[cinntaile]

Not really. It's how I thought it worked since that's how it works pretty much everywhere they have this same issue. You stress the grid by offloading your excess electricity to the grid. Now they have to dispose of it somehow and this costs money. The problem arises because lots of people are offloading their excess electricity at the exact same times so nobody needs it really. It's a victim of its own success haha.

[quantumwannabe]

1-1 net metering just isn’t a viable model. It sounds nice from the perspective of someone installing solar on their house, but it doesn’t make sense at a grid scale and it has meant that most home solar installations are just distributed power plants instead of being energy independent. The only thing that really makes fiscal sense for the utility provider is being paid/paying the current price for electricity at whatever time they send/receive power. Unfortunately for people with solar panels, this means getting paid less when selling and paying more when buying, as everyone else with solar panels is selling their excess electricity and buying electricity at the same times. Even with that price spread, it may make sense for power companies to charge a high connection fee or higher than retail rates for power to solar generating customers because they aren’t paying for the infrastructure they need when they are selling power like someone who buys all their power from the grid would.

[cinntaile]

I agree with this. In principle the solar panel owners are taking all the profits while socializing all the costs, which is good for them but it's not a fair system. Unfortunately by the time the lawmakers realized their "mistake", the solar panel owners had already gotten used to this system and as we all know... Nobody likes paying taxes/levies that reduce their income.