[HN Gopher] How should net metering affect your electric bill?
___________________________________________________________________
How should net metering affect your electric bill?
Author : snewman
Score : 177 points
Date : 2022-02-03 15:20 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (climateer.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (climateer.substack.com)
| yholio wrote:
| Rooftop solar was always form of green subsidy: you get the same
| flat price for energy you dump into the network as the price the
| utility charges you. But what you put in at random times of your
| own choosing is much, much less valuable than a guaranteed power
| feed at any hour or season. At times it might have negative
| value, the power you put in costs the utility money. That simply
| cannot scale.
|
| The only way I can see the two prices equal is if you provide
| power in the network on request from the utility, at specific
| time intervals from your own storage. But then you wouldn't need
| a power utility.
| dangjc wrote:
| A huge portion of electric bills are paying for wildfire
| damage/hardening and for expensive transmission lines. Rooftop
| solar reduces both, but is not being credited for it in NEM 3.0.
|
| When electricity is generated and consumed locally, it doesn't
| need to be transmitted across huge distances using expensive
| transmission infrastructure. There's also less wires that can
| trigger fires. But infra is the only way regulated utilities are
| allowed to make a profit.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/business/energy-environme...
|
| These increased costs being passed to California consumers could
| kill electric cars. We're paying $0.30-$0.40 / kwh to PG&E, which
| pencils out to over $9 / gallon.
|
| https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35152087/tesla-model-3-ch...
| jefftk wrote:
| _> We 're paying $0.30-$0.40 / kwh to PG&E, which pencils out
| to over $9 / gallon._
|
| No way. An electric car (including charging inefficiency) uses
| about ~0.3 kWh per mile, so at $0.35/kWh each mile costs you
| ~$0.10 in electricity. If a gas car gets 35mpg, then for each
| mile to cost ~$0.10 in fuel, gas would need to cost $3.50 not
| $9.
|
| How are you getting $9?
| jeffbee wrote:
| The only reason that sounds bad is because fuel is under-taxed.
| Gas should be _at least_ $9 /gallon.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| This article carries way too much water for PG&E. Sad, but I
| guess since we're gearing up for a net-metering 3.0[1] fight
| we'll see more and more articles like this one.
|
| Here's the places where I think it misses the mark:
|
| * The energy generation costs listed by the author actually
| includes rooftop solar. PG&E paid exactly $0 for you to spend
| $30k installing the panels, so that number is low for PG&E for a
| reason.
|
| * PG&E turns around and sells your solar power to people enrolled
| in "Solar Choice" plans who will pay 50% more for electricity
| than what PG&E net metered you.
|
| * California has a green energy mandate and rooftop solar is one
| of the ways PG&E can meet the mandate _while offloading the
| entire cost of the system onto the homeowners_.
|
| * Net metering last for 1 year and after that PG&E "credits" you
| the wholesale value of your excess electricity, which they value
| at approximately 1c/kWh even though they charged other people
| $0.40/kWh during peak time for that power you exported.
|
| * The CA legislator mandated all new homes are installed with
| solar panels. Kind of makes sense why PG&E was favorable of this
| bill. PG&E again has offloaded the cost of installing green
| energy generation on someone else.
|
| * The monthly non-bypassable fee that the author describes as
| "pretty low" is actually closer to $10/month and expected to rise
| with NEM 3.0 to $50 a month or more. Keep in mind that PG&E has
| 5.5 million customers, so this number is significant.
|
| * Grid defection is illegal in most municipalities so even if
| someone wanted to install a battery and go off-grid they still
| have to pay the $10 a month non-bypassable PG&E fees.
|
| Net Metering 3.0[1] "fixes" the problem the author attempts to
| describe, but really it's a rug-pull on everyone in CA who spent
| tens of thousands of dollars to install rooftop solar.
|
| Customers installing solar panels at their expense is a subsidy
| FOR PG&E, not the other way around despite what this spin
| attempts to portray.
|
| 1. https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/california-net-metering-
| ch...
| yuliyp wrote:
| Where is this mythical $0.40/kWh price for electricity (not
| transmission) actually occurring?
|
| Net metering does not expire after a year. You can continue to
| get any power you need matching the power you had put in on a
| 1:1 basis. The 1c/kWh is for the excess.
|
| Most of PG&E's infrastructure is transmission infrastructure,
| not generation. They wouldn't be building power plants
| themselves, anyway. Net metering allows rooftop solar to
| effectively get paid for electricity at a much higher rate than
| PG&E or local electricity cooperatives than would be paying on
| the open market. It is designed as a subsidy to motivate people
| to install solar. Pretending that it's a subsidy for PG&E is
| missing the mark.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| > _Where is this mythical $0.40 /kWh price for electricity
| (not transmission) actually occurring?_
|
| The standard residental TOU plan for PG&E peak usage ranges
| from $0.33 to $0.45 depending on the season. Have a look
| yourself[1]. But PG&E actually classes your solar power as
| green energy and sells it to "solar choice" customers at even
| HIGHER prices[2].
|
| > _Net metering does not expire after a year. You can
| continue to get any power you need matching the power you had
| put in on a 1:1 basis. The 1c /kWh is for the excess._
|
| There's no roll over of any extra generated power. You use it
| or you lose it. If you have $300 in retail credits they'll
| cash you out for $15 which is the wholesale price of it and
| you'll start again for the next year.
|
| > _Net metering allows rooftop solar to effectively get paid
| for electricity at a much higher rate than PG &E or local
| electricity cooperatives than would be paying on the open
| market._
|
| You're paid in credits. Kind of like getting a gift card that
| expires in a year or days depending on when it was generated.
| It's non-transferrable and for all intents and purposes
| disappears at the end of the year when they true you up. To
| think people paying $30k for rooftop solar are somehow taking
| advantage of PG&E is laughable, especially given PG&E has a
| green energy mandate and doesn't have to pay a dime for that
| $30k installation.
|
| 1. https://www.pge.com/pge_global/common/pdfs/rate-plans/how-
| ra...
|
| 2. https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/solar-and-
| vehicles/opt...
| Dave_Rosenthal wrote:
| I just moved into a new construction house in Colorado with a
| substantial (23kW) solar installation. It's been interesting to
| see how much, in the words of the author, 'feeding bread to pigs'
| I have ended up doing.
|
| The solar installation (which is probably larger than optimal) is
| dictated by the policy for the house to be "net zero", which in
| turn is dictated by a policy based on the size of the house. (In
| practice, solar is the cheapest way for the builder to get all
| the way to 'net zero' after the usual decent insulation, windows,
| etc.)
|
| So that's how I got solar, but now I want to turn it on. Well,
| this is not in the interest of the utility at all (they lose
| money), but they still by policy get to 'approve it'. This
| required a many-month (and many phone call) process of reviews,
| approvals, etc. which concluded in the utility activating
| (installing a meter for) the installation. In total it was maybe
| 9 months from when the solar was all wired up and sitting in the
| sun until it was producing any electricity for the world!
|
| Now the utility gives me a choice of two billing options. At the
| end of each month, excess energy I've generated can either be put
| in a kWh bank and rolled over as credit, or it can be paid out.
| However, the payout is hilariously low (like $0.01/kWh) so of
| course everyone chooses the bank.
|
| But now incentives are all screwed up! Since I easily generate
| more electricity that I will ever use (see above for why policies
| drove us to an installation larger that necessary) my household
| has no incentive to conserve at all. E.g. I am heating my garage
| with an electric heater because it costs me zero.
|
| So the net effect of all of these policies intended to promote
| conservation are:
|
| 1) To drive up the price of housing in an area where that is
| already one of the big challenges the community is fighting
|
| 2) To completely disincentivize any actual conservation
|
| 3) To have new solar installations laying fallow for 6-9 months
|
| I don't know what the solution is, but the problems are pretty
| easy to see.
| nostromo wrote:
| > Since I easily generate more electricity that I will ever use
| (see above for why policies drove us to an installation larger
| that necessary) my household has no incentive to conserve at
| all.
|
| ... so? You're generating energy from the sun. Feel free to use
| it all. We don't conserve energy for fun, we conserve it to
| protect the environment.
| Dave_Rosenthal wrote:
| You comment makes sense if I was not hooked up to the grid.
| But I am. So, if my family conserves, that energy we save
| offsets someone else's coal-generated energy and helps the
| environment. But I have zero incentive to so do because of
| layers of bad policies.
| twoodfin wrote:
| It'd be interesting to know the "true" price of that
| energy. That is, what the utility would pay you for what
| you feed back into the grid vs. acquiring that energy from
| another source. Essentially impossible to calculate given
| all the regulations and subsidies, but my guess is that it
| would be quite low relative to your metered rate, and thus
| the actual "offset" of carbon-based fuels is small.
| warble wrote:
| Yeah, in the current market you're correct, but we should
| be concentrating on creating an excess of cheap power
| (carbon free of course) rather than conserving.
| bryceacc wrote:
| why not both? they literally ALREADY HAVE the excess of
| cheap power AND can conserve. This is a push for action
| on policy and incentives
| throwaway329183 wrote:
| The big problem is timing, if your neighbour's solar panels
| were at peak output in the night and yours in the day, the
| credit system works.
| oogali wrote:
| > I don't know what the solution is, but the problems are
| pretty easy to see.
|
| In theory, if you were dealing with one entity, it could be
| pretty easy.
|
| But you are actually dealing with multiple entities:
|
| - your utility's transmission subsidiary
|
| - your utility's generation subsidiary
|
| - your applicable regulatory entities
|
| - your regional grid operator/planning organization
|
| > Well, this is not in the interest of the utility at all (they
| lose money), but they still by policy get to 'approve it'. This
| required a many-month (and many phone call) process of reviews,
| approvals, etc. which concluded in the utility activating
| (installing a meter for) the installation.
|
| Your utility would much rather just say no and be done with it.
|
| They similarly have no financial interests in operating a
| Kafka-esque bureaucracy that requires them to staff entire
| departments that are a net drain on their revenue.
|
| But they are obligated by the state regulator to have a uniform
| framework and process for electricity generators (which you are
| now) to interconnect with their transmission network (you to
| their lines).
|
| This pulls you into the category of safety, reliability, and
| financial requirements which are typically only applied to
| commercial generators.
|
| The primary things the utility (both transmission and
| generation) wants to avoid is backfeeding and islanding -- the
| former is dangerous to linemen, the latter is dangerous to your
| neighbors' equipment.
|
| > However, the payout is hilariously low (like $0.01/kWh) so of
| course everyone chooses the bank.
|
| The payout for generation is negotiated by three entities: the
| regional grid operator which is committing to purchasing
| capacity, the utility's transmission operator which charges to
| interconnect and deliver your power, and the state regulator
| who has the FINAL say on rates.
|
| Additionally, your utility along with every other utility in
| America is engaged in demand management programs.
|
| The TL;DR version is utilities pay tens to hundreds of millions
| of dollars to vendors over the span of a multi-year contract to
| REDUCE electric demand.
|
| This typically manifests itself to retail customers the form of
| free Nest thermostats, time of use programs, and subsidized
| appliance efficiency upgrades (or rebates).
|
| If they could redirect this money to small generators like
| yourself and have the same impact, they would drop their demand
| management programs in a heartbeat (and the regulatory
| obligations that come with it).
|
| I wrote this on my phone, so I can't easily list references,
| but I did use a number of searchable terms that will lead you
| in the right direction.
| SilasX wrote:
| Maybe it's just me, but I don't get how any of that
| translates to a defense of the utilities' overall behavior.
| (Though I appreciate the context -- thanks!)
|
| Why can't they like, _suggest_ to the relevant authorities,
| that it be refactored along more logical lines, where solar
| power generators have the appropriate checks for safety
| (before feeding into the grid), and are paid a significant
| fraction of the value their power adds to the network?
|
| I don't expect them to be Remy-Danton-grade workaholic
| lobbyist heroes. But if they recognize that there are
| perverse incentives, why aren't they pushing, however gently
| and tepidly, for natural fixes to the misalignment of
| incentives?
|
| If you were in a startup that had fundamentally screwed up
| incentives that prevented the optimal solution, you (like
| most here) would probably at least start _writing the
| document_ that outlines what the system should look like, and
| push a little towards its implementation.
|
| So where is that document? Why is their first reaction to
| create this passive-aggressive Kafkaesque barrier to
| integrating solar, _knowing_ that it slows down solar roll-
| out and our efforts to decarbonize?
|
| Why can't they answer the criticisms as, "oh, yeah -- you're
| preaching to the choir here. This is how we'd prefer it work,
| but we can't get the others to agree."
|
| If they actually do that, then I accept that they may be
| operating in the least bad option. If not, they are making
| the problem worse, and do merit the criticisms levied at them
| here.
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| >To completely disincentivize any actual conservation
|
| If you are running off of 100% solar that isn't a net negative
| impact to the environment to use more power in nearly every
| case.
| aftbit wrote:
| Don't forget the embodied energy of the overbuilt solar
| system!
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| I had, thanks for reminding me.
| mediaman wrote:
| There are two environmental costs to this setup.
|
| The first is that if he weren't frivolously moving electrons
| through his heater, there would be more to feed to the grid
| for other people. So there is an opportunity cost of reducing
| CO2-generating energy production elsewhere.
|
| The second is that he installed a much bigger array than
| optimal, due to regulatory requirements, and that too has up-
| front environmental consequence. Since he's burning off that
| excess electricity rather than feeding it to the grid,
| there's really no redeeming value to an array that's too big.
