What incentive does anyone have to go "green" with solar anymore. Combine this with the fact that they're trying to push all new homes to require solar, it's clear it's just another money grab.
If I was still in the Bay, I'd have a 280 ish bill to pay for the convenience of having solar, assuming i'm reading this right. Combine that with the payment of $300 for the solar system itself and i'm well above what my power bill was by a large margin.
All these rulings do is turn people away from trying to reduce carbon usage and make things more economically prohibitive.
They propose to pay customers $0.05 / generated kWh instead of the $0.20-$0.30/kWh that customers pay in California. So you would have to generate an excess 160 kWh /month to cover the $8 fee (per installed kW of capacity). Your non-solar neighbor who uses your 160kWh of generated electrons will pay the utility $32-$48 for them, while reaping the benefit of lowered stress on the grid.
160kWh is twenty 8 hour days at 100% efficiency. That will almost never be worth it. I guess that’s the end of net energy metering in California.
According to an article about the legality of the fee linked elsewhere in this thread, customers can still opt out of NEM, and just waste the excess electricity generation.
That will essentially always be the right financial decision.
It would actually be less hostile towards solar installs if they simply paid $0 for excess energy, and didn’t introduce the fee.
It makes sense. The cost of generation is just a part of the cost of distribution. It never made much sense to force the power company to buy power from consumers at consumer prices, it amounted basically to a subsidy for grid-tie installations.
What I hope is that this incentives people to move towards off-grid systems with their own storage. Grid-tie was never viable in large scale if you really think about all the details.
Think of an install that generates enough for the customer during the day and needs grid supplement at night. Based on reading this, they'd still get charged. Maybe it's only for solar that feeds back to the grid, but event then, if I only have a small amount of excess capacity, it's possible it won't even cover the monthly charge.
If I was still in the Bay, I'd have a 280 ish bill to pay for the convenience of having solar, assuming i'm reading this right. Combine that with the payment of $300 for the solar system itself and i'm well above what my power bill was by a large margin.
All these rulings do is turn people away from trying to reduce carbon usage and make things more economically prohibitive.