[iamericfletcher]

" Voluntary, industry-led recycling efforts are limited in scope."

Did anyone else chuckle when they saw this?

Also, what will happen to the poor people who cannot detach from the grid? As the amount of people using solar increases, I am sure the costs for those who can't afford solar will increase, right? Also, as solar increases, if it does, the already horrible grid infrastructure will suffer even more so as the utility providers face even less financial incentive to provide upkeep.

[dimitrios1]

I am taking a hunch here, but I imagine that it is cheaper for you to provide energy to the grid (once the grid is already established) than for the power companies to provide energy to the grid. IIRC, your unused power you generate goes back into the grid correct?

[CuriousCosmic]

The argument they are making is one that you will see a lot in these types of discussions. As renewable energy becomes cheaper and easier to add to individual houses, the supply of cheap energy combined with the decrease in energy demand from wealthy households will drive down energy prices and cut into the operating margins of power companies.

If too many people start producing power and not buying it themselves, power companies would not be able to afford maintaining the power grid as effectively or would have to increase prices for people who can't supply their own power.

Basically the argument is that a movement for those who can afford to be self-sufficient to do so ends up being a tax on those who can't afford to.

There is some level of merit to this argument and if we transition to a heavily renewables based energy system, we will likely see this occur to some extent during the transitional period.

There are a handful of solutions to this problem but the easiest is to move maintenance of power infrastructure from the public utility to the government and implement a local tax to pay for the power grid. Power Utilities would still exist however instead of also maintaining the grid, they would just be responsible for producing power and supplying sufficient redundancy to minimise/eliminate brown- and black-outs.

With this solution, everybody shares the burden of maintaining the grid rather than just those who can't afford to be self-sufficient. Those who are able to be self-sufficient can feed back into the grid to help recuperate their expenses on their energy equipment as well as some of the tax they paid in.

[trenchgun]

> I imagine that it is cheaper for you to provide energy to the grid (once the grid is already established) than for the power companies to provide energy to the grid.

This is a bit inaccurate. Utility scale solar is cheaper to produce than rooftop solar generally.

But there are a lot of other things in play too, such as markets, subsidies etc.

Also: power companies don't just provide the electricity to the grid, they keep the grid running and in balance. If the consumption does not equal the production at all times you are going to get blackouts.

[lima]

That's how 99% of PV installations in Germany work. There's two meters and surplus energy during the day is sold to the power company.

Self sufficiency isn't the goal and makes no sense even with batteries getting cheaper.

[noscrewstoyous]

correct, any amount on on site generation reduces stress on the grid. my power company actually pays me for what I produce over the first 10 years of my panels life... this is in addition to my savings