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| True. Thanks for that.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Well one thing you can do is try to figure out the approx.
| carbon output of those extra panels and buy trees to help
| remove an equivalent amount from the atmosphere so you can
| offset the carbon output. Of course you are spending money
| doing this and one must consider the carbon emitted in the
| process of earning that money. Depending on his
| circumstances this could be very little or none.
| FabHK wrote:
| This frightful story reminds me of Dan Luu's recent piece on
| Cocktail Party Theories [1], among other things about the
| "error of taking a high-level view and incorrectly assuming
| that things are simple". As so often, the devil lies in the
| details.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30185229
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> For instance, pricey CDs prevented lots of people from
| listening to music.
|
| Nope. Nobody I knew in the 90s had this issue. In fact, higher
| prices caused _more_ people to listen to _more_ music. Unable to
| afford CDs, the kids turned to Napster. After that they had
| access to more music than any generation in history. This in turn
| forced the music industry to change, to create online delivery
| platforms. Napster might be gone, but those 90s CD prices are why
| we have streaming services today.
| burkaman wrote:
| There must have been a lot of people that had access to record
| stores but not to the internet, and not enough money for lots
| of CDs. And Napster launched in 1999.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Napster was the first big name, but there were other schemes
| for downloading music earlier. Mp3s had been around since the
| early nineties. Even without downloading, high CD prices saw
| kids copying and burning CDs for each other as soon as
| burners were available. So long as you had some social
| connections you knew someone with access to free music.
| jdofaz wrote:
| As a 90s kid with no money, the solution was to wait for the
| song to play on the radio and record it to a cassette tape.
| EricE wrote:
| Thank you. And it was rather commonplace. The idea that
| music wasn't accessible is crazy.
| kbos87 wrote:
| There was a long period of purchasing music from stores before
| Napster was even an option. Having to spend $12-$16 on a CD you
| intended to listen to one, maybe two songs on absolutely
| stunted the amount of music people listened to for a very long
| time.
| EricE wrote:
| You didn't have radios wherever it was you lived? No friends
| or cassette tapes?
|
| Heck I still have stacks of cassette tapes from the 80's and
| early 90's - waiting around to record your favorite song from
| the radio (and cursing DJs that talked over the intro's) and
| then creating custom mix tapes for friends that we then all
| passed around to each other was a right of passage.
| zbrozek wrote:
| What compels someone to elect a NEM plan? It seems increasingly
| favorable to avoid them and set your equipment to zero-export.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I only want solar/wind/etc if I can be off grid.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| I can understand why it can be necessary, but why is being off-
| grid desirable? Having solar/wind/etc is great, but a grid
| connection gives you a bail-out in case things go south, e.g.
| an outrageously hot and windless summer night might create a
| demand that cannot be handled by your battery (if any).
| bick_nyers wrote:
| I don't agree with the parent commenter, but in some
| states/countries net metering is being turned around to
| having to pay a flat fee per kWh of solar generators. For
| example, my electric bill is around $160, I can net zero it
| out with 8kWh of solar costing me (installing it myself)
| about $8k total, but then if I get charged the $8 per kWh per
| month that is being proposed, I now pay $80/month to maintain
| a grid I rarely use as opposed to $0/month. Shifting my ROI
| from 4 -> 8 years. If you get solar installed with an
| installer, you would probably pay something like $20k for
| that same array, so your ROI goes from 10 -> 20 years, where
| your warranty might stop at 10 or 15 years. If you instead
| threw that $20k lump sum on the stock market and got 5% per
| year, you would match the amount you would have saved on
| solar.
|
| Edit: Math is hard, that's $64 a month and the numbers change
| slightly but the essence of what I'm saying still holds
| StillBored wrote:
| But your price in that case should be really outrageous
| because your just externalizing the cost of the utility
| having to build a peaker plant somewhere and run it on a
| couple peak days a year (and maintain the infra). That cost
| should be averaged over the year for someone who uses 100%
| grid electricity, but for someone who only uses it when the
| production is the most expensive then they are freeloading on
| everyone else. That is sorta the point of the whole article.
|
| It is also fundamentally the problem with wind and PV even at
| grid scale. Its true costs are buried behind the (generally)
| natural gas turbines being built to back it up because the
| grid can't just say "sorry no power right now, you get to
| freeze" like happened in TX last year. So, one has to take
| the max power usage, and assure there is capacity even if it
| happens to be dark/cold and without wind. Usually there is a
| fair bit of excess capacity in place to deal with plants have
| to shutdown for maint/etc so it just becomes a question of
| assuring that all the plants don't do maintenance at the same
| time (enron/CA anyone?), and they aren't going to be doing
| maintenance during the parts of the year when peak power draw
| happens (generally the dead of winter, and summer).
| giantg2 wrote:
| Well, if grid connected, then it wouldn't make sense to have
| a battery that is basically never used. Plus, you pay a fee
| just to be connected. If building a new house, I would rather
| save on the expensive hook-up cost.
|
| In the event of installing a system, I would want it to be
| sized appropriately and have proper design of the rest of the
| system. Better insulation, passive heating and cooling
| strategies, as well as a geothermal heat pump would all be
| good improvements. Arguably, those would the best to focus on
| before implementing solar due to the increased efficiency,
| reducing the necessary battery size, etc. Some of these my
| not be easy or practical with existing houses, but many are.
|
| Ideally I would like a solar/hydro setup, but that would
| require a property with a water source.
| user_named wrote:
| lkrubner wrote:
| About this part:
|
| "Maybe Some Lies Are Necessary?"
|
| In his book "10% Less Democracy" the economist Garret Jones
| pointed out that politicians make terrible decisions during
| election years, therefore, if we had longer terms in office, and
| therefore fewer elections, we'd have better government.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/10-Less-Democracy-Should-Elites/dp/15...
|
| Likewise, in 1787, Alexander Hamilton insisted that the USA
| President should be elected "for life, on good behavior." He
| imagined that having a leader commit to a country for life should
| lead to good governance, so long as the person could be easily
| removed if they behaved badly.
|
| "Democracy For Realists" rounds up some of this thinking. While
| Achen and Bartels don't explicitly endorse longer terms in
| office, they do quote a lot of people who feel longer terms in
| office would lead to better government, and also more honest
| government.
|
| I've been studying this issue and using a Substack as the dumping
| ground for my research notes. If you're interested, here is an
| excerpt where they talk about the struggle to add fluoride to
| municipal water, and the pushback the political leaders got:
|
| https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part...
|
| Here is an excerpt about the damage done by referendums, of the
| type that dominate in California:
|
| https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part...
|
| " _La Follette was eventually the 1924 Progressive candidate for
| president, but the anti-party spirit of that movement is already
| apparent in these remarks two dozen years earlier. As Key (1942,
| 373-374) put is, "The advocates of the direct primary had a
| simple faith in democracy; they thought that if the people, the
| rank and file of the party membership, only were given an
| opportunity to express their will through some such mechanism as
| the direct primary, candidates would be selected who would be
| devoted to the interests of the people as a whole."_
|
| _Some canny political scientists were immediately skeptical. For
| example, Henry Jones Ford (1909, 2) noted that_
|
| _"One continually hears the declaration that the direct primary
| will take power from the politicians and give it to the people.
| This is pure nonsense. Politics has been, is, and always will be
| carried on by politicians, just as art is carried on by artists,
| engineering by engineers, business by businessmen. All that the
| direct primary, or any other political reform, can do is to
| affect the character of the politicians by altering the
| conditions that govern political activity, thus determining its
| extent and quality. The direct primary may take advantage and
| opportunity from one set of politicians and confer them upon
| another set, but politicians there will always be so long as
| there is politics."_
|
| I include my own opinion in the Substack, which is that longer
| terms would help make for most honest government.
|
| Achen and Bartels also offer a detailed look at a region of
| Illinois in which the public was invited to vote on the budget
| for the fire department. The public voted for the cheapest, least
| expensive budget they were offered. The public saved themselves a
| total of just $0.43 cents per family a year, while having to
| suffer from very slow response times from the fire department.
| This seems to be a clear example of the public sabotaging its own
| interests, when invited to vote on issues directly:
|
| https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part...
|
| Finally, here is the part where Achen and Bartels come close to
| suggesting that longer terms would allow politicians to be a bit
| more honest. They make the point that it was the politicians
| close to an election who were most likely to pander:
|
| https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part...
|
| " _For lower-level offices, however, a good deal of variation in
| term lengths remains, and it seems to have just the sort of
| consequences suggested by Hamilton and by Canes-Wrone, Herron,
| and Shotts's analysis. For example, elected officials facing the
| issue of fluoridating drinking water in the 1950s and 1960s were
| significantly less likely to pander to their constituents'
| ungrounded fears when longer terms gave them some protection from
| the "sudden breezes of passion" that Hamilton associated with
| public opinion. Figure 4.3 shows the dramatic difference that
| longer terms made to mayoral support for fluoridation. Many
| political leaders, not caring deeply about the topic, ducked; but
| those with longer terms had more political leeway to do what was
| right, and a significant fraction of them used it._ "
|
| It seems likely we could get a more honest kind of government if
| politicians were elected for a single very long term, of perhaps
| 15 or 20 years. The top judges in Britain are appointed for 18
| years, so perhaps that is the ideal number when you want to
| ensure someone's independence, while still allowing the regular
| churn of generational change.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Alexander "I helped patroons in Upstate New York put in place a
| literal feudal system that kept tenants in debt peonage for
| decades and entailed their land" Hamilton has no business
| suggesting life terms for anything.
| StillBored wrote:
| Really, in deregulated markets, a similar concept should apply to
| wind/solar generators. They should be forced to guarantee 100%
| reliable production, which means that they are responsible for
| the batteries or gas plants as well.
|
| Then they won't get to financially destabilize the reliable power
| producers by shifting the costs of having a plant sitting around
| idle for most of the year to some other org that has to balance
| the books.
| krapp wrote:
| In a deregulated market, no one forces anyone to guarantee
| anything.
| StillBored wrote:
| Well power deregulation has a lot of meanings, here in TX, in
| which is considered a "deregulated" market (because the
| producers, transmission and retails are different orgs, and
| there is an energy market) normal generators have to file
| servicing/downtime requests, which can be rejected, when they
| won't be able to deliver their nameplate capacity. That is to
| assure there is sufficient grid/transmission capacity, they
| won't be offline during peak demand season, etc.
|
| So, power deregulation doesn't mean "free for all", because
| then they would just play games of assuring under supply and
| drive the price up, and the grid stability down. In the US it
| just generally means that there aren't integrated municipal
| power companies (which can sometimes still exist in
| deregulated environments). In TX case, the deregulated market
| has a market regulator called ERCOT.
|
| (edit: to expound on this more) An integrated power company
| generally is responsible for assuring it can meet the peak
| demands of its customers. Which means it builds the power
| plants, transmission lines, and gets paid directly by the
| consumers. This was much of the US a few decades back where
| individual co/orgs were responsible for their service areas.
| The grid is more a bunch of regional grids all synced, so
| while a certain amount of power could be drawn from one
| region to another it wasn't the normal mode of operation.
| Anyway, the point being that should such an org build wind/pv
| they would also be responsible for building/maintaining the
| backup generation. So the books balanced in the end, that
| isn't true when any rando can attach an intermittent source
| to the grid, and reap the benefits when it suits them.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| >In the US it just generally means that there aren't
| integrated municipal power companies
|
| Huh? There are plenty. The second biggest city in the US
| has one.
| StillBored wrote:
| Hu? I was trying to define what a is considered a
| deregulated power grid, because apparently people don't
| know how its generally defined in the US. I wasn't saying
| that the entire US is deregulated, its state by state as
| the example below points out, and even in some
| deregulated states (like TX) there remain integrated
| power companies, again as I said.
|
| random google hit, https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-
| deregulated-power-grid?share...
| nathias wrote:
| prices as prices aren't lies, they just don't have any immediate
| relation to costs
| microfen wrote:
| People have seen this net metering problem coming from far off. I
| wrote a very unpolished undergrad thesis on this a while ago.
| Some standout articles from back then showed how net metering
| leads to a positive feedback of solar adoption [1] because of how
| rates are structured throughout this country (and the world for
| that matter), and it was time to consider modifying the rate
| setting process [2]. My conclusion was that net metering ends up
| being a regressive tax on those who can't afford the upfront
| capital to install solar themselves.
|
| It's been a while since I looked at residential solar tariffs,
| but there were a lot of ingenious solutions being proposed to
| deal with the downsides of net metering and poorly set feed-in
| tariff rates. Minnesota's Value of Solar tariff [3] is the one
| that comes to mind as being pretty clever.
|
| [1]:
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
|
| [2]:
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10406...
|
| [3]: https://www.mnseia.org/value-solar
| FabHK wrote:
| Very interesting, and surprising conclusion. I hadn't seen this
| problem before. (Though, note regarding "coming from far off" -
| the articles you cite are from 2013, 2014.)
