[praxulus]

Net metering just doesn't make sense though. Everyone who wants to rely on the grid for power availability ought to pay for grid upkeep costs. Net metering would make sense if it came on top of a baseline "connectivity fee" that covered grid maintenance, but that's not the current policy, would likely be politically infeasible, and would hurt rooftop solar customers financially anyway.

Subsidizing solar is a perfectly good policy choice, but net metering is ultimately an unsustainable way to implement it.

[walnutclosefarm]

That's how my distributed generation contract with our Rural Electric Cooperative works. We pay $50/month for the connection, but the actual use/generation is 1 for 1 net metering. We are limited in how much generation we can connect to 105% of our average annual consumption, so over the course of year, on average, we zero out energy costs. If we want to connect more distributed generation than that, the tariff shifts to we get wholesale for what we sell, pay retail for what we use.

[gh02t]

Is the $50/month prorated into the cost if you end up net consuming for the grid? Or are any costs on top of that?

[walnutclosefarm]

We pay $50 per month real money for the service, regardless of the net metering. If we are net producers in a given month, we pay nothing additional for power, and get a credit (in kwh) that rolls forward to the next month. If we are net users, after applying any rolled forward credits, we pay for the net usage in addition to the $50. Once a year, any rolled forward credits not used are paid to us at what amounts to wholesale rates, so we start over with zero credit balance.

[dpierce9]

Net metering means utilities sell the power your system produces at full price to your neighbor. They pocket the avoided cost of producing and delivering that power (and during price spikes the cost of fuel can be higher than the value of producing power).

Net metering does create stranded assets if everyone does it. But not everyone does. Further, the idea that the utility gains NO benefit from net metering is wrong.

The corresponding view that rate payers are subsidizing solar by paying additional grid costs is wrong. Solar reduces grid demand. This reduces required generation capacity. Capacity is very expensive.

[konschubert]

Your solar panels tend to produce power at times when power is cheap - because there is so much solar power.

When you do net metering, the utility has to pay on top: They have to sell the power that you produce on the spot market, but the price they get for it is less than what they have to pay to you.

It's not a scalable approach.

[Retric]

Solar also produces power when demand is at it’s absolute peak. It varies by location but prices are still cheapest at night the vast majority of the time.

There’s many ways to do net metering, but regulations are setup to maintain profitable local utilities. Utilities hate it because they make less money by selling less electricity not because it’s ever going to drive them to unprofitability.

[mcv]

I think the demand peak is in the evening. Whether that overlaps with daylight depends on the season. I suppose in areas where people use a lot of AC, peak demand might be earlier in the day, but I haven't seen any figures showing that. I have seen the evening peak.

[Retric]

It really depends on what you mean by peak demand. From the grid’s perspective a home with rooftop solar has zero demand during peak solar production.

However, that’s ignoring the home actually uses electricity during that period it’s demand simply isn’t something the utility can make money from.

Similarly, transmission losses increase as temperatures rise which requires more production to offset those losses. From the perspective of a natural gas power plant that load is just as real as actual customer demands because utilities need to pay for it.

Finally, time zone boundaries and suburbs being on the east or west of cities on the coast make a noticeable difference. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2572317/Are-...

[kyriakos]

Maybe I'm wrong here but everyone seems to be considering only home use. During day time there's higher demand from factories and industrial processes even if home use its at its lowest.

[jjav]

> Your solar panels tend to produce power at times when power is cheap - because there is so much solar power.

But that's not true in how PG&E prices power. The very highest rates start when the day is just past warmest and sunniest (3pm) when there's tons of solar power available to feed into the grid. The cheapest rates start at midnight when solar contribution is obviously zero.

[FartyMcFarter]

Net metering doesn't make sense for a simple reason:

- when you use power, the grid is forced to produce it for you at that specific moment.

- on the other hand, solar panels produce energy at random times, regardless of whether it's needed or not.

Net metering forces symmetric pricing into a fundamentally asymmetric situation, which is not scalable.

You could think of similar asymmetries in other contexts where the unfairness is obvious. Imagine making a deal with a restaurant for them to deliver pizzas to you whenever you order them, and in exchange you'll give them back the same number of pizzas at a time of your choosing (or at random times). This is obviously not a fair deal for the restaurant.

[burnished]

Your analogy introduces factors that aren't present in the system, I dont think you need to use one here. Solar panels arent exactly random for one, pizzas arent fungible for two, and the grid is already composed of many producers and consumers for three.

[belorn]

Energy as a service isn't fungible either. You can not trade energy at one point in time with energy at an other point in time and expect both to have identical value. There are many energy speculators which trade is to determining when prices are low or high, and with good weather predictions its not that difficult to make a accurate guess about the price a few days ahead in time.

[burnished]

How does that make a pizza restaurant a better analogy than just the situation itself?

