Net metering does create stranded assets if everyone does it. But not everyone does. Further, the idea that the utility gains NO benefit from net metering is wrong.

The corresponding view that rate payers are subsidizing solar by paying additional grid costs is wrong. Solar reduces grid demand. This reduces required generation capacity. Capacity is very expensive.

I joked with my neighbour that we should wire up our homes and sell my excess to him at mid point and we would both be better off.

What would seem logical to me would be a base charge, they net meter you to zero, but then you sell power at the wholesaler rate. If that wipes out your connect charge you still have them the value that they would have paid for the power you made.

Maybe the base charge would have to be higher for net metered houses, it might have some subsidy built into it based on expectations of selling power to the client.

Net metering is as good a subsidy for green energy which we DIRELY need as any.

Making perfect the enemy of the good is bad enough as a general principle but is 100x worse when the future of the planet is at stake.

I am not so sure that is true. Seemingly a large percentage of new installation costs are fixed (paperwork, labor, inverters, etc) with only a smaller portion for the panels themselves. For a minor incremental cost, you can fully provision your house.

https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news-release/2022/10/ratep...

This is the trade-off you take when you become a quasi-government company. You get a low, but nearly guaranteed profit. Executives still get their bonuses, employees get paid, etc.

If they want more variable rates of return then they can drop the public protections and go full private like any other regular company.

Profit margin is after deducting all expenses. A lot of corrupt spending can be included in expenses to reduce the profit margin at will while still raking in the cash. So yes, that's absurdly high given how they operate.

What we should do is pay a large flat monthly fee for the grid connection, then a lower rate for generation/usage, rather than bundling the delivery costs in. This is how many other utilities (Gas, Water, etc.) are billed, and it makes much more sense. This would also line up better for people with solar panels, as those who choose to leverage a grid connection would lay in line with their utility, or could choose to go off-grid, if they didn't want to pay for the availability of the grid.

1) it increases resilience in disaster scenarios and a lot of high usage scenarios. I especially think back to Puerto Rico getting hit by the Hurricane, or the Texas icestorms or things like that. Having a lot of homes semi-independent of the grid would help people mitigate impacts, because you can rely on neighbors for certain things while the grid is down.

2) BEVs are going to introduce a huge additional burden on the grid. But if we couple it with a lot of home solar installations, it will reduce the impact to the grid and the grid can focus on more industrial tasks like highway supercharging for semis and those big challenges.

3) aside from the solar panels, home solar means a distributed storage for the grid too.

Net metering is flawed, but there's the baby with the bathwater argument. Let's introduce better incentives before chucking the flawed ones that are working, and I don't see that happening.

And it's hard to price the incentives. Home solar panels are going to change a lot with forthcoming perovskites, and home storage is going to drastically change with production Sodium Ion, high density LFP/LFMP in the next few years, and Sulfur beyond that.

What I think is ridiculous is the pricing of home solar+storage versus what the grid buyers get. If home solar programs could have their panels bulk-purchased along with grid solar purchases and then the grid providers have to get them installed to homes, it would swap the grid providers from opposing home solar to being incented to finding people to allow the installation.

I think the real issue is that the pricing is almost completely divorced from the actual cost structure, so the whole rate system is a kludge that gives everyone the wrong incentives.

Have the power fee set realtime by a market. The price might go to zero if there is excess generation.

Have the transmission fee capped by a regulator - and charge it for any kilowatt hours that enter the power network.

Allow third parties to arbitrage and offer 'fixed rate' deals, so consumers aren't at the whims of an electricity market with occasional sky high prices.

No, it doesn't.

I have solar+battery with net metering. I buy from the electric company at ~11.5c/kWh and sell our excess to them at ~2.7c/kWh for a difference of ~4.3x

As the sole entity that you can sell to - short of regulators being involved - they set the rate. And yes, there's already a monthly connection fee.

This makes the false assumption that those “fungible” dollars are somehow earmarked for solar and the homeowners wouldn’t just spend them on some other, non-solar, goods.