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| >My conclusion was that net metering ends up being a regressive
| tax on those who can't afford the upfront capital to install
| solar themselves.
|
| This is the traditional conclusion in the utility business, but
| I'd say it's also almost meaningless. By the exact same
| arguments, any kind of conservation winds up being a
| "regressive tax on those who can't afford the upfront capital",
| e.g. insulation, fancy windows, high efficiency HVAC.
|
| If I can afford a $2400 upfront cost to go above code on my
| HVAC unit, but it saves 100 a month, that savings is being
| subsidized by the people who can't afford it. The utility loses
| 100 a month in revenue but much less than that in costs, and
| the difference is picked up by the broader customer base.
|
| Hell, turning your thermostat settings up in the summer is a
| "regressive tax on those who can't handle the less comfortable
| temperature" by exactly the same argument.
| nostrademons wrote:
| It also ignores how R&D and tech markets work. That
| "regressive tax on those who can't afford upfront capital" is
| an "R&D subsidy to early customers who are providing the
| upfront capital to lower the cost of solar". As solar
| companies get more wealthy customers, they can spend more on
| technology to improve efficiency, they gain economies of
| scale, and they can attract more financial capital on equity
| markets.
|
| All of this has actually played out - the cost per watt of a
| solar installation is now 1/3 of what it was 10 years ago:
|
| https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2021/documenting-a-
| decade-...
| paxys wrote:
| Cool article, but this is literally the first chapter of any Econ
| 101 textbook. Nothing new or groundbreaking is happening in
| California.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| One of the most common "lies" is price windowing where you charge
| multiple prices for something that costs you the same. Like when
| Intel used to sell a 486SX at a lower price because the math co-
| processor was deactivated on the same chip as the more expensive
| 486 DX. This pricing "lie" allowed Intel to get more total
| revenue and sell more total units because they could charge more
| and less at the same time. Airline ticket prices also work like
| this sometimes.
|
| Why I put "lie" in quotes is that prices always reflect more than
| cost. They also reflect the utility to the purchaser. Some people
| are always willing to pay more or less. Beyond cost, price also
| reflects utility. It's true the price of electricity is
| manipulated to shape behavior, but its also true that 200 kW
| hours is twice as useful as 100kW hours and the purchaser may be
| willing to pay twice as much for it.
| parineum wrote:
| > because the math co-processor was deactivated on the same
| chip
|
| I don't know if this is true of your specific example but
| modern CPUs SKUs that are differentiated by core count do the
| same thing except they disable those extra cores because they
| are faulty but will disable a working core to make a quota.
| jsight wrote:
| Honestly, this feels like a bit of a red herring. The net
| metering issue is getting more airtime lately, but it isn't
| nearly as big of an issue as the proposed connectivity fee that
| is only targeted at solar customers and based on the nameplate
| capacity of solar.
|
| That fee is directly designed to capture the benefits of solar
| for the utility and has little to do with real costs to the grid.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| This is exactly right. Now that PG&E has built a sizable solar
| installation base, the NEM3.0 move is to make sure they can
| capture more profit. Their plan for passing NEM3.0 seems to be
| to cry and moan about how they're being taken advantage of by
| individuals who paid $30k to install solar panels on their
| homes.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| When your business model is getting a guaranteed ~10% return
| on equity, you're going to fight hard to not give up your
| cash cow.
|
| https://dms.psc.sc.gov/Attachments/Matter/5f64b1b3-d2bc-4b20.
| ..
| skybrian wrote:
| Not really guaranteed if you consider the risk of
| bankruptcy due to wildfires.
| 14 wrote:
| People need to be off the grid completely and when that
| happens what will these power companies do? If we ever get
| the affordable battery system that are always just around the
| corner that will allow this to happen. I look forward to the
| day. Our electric company has been raising rates and the
| system is not fair. It is tiered so the more you use the more
| you pay in hopes to reduce usage. Fair enough. But in my
| house we have 5 adults and 4 children. We have the same tier
| as someone with 1 adult and no children. So even though we
| are more environmentally friendly and our heat heats 9
| people, our lights provide light for 9 people, because we use
| more electricity in other areas like showers we always end up
| at the higher tier paying a lot for electric even though on a
| per individual basis we use less electricity. I unfortunately
| am in Canada and the solar power just isn't efficient enough
| here to make it worth while.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > People need to be off the grid completely
|
| I thought that when I was 16. Now that I'm 58, there is no
| way in hell I am in favor of every household having energy
| storage systems sufficient to see them through every night
| and season of high energy use. I'm all for some level of
| distributed power generation, and some level of distributed
| energy storage, but "people need to be off the grid
| completely" is, IMO, a step too far.
| zbrozek wrote:
| I'm 34 and am working towards being grid-independent
| because the cost exceeds the value.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| As I've described here (comment in thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30195830 ), it would
| be essentially absurd to try to go fully offgrid in our
| home here near Santa Fe. Note that I define full offgrid
| as "not burning wood to supplement electricity usage for
| heat", which may differ from your view.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| Grid defection is illegal in almost every municipality in
| the country. Companies like PG&E have a legislated monopoly
| and there's no other option for you.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> Greenhouse gas emissions are a classic instance: polluters
| don't pay for the carbon they emit. This is the ultimate
| distorted price: emissions have a high cost, but the price we
| charge polluters is $0. That price is a colossal lie.
|
| I always say if you want to make someone pay for carbon
| emissions, the easiest way is to tax its extraction from the
| ground. Tax coal, oil, and gas extraction (or import) and call it
| a day. No sense creating artificial markets for carbon credits or
| other such nonsense that just encourages gaming a system and
| feeding middlemen.
|
| The author IMHO totally blew it by digressing from the net-
| metering thing. Its a really good example of how pricing doesn't
| match costs, but he offers absolutely nothing as a fix for that
| situation. Charging people a base rate for the infrastructure
| plus usage sounds nice, but that causes problems for poor people
| and kind of subsidizes large users. The current pricing scheme
| which increases costs with usage (progressive pricing?) seems
| more fair. Or what about splitting the bill into infra and usage
| portions, then solar installations would pay infra for power
| flowing in _either_ direction. I 'm sure there are plenty more
| ideas out there, but the author offers none.
| LadyCailin wrote:
| That split bill thing is how it works here in Norway. The
| nettleie (infra part) is regulated like a utility, because it's
| a monopoly in the area serviced, but the actual electricity is
| fully free market, because you can choose whoever you like to
| actually provide the electricity.
|
| Actually though, now that I've typed this out, the nettleie is
| charged per kWh drawn (as well as peak demand), and I'm not
| sure how that changes if you have solar panels. Maybe another
| Norwegian can comment. In any case, splitting the infra and
| production makes sense to me, and definitely can be done.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Shouldn't the people who use the resource more pay more for its
| maintenance and upkeep? Seems silly to force everyone to equally
| maintain a resource that not everyone equally utilizes.
| jmacd wrote:
| The (privatized) power utility in Nova Scotia, Canada just this
| week proposed a fee of $8/kWh for solar power entering the grid.
| It was met with a pretty ferocious response to the point the
| government started re-writing the legislation that governs
| utility regulation.
|
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/premier-vows-to-p...
|
| A very large solar industry has been established around these
| pricing discrepancies. Not easy to undo (and I guess not obvious
| if it should be undone).
| bonzini wrote:
| Note that it's $8/kW/month (presumably based on peak kW
| production); not $8/kWh.
| jmacd wrote:
| shoot, you are right!
| bonzini wrote:
| I checked because it seemed a bit expensive. :)
| jonahbenton wrote:
| This piece doesn't go nearly far enough.
|
| Blue pill: prices are economic signals reflecting supply and
| demand and play five distinct roles in capitalist economies...
|
| Red pill: prices are a statement of relative power between and
| among interacting entities that occasionally take economic
| factors into consideration, but only occasionally.
|
| Subsidy irrationality and many other artifacts mentioned in this
| piece that are difficult to reconcile in a blue pill world make
| complete sense in a red pill world.
| epistasis wrote:
| One thing that's missing from this is that with current
| California net metering, for new solar customers, you can't dump
| a kWh on the grid at noon and then swap it for one at 7pm at the
| top of the duck curve.
|
| New plans are all time-of-use rated, meaning that you can only
| swap kWh within the same time of use band. At least, that's how
| it's been explained to me, I have not yet been able to find any
| explicit rules on PG&E's site explaining how time of use and net
| metering interact. (And for that matter, PG&E goes to nearly
| excessive length to avoid describing how anything works, what the
| actual rates and charges are, or generally putting the most
| useless pablum on their website.)
|
| I think that all of these market designs and pricing schemes need
| to be made with an eye on getting to the lowest cost zero-carbon
| grid. Current best models are coming from Christopher Clack at
| Vibrant Clean Energy, and all his modeling shows that if we
| deploy lots of distributed solar and storage at meters, and
| upgrade distribution, we end up saving massive amounts of money
| over the decades. The reason is that by having distributed solar
| and storage, you can massively reduce other fixed cost parts of
| the grid as they age out.
|
| So really we need net metering policy that encourages that sort
| of capital investments today, and not just in the wealthiest
| neighborhoods that have good credit scores or $20k to spend on
| home improvement on homes occupied by owners, but all over the
| grid, including rentals.
|
| That's going to take not only good net metering policy, but also
| new innovation in financing and entrepreneurship. Figuring out
| how to convince landlords to let you install solar and storage
| all over, and integrating that into a virtual power plant is a
| nut that somebody needs to crack. Maybe it won't be
| entrepreneurs, maybe it will be cities making municipal Virtual
| Power Plants to meet their own ambitious climate goals. But there
| are a few key pieces missing from the best possible, most
| economical efficient, energy transition. And if we just let the
| utilities dictate policy, we will _not_ be getting anything like
| the most economically efficient grid, we will get grids where
| they can make maximum profit.
| thomastu wrote:
| > I have not yet been able to find any explicit rules on PG&E's
| site explaining how time of use and net metering interact. (And
| for that matter, PG&E goes to nearly excessive length to avoid
| describing how anything works, what the actual rates and
| charges are, or generally putting the most useless pablum on
| their website.)
|
| PGE explains this for retail customers right here:
| https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/solar-and-vehicles/gre...
|
| The various rate schedules for the different NEM
| interconnections are also published and easily found. e.g. for
| NEM2 - https://www.pge.com/en_US/for-our-business-
| partners/intercon... (the actual tariff is on the pdf link on
| the right hand side - https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/ta
| riffbook/ELEC_SCHED...). Each rate will have some text like
| this which describes what the rate is.
|
| > All rates charged under this schedule will be in accordance
| with the eligible customer-generator's PG&E otherwise-
| applicable metered rate schedule (OAS).
|
| So if you are a PGE customer on the E-TOU-C rate schedule, NEM2
| (roughly) credits your excess generation under that schedule.
| Part of this should hopefully move new home-owners to either
| install batteries or if that is cost prohibitive, install west-
| facing panels.
| conk wrote:
| For each kwh you feed to the grid you get a credit for the
| value of that kWh during that time. Say off-peak is $.20 and
| peak is $.40 (this is an exaggeration but makes the math easy).
| You would need to feed 2 kWh to the grid during off peak to
| cover 1 kWh drawn from the grid during peak usage. On top of
| this there are non-by passable charges for every kWh drawn from
| the grid regardless of any credits on your account.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I see no reason why not do this in proper spot market way.
| Calculate it every 5 minutes, what you supply you get
| accounted for and what you use or that is withdraw you get
| accounted. At certain intervals these are matched and you pay
| the difference.
| epistasis wrote:
| Those numbers are actually really close to reality for some
| of the electrical vehicle rates, which go down as low as
| $0.21 for off peak, around $0.40 for part-peak, and $0.53 for
| full peak. Other TOU rate plans only go as low as $0.31
| during some seasons, and peak in the mid 40 cent range.
| paulmd wrote:
| > The reason is that by having distributed solar and storage,
| you can massively reduce other fixed cost parts of the grid as
| they age out.
|
| The article also completely ignores the concept that
| distributed generation can actually reduce infrastructure
| needs. If you're generating the power at the "last mile" and
| sending it to your neighbor, that power doesn't travel through
| a substation, it doesn't travel through long transmission lines
| that need to be maintained, it's just generated (roughly) where
| it needs to be, saving you a lot of infrastructure. So it
| certainly seems "fair" to offset that infrastructure cost at
| least somewhat - you are providing value to the utility in
| terms of infrastructure they don't have to build themselves.
| And they sell that power that you feed back to customers paying
| for "green energy" at a premium as well.
|
| (note that despite regular peaks occurring later in the day,
| annual peaks almost always occur during periods of high solar
| production - it is aircon during summer heatwaves that blows
| the grid, not cooking dinner. So you are delivering huge value
| in terms of peaker plants that don't have to be built to run a
| few days a year during those heatwaves.)
|
| I don't live in California but in 2020 we had heat waves and my
| local power company blew up 2 substations in my area from the
| load. That wouldn't have happened with more distributed power
| generation, solar production is at its peak precisely during
| those heatwaves that strain the grid so badly, but the
| utilities were actually making a big push at the time for net
| metering to be abolished and solar production to be reduced.
|
| And of course we still pay incredibly high transmission costs -
| we have 8-9c per kWh electricity but my transmission and
| delivery charges are approximately 12-14c, for a normal
| suburban area (I'm not out in the boonies), so obviously that
| money isn't making it into the infrastructure where it needs to
| be anyway.
|
| (Compounding this issue, of course, is that there are plenty of
| people who _are_ out in the middle of nowhere, and I 'm sure a
| good chunk of that cost is going to subsidizing them. If we
| want to talk about market distortions and ignore the greater
| social good - how about we move away from these hidden
| subsidies to people living in the middle of nowhere? Make them
| pay the actual costs of their roads and electric and other
| services.)
|
| Big picture it's hard to see the pushback against net metering
| as being anything other than rent-seeking by an entrenched
| industry. They're charging huge delivery fees and not
| maintaining the grid, and they're pushing back against remedies
| literally at the same time as their infrastructure is failing.
| They're paying you nothing for electricity fed back into the
| grid, while charging other customers a premium for "green"
| electricity. Pick a side, it's either valuable or it's not.
| rr808 wrote:
| > If you're generating the power at the "last mile" and
| sending it to your neighbor, that power doesn't travel
| through a substation, it doesn't travel through long
| transmission lines that need to be maintained, it's just
| generated (roughly) where it needs to be, saving you a lot of
| infrastructure. So it certainly seems "fair" to offset that
| infrastructure cost at least somewhat - you are providing
| value to the utility in terms of infrastructure they don't
| have to build themselves.
|
| This is true if you're not connected to the grid. However if
| you use power on those cold winter cloudy days you need all
| that infrastructure still. The difference is when you used
| the grid's power every day that cost was spread over the
| year. If you only use grid power 20 days a year that grid
| infrastructure is very inefficient and costly.
