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by opo 1935 days ago
>... I haven’t had to pay more than $12/month, and that is the fee we are charged by PGE to be hooked into the grid so we can sell them our excess.

Wow. If you are only paying $12 a month for access to the grid, you are paying a small fraction of your share of the cost of maintaining the grid. These consumer solar subsidies are a massive subsidy from the poor to the wealthy and really aren't sustainable.
2 comments
supertrope 1934 days ago
Net metering is a temporary state intended to build critical mass and get mass production going. Solar panel owners don't pay the full cost of grid services, and utilities are not paying them for the full value of the electricity fed back in.

Residential solar IMO is mal-investment because grid scale solar has better economies of scale. Solar plants are easier to maintain. The grid is not built for widespread net metering. Rooftop solar has more fatalities than nuclear because of installers falling off.

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reducesuffering 1934 days ago
Hardly. My "access" bill is $20/mth, but my panels give $350/yr more to the grid than I use. PGE gives me like $30 of that back at the end of the year. So that $12 / $20 doesn't tell the whole story. They are also likely giving a lot more renewable energy to the grid that isn't compensated and is more like another $30/mth of cost.
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opo 1933 days ago
>...but my panels give $350/yr more to the grid than I use.

You are likely confusing wholesale and retail prices of electricity. Even just considering solar, the cost for a utility to generate the power itself is likely between 2-4 cents per kilowatt. Most states require the utility to essentially pay the retail rate for electric power for any power generated by rooftop solar since it directly offsets the electrical usage. (Never mind that the electric power might have to be purchased when the utility doesn't want the power.)

Buffet has complained about how this issue:

>...His logic is simple, he wants to have to pay wholesale electricity rates for the energy generated by rooftop solar instead of the same price NV Energy is charging these customers since he says it will penalized customers without solar panels.

https://electrek.co/2016/03/01/warren-buffett-explains-his-l...

So unless you are using the wholesale price for the estimate for the value of the excess electricity generated, you are greatly overestimating its value.

Besides overpaying for the electricity generated by rooftop solar, your $20 access bill is another subsidy. One estimate is that the average yearly cost to maintain the grid is about $750 per customer.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/the-u-s-elec...

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irrational 1933 days ago
Wait, don't we want to penalize customers without solar panels?
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opo 1932 days ago
>Wait, don't we want to penalize customers without solar panels?

Why do you say that? If the government wants to subsidize solar power, isn't it better to do it in a way that is safer, less expensive and the benefits are shared by all consumers?

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