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by 0xquad 1647 days ago
Per LA Times [ https://www.latimes.com/environment/newsletter/2021-12-16/ca... ]

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.

2 comments

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.