|
| Net metering is an anachronism. You should pay and receive
| the current spot price which is near zero on Spring/Fall
| sunny days and super high in Summer evenings and Winter
| nights.
| epistasis wrote:
| Right, but that fixed cost of the grid is entirely
| determined by the peak capacity needed, not by average
| usage.
|
| And actual usage of that capital often has peak usage much
| more extreme than a typical 90/10 rule, meaning that the
| vast majority of that fixed cost is mostly unused.
|
| The key to decreasing that peak is the distributed storage
| that's paired with distributed solar. It allows massive
| amounts of cost savings, despite needing to beef up the
| distribution side of the grid for this to work.
| paulmd wrote:
| Which - to go back to my "the utilities need to be paying
| fair rates for the infrastructure provided by clients" -
| if you're going to be putting extra cycles on my battery,
| you'd better be paying me a decent rate for it. I've
| always seen the idea thrown out as this abstract "we can
| use everyone's car as a peaker battery, it's gonna be
| great!" but if they are gonna pay distributed storage
| rates like the rates they pay for distributed generation,
| then fuck no, I'm not letting you wreck my battery for 50
| cents a day.
|
| Utilities are gonna charge you 25c a kWh extra for peak
| demand delivery, and then be paying the actual people
| delivering it like 1c a kWh, you can book it.
| paulmd wrote:
| > This is true if you're not connected to the grid. However
| if you use power on those cold winter cloudy days you need
| all that infrastructure still.
|
| Cold winter days don't represent peak consumption for the
| grid, there is no capacity being built specifically for
| cold winter days. In contrast there _is_ capacity being
| built to offset everyone turning on the A /C during summer
| heatwaves, and solar has high power output during those
| periods.
|
| Your argument is specifically called out as being a misuse
| of the "duck curve" concept.
|
| > Common misconceptions
|
| > One misconception related to the duck curve is that solar
| photovoltaic power does not help supply peak demand and
| therefore cannot replace other power plants. For example,
| in California, solar output is low at 7 pm when daily
| demand usually peaks.[19] This fact leads some to believe
| that solar power cannot reduce the need for other power
| plants, as they will still be needed at 7 pm when solar
| power output is low. However, California's annual demand
| peaks usually occur around 3 pm to 5 pm,[20] when solar
| power output is still substantial.[19] 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.[21] As a result, solar power does in
| fact help supply peak demand and therefore can substitute
| for other sources of power.
| rr808 wrote:
| Possibly, I can't find an easy source of spot price over
| time.
|
| https://www.caiso.com/todaysoutlook/pages/supply.html is
| pretty good for total energy used and sources. In the
| Summer 3-5pm could be demand peak, but looks like the
| total energy used is high over a few hours, even after
| sun down.
| surfmike wrote:
| "In practice, it's often politically difficult to argue for overt
| subsidies, and we resort to workarounds like net metering."
|
| The reason we have so many hidden subsidies (also: tax credits)
| is precisely the sentence above. It's the difference between
| policy and politics. Few policies are designed well because the
| main force driving their creation is political support (or the
| lack of it).
| __s wrote:
| "carbon tax" is trouble to enact because you can't expect to
| rally support for something with the word tax in its name
|
| Then people complain about where will that tax money go. It
| doesn't matter. The government could burn all the carbon tax
| money collected _( & in fact, this would help against
| inflation)_. The purpose is to fix incentives, not find funding
| guelo wrote:
| Giving the carbon tax revenue back to people as cash payments
| could help politically.
| hardtke wrote:
| Canada promised to do that and the proposal was still
| wildly unpopular and abandoned. If you've build your life
| around no carbon tax (e.g. you live far from work and need
| to drive) you will personally suffer from such a change and
| will vocally lobby against the change. We end up with
| things like the Yellow Vest movement in France or the
| political instability that happens when any government
| tries to reduce fuel subsidies. It seems that voters are
| more sensitive to the price of gas than any other issue and
| any political party that causes the price of gas to go up
| gets voted out of office. Paul Krugman wrote a post
| recently showing that US consumers' inflation expectation
| exactly tracks the price of gas. I've concluded that any
| consumer impacting carbon tax cannot work in a democratic
| system. We need subsidies (both explicit and hidden) to
| reduce our carbon emissions.
| stormbrew wrote:
| > Canada promised to do that and the proposal was still
| wildly unpopular and abandoned. <...> I've concluded that
| any consumer impacting carbon tax cannot work in a
| democratic system.
|
| We have a carbon tax in Canada and it's probably not
| going away any time soon (it is, in fact, scheduled to
| continue going up), so I'm not sure what you mean here.
| The provinces can do a rebate/dividend if they want
| and/or run their own system designed that way but I'm not
| sure if any have.
|
| I'm not sure if your first statement is just saying we
| abandoned a rebate, but your last statement implies you
| think any consumer carbon pricing is impossible
| regardless of that, while your example says otherwise.
| dahfizz wrote:
| Doesn't that ruin the incentive structure? Your cash
| payments are higher when carbon use is higher.
| stormbrew wrote:
| In this kind of scheme, you don't get what _you_ paid
| back as cash, you get something more like a dividend of
| the revenues (possibly just as a non-refundable income
| tax rebate or something, or as a dividend check given to
| all adults, depending on the particulars of your region
| 's tax aversions).
|
| So you're actually incentivized to consume less, because
| you get more out of it if your tax payments are less than
| your dividend.
|
| Obviously there might be some perverse incentives to
| like.. causing a global increase in emissions while
| keeping your own small somehow but those are probably
| hard to significantly profit from.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Not only is the "tax" word problematic, but if you call it
| "carbon pricing" that irks the people who are reflexively
| anti-market. And no matter what you call it, the
| sanctimonious environmentalists will fight it because it
| minimizes the need for heroic personal sacrifice with respect
| to preserving the environment (frankly, these personal
| sacrifices probably aren't significant in the first place--
| the bulk of pollution is industry and transport, especially
| that which we outsource to China, etc).
| triceratops wrote:
| > the sanctimonious environmentalists will fight it because
| it minimizes the need for heroic personal sacrifice with
| respect to preserving the environment
|
| Any evidence for this? IMO "Sanctimonious
| environmentalists" only care that consumption reduces.
| Whether that's voluntary or due to being priced out by
| carbon taxes is irrelevant. If anything doing it
| voluntarily, before it was ever needed to make your
| household budget work, would make them feel even holier.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| It's pretty much a tautology--I'm defining "sanctimonious
| environmentalist" as one who makes showy personal
| sacrifices for esteem. If emissions decrease because
| manufacturing processes become more efficient, then their
| sacrifices were for naught and the lifestyle they've been
| pushing on others becomes irrelevant (or decreases in
| relevance).
| triceratops wrote:
| > then their sacrifices were for naught and the lifestyle
| they've been pushing on others becomes irrelevant
|
| And I'm arguing the opposite. In the short-term at least,
| costs will rise and people will be forced to cut back.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I agree that's the short-term effect (although a carbon
| tax will likely start out small and increase over time so
| as to minimize unpopular effects), but in my experience
| this analysis is too sophisticated for most of this
| "sanctimonious environmentalist" group. I.e., people who
| tend to believe that the environment hinges on converting
| people to vegan cyclists are not likely to understand
| economics well enough to understand a carbon tax. This is
| a big and unflattering generalization for expedience
| sake, so I'm trusting readers to understand the larger
| point and not get mired in "this is a generalization!"
| counterarguments.
| guelo wrote:
| Environmentalists would absolutely not fight it. They've
| been begging for a carbon tax for 40 years.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I was specifically referring to the subset of
| environmentalists who believe that salvation lies in
| converting everyone to veganism and cycling. But there
| are a lot of people who style themselves as
| environmentalists who oppose carbon taxes:
|
| * The "personal responsibility" environmentalists
| described above
|
| * The "anti-market" environmentalists who assume without
| evidence that markets necessarily make things worse
|
| * The Green New Deal environmentalists who largely want
| to use the threat of climate change as political cover
| for social spending ("climate justice").
|
| The last bullet might be too broad--there might be some
| GND environmentalists who are sincere, but certainly the
| overwhelming majority of GND policy and rhetoric seem to
| be more concerned with social spending than decarbonizing
| the atmosphere. I think there's a lot of overlap between
| this group and the prior two groups as well.
| hardolaf wrote:
| The delivery fee being artificially low was a political
| decision to subsidize utility prices for the poor. Every single
| utility has step function of pricing for usage fees that works
| to capture the cost of providing the infrastructure. This is
| why net metering never made sense to utilities and why they
| were trying to reject it despite states and politicians seeking
| to force it on them. The utilities who did go all-in on net
| metering willingly did so at the generator rates which pissed
| off a ton of homeowners but that was actually a fair thing to
| do as that reflected the real price of the energy being
| provided.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| This is why all subsidies should be in the form of cash. Give
| poor people cash rather than obfuscate prices, which then
| results in hampering of market mechanisms and results in
| inefficient allocation of resources.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Aside from the obvious problem (which poor people) it is a
| very interesting idea to remove all subsidies (explicit and
| implicit). Terrifying but interesting
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The obvious problem is solved by making it universal. You
| do not need to choose which poor people, just make it
| everyone, and then collect a marginal income tax.
| Although, I would prefer marginal sales taxes, but that
| seems technically impossible with current technology.
|
| The reason why it is not done is because it would lay
| bare all the inequities in the system, as well as require
| higher taxes due to not being able to hide the inequities
| in various forms of price discrimination/segmentation.
|
| Keeping prices obfuscated means costs can be distributed
| across the population in an unfair manner / benefits
| reaped in an unfair manner, as well as ability to punt
| costs into the future.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| >>> The reason why it is not done is because it would lay
| bare all the inequities in the system,
|
| Is that a common justification for UBI? I have not heard
| it but it would be a big reasons for me to support it -
| any reading you know of?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It is a personal conjecture. Every time I come across
| price obfuscation, or not doing the straight forward
| thing, it is because the seller does not want the
| transaction to be as transparent as possible.
|
| Tax deductions, credits, student loans, subsidized
| mortgages, taxpayer funded pensions, Medicaid reimbursing
| differently (lower) than Medicare reimbursing differently
| than Tricare, and so on and so forth.
|
| It is always a political decision to reduce total costs,
| or drive the benefit to certain populations, or use
| liberal assumptions to present future costs as less than
| they really are and so on and so forth.
|
| If we want people to have a house, give them money to buy
| a house. Or a house. Same with education, healthcare,
| everything. The big problem with this is cash has to be
| accounted for today, transparently, and cleanly. There is
| no option to muddy the waters.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| Even in a single example such as your electric bill, this
| is absolutely impossible (or, maybe with a team of
| statisticians and accountants working on each customer's
| bill each month, and of course their associated costs).
|
| The fact is, the utility does not know how much money you
| cost them in a given month and it's impossible to say.
| Some of your electricity is being generated from a plant
| planned and built 40+ years ago, long since paid for. Is
| that electricity sold at the cost of fuel and
| maintenance? Electricity generated from a new plant then
| has a corresponding capital cost component but how's it
| portioned out at the customer level? What if they had to
| go change your transformer 20 years ago but your
| neighbor's still on their old 50-year-old transformer
| next door?
|
| Unworkable.
| boringg wrote:
| I'm not sure I even understand what the point of this substack
| article is and it is oversimplified. Is it him just examining
| what net-metering is then realizing that the utility provides
| more value than just electricity generation and that is eye
| opening to him?
|
| There's no conclusion and no cohesive argument just that the
| world is full of pricing distortions or that what you pay in
| prices isn't always exactly what you get (subsidizing some other
| development). Is it a take that NEM is flawed?
|
| Is it him moralizing that the climate tech industry is taking
| advantage of subsidies? "Don't cling to a subsidy longer and
| harder than necessary" --> Please look at the on-going subsidies
| to Oil & Gas - its absurd.
|
| If you really want to understand electricity generation pricing
| you should start looking at all the pricing nodes in real time
| and bring in energy storage, capacity payments, spinning
| reserves, non-spinning reserves, day ahead market, 5 minute
| market etc. On top of that you should start layering in how the
| federal government subsidizes different energy industries and add
| that layer on top of it. It's incredibly complex and certainly
| not clear what you are paying for.
|
| The top layer of how retail get's comped for the generation (in
| California) is interesting and a long-term risk for the utility
| (if enough people/companies put solar on roof and use NEM) if
| solar generation truly takes off. Long way to go as someone who
| works in the industry.
| FabHK wrote:
| I agree that the article is maybe not very clear in its
| conclusion. But one valuable thing I took from it is this
| pernicious tension I hadn't been aware of before between
| pricing electricity in accordance
|
| - to actual production costs: large fixed "standing charge"
| (per unit of time), small consumption charge (per unit of
| energy)
|
| - with environmental goals: small fixed standing charge, large
| consumption charge.
|
| You could argue that you should just (that word is doing a lot
| of work here) internalise the external costs, and then price it
| as "undistorted" as possible. Does that lead to the right
| answer here?
| boringg wrote:
| You end up with a bunch of other challenges. The
| infrastructure costs of the grid are quite high to build and
| operationally expensive. That cost needs to be defrayed
| somehow.
|
| The Time of Use (consumption charges) that aren't explained
| that well and differ quite significantly depending on the
| tariff structure you apply to. Consumption for commercial use
| is charged in two ways kwh that you require but also the peak
| kW that you need per month. This is in order to recoup the
| marginal cost of electricity produced at the "peak" of the
| month.
|
| I'm not trying to just muddy up the waters but I think the
| underlying analysis is overly simplistic and inaccurate. I
| would hate for people to think that this substack article is
| an accurate portrayal of the complexities of the energy
| system and the pricing structures. Residential rates are only
| portion of the grid.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| The problem with Net Metering is that some politicians don't
| understand how electricity (and energy) works, but feel like they
| need to "do something" in order to tackle climate change.
|
| Net Metering was a great way to subsidize solar when it was a
| niche market. Now it's not. IMO, we should stop subsidizing solar
| and start subsidizing home batteries. IE, only allow "Net
| Metering" if there is a battery, sized to match the panels, that
| the power company can control.
|
| This way, we can make the system "win-win." The consumer benefits
| from cheaper electricity, and the power company benefits because
| they can tap the generated electricity when it's needed most.
| tempnow987 wrote:
| One BIG issue with this article. You are often not allowed to
| just go off grid and use your own battery as a backup.
|
| Does anyone know if they've changed that (zoning / building code
| / certificate of occupancy) requiring an interconnect with the
| grid?
|
| That is my big issue here. We are getting told how we need to pay
| for them to build us a bigger / higher power grid. What if I want
| to go off grid.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Make your own country. Being interconnected with the grid is a
| net positive, for everyone, you included.
| bick_nyers wrote:
| If the law is going to mandate staying connected to the grid
| (subject to any maintenance fees the utility company desires,
| independent of usage), then those grid maintenance fees
| should be moved to tax dollars.
| tempnow987 wrote:
| Listening to a big corp like PG&E whine about how they are
| going to need to spend billions to upgrade a grid I'm not
| using, and so will need to charge me to have solar and
| battery power is rediculous if part of the reason they need
| to spend all this money is they won't allow folks to be
| disconnected from the grid.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I don't know who told you this but I own a 100% off-the-grid
| property in Mono County that has solar and battery banks (and a
| generator).
| tempnow987 wrote:
| Fantastic! Then I have no complaints. The grid is a great
| resource, IF you are using it, then you should pay for it.
| And mid-day solar (when PG&E curtails their own solar) does
| not have same value of power at 6PM - so they need to fix
| that for sure, which will result in more local battery demand
| (a good thing).