[hbarka]

Analogies are terrible but I’ll bite—

Imagine if you will there’s a peak demand for pizzas (dunno maybe Super Bowl?) and the pizza company is struggling to deliver enough pizzas. You come in and say hey Mr Pizza Company I’ll help out with that demand and make pizza for you, and so will my other neighbors and we’ll help you supply pizza. Mr Pizza Company takes your pizza and sells it but only pays you a fraction of what they charged their customers. And on top of that charges you for making pizza for them. This is what you get in return. Except you’re making pizza everyday and giving it to the pizza company so they can sell your pizza out in the market first before they sell theirs. The greatest trick played.

[bunabhucan]

Example from Boulder: big houses near open space at the "end of the line" as far as the dendritic distribution grid is concerned install solar. On a cold sunny day those houses produce more than they need and more than the network leading to them was sized to deliver. Who pays to upgrade the transformers and switchgear upgrades? Should it be subsidized by all ratepayers?

[HDThoreaun]

Utilities pay much lower wholesale costs than than they sell the power for. Why should they be forced to buy your power at an inflated rate when the generator will sell to them for 90% less?

[jackmott42]

Agreed, at some point the grid will need to spend on storage to enable more solar users. So either you need to have a fee to pay for that, or push the storage burden onto the end users. Make that cost apparent and force people to deal with it and we will find creative ways to do so (like more EV vehicles that can act as storage, as the Ford Lightning can)

[briffle]

If only people were buying hundreds of thousands of batteries a year. Ideally mobile, on wheels or something. that they could plug in while working, and suck up all this extra grid power...

[baq]

More likely at some point it will be uneconomical to run PV without attached storage. As an added bonus you’ll be able to pull cheap power on the winter from the grid overnight if you have that kind of tariff available.

[monkeydust]

Just be glad your not in the UK. I pay 35p / kWh down and get only 5p / kWh for excess I sell to grid through Smart Export Guarantee. Price down has doubled in two years and way up has hardly moved.

I joked with my neighbour that we should wire up our homes and sell my excess to him at mid point and we would both be better off.

[jacquesm]

> I joked with my neighbour that we should wire up our homes and sell my excess to him at mid point and we would both be better off.

I've been looking at this but not as a joke and you run into some fairly interesting problems when you start paralleling after the meter. Long story short: don't do this unless you have a lot of electrical engineering chops or you might end up create a liability in case of a leak to ground or an overcurrent situation. This needs some special handling. The best way would be to just create an extra circuit and use a waterproof extension cord to power it, that way all GFPs see their real current and not a fraction of it and you can't accidentally feed into a distribution panel at more current than the breakers see, which is an excellent way to start a fire.

[gnicholas]

Low-effort version, if he has an EV: get a long charging cable and charge him up when you're generating excess.

[monkeydust]

He doesn't but few on the street do. Could hack something over the summer that provides some charge on my driveway when I am net producing. Not sure if any legal/tax issues with the setup though. An interesting community project.

[reacharavindh]

It might even be a greater option to have a community battery booth(a bank of LFP or the upcoming Sodium ion batteries). Everyone throws their excess energy into it, and it can be a charging station for e-bikes, EVs etc.

Absolutely no clue about legal issues though.

[monkeydust]

Interesting, getting close to a virtual power plant I think. Ideally you want to use the grid network for transmission to the bank of batteries.

[kbob]

Or just let him park at your place.

[mrguyorama]

In maine, CMP charges $11 a month for a "connection" to the grid and your first monthly 50kwh. Is that not the case in california or other net metering markets?

[eppp]

$11 doesn't even come close to touching the distribution cost. It is just a way of showing you a slightly lower kWh rate if it is that low.

[ihaveajob]

Yes it is, there's a connection fee of approximately $10/month for that same reason. Net metering is a totally unrelated topic. What's being argued about is the rate. Until now, rooftop solar customers get a retail-level payback for excess production sent to the grid. Under the proposal, this payback would be at the wholesale price, which is significantly lower.

[jrochkind1]

You can still totally offset your own actual consumption at retail rate, but any negative over your actual consumption for the month, you only get paid cash at wholesale rate?

Without knowing anything about this or any context... that does not seem unreasonable to me.

Note that OP didn't even require net negative at all to have it still totally be a great investment. He only offest a portion of his actual usage. So net negative paid only at wholesale rate seems like it should still be functional economically and leave plenty of incentive. Wouldn't have effected OP at all, for those who do go net negative and it effects, it seems like it shouldn't tip the scales.

[dahfizz]

> You can still totally offset your own actual consumption at retail rate

AFAIK, most home solar is not set up this way. You don't use the energy from your solar panels. The solar panels feed directly into the grid, and your usage comes directly out of the grid.

So if you use 100kwh, and generate 100kwh, then you will pay 100kwh at retail rate, and receive 100kwh at wholesale rate.

