[tonyarkles]

> why cut the incentives right when they’re starting to produce meaningful results

Because it's unsustainable and every rooftop solar installation that has net metering causes electricity to be more expensive for everyone. The same time your rooftop system is producing its peak capacity is likely to be the same time the nearby grid-scale solar plants are producing at peak capacity, but the utility is forced to pay you retail price for the power you're producing when they'd rather get it at wholesale price from the larger facilities.

[beembeem]

A few comments:

Your comment assumes that the utility needs to be using up lots of land to power customers. Rooftop solar is far more efficient and there is no extra transmission required. Utilities don't need to consume vast tracts of land just to provide power to customers.

> retail price

Utilities in California (by law) already deduct fees out of this, so it's not reimbursed at full retail rate anyway under old NEM rules. There's also an absolutely massive gap between retail and wholesale rates that could be explored.

[tonyarkles]

If what you're proposing about rooftop solar being more efficient was true, why wouldn't the utilities just pay to roll that out to residential customers? E.g. the utility pays to install the panels on your roof and then you get a discount on your electricity to pay for the "roof lease"?

[beembeem]

It is because utilities can externalize many costs with their current development practices. Every now and then the federal government jumps in with some more funding for them too (see: Diablo Canyon). Incentives aren't aligned between the utilities and their customers.

[tonyarkles]

> It is because utilities can externalize many costs with their current development practices

I'm curious what you mean with that statement. Which costs are they able to externalize by building grid scale solar that they'd have to cover out-of-pocket for a grid-scale rooftop solar deployment?

> Incentives aren't aligned between the utilities and their customers.

I mean, as a first approximation the utilities incentives are:

- keep capex and opex costs as low as possible

- while selling electricity at the prevailing rate inside their RTO

"Shorting The Grid" by Meredith Angwin paints an absolutely atrocious picture of the governance structures inside many RTOs and there are definitely perverse incentives at play, but fundamentally the utilities want to sell electricity while maximizing their margins.

I'm not even sure what the "customer incentives" are beyond paying as little as possible to keep their lights on and houses heated and cooled.

[beembeem]

> Which costs are they able to externalize by building grid scale solar

The biggest one is transmission. Most utilities have an arrangement where they can receive a certain return from customers with new capex. No large-scale transmission is required for rooftop installations.

Thanks for the book recommendation. I'll have to check it out.

> "customer incentives"

Correct. Customers are incentivized to use as little as possible and therefore save money. The utilities are incentivized to get customers to pay for new projects to earn a guaranteed return. And if a customer overgenerates their credits in a net metering scenario? Typically this is free energy to the utility. No payout.