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| It seems to me if it's true that the cost of distribution is
| something like 77%, then it really argues in favor of more houses
| being off grid -- For the cost it may have been better to build
| self sufficiency, and/or micro community grids rather than a
| giant regional one. The economy of scale in generation is lost in
| the costs of distribution.
| 7952 wrote:
| In practice local generation and storage has fewer possible
| customers. The grid has limits on how much can be exported from
| a residential substation. A generator connected to a big
| substation can send electricity to millions of potential
| customers. And a battery can receive energy from all over the
| grid. The local intermittency is easier to iron out when you
| can benefit from geographical separation, different modes of
| generation and different weather conditions.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| That distribution cost is not at all related to solar. With
| rooftop solar your power travels across the powerline maybe 1
| city block to your neighbor. It's not traveling thousands and
| thousands of miles.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Right, the claim that renewables are cheaper than nuclear and
| other alternatives are a half-truth.
|
| It's true that renewables can be highly affordable when the sun
| is shining but when the wind is blowing but the reason why they
| work with the current grid is that natural gas is highly
| available and cheap and the capital cost of gas turbine
| generators (very similar to jet aircraft engines) is very low.
|
| Hydroelectric can fill some of the gap but at an environmental
| expense: if you want to support a healthy ecosystem you need a
| relatively continuous flow in rivers. If it is starting and
| stopping a lot you are depriving the ecosystem of a valuable
| service.
|
| The idea that consumers can match demand and supply is also
| limited in applicability. If you turn off power to an industrial
| facility like a microchip factory you can destroy days if not
| months worth of production. Wholesale electricity prices can
| range from negative to astronomical and it is outright cruel and
| unrealistic to expect ordinary consumers to be exposed to that.
|
| Options for power storage have improved dramatically in the last
| decade thanks to the development of electric car batteries but
| they are still orders of magnitude too expensive. If they follow
| the same curve solar has they could come within reach but with
| any setbacks they could remain science fiction.
| beerandt wrote:
| It's this, but it's also more direct and indirect regulation.
|
| For example:
|
| Natural gas compressors now need to be electrically powered
| instead of NG powered. Added cost, but doesn't reduce total gas
| burned.
|
| Oil companies are forced to do things like build equipment that
| captures 100% of vented gasses (instead of burning them off),
| even when the embedded cost of manufacturing said equipment
| exceeds any gains. Ie, it creates more emissions than it will
| ever capture. But still raises the price of oil.
|
| Some of the Texas power plants last year could only generate at
| the power levels that maximized efficiency (or minimized
| certain emissions) instead of at maximum output. Asking for an
| emergency authorization to produce at 100% was granted by the
| feds, but only at a minimum market price of $1500/MW.
| (Typically ~$30, with normal extremes ranging from maybe
| $20-150.)
|
| CAFE standards are essentially quotas that increase the cost of
| regular ice vehicles in order to subsidize green, hybrid, and
| electric vehicles.
|
| And perhaps the most direct influence on oil prices is
| preventing auctions for new federal mineral leases, limiting
| exploration and extraction of o&g offshore and on federal
| lands.
| epistasis wrote:
| > they are still orders of magnitude too expensive
|
| This isn't right as of today, stored energy charged by solar is
| about $0.20/kWh ($200/MWh) which is within spitting distance of
| the cost of new nuclear. And when you average this cost with
| the cost of solar/wind delivered directly, it's a huge cost
| winner.
|
| https://www.lazard.com/media/451566/lazards-levelized-cost-o...
|
| This is just the cost today, batteries are dropping
| precipitously in cost. If storage dropped in cost multiple
| orders of magnitude, and there's reason to believe that it will
| drop at least an order of magnitude, then thermal cycle
| electricity will completely obsolete.
| jeppesen-io wrote:
| Thank you for saying this. I find in technical circles, like
| HN, it's often underappreciated how dramatically solar, wind
| and stored energy are becoming cheaper year by year while
| production capacity continues to grow
| epistasis wrote:
| It's funny because the technical crowd should be best
| situated to understand the incredible tech curves of solar,
| wind, and storage, as they have experienced the advancement
| of computer tech. However, for other technical fields, such
| as civil engineering, they are not used to dramatic cost
| drops.
|
| Nuclear has a surprising negative learning curve. This is
| obvious when comparing different reactor designs over time,
| with ever increasing costs. But the more surprising finding
| is that building the same reactor multiple times get more
| expensive, not less. This is true even during France's
| successful build in the 1970s, so regulatory changes can't
| be the sole reason for increasing costs:
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301
| 4...
| FabHK wrote:
| Question is whether batteries are getting better fast
| enough. Cost per energy stored might be coming down
| relatively quickly, but energy density (energy per volume)
| or specific energy (energy per mass) are improving only
| very slowly. As a consequence, I think long-range electric
| passenger jets, for example, are many decades off.
| epistasis wrote:
| In the context of grid electricity and nuclear, this
| parameter doesn't matter.
|
| For long-range passenger jets, batteries will likely
| never be feasible. Aviation will have other solutions.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| By "very slowly" you mean double the capacity per kg in
| the last decade at a tenth of the cost? Because that is
| more or less what happened in the last decade.
|
| If you don't believe me, the Nissan Leaf originally had
| 21KWH of capacity when it launched in 2010. The smallest
| variant of the latest model has 41 KWH. You can also get
| a 60KWH version. And you can actually install new
| batteries into an original Leaf and double the range
| while slightly lowering the weight. And of course those
| batteries are now a fraction of the cost that they were
| in 2010. Back then replacing the battery would have cost
| tens of thousands of dollars. People are getting that
| done for around 5K now for a battery that is literally
| twice the capacity.
|
| The discarded batteries typically end up being part of
| some grid storage solution.
|
| Another doubling in the coming decade is likely. As is
| further reductions in price per KWH. Maybe not 10x. But
| probably more than 2-3x.
|
| It's profitable now to buy expensive storage solutions
| for grid providers. Ten years from now that will be a lot
| more attractive.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Yes, it gets better when you consider that homeowners that
| are putting solar on their roof are essentially providing
| large amounts of power to energy companies without these
| companies having to actually spend on infrastructure. It's
| home owners who bear the financial burden for that as well as
| the risk.
|
| It gets even better if you consider many people are also
| installing batteries or plugging cars with vehicle to grid
| functionality (like the new Ford pickup truck is capable of
| as well as several other EVs).
|
| A lot of houses with solar and batteries enables the creation
| of virtual power plants that can supply many GW of power to
| the grid during peak hours. So, when demand is highest, they
| can sell power at the most lucrative rates straight from
| batteries that were charged for free during the day. And they
| don't even have to buy the batteries or the panels. All they
| need to do is give a cut of the profits to the home owners.
|
| Basically, the way the EV market is developing, there are
| going to be many millions of large capacity batteries on
| wheels plugged into the grid at any time. All power companies
| have to do is find a way to tap into all that power. Even
| discharging them a little bit collectively creates a lot of
| power.
|
| E.g. supplying half a KWH over the course of an evening
| barely moves the needle on a car. Most EVs have something
| like 40-50KWH of battery. So we're talking a percent or so.
| They'd be trickling out electricity at a low rate of
| something like e.g. 500W or even less. Times a two million
| plugged in cars is about 1 GW of capacity. Do that for an
| hour and you get 1GWH of power at the cost of very slightly
| draining the batteries on a few million cars. That's just car
| batteries. Many home owners also have batteries installed
| into their houses, and solar on the roof to charge them. And
| many of those setups are net producers for large parts of the
| year.
|
| A gas plant costs about 1000$/MWH to operate. Possibly a bit
| more lately due to the high gas prices lately. So, 1GWH of
| power is about 1M $ in cost. That's worth paying something to
| home owners. Most of them are happy to just have the KWH
| slashed from their monthly bills. The rest is basically pure
| profit. Any GWH of gas they don't have to burn adds to their
| profits. Power companies are spending billions on expensive
| grid batteries to lower that cost.
| gennarro wrote:
| I'm shocked by how easily electricity prices are easy to find yet
| no one knows what theirs is! Example: https://utility.report
| greendave wrote:
| How exactly do they come up with a single price per zip-code
| given that rates are dependent on choice of electricity plan,
| on-peak vs. off-peak, % of baseline and so forth?
| thomastu wrote:
| those are average rates, not actual retail rate schedules -
| useful for talking about something like an annual consumption
| number but not so much for something like net metering where
| the time of use is a big deal.
| api wrote:
| This is why your bill should separate your grid fee from your
| generation fee. Net metering could apply to the generation fee
| but not the grid fee, and your generation cost should be
| determined by the time you are using power (due to peaking) not
| just the amount.
|
| Want to escape the grid fee? Then you have to actually disconnect
| with full battery backup. That would promote independence and
| community microgrids, which would be a good thing for robustness
| and overall system efficiency. Someday I can easily imagine
| suburban and rural areas with no "big" grid connection and the
| grid becoming primarily a thing for industrial and high density
| areas.
| bmmayer1 wrote:
| Good piece...putting on my econ hat here, it would definitely be
| more accurate to say that prices are _signals_ that reflect the
| all-in cost of moving products and their dependencies through a
| supply chain and to the consumer. These signals can be disrupted
| by many factors, including competition or lack thereof,
| regulation or tax policy, etc, that often can make things
| inefficient. But in the examples the author uses, it 's not that
| the price is divorced from cost, it's that the price of video
| tapes reflects the all-in cost of production, distribution, as
| well as the cost of fighting piracy. High medical prices reflect
| the incentives and constraints of the system that has been built
| around the service. High drug prices reflect the cost of R&D, not
| the cost of pouring cheap compounds into a plastic mold.
|
| Which is not to say that prices are not truthful per se -- just
| that pricing signals can be easily disrupted by factors not
| normally in the consumer's direct field of vision, and can be
| exploited by "loopholes" (which are just another way to send a
| signal back to the firm that the price is incorrect).
| [deleted]
| skybrian wrote:
| From an information theory standpoint, prices are a very simple
| summarization of overall costs that throws a lot of information
| away.
|
| This is useful to do because supply chains are complicated and
| understanding them would impose a burden on consumers. But it
| also means we remain ignorant of how goods and services get to
| us and what the system constraints are.
|
| Also they aren't just about cost, but also about expected
| demand, and competition to capture that demand. This makes the
| information about costs a muddy approximation at best.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Here in New Mexico, when I connected our 6.6kW PV array to the
| grid, I had the choice of net metering or not. But there was a
| wrinkle: if I chose net metering, the power company could use our
| installation to count towards its own state and federally
| mandated shift toward renewables.
|
| Being a cantakerous old geezer, I said hell no, and opted for no
| net metering. Works out OK from my perspective: still pay small
| electricity bills for the excess that we need for 3-4 months a
| year, and just the $7.70 connection charge for the rest.
| kevindong wrote:
| In NYC at least, electric supply charges are distinct line items
| from electric delivery charges. Consumers do have the option of
| choosing who supplies their electricity (e.g. namely if you want
| to buy your electricity from a green source). But the local
| monopoly is always entitled to charge you for the service of
| actually delivering said electricity to you.
|
| Both charges fluctuate from month to month. When I still lived in
| Indiana, the local monopoly lumped together supply and delivery
| charges into a single line item which, interestingly enough, was
| significantly lower than what I pay for just delivery now.
|
| The following prices are for roughly April.
|
| NYC (ConEd) delivery charge is ~$18/month + ~$0.123/kWh. Supply
| is usually something like ~$0.115/kWh.
|
| Indiana (Duke Energy) total cost (including both supply and
| delivery) was ~$9/month + ~$0.115/kWh.
| paxys wrote:
| It's the same in California. The problem is that the delivery
| charges are also calculated per kWh (so, the cost of delivering
| a single unit of electricity to your house). But what happens
| when the net electricity delivered is zero?
