My family in Texas has told me that some electricity cooperatives have been disincentivizing solar by charging different rates to customers with solar or charging fees when customers with solar produce excess power.
They need to protect the fossil fuel powered central grid.
People with solar panels can definitely produce in a year all the energy need they want and basically pay zero after they install solar panels (bills went from 1k+ to less than 100 per year), so they're just using the central grid as a free battery that never deteriorates, never need to be bought and exchanged for a new one every once and then.
The central grid makes very little money out of solar user and they can't justify their existence or improve themselves and go solar.
Now there are rules that say you can't buy more solar panel than what your expected consumption is and they want to install a remotely controlled system so that the central grid won't purchase your electricity unless it's favourable for them.
People are fighting the first rule by buying a lot of cheap resistive heaters which consume a lot of energy which they can use to get enough solar panels to cover their needs.
There is not much hope for the remote control but I guess in that case we'll have to go with batteries. Hopefully by then Form Energy would deliver their iron-air batteries.
They need to protect the fossil fuel powered central grid.
People with solar panels can definitely produce in a year all the energy need they want and basically pay zero after they install solar panels (bills went from 1k+ to less than 100 per year), so they're just using the central grid as a free battery that never deteriorates, never need to be bought and exchanged for a new one every once and then.
The central grid makes very little money out of solar user and they can't justify their existence or improve themselves and go solar.
Now there are rules that say you can't buy more solar panel than what your expected consumption is and they want to install a remotely controlled system so that the central grid won't purchase your electricity unless it's favourable for them.
People are fighting the first rule by buying a lot of cheap resistive heaters which consume a lot of energy which they can use to get enough solar panels to cover their needs. There is not much hope for the remote control but I guess in that case we'll have to go with batteries. Hopefully by then Form Energy would deliver their iron-air batteries.