[singhrac]

Hmm, I've never heard of such a setup, actually. Usually these kinds of generators are called "behind-the-meter" because they are literally behind the electric meter, so any generation you make is directly used by your house, and any excess crosses the meter. At least this web page (from a utility in NE-ISO) indicates that solar generation is still behind the meter even in a net generation setting: https://www.bostonsolar.us/solar-blog-resource-center/blog/w.... It could vary from place to place, though.

[scubbo]

I just got solar panels installed (in Berkeley, CA). I can confirm that this setup (you feed into the grid, and then get supply back from the grid) was the primary option suggested (it was possible to request and receive a self-contained "behind-the-meter" system, but was considered unusual)

[jrochkind1]

Hm, while I understand what you mean about where the actual energy goes, my understanding of how the costs are accounted are that there isn't any separate metering for "electricity out" vs "electricity in".

The Solar out actually runs your meter backwards, so does actually reduce the amount the meter shows you owing to charge you at the retail rate. There is no metering present to make it possible to charge you for the 100kwh you used at one rate, but then you pay you for the 100kwh you generated at a different rate. The electricity you generate runs the meter backwards, and reduces what you are charged for consumption -- which monetarily means you are "being paid" for it at the retail rate.

But if your meter goes negative in a given time period, they can tell at the meter you actually generated more than consumed, and could pay you out a different rate for that. (Or as OP notices, in some places, they allow you offset your use, but don't actually pay out for net negative at all. )

This is why the metering is called "net", it's your "net" use, consumption minus generation. I believe that's how it works for my friends here in Baltimore who have solar panels.

Are there other places in the USA where they install more sophisticated metering capable of separately metering out and in, and charge different rates for it?

Or, anyway, since we're talking about California, if anyone wants to clarify how it actually is going to work in CA, rather than speaking in hypotheticals based on our theoretical understanding of how things work, that would be even better!

[saltcured]

With PG&E, we have networked meters that report fine-grained usage in order to support the newly standard time-of-use rate plan. It is not an average over a metering period like a month but able to resolve usage at different hours of the day. Even my bill shows peak and off-peak usage as daily bar graphs, and I think I can login to see more fine-grained data at the power company website if I wanted to.

But I agree with the message several posts up. The old net metering was a subsidy and I understand it going away. It makes sense to me at a technical level that you would be billed your fine-grained net usage, so if your solar supports your daytime load then you didn't consume power, but you can't expect daytime excess to 1:1 cancel your nightime grid load, unless you install local batteries to time-shift your own power.

The old net metering did that. People generate excess during the day and consume power at night from the grid and expect it to all cancel out.

[eppp]

There are indeed places that have better meters in the USA. In the past we installed two meters but it can now be done with one.

[baq]

My 3.5kWp PV installation is hooked up to one phase in the house and that power is definitely being used without being counted by the (2-way) meter.

[HDThoreaun]

$11 a month is nowhere close to the grid upkeep cost.

[brk]

Most net metering does have a base connection charge. Mine is ~$35/mo, even when I have produced more energy in a month than we consumed, my bill was still about $40 after base fees and taxes/etc.

[K0balt]

Isn’t there a base charge though? In my home town it’s around 25 dollars a month just to be hooked up whether you use anything or not.

What would seem logical to me would be a base charge, they net meter you to zero, but then you sell power at the wholesaler rate. If that wipes out your connect charge you still have them the value that they would have paid for the power you made.

Maybe the base charge would have to be higher for net metered houses, it might have some subsidy built into it based on expectations of selling power to the client.

[HDThoreaun]

The thing is that grid upkeep costs increase when people are selling power back. Who should have to pay for those increased fixed costs? Net metering means everyone pays.

[scld]

In the northeast at least there are separate lines for supply and distribution. If your supply goes negative, you still pay the distribution fee....and if you supplied more than the distribution cost....why wouldn't you receive money? Unless the energy company is for some reason not charging properly for distribution, seems everything is already baked in.

[pydry]

This kind of attitude only really make senses if there is a carbon tax.

Net metering is as good a subsidy for green energy which we DIRELY need as any.

Making perfect the enemy of the good is bad enough as a general principle but is 100x worse when the future of the planet is at stake.

[ezfe]

But that's why your bill has generation and delivery split into two lines. Net meter the generation line but don't touch the delivery line.

[jacquesm]

But you do pay for 'grid upkeep costs', the grid availability is a part of that connection fee, otherwise what would you connect to if not to the grid. Even if you consume zero KWh in a month you will still pay.

[mcv]

Even then, solar panels produce electricity when demand is low and supply is high. In the evening, demand goes up and solar panels produce a lot less.

[_ea1k]

I tend to agree, but the fixed $/kw monthly fees that utilities want is just about the dumbest possible alternative.

[umvi]

In Idaho at least, you do have to pay a monthly infrastructure fee even if you are using net metering.