|
| You could argue that customers should be charged for both the
| electricity delivered to their house _and_ the electricity
| taken away from their house, since they are using the grid and
| other expensive infrastructure for both. However you are now
| disincentivising people from installing solar and giving back
| their excess power.
| kube-system wrote:
| Thanks, this is the detail I was missing. Net billing for
| delivery makes zero sense. I think the reasonable solution is
| to bill the consumption direction only.
| cletus wrote:
| The author here would do well to and understand and use terms
| like "fixed costs" and "variable costs". There are large fixed
| costs in the power grid and the author is complaining that the
| retail price of electricity doesn't reflect the variable costs,
| leading to distortions and perverse incentives.
|
| But this doesn't make prices "lies".
|
| > The current net metering system in California is pretty
| favorable to customers with rooftop solar; in effect, it's a
| subsidy.
|
| It's quite an overt and deliberate subsidy to foster solar power
| technology (which has been wildly successful), reduce demand on
| the grid and to shift the pattern of power usage. Electricity use
| spikes during daylight hours [1]. This happens to be when the Sun
| is shining and solar power works. Peak demand is really the only
| thing that matters in powering a grid. Solar is highly effective
| at reducing peak usage.
|
| I honestly don't know why the author feels like any of this isn't
| "upfront".
|
| [1]: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915
| hervature wrote:
| Perhaps you and I are reading this differently. In my opinion,
| the author clearly delineates the two to be able to make this
| claim:
|
| > In other words, the direct cost of providing an additional
| unit of electricity or natural gas is only 23% of overall
| operating expenses.
|
| The way I read it, the author is not claiming the subsidy is
| the misleading part, just that, once there is mass adoption,
| the price of everything will actually go up to something very
| close to the current costs being paid by non-solar panel
| households. That is, at some point, homeowners who build solar
| panels right before this subsidy ends will get burnt very
| badly.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| There's the marginal cost of electricity, and there's the
| marginal cost of electricity at peak time.
|
| The second one is much higher, and solar hits precisely it.
| Yeah, there is still a subsidy and it will go away at some
| point, but it's not 77% of the costs like the article states.
| snewman wrote:
| Author here. Thanks for the feedback!
|
| Agreed that net metering was deliberately designed as a
| subsidy, and that there was nothing hidden or underhanded about
| this, it was (and remains) all quite overt.
|
| And yet. The inspiration for this post was a discussion on my
| town's email list, where a lot of people were talking about net
| metering as if it were the natural and obvious way of doing
| things (and thus were very upset at the proposal to weaken it).
| They either never heard that it was designed as a subsidy, or
| have forgotten (whether through motivated reasoning or the
| simple passage of time).
|
| I think this is a form of tech debt. You have an algorithm
| that's not adapting to new circumstances, the clean solution is
| too difficult / expensive, so you just hack some of the
| parameters of the existing algorithm to give good-enough
| answers in the current circumstances. Eventually everyone
| forgets the history and assumes those are the "correct"
| parameters, and resists changing them even if the system has
| moved out of the circumstance under which the parameters gave
| an OK result.
|
| > the author is complaining that the retail price of
| electricity doesn't reflect the variable costs
|
| I think you mean "doesn't reflect the _fixed_ costs "? And yes,
| it might have been better if I'd taken the time to introduce
| the terms "fixed cost" and "variable cost".
| bonzini wrote:
| I have a question since I am not in the US: is net metering
| based on paying for the difference between consumed and
| produced energy (kWh), or between the _prices_ of consumed
| and produced energy?
| SamBam wrote:
| > It's quite an overt and deliberate subsidy to foster solar
| power technology
|
| I'd say that the issue the author is addressing is that it is
| _not_ so overt. Sure, if you meditate on it it becomes clear it
| 's a subsidy, but I think the vast majority of the people who
| take advantage of it simply think "I produce as much as a use,
| so of course my bill should be zero."
| dboreham wrote:
| Can confirm, having talked to family members with recent
| solar installations.
| stevemadere wrote:
| The vast majority of people are unwilling/unable to think
| deeply enough about the system to understand it. Thus, the
| simplified rule of thumb that generating electricity
| reduces your power bill is needed for them to even
| understand the general direction of what needs to be done.
| Perhaps the power utility could include an explainer page
| at the back of the monthly statement for those with the
| interest and capacity to understand it. Maybe 2% of people
| will read and understand it. The other 98% can just be smug
| about their lowered power bill and blissfully unaware of
| their part in accelerating the market shift to solar.
| greendave wrote:
| Well, if my net usage from the grid were to drop to zero,
| without solar (say because I used a gas generator or
| whatnot), I'd basically be paying the utility zero too
| (modulo some small connection fees). The utility still
| wouldn't save on any of its fixed costs though. What net
| metering with solar does is simply make this option much more
| practical.
|
| The straightforward solution would be to fund major
| infrastructure costs using something other than volumetric
| pricing. But it's easier to just impose fees on solar.
| Macha wrote:
| Or to put in a smaller scale and not require adding your
| own generation, are you stealing from an electricity
| company's fixed costs if you turn all your applicances off
| when you go on holiday, or if you have a holiday home which
| is only occupied 25% of the year? I think the answer is
| clearly not.
| greendave wrote:
| Or for that matter, switching to more efficient
| appliances or other types of conservation.
| SamBam wrote:
| But there's a huge difference between actual zero usage and
| net-zero usage. That's the whole point.
|
| If you're using a generator (or, as another comment said,
| just use hardly any electricity) then you're not a burden
| on the system at all (or barely).
|
| If you're "net zero" because you feed the grid your excess
| power during the day and take away power during the night,
| you're using all their infrastructure.
|
| In your example, you don't need the grid, so it makes sense
| not to pay grid overhead (minus arguments about how we
| still pay for schools with taxes even if we're not using
| them).
|
| In the solar example you absolutely need the grid. So net
| metering down to zero is definitely a subsidy. A subsidy I
| absolutely agree with, but a subsidy none-the-less.
| jplr8922 wrote:
| As an ex-power trader active in the californian market, his
| analysis is incomplete.
|
| The pricing of wholesale market depends on many factors,
| including 1) the amount of electricity consumed at time T
| (quantity) 2) the variation on that amount at time T (delta of
| your quantity) 3) the location (delivery fee for your quantity)
|
| The problem with solar in californa is that electricity is
| produced when the market does not need it, and that it stops
| production when the demand increases. The current reality is that
| 'green' power generation increases the dependance on 'brown'
| power source for reliability reasons. Your can read more about
| this here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve
|
| That ''net metering'' thing is to electricity prices what Santa
| Claus is to christmas presents.
| cwal37 wrote:
| ctrl+f "missing money" no hits.
|
| A lot of this is actually a very well explored problem in
| electricity markets, particularly at the wholesale level, and
| part of why, e.g., capacity markets exist in most deregulated
| market sin the US (outside of Texas). I know this post is focused
| on retail, and net metering, but this concept extends pretty
| broadly across electricity generation and sales.
|
| For a little more explanation on the capacity market side of
| things I'll quote from the Independent Market Monitor for NYISO,
| ERCOT, MISO, and ISO-NE in a FERC filing from last year
| (disclaimer, I used to work there)[0]:
|
| _The purpose of the capacity market is to satisfy resource
| adequacy requirements. Because an efficient energy-only market
| would generally sustain a long-term capacity level far below the
| planning requirements of the Eastern RTOs, additional revenues
| are needed to sustain capacity levels to satisfy these
| requirements. The capacity markets, therefore, set prices that
| reflect the marginal cost of satisfying these planning
| requirements and provide the "missing money". This marginal cost
| or "missing money" in the long-run is equal to the cost of
| investment minus the operating revenues from the sale of energy,
| ancillary services, etc.
|
| If resources are under-compensated for energy and ancillary
| services, it will tend to increase the missing money and raise
| capacity prices. Importantly, if flexible resources are
| systematically under-compensated, it will inefficiently shift
| revenues into the capacity market and shift incentives in favor
| of investment with less flexible characteristics. For this
| reason, we have repeatedly sought to promote energy and ancillary
| services market reforms that will reduce the need for out-of-
| market actions to maintain reliability, which while necessary in
| the short-term, are particularly harmful to incentives for
| investment in flexible resources._
|
| [0] https://www.potomaceconomics.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2021/03/...
| ridaj wrote:
| Wait until this person realizes that money is a lie anyway, too!
| Fr3dd1 wrote:
| Kind of different in germany. I work as a dev team lead for a
| company that develops billing software for the german energy
| sector. Its super regulated by the government. For example,
| depending on the year you got your soloar, the amount of money
| you get for your energy you bring back into the grid, is
| different. All has its pros and cons tho
| FabHK wrote:
| Can I ask, in Germany, are there (many?) days when households
| with solar are net energy positive?
| samatman wrote:
| I'm not sure where to start with this article.
|
| Ok, how about here: there is no necessary connection between
| costs and prices, at all, and this is why some businesses go
| broke and others are worth a trillion dollars.
|
| Starting completely over with the basic microeconomics correct,
| there's surely an interesting question about public utilities
| which are paying prices for electricity which no longer line up
| with amortization and other costs of provision to be answered.
|
| Everything said about clubs was not-even-wrong, though.
| bo1024 wrote:
| Possibly right but in an ideal world for maximum welfare,
| prices should signal costs or externalities.
| zopa wrote:
| That's a nice emergent feature that happens when you have
| plenty of competition, low transaction costs, perfect
| information and so on. Sometimes the real world is close
| enough to that one that you can pretend prices and costs are
| the same (although even then, just marginal costs, which
| doesn't include infrastructure that's already built).
|
| But it shouldn't be even mildly surprising when they diverge;
| it's certainly not a lie.
| ballenf wrote:
| But isn't the idea of a "utility" that it operates as a unique
| type of company that prices its services in sync with costs? In
| fact many utilities are explicitly cooperatives.
|
| To me, "privatized utility" is an oxymoron and that point is
| just a company with a mandated or de facto monopoly.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| Large commercial customers typically pay capacity costs -- i.e.
| if you need 1MW of power, you pay for that 1MW of capacity on top
| of your actual demand costs.
|
| If they did this with residential customers, it would make
| residential energy storage (i.e. batteries, but maybe thermal or
| other storage) more attractive, so instead of paying for a 200A
| circuit to meet your peak demand, you pay for a 50A circuit to
| keep your home battery charged and that battery kicks in to meet
| your peak demand.
|
| And once you have that battery, you may as well add solar as
| well.
| harterrt wrote:
| OP hints at this - but the problem seems to be net metering lumps
| capacity payments in with the cost of power.
|
| Some markets run a separate capacity market that rewards power
| generators explicitly for their capacity - independently of
| whether they actually generate any electricity. (California's
| market (CAISO) doesn't do this)
|
| A long time ago I was involved in setting capacity market prices
| if y'all have follow up questions.
| giantg2 wrote:
| My utility charges separate amounts for generation and for
| distribution. In theory (I don't have solar), the electricity
| generated by the rooftop panels should be compensated at the
| generation rate. The the utility would then charge the
| consuming customer the distribution rate.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| SCE and PG&E both separate out delivery vs. generation costs,
| _and_ net metering only compensates you for the generation
| costs, but (per other comments I see here) the delivery costs
| are laughably low.
| jdofaz wrote:
| Speaking of CAISO they have a cool website with electric prices
| for much of the western US
| http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/prices.aspx
| kube-system wrote:
| Many energy deregulated states charge supply, transmission, and
| distribution as separate line items. Is this not the case in CA?
| Seem strange that it wouldn't be, how else would you handle
| billing when someone chooses a different supplier?
| irrational wrote:
| > If a house on average generates as much as it uses, the
| electric bill will be zero. (In practice there's a minimum
| monthly fee, but it's pretty low.)
|
| This was the case in the last house I lived in. The solar panels
| generated enough power that there was never an electric bill
| other than the $12 fee to be hooked into the grid. And this was
| in cloudy, rainy Oregon.
|
| I did think about this scenario. If everyone had panels like that
| house, how could PGE make any money?
|
| Note: we lived in that house for about 10 years before installing
| panels, so we knew the average monthly electric bill. We paid for
| the panels with a loan and the monthly loan payment was lower
| than any of our monthly payments during the previous 10 years. It
| was cheaper to get panels and pay the loan than to pay the
| monthly electric bill without panels.
| bonzini wrote:
| If everyone had panels, the kWh price for daytime usage would
| be $0 or close to zero. Everybody would still pay almost fully
| for nighttime usage, while daytime usage and production would
| not have any impact on the bill. Either the fixed part of the
| bill or the nighttime price would grow as needed to cover the
| actual cost of the grid and the cost of energy on cloudy days.
|
| Either way, the new pricing would stimulate the installation of
| solar-powered batteries, to arbitrage between expensive
| nighttime consumption and cheap selling of surplus production
| in the morning.
|
| On cloudy days the grid would have to supply almost-free energy
| at noon, but then would also make more money at night because
| households batteries wouldn't have enough charge. I'm not sure
| if this is true in the summer, when even on a cloudy day there
| might be enough sunlight to charge the battery, but the actual
| balance would guide the utility company on how much to increase
| the fixed part of the bill vs the nighttime price.
|
| I am not usually a fan of the efficient market hypothesis, but
| here it seems to work albeit with some serious simplifications.
| rr808 wrote:
| > If everyone had panels, the kWh price for daytime usage
| would be $0 or close to zero. Everybody would still pay
| almost fully for nighttime usage, while daytime usage and
| production would not have any impact on the bill.
|
| Right - but this is different that everyone expects it to
| work. People expect to sell power to the grid when the sun
| shines, then get the same power from the grid at night and
| offset them to be net zero cost. It is not sustainable
| pricing.