NEM3.0 incentivizes exactly that. It prices exported electricity at the avoided cost rate. During the late summer and early fall, between 7-9PM that can be more than $1/kWh, or 3x the average NEM2.0 rate [1]. Of course to maximize that rate you need to store energy and sell it back at the optimal time.

The average rate with NEM3.0, however, is much lower.

1. https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/-/media/cpuc-website/divisions/energ...

What will you do when it has been raining/cloudy for weeks straight like it has recently in California? For this period, wind has dramatically outproduced solar [1]. Even in the summer/fall, when there was severe wildfire smoke in the area, my solar+battery barely produced anything.

Sure, you can set up a propane generator (very expensive at the size needed for a full house backup), but then you are dependent on the propane-distribution grid. The dirty secret of "no-sacrifice off-grid" lifestyles is how much they are dependent on propane for heating and electricity.

Also, the grid's up-time is going to be better than your home battery setup up-time both because it is constantly maintained and it has access to a greater diversity of energy sources (wind, nuclear, fossil, large-scale storage) that are firmer than anything you can attach to your house.

The fact is that modern living standards (cars, TVs, comfortable temperatures) require a much larger amount of energy and energy-availability than most people can produce on their properties with solar. The additional energy has to be imported somehow, either from the electric grid or as liquid or gaseous fuels.

1. See Renewables Trend at http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html

This is exactly my sentiment and is the reason that we have made ourselves independent from the grid.[1]

However the math gets very difficult if you need to charge an electric car ... it's a tremendous amount of electricity to keep one, not to mention two, cars topped up after daily use.

The extra panel and battery requirements for cars are such that it really does make sense to be grid-tied and arrange your charging on off-peak hours, etc. That is what makes this so frustrating for typical homeowners - there's an obvious and sensible symbiosis here that would work well for (most people).

[1] That, and the fact that I hate PG&E with the burning fire of 1000 suns.

Theoretically, the grid is supervised by the California Public Utilities Commission, which has wide latitude to set standards and regulations for PG&E and others. The Public Utility Code is the highest law in the state of California[2], so IMHO a large part of the blame for PG&E's failures fall on CPUC's failed oversight[3][4]

[1]: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=40913

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Public_Utilities_Co...

[3]: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/CPUC-head-Michael-Peev...

[4]: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/pge-probation-lift...

Of course, in 1896 an Edison company merged with the derivative of the original San Francisco Gas, to become San Francisco Gas and Electric. By 1905, that merged with something else to become PG&E.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Gas_and_Electric_Compa...

The wider "grid" is managed by CAISO - the independent system operator.

LA's utility is municipally run, in contrast to the big 3 IOUs in the state - PGE, SDGE, SCE.

SDGE had a 50 year exclusive franchise agreement with the city of San Diego that recently renewed under slightly different terms. Notably, and I'm paraphrasing: the city has the option after 10 years to terminate under certain conditions. [1]

Enron lobbied for, contributed to, and profited off of utility deregulation over 20 years ago. [2]

[1] https://www.kpbs.org/news/midday-edition/2020/07/27/sdges-50...

[2] https://www.consumerwatchdog.org/newsrelease/lesson-enron-el...

Would I do it that way again? Probably not. But I have more wiggle room now.

Definitely could be the case. Your situation is interesting in that it is opposite to the order of transitioning towards a heat pump over here. Perhaps a heat pump was your starting point as there was no gas connection?

Over here we start with gas heating (almost every house) after which we try to transition towards a heat pump. They say you should first insulate your house to the maximum possible before even considering a heat pump. Fail to do this and the heat pump won't even be able to produce enough. This calculation is of course locally specific, unlikely to apply to you.

In fact, many houses will never be able to transition and will end up with a hybrid pump as the maximum achievable.

I would recommend anyone to do such tour of the house. You're very likely to learn a lot and be in for a shock here and there. Totally agree with you that most people are far away from a state of micro managing energy, there's big wins to be had with little sacrifices in convenience.

And yes, that was the background of my question: If I'd save 210$ in electricity per month, my very first question would be why I even use that much in the first place. Could be valid reasons for it, of course.

