot like what they are talking about
What they’re talking about is revoking the law that grandfathered people into NEM 1.0 and 2.0 contracts. Keep in mind, the people who purchased solar under NEM 1.0 and 2.0 did so under the presumption that they would be able to stay on it for at least 20 years (because that was codified in law).000
only getting paid some large percentage of the price for energy sent to the grid
NEM 3.0 reduces the way credits are calculated to, on average, 25% of what they were before, and that are not the same as the retail rate.
https://aurorasolar.com/blog/explaining-and-modeling-californias-net-billing-tariff-nem-3-0/ has some examples. At the same time that electricity from the grid costs $0.44/kWh, solar sent to the grid only returns a $0.05/kWh credit.
5 cents is not a large percentage of 44 cents.
If your neighbor has solar and you charge your EV in the middle of a sunny day when your neighbor is at work, you’re probably using your neighbor’s electricity to do so. That’s gonna cost you $15 and net your neighbor a $1.71 credit.
Under NEM 1.0 and 2.0, if you import from and export to the grid in the same hour, those amounts are netted, even before NBCs come into effect. But under NEM 3.0, you could get billed for importing in the same hour even if you exported far more than you used. If you imported 1 kWh from the grid, you’d need to export 9 kWh to break even.
Again, this doesn’t make sense. Someone is paying $0.44/kWh for the energy you exported, but you’re only getting $0.05 credit for it.
If your solar system has storage, you can strategically export energy to the grid when the compensation is higher. That’s something you can consider when installing your solar system… but that’s not true for the people who are grandfathered into NEM 1.0 and 2.0, who knew they were grandfathered in by law.
And from what I’ve heard, even that doesn’t actually help that much, because the credits don’t apply to the largest part of the bill - they apply to “generation,” not to “delivery.” I haven’t found a reliable source confirming that, but if true it just adds insult to injury - if you pay the added cost to install an intelligent storage system and configure it to return money to the grid when their costs are highest, you get a credit equal to the cost you helped them avoid, but then the credit’s actually only usable on a small portion of your bill. If the calculations are based on avoided cost, you should get those credits even if it means the electric company is paying you.
I agree that there’s no problem now, and also that the percentage they are trying to pay is overly low. I think they should be paying somewhere in the vicinity of 50-70% of the buy price, so that is a terrible rate.
They can pay for the grid maintenance and storage if they’d like to set it up that way. NEM sort of addresses this but they’ve planned it poorly.
Ah yes, the “burden” of free energy. 🙄
No, the burden of providing free energy storage.