| bonzini wrote:
| Sure, but nobody promised kWh offsetting would remain in
| place forever. $ offsetting can still save you money.
|
| Also, because you entered the solar market first, you might
| have easier access to credit to upgrade it with batteries.
| So you'll benefit from price arbitrage more than the late-
| comers who have just taken a loan to install a solar roof
| and can't afford the batteries right now. Or you might buy
| a plugin car, charge it cheaply when the sun is high, and
| save on gas expenses (that's what I do since I work from
| home, :) and it's possible to both top up the car and
| charge the 4 kWh solar batteries in most sunny days with a
| very small 3 kW installation).
|
| Which brings up another problem especially in Europe: taxes
| on gas are financing roads and the like in ways that sooner
| or later will have to be covered by increasing electricity
| prices. Right now, early buyers of electric cars are having
| their purchase subsidized because effectively they pay
| fewer[1] per-km taxes than owners of ICE cars.
|
| [1] not just less taxes, also literally fewer
| secabeen wrote:
| > The solar panels generated enough power that there was never
| an electric bill other than the $12 fee to be hooked into the
| grid. And this was in cloudy, rainy Oregon.
|
| Yeah, this is it in a nutshell. You were only being charged
| $12/month for a grid connection, when a grid connection was
| clearly worth much much more than that. The usual cost of a
| full off-grid system can clear $100k if it's sized to cover
| HVAC.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > The usual cost of a full off-grid system can clear $100k if
| it's sized to cover HVAC.
|
| Or is essentially absurd... my 6.6kW system generates about
| 3x more than we need for 8 months of the year, but about 1/3
| of what we need for 4 months of the year (the period when our
| air-source heat pumps, aka minisplits, are in use).
|
| To be able to go off-grid would require either:
| - a systems 3x bigger than we have, generating 9x more power
| than we need for 8 months of the year
|
| OR - a gigantic (10MW?) battery system to
| store the excess power from the summer
|
| Neither of these make any sense to me, and seem like well-
| intentioned but fundamentally ill-conceived designs.
| secabeen wrote:
| This is a fair observation. Interestingly, what you
| describe (a system 3x larger than your average load) is
| essentially what the grid has to have. Looking at the
| California data, here in Winter, today's peak usage is
| about 28 Megawatts and the overnight low is about 20MW.
| However, the peak all time usage for California is over
| 50MW. Our entire electric grid has to handle that 100%
| delta in usage; it's not surprising that a personal grid
| would have to handle at least that much delta. That's just
| what is required to have 24x7x365 electricity; you can't
| hide from that reality.
| irrational wrote:
| But doesn't California have rolling blackouts? That makes
| it seem like the grid needs to be larger than 3x.
| secabeen wrote:
| Not usually. There are grid shutdowns in wildfire risk
| areas during high wind events, and there was a brief
| rolling blackout last year over two nights in a small
| area, but it's been almost 20 years since the broader
| blackouts that made national news:
|
| https://www.marketplace.org/2021/07/22/a-california-fix-
| for-...
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| It's not about hiding from the reality. It's about how
| energy storage (and generation) systems scale and can be
| activated/deactivated.
|
| On the generation side: If I had put in a 21kW system to
| cover our winter needs, the extra power it generates
| during the summer would have been unconditionally
| generated. Do this broadly across the population and the
| power grid has a substantial management problem.
| Conversely, utility-run systems are likely to be built so
| as to be much more modulatable, to match demand.
|
| On the storage side: yes, obviously the total storage
| required is the same, but for more or less all the
| technologies I'm aware of today, this would be much more
| efficiently done with large storage systems than per-
| household distributed ones.
| seventytwo wrote:
| The grid phase needs to be maintained as well, and I don't know
| how that would happen without a giant, centralized set of
| turbines somewhere.
| vehemenz wrote:
| If some states weren't captured by utility monopolies, then solar
| users would be legally allowed to disconnect from the power grid,
| potentially solving the first issue. It's amazing to me that this
| is illegal anywhere.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| I mean - if you aren't using any power - the base charge is
| usually less than $10/m.
|
| This doesn't seem like an absurd amount of money to have power
| when your system inevitably goes down for a time.
|
| Additionally - if you want to sell your house - you're going to
| lose a fortune taking it off the grid. It wouldn't qualify for
| most financing.
|
| It's not worth saving $10/m for almost any rational/economic
| person.
| mechanical_bear wrote:
| Yes, but by disconnecting you aren't contributing to the
| tragedy of the commons sort of issue the author talks about.
|
| wHaT iF eVeRyOnE dId It?!
|
| Everyone isn't doing it, and ideally more people would be
| taking advantage of net metering. Until such time that it is
| causing real issues with the utility companies being able to
| keep the lights on, this is all a moot point. If it
| encourages solar adoption, then it's a good policy, for now.
| Revisit discussion when it's actually close to being an
| issue.
| secabeen wrote:
| > This doesn't seem like an absurd amount of money to have
| power when your system inevitably goes down for a time.
|
| It's an incredibly low amount of money to have 24x7x365
| reliable power. The alternative (off-grid systems) cost tens-
| to-hundreds of thousands of dollars. $10/m is nothing, and is
| arguably too low. The solution should be to charge _all_
| customers a higher fixed monthly charge for grid access and
| distribution, and then charge less for the power consumed.
| ZetaZero wrote:
| California had proposed a rule (NEM 3.0) that would add a
| grid access charge for solar, which is reasonable. However,
| the cost for the average solar install would be $50+/month.
| greendave wrote:
| FWIW, there's already a $10/mo minimum monthly charge, and
| a $0.02-$0.03/kWh non-bypassable charge for all energy
| consumed from the grid in NEM 2.0. So even a net-zero solar
| customer always pays $10-15/mo or so.
|
| The only reason why some solar customers pay zero is that
| they _significantly_ overproduce (export more than they
| use) and overproduction is compensated at the wholesale
| rate (typically $0.03-$0.04/kWh for PG&E), not the retail
| rate ($0.11-$0.45/kWh for PG&E).
| woodruffw wrote:
| As far as I can tell, only Florida makes it actually illegal to
| disconnect from the power grid[1]. It seems to be legal in
| every other state, subject to doing paperwork.
|
| [1]: https://off-grid-home.com/is-it-legal-to-disconnect-your-
| hom...
| bick_nyers wrote:
| What if I just didn't pay my bill and the utility company
| disconnected me from the power grid? Would I be subject to
| fines and jail time? Absurd, but hey, that sure sounds like
| Florida.
|
| Edit: If you follow the link in the article, it sounds like
| this was all because of disconnecting the water hookup and
| has nothing to do with solar power?
| woodruffw wrote:
| Purely speculation on my part, but I think the power
| company disconnecting you for nonpayment probably wouldn't
| count: they don't physically take the line down, which is
| the condition that Florida seems to be concerned about.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Off-grid electricity used to be illegal in California under
| Title 24. The law required residential homes to have an
| "interconnection pathway." However, the law has recently been
| updated and now specifically allows off-grid electricity.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| In Sweden there are 2 separate charges, one for infrastructure
| and one for consumption. The infrastructure bill scales with how
| big your breakers/fuses (English) are while consumption scales
| with how many KWh you've used. You often have a different infra
| provider and power provider.
|
| For someone living in a condo/apt the infra cost is usually
| higher than consumption while in houses where heating often is
| powered by some heat-pump system(drill, air, ground) consumption
| is higher.
|
| Houses with district heating can scale down their capacity to
| lower the infra price.
| tempnow987 wrote:
| This is common in the US as well actually.
|
| A-10 rates for example in PG&E land have a demand charge -
|
| https://www.pge.com/en_US/small-medium-business/your-
| account....
|
| Basically, based on breaker size. If you have a 400A breaker
| you might pay $2,000 / month demand charge. Usage might be
| small (sometimes these loads are spikey). It's not uncommon for
| folks to then pay more attention to peak load if you pay based
| on breaker size effectively.
| clairity wrote:
| this is a form of two-part pricing[0], which is a compromise
| between simple (single) pricing and continuous pricing (aka
| perfect price discrimination) to maximize value capture with
| minimal complexity.
|
| two-part pricing also tends to make markets (from the demand-
| side) more rational and efficient, but that's not often the
| reason it's employed, which is why regulation is often needed
| (particularly in monopoly markets).
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-part_tariff
| sfteus wrote:
| This is the case at least in some parts of the US as well.
|
| I believe in all of Texas (North Texas here), your costs are
| broken down by energy costs and delivery costs, the latter of
| which is paid to your TDU to maintain the infrastructure. For
| our plan the delivery charge is roughly 45% of the kWh price.
| secabeen wrote:
| Yes, this model is common in other utilities in the US (both by
| water and gas bills are structured this way), with a large
| meter fee and a consumption charge in line with the resource
| cost.
|
| Electricity could certainly be charged this way (and should),
| but it would be a huge change in how electricity is billed
| here, and the PUC would rather just make changes to just the
| net-metering system rather than open the can of worms of a full
| rate re-write.
| Arainach wrote:
| I've seen this model, but it seems counterproductive to any
| environmental goals. For instance, my water infrastructure
| bill absolutely dwarfs my usage. I could take an hourlong
| shower every day and barely notice the increase in my bill.
| It seems like it's sending the wrong message.
| secabeen wrote:
| Is water scarcity a thing in your area? Perhaps your water
| is cheap because its readily available in your area. In
| Chicago, they have so much water in Lake Michigan, most
| homes don't even have water meters.
| manquer wrote:
| Living close to a water source or reservoir doesn't make
| conservation less important.It is a intricate system with
| complex interconnects
|
| A lot of places downstream will be using the water from
| your Lake /Dam /river as their only source. Same reason
| why in some states like Colarado it is illegal to rain
| water harvest. Riparian rights and ethics are complex
| appletrotter wrote:
| Maybe it does sometimes though? Speaking of the great
| lakes, if you live in the region it doesn't take you very
| long to drive out of the watershed for your respective
| lake. That should be where the bounds of effect end, and
| that entire region will generally have plenty of water.
| For example, Ohio has two watersheds, one for the lake up
| north and another for the Ohio river which takes up 2/3
| of the state. Excess water consumption in the lake erie
| watershed shouldn't ever hurt the ohio river watershed.
| Issues with the rivers that feed the ohio river might
| cause issues, but the point is this: the degrees to which
| regions are linked in terms of water varies dramatically.
| brnt wrote:
| Waterpipes have been known to cross watershed boundaries.
| Or am I missing your point?
| secabeen wrote:
| Fair. I still prefer an honest system that charges a
| fair, flat rate for the infrastructure, and then a usage
| charge for usage. If we want to disincentive usage, we
| can put a tax on the consumption rate; that's certainly
| better than wrapping up some/all of the infrastructure
| costs into the consumption rate just to make the latter
| higher.
| manquer wrote:
| It is not just about conservation and high consumption.
|
| For example, it is lot easier to build infra when you
| charge people 4x their consumption cost as single item,
| than split into line items. When you need to build a new
| power plant the infra costs are going to shoot a lot and
| nobody would want to pay for that when they see an line
| item for infra.
|
| Every SaaS company and all of Cloud is built on this
| human behavior . I would even go so far to say that even
| mortgage, insurance, any credit business depends on this
| behavior. Most people would pay extra for their server by
| hour or second rather than pay for consumption + infra.
|
| Also infra costs split equally is unfair ? if you consume
| more, more of the infra costs have to be apportioned to
| that person right ? Basically if power plant producer
| 1000MW the person consuming 900MW has to pay 90% cost of
| building the plant in addition to paying 90% for
| consumables for generating that 1000MW .
|
| The solution here is to have spread between buy / sell
| rates which account for distribution losses, maintenance,
| infra and storage and peak capacity planning etc
| jabl wrote:
| > I still prefer an honest system that charges a fair,
| flat rate for the infrastructure, and then a usage charge
| for usage.
|
| There's a lot of things where the infrastructure costs
| are baked into the per-unit cost of stuff you buy. I'd
| say it's even vastly more common than separate
| infrastructure vs. per-unit charges. You don't pay a
| separate constant infrastructure fee for the petroleum
| refinery infrastructure when filling up your car, it's
| all baked into the per-liter (or per-gallon) cost. Nor do
| you pay a fixed cost for funding the astronomically
| expensive semiconductor fabs when you buy something
| containing electronics, it's all baked into the per-unit
| cost. Etc. etc.
| rhino369 wrote:
| >Living close to a water source or reservoir doesn't make
| conservation less important.
|
| It doesn't necessarily make conservation less important.
| But it certainly does in some places like Chicago. They
| pull water from the same water shed that it eventually
| flows back into after use. And they control how much
| water flows from Lake Michigan into the Chicago river
| (and eventually the Mississippi River) via a damn.
|
| It's probably a bit more complex than that, and creating
| that system did change the water flow in the Great lakes
| (but that damage was done 130 years ago). But right now,
| its essentially free water. In Illinois, all roads
| (waterways) lead to Rome (the Mississippi).
| manquer wrote:
| I don't have detailed knowledge of Great lakes to give
| you specifics on why this is a problem
|
| However generally no water system is closed or
| independent of each other. Precipitation, weather and
| other cycles (wind, heat, underground etc) make even
| small changes in distant places drastically impact
| outcomes anywhere ( the OG butterfly effect).
|
| So I would still say conservation of use is independent
| of how abundant it seems locally and how disconnected it
| looks on the surface to other problems.
| jabl wrote:
| Where I live we have plentiful of clean water. However
| what constitutes a major part of the water bill is the
| sewage treatment. No separate metering for clean water vs
| sewage, they just assume that everything you use also
| goes out as sewage.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| The problem we've had where I live, is that when people do
| a good job reducing water/electricity consumption the
| utility companies have to either jack up their rates, do
| layoffs, or go broke because they aren't able to amortize
| their fixed costs as well.