It frankly worries me. Heat pumps and EVs are going to spike consumption dramatically, where even smallish price and taxation movements will have an outsized impact. Not to mention the grid being able to handle it at all, as most people can't ever generate anything close to that level.

1) The money spent on panel rotators can be invested into having more solar panels.

2) Affixed solar panels are significantly more storm and hurricane proof. If there’s one bad storm with rotating panels, your investment principal is gone.

3) Maintenance costs increase when these moving parts eventually break. Fixed panels have no moving parts.

Also, be sure to do your own roof measurements when you look over their proposals. For my project, they used fairly inaccurate aerial/sat photos, which got the shape of my roof entirely wrong. Had I accepted their offer, I'd have ~33% too many panels / racking that wouldn't fit on the roof.

I ended up sourcing all the materials myself. I got much nicer inverters (1:1 Enphase IQ8+) and PV modules (455W LG bifacial) than what they were offering (2:1 APSystems inverters, 355W Bluesun panels).

The real kicker: I had enough budget left over to have a professional solar installer install all the panels for me, so I'm not the one that has to get on my steep roof, plus I have a warranty on the worksmanship of the installation. Pre-incentive, I'll have spent about $24k on my self-sourced version.

At some point I'll write up a blog post about the whole process - parts selection and sourcing, finding an installer, permitting, etc. It's really not that hard.

I understand that there are reasons for this, but as someone with the qualifications but not the certification, I hate that I have to pay someone else to do things like this.

In my opinion, a good DIY solar company site would have transparent pricing and ability to buy components. I understand there are variations in installations and pricing may be different, but they should have a pricing catalog.

There are so many ways a rooftop solar installation investment can turn against you. If regulations change, your net metering goes away. If electricity prices drop, your ROI goes negative.

Rooftop solar is a fun enthusiast project, but it's a lousy use of solar panels. Community solar or utility solar projects are far better for homeowners. And for the environment.

The only reason people do it is that there are artificial incentives; it's not actually efficient in reality.

Roof leaks that are accidental are covered by insurance, and the work to remove or replace the panels is part of that. Typically you adjust your home insurance coverage by the value of the panels when you install them to make sure everything's covered.

That just leaves the chance that the installer work will be good enough to make it ten years but not twenty, and the insurance won't cover the damage. I don't know the odds of that. It seems like it would be infrequent, but what numbers do you use?

It's amazing how ignorant people can be to the world around them. Let's assume you live in the US, since the article is dealing with those subsidies.

The food you're eating - c. 20% of US farm income is subsidies [0]

The employees of the restaurant - probably, at least one of them is on a government support program to augment their wages [1]

The car you drove to the restaurant in - the US Federal government subsidized your gas (ever wonder why US gas is cheaper than Canada/EU?) [2]

So maybe instead of spending your time looking down your nose and 'not understanding why people don't understand economics,' why don't you do research on the world around you?

[0] https://perc.tamu.edu/PERC-Blog/PERC-Blog/U-S-Farm-Subsidies...

[1] https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-21-45

[2] https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subs...

Are you surprised, truly? All right, I’ll play along.

We have a progressive tax system. So the majority of the costs are born by the wealthy and the well-off, rather than the working class. Some of the well-to-do got that way by grit and hard work; others by luck; and at least a few by fraud and worse. They’re the winners of a somewhat-arbitrary game, and I don’t see anything wrong with tweaking the rules in pursuit of a collective good, like wider solar panel deployment.

Meanwhile! We know that most industries have quite dramatic learning-by-doing and returns to scale. And yet in this fallen world transaction costs and imperfect information can prevent new technologies from getting enough scale practice to become economically viable. So temporary subsidies in the early stage have a good chance of bringing costs down for everyone.

I’m very glad to be the first to introduce you to these arguments, if I am. You don’t have to agree: I left my mind-control goggles in my other coat. But please, don’t play dumb.

Yes, it obviously is ok? Your next restaurant meal doesn't have a broad impact on the world we live in, whereas the deployment of solar panels does.

