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by tonyarkles 1008 days ago
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"?
1 comments
beembeem 1008 days ago
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.
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tonyarkles 1008 days ago
> 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.

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beembeem 1007 days ago
> 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.

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