| Bilal_io wrote:
| That's how it is for electricity in Texas. You pay a delivery
| charge, and then usage charge, both based on kw/h.
| junon wrote:
| You also pay for power you don't even use, from other power
| providers, in the case of extreme crisis, it seems. I've
| never lived there but from the outside Texas's power
| situation seems broken at best.
| Bilal_io wrote:
| That's accurate. We're in constant fear of losing power
| whenever there is a freeze warning (we're on that today
| and tomorrow at least), rain or heat. That's all thanks
| to the greedy for-profit system enabled by "conservative"
| politicians.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| That's not really accurate. I've lost power 4 times total
| in 30 years here. Usually big Texas thunderstorms, never
| heat.
|
| The 100 year winter freeze I lost power for two days,
| that was the longest ever.
|
| Haven't lost power since then, didn't lose power for a
| couple years before that.
|
| We have the cheapest rates because of the way
| distribution and providers are setup.
|
| The problem with big user bills were SV companies like
| Griddy tricking people into buying variable rate
| electricity, something we made illegal since then.
| Bilal_io wrote:
| I am not denying your experience, but I was talking about
| my own. I lost power for over 3 hours just 2 nights ago.
| And since the horrible experience we had in February 2021
| we (me and everyone I know) have been living in fear it
| might happen again.
|
| A quick look at Centerpoint's own outage tracker[1] shows
| outages everywhere in different parts of Texas.
|
| 1. https://gis.centerpointenergy.com/outagetracker/?WT.ac
| =OC_Im...
| nomel wrote:
| I don't see why "fear" is necessary. Power has never been
| a constant. When I was a kid we had a box of candles
| under the sink and warm blankets stacked in the garage,
| and some emergency food/water to last a week. Now that
| I'm an adult, I still have the same. I don't understand
| this trust and expectation of flawless infrastructure,
| where "fear" would come into play. Inconvenience, sure.
| You should be able to easily remove the fear aspect, with
| minimal preparation.
| Bilal_io wrote:
| "fear" is necessary because I was stuck at an apartment
| for 3 days and nowhere to go with no heat and no water
| when the weather outside was -17 degrees.
| nomel wrote:
| As my comment suggested, you could change that fear to
| inconvenience with minimal preparation: put some water
| jugs, canned/packaged food, and blankets+cheap snow
| outfit in your closet, and throw in a little campground
| propane burner for a nice warm meal. -17 outdoors is a
| warm ski day indoors. If you've known anyone that lives
| in a cold part of the country, having some preparation is
| an extremely common practice.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| That would actually do something to address the risk,
| removing their ability to complain.
| Bilal_io wrote:
| Or fix the damn infrastructure. Other states and other
| countries get worse cold waves and others get worse heat
| waves and they don't lose power. Stop putting the blame
| on people.
|
| > Campground You realize most people love in apartments
| right? Most apartments don't have fireplaces.
| nomel wrote:
| > You realize most people love in apartments right? Most
| apartments don't have fireplaces.
|
| No, I mean the little burners you put on top of portable
| propane tanks, that are usually used for BBQ's or while
| camping. Searching "campground propane burner" in Amazon
| shows several hundred results of what I'm talking about.
| They don't require a campground to operate.
|
| > Or fix the damn infrastructure.
|
| You and your fear exists in the reality that is right
| now, which includes bad infrastructure, that will almost
| certainly take years to fix. If you desire to not live in
| fear, for the next few years, you can easily do it with
| minimal, extremely common in places where it's cold,
| preparation. If you desire to continue living in short
| term fear, when it's so easy to mitigate that fear, then
| well I guess you do you.
| Bilal_io wrote:
| Thank you for the advise. I will invest in one of those
| burners.
| sfteus wrote:
| That's great that your power has been mostly reliable,
| but it is not the case for a lot of the people here.
|
| In my family alone, my brother and his wife lost power at
| the apartment they had then for 3 days during the ~2014
| winter storm, during which our apartment lost power for
| around a day. My parents lost their power for all 4 days
| of the storm last year, and had to travel 15 miles or so
| to my brothers house after their inside temperature
| dropped below freezing on day 3. They just let us know
| their power is out again this afternoon. My wife and I
| are lucky enough to have since purchased a house close to
| some critical infrastructure so we've rarely lost power
| comparatively, but we still lose power several times
| throughout each summer during heat waves.
|
| I also want to reiterate: this happened in 2011, again in
| 2014, again in 2021, and again in 2022. The storm in 2021
| was objectively the worst of the bunch, but 2011 was
| similar. It is _not_ a 100 year freeze. It is happening
| more regularly, and our government has ignored
| recommendations to better prepare for it going on over a
| decade now.
|
| EDIT: Just to round this out, a federal report was
| provided in the wake of the last "100 year" storm that
| occurred in 2011[1]. In it, there are several dozen
| recommendations, many of which were at least in part the
| cause of the 2021 outages as well.
|
| -----
|
| [1]: https://www.ferc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-04/08-
| 16-11-re...
| hunterb123 wrote:
| Just replying to other anecdotes with my own.
|
| And I disagree with your assessment of our weather and
| government.
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| The way electricity market in Texas works in general looks
| very similar to EU countries.
| secabeen wrote:
| But that's the problem! The cost of the grid is the same
| whether it delivers you 100kWh or 10,000kWh. The delivery
| charge should be a fixed monthly charge, based on the size
| of your meter, not scaled to the number of kWh you consume.
| brohee wrote:
| That's not true at all, as people use more electricity,
| aggregate usage gets higher and the grid eventually needs
| beefier interconnections, beefier transformers... The
| delivery charge would actually be fairer based on peak
| usage, as it has more relevance to the sizing of the
| grid.
| secabeen wrote:
| > That's not true at all, as people use more electricity,
| aggregate usage gets higher and the grid eventually needs
| beefier interconnections, beefier transformers...
|
| To a degree, but not in a linear fashion to the amount of
| power delivered, and certainly not on a unit-power
| delivery basis.
|
| >The delivery charge would actually be fairer based on
| peak usage, as it has more relevance to the sizing of the
| grid.
|
| Very true, and also very common in commercial power
| billing, usually called a "demand charge" where you pay a
| specific tariff based of that peak of usage.
| Unfortunately, it can create really spikey and hard to
| manage bills, so I accept the argument that it's not
| appropriate for residential use. Thus, a flat charge on
| your meter size. On many commercial bills, the demand
| charge can exceed 75% of the total bill!
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| Even demand charges often do a bad job of matching
| utility costs. If I run a church and my peak demand is
| consistently reached at 11 AM on Sunday morning, guess
| what, I'm way overpaying relative to my cost to the
| utility.
|
| The problem with high meter charges (or charging based on
| panel amperage/etc.) is that it doesn't do a good job
| matching utility costs either. Let's say I have a 2-story
| house and split it into a duplex. I add a second panel on
| the top floor and live on the bottom. Did my second panel
| double costs for the utility? Absolutely not. If I build
| a carriage house in my backyard with a 200 amp panel,
| does it cost the same to the utility as if I put a 200
| amp panel on my new house in my far-off exurb? Absolutely
| not.
|
| That's not to get into the distributional effects of
| these kinds of changes. Any kind of base-rate increase
| will absolutely hammer the poor in order to save lots for
| suburb mcmansions. This may be economically more
| efficient, but good luck selling it.
| jabl wrote:
| If you'd want the transmission charges to match the cost
| to the utility you should have a base charge consisting
| of basically the cost to the utility of maintaining your
| customer relationship after the initial hookup cost, and
| another part to match the utility O&M cost of the grid
| distributed over all the customers. Then on top of that a
| time-varying per-kWh charge for the electricity
| transferred. This would probably in most cases be pretty
| cheap, except when the grid (either the utility grid as a
| whole or the local part that you're connected to) starts
| to become overloaded; in that case scarcity pricing would
| apply which would presumably be very high. This would
| incite customers to reduce usage during scarcity, or give
| the utility funds to invest in grid expansion.
|
| Similarly for the energy price, that should match the
| wholesale price. Though see the $10k bills some people on
| a wholesale price plan got during last year's Texas
| freeze for why such an idea might not be so popular in
| practice, theoretically beautiful as it may be.
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| It encourages you to use more electricity though, which
| is not good.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Encourages you in what way? Your bill is still higher the
| more energy you consume, just increasing more slowly than
| if the rates were higher.
|
| Many believe (and I'm inclined to agree) that encouraging
| a switch from locally burned fossil fuels to electricity
| is better _even if that electricity is currently*
| generated partially from fossil fuel_. The theory is the
| electric plants could more easily become cleaner than if
| millions of home need to have their heating equipment
| upgraded.
|
| The problem where I am is that natural gas is so cheap
| (though less than previously) that it's hard to make
| electric heating competitive.
|
| * no pun intended
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| It encourages you in the sense that the marginal cost of
| turning your heat up to 75 in the winter instead of 70 is
| much lower, or that buying a 4000 sq. ft. house will not
| come with as big an increase on your monthly costs as it
| does now.
| secabeen wrote:
| There are ways around that though; you could give a small
| rebate on the meter fee for low-use customers, to
| encourage conservation. (My water bill is that way, the
| full meter charge is around $50/month, but if you use
| less than 700 Cubic-feet of water a month, the meter fee
| drops to $30/mo.) Is a little less pure than just
| charging a fair rate, but seems a reasonable hybrid
| approach.
| zbrozek wrote:
| The current system in PG&E territory encourages me to
| prefer gas to electricity everywhere I'm able to make the
| choice. That's surely worse.
| OJFord wrote:
| Yeah, similarly in the UK we have a 'standing charge' (PS/day)
| in addition to the 'unit charge' (PS/kWh) - same provider
| though.
|
| And I can't see why it wouldn't tie up with the reality of the
| costs. (Competitive downward pressure, and no silly anti-
| competitive cap as there is on variable PS/kWh pricing.) From
| memory mine's about PS6-7pcm.
| pmyteh wrote:
| The cap was never really intended to be a fixed price for
| electricity: the main purpose was to ensure people with an
| arbitrary supplier (chosen by previous tenants, or the
| landlord, say) and who weren't canny enough to notice they
| were being overcharged and shop around, didn't get ripped off
| too badly. Lots of people who stayed with the descendant of
| their old regional electricity board paid over the odds, for
| example, because consumer inertia meant it was profitable for
| them not to have competitive prices.
|
| That all electricity prices are now essentially at the cap,
| so it's also acting as a floor, was not intended or
| particularly anticipated, I think.
| emeraldd wrote:
| Had to look up `district heating` ... that's a not a common
| thing in the US..
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating
| FabHK wrote:
| Ha, in Germany it's called "Fernwarme", which corresponds
| nicely to "teleheating" (which Wikipedia lists as an
| alternative name). It's great, not only does electricity and
| water magically come from a wall in your basement, but also
| heat :-)
|
| I thought they had abandoned the idea of using heat from a
| nuclear power plant for district heating in Russia, but
| apparently that is actually done [1, 2] extensively.
|
| Having a pipe into your house directly (well, not directly,
| indirectly, but still) from the nuclear power plant next
| door... not sure how I'd feel about that.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VVER#Tertiary_cooling_circu
| it_...
|
| [2] https://www.powermag.com/district-heating-supply-from-
| nuclea...
| ptaipale wrote:
| District heating from nuclear used to be a no-no but has
| recently gained momentum in Finland (as an idea). Build an
| SMR near the city for electricity, and use the excess heat
| for district warming (which is needed during most of the
| year).
| jrockway wrote:
| It's a thing in the US. If you're ever walking around
| Manhattan and see steam coming out of a traffic cone, that's
| the side effect of district heating (groundwater hitting the
| very hot steam pipes and vaporizing).
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| Not a common thing != not a thing
| andi999 wrote:
| Which should not happen, I mean do you not insulate the
| pipes?
| [deleted]
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Won't insulating the pipes reduce the heating
| effectiveness?
| cameldrv wrote:
| It seems like what is getting lost here is that the reason PG&E
| only charges for usage and not a fixed connection fee is that
| that's what the state wanted. They wanted heavy users to pay a
| disproportionate share of costs to encourage lower usage. In
| fact, they even put in a "climate credit", which is a fixed
| rebate users get that effectively makes the connection fee be
| negative.
| tguvot wrote:
| there is a minimal usage fee, which is essentially connection
| fee
| m463 wrote:
| Punative pricing in california is really a disservice to
| customers/consumers.
|
| In just about every other business, if you use a lot of
| something, you get a discount. For california electricity,
| it's the opposite.
| ketzo wrote:
| It's a matter of tradeoffs. California electric companies -
| and PG&E in particular - desperately need to decrease load
| during fire season so that they have more flexibility in
| the grid. It's important for them to try and disincentivize
| power usage pretty much however they can.
|
| Plus, using less power is better for the environment.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| It's a disservice to the high-usage customers, who want to
| offload their environmental costs onto their grandkids
| and/or countries less equipped to deal with climate change.
| Soak 'em, I say.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| It's capacity pricing. If you want to buy same-day tickets
| for your whole family to board a full flight, the airline
| will sell the tickets to you, but it might be at a 5x or
| 10x mark up. The airline is betting that they'll be able to
| talk people into forfeiting their seats by giving them
| airline credits, and tickets on a later (less crowded)
| flight, then pocket the difference.
|
| Expecting the airline to give you and your giant family a
| discount in the situation is obviously absurd. When you're
| at capacity, it's in your best interest to encourage people
| to shift their consumption to off-peak times, and to
| punitively charge the people that insist on consuming a
| disproportionate amount during full capacity.
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