And nobody pays for anything with inflation. That's not how inflation works.

Assuming you have batteries, you discharge and charge them on a daily cycle, not a yearly cycle, to make the most money/have the most benefit. There are predictable time of day based troughs and peaks in the price that you can take advantage of.

https://hackaday.com/2021/10/08/power-your-home-with-a-water...

so OP's number of 12MWh checks out for a whole year

Though, https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/ makes me wonder how you are getting 25c/kWh prices, as author estimates. Maybe higher price tiers due to usage.

Additionally, if you live in a place where power is $0.20-$0.30/kWh, then $233/mo is not a particularly large amount of electricity, especially for a single-family house. At $0.30/kWh, that's only ~775kWh of electricity.

https://www.pec.coop/your-service/distributed-generation/int...

This has changed the payback equation quite a bit. I'm now incentivized to do everything I can to use the power I generate rather than returning it to the grid, whether running more A/C during daylight, running laundry during the day, or storing it on my Powerwalls for using off hours.

Although the payback equation doesn't really make sense anymore, we're still happy with our decision to install solar + powerwalls because we can run the A/C as much as we want without feeling guilty, and also get a solid backup in case of major storm events like the 2021 winter storms. We both work from home and have an infant so keeping the house comfortable is important.

This would likely incentivize storage, and could be extremely valuable with V2G technologies that are incoming.

Not making an argument either way, I just hadn't really considered if this was a factor until I read your comment.

It's true though that the snow will melt or fall off quickly when it's not that cold anymore.

Doesn't seem like that would matter once covered by a few inches of snow. But otherwise your points seem solid.

Edit: There are "reverse" shovels called roof rakes[1] that can help remove snow before it builds up.

[1] https://www.thespruce.com/best-snow-roof-rakes-6830889

> I ended up getting a 7.56 kW solar panel system consisting of 21 LONGi panels[1] and 1 Solar Edge inverter[2].

[1] https://www.solaris-shop.com/longi-solar-lr4-60hph-360m-360w...

[2] http://www.solardesigntool.com/components/distributeddcinver...

I'm 33 degrees south, so obviously 'better' in terms of solar potential. We probably also have fewer cloudy days (though much hotter days during summer, I'm not sure how that compares out over the year).

My panels are not optimally installed, at least not optimally for capture - but definitely optimally for installation cost. I have a gable-roof shed facing roughly NW, with 22 panels on the NW side, and 11 on the SE side. Roof slope is about 9 degrees.

I just start to flat-line my 10kW inverter, fed from 12kW panels, about 3 weeks (on the winter side) of the equinoxes - so there's definitely room to improve the configuration there. FYI in summer I generate average ~70kWh a day, and in winter about 30.

It sounds like author put these panels on in late 2021 --which should post-date the worst of the COVID-induced shipping/trade bumps, and pre-date the Ukraine / Russia induced effects.

EDIT: You mentioned "... tariffed as much as 30% in the US ..." -- I agree that kind of figure could be explained by duties, tariffs, etc, but the difference here is actually 3x (26k vs 9k) for a system that's only about 60% the capacity of mine. A like-for-like system, extrapolating from TFA's numbers, would be US$35k, or nearly 4x difference.

I dont consider strong arming someone due to your now advantageous position against something you previously agreed upon and reasonably similarly delivered (7 months instead of 6, we're not talking about multiple years later here).

A similar ethical framework would allow someone in marriage say "I quit my job, can get alimony from you, better do as I say or I'm filing for divorce" -- It's all legal. Still unethical.

Yeah it makes sense that a limitation like that forces competition, along with cheaper import costs from China I imagine not hurting.

30c/kWh is not really cheap by most countries standards, especially when you really need aircon during summer and from this year can't build a new home with gas heating or cooking in WA.

Going to be an interesting few years I think as grids start to move away from coal base loads en-mass

I've also heard that one way to get booted from your homeowner's insurance is to ever file a claim. I know several people who lost coverage after their first claim (decades after becoming a customer).