[reenorap]

Why bother? Power companies will complain they are losing money and regulators will allow them to buy energy from residential solar panels basically for free (NEM 3.0). This is California.

California has spent decades convincing people to convert to solar panels and EVs and now that many have switched, they doubled electricity prices and told us not to charge when it’s too hot. Now they want solar panel owners to pay a surcharge for “connecting to the grid”, upwards of $100/month or more than my actual solar bill. It’s all a scam.

[mkozlows]

It's not a scam. Connecting to the grid has enormous value, and keeping the grid up has real costs. A model where your generation pays you retail prices doesn't make sense.

California's current net metering system, which is more reflective of the true benefits and costs of solar to the power system, has been incentivizing people to add storage to keep their solar rather than get paid big money to feed back midday low-value solar, which is a big win.

[zugi]

> Connecting to the grid has enormous value

Yet in most locales it's illegal to disconnect from the grid.

If disconnection were legal for those who want to be energy self-sufficient, then charging just to connect would be more defensible.

[bsder]

> Yet in most locales it's illegal to disconnect from the grid.

That's kind of ... required?

Otherwise you have a bunch of people who are off the grid until the sun doesn't shine for a week and they run their batteries down and then they all try to connect simultaneously and collapse your grid.

Most places I know of don't care if you never connect to the grid--you get your exemption and get on with life.

However, once you are connected to the grid even once, the grid operator has to size things for the worst case when everybody is connected to the grid and drawing power and work things out for stability when everybody disconnects and they have to back off generation. At that point, the grid operator is well within their rights to demand that you comply with cooperative regulations like making a request to connect/disconnect from the grid itself.

[labcomputer]

Are you being deliberately obtuse?

It is illegal to discontinue your relationship with your local electrical utility. As in, completely disconnect from the grid, cut the wires and never look back.

As the previous poster said, charging for the “privilege” of connecting to the enormously-valuable grid would be a little bit defensible if having a connection were not legally required in most places.

[bsder]

The problem is that there are two different costs associated with running an electrical grid. The first one is a variable usage cost tied to generation and is what everybody thinks about. The problem is that there is also a second constant capital cost to simply maintain your connection to the grid.

In the past, the variable usage generation cost was much greater than the capital cost of maintenance. Solar generation (and decades of energy efficiency programs) breaks that.

The solution is to split electrical bills explicitly into the two parts (variable and constant). The problem with that is that a bunch of people installed solar with the expectation of an amortization schedule of much, much lower electricity bills since most of the cost was bundled into the usage cost which solar would reduce. If you change that billing, the amortization of that solar system goes right out the window.

The secondary problem is that this is politically dangerous because the people you are upsetting are homeowners who have some money and vote fairly reliably.

Furthermore, it is not illegal to COMPLETELY disconnect from the grid. As long as you follow the building codes, you can have the utility come out and completely disconnect the wires and you're good to go. You will likely have to demonstrate some local electrical system within the bounds of your local building codes. However, it is not uncommon for houses in the less populated areas of California to not be connected to the grid at all.

What is NOT legal is leaving those wires connected to the grid and toggling your connection on and off. If you are on or even possibly on the grid, you are expected to cooperate, and you have to help pay for the grid.

[gamblor956]

You have it exactly backwards.

It is illegal for the utility to disconnect you for nonpayment. There is nothing requiring you to connect to the utility.

In CA, the requirement is that the building either be connected to the electric grid or demonstrate that it has a code-compliant alternative power system capable of meeting all of the buildings expected power needs. The issue is that most residential solar installations aren't capable of meeting all needs except possibly in the summer.

[HWR_14]

I have no idea where it would be illegal not to connect to the grid. You can just not pay your electric bill.

[hparadiz]

You know I can just not use that grid electricity, pay the absolute minimum, and then do everything off grid right?

[hahahaa]

Not according to this ancestor comment:

> Now they want solar panel owners to pay a surcharge for “connecting to the grid”, upwards of $100/month or more than my actual solar bill

[DANmode]

Depending on jurisdiction.

This is not ubiquitous. It is common.

[perpetuallunch]

Since all we’re doing is opinions, and all opinions are equal.

It’s a scam.

All that money we’re coughing up for rooftop solar and batteries at home would be better spent investing in grid scale electricity generation, of any technology.

That way the best ideas generate more profit than the lesser ideas, and market discovery can solve problems.

Maybe governments could incentivise renters and home owners alike by discounting tax liabilities on new power generation investments. Or share holders could be offered discount rates. I’m open to ideas.

Rather than government picking winners, which seems to have a terrible track record.

Therefore, I posit my opinion is more valuable than yours.

[mullingitover]

> All that money we’re coughing up for rooftop solar and batteries at home would be better spent investing in grid scale electricity generation, of any technology.

In my city we literally can't buy any more grid scale solar. We rely on the county for transmission, we're buying all we can, and we're maxed. So you either get solar installed or you're paying some of the highest rates for electricity in the country.

I'm installing the max balcony solar the law allows the day it's legal. It's the biggest no-brainer every, it'll pay itself off in ~2 years in my case because it's knocking out the most expensive part of my power bill.

[perpetuallunch]

> in my city we literally can't buy any more grid scale solar.

Ok. That’s not the argument I was making though.

And neither is the rest of your comment a reply to anything I wrote.

Of course in the absence of the full suite of options, people will and should make rational economic decisions based on the options they do have.

And hopefully keep voting the bastards out until better options are on the table.

[perpetuallunch]

Similarly here in Australia.

Electricity prices keep increasing, daily supply charge keeps increasing (this ones supposed to pay for the transmission network), while the solar feed-in tariff keeps decreasing.

With the added stupidity that, obviously the sun works during the day and so do you.

Now tax payers are forced to subsidies residential batteries as well as rooftop solar, which results in a wealth transfer from everyone else to home owners, and isn’t a policy that helps low income earners and / or renters.

It’s also government picking winners, which historically has never worked, rather than letting private enterprise pick winners, and potentially failing, in an open and free market.

Wild.

[thelastgallon]

Didn't Australia just introduce free daytime electricity?

[perpetuallunch]

No.

[benj111]

>It’s also government picking winners, which historically has never worked, rather than letting private enterprise pick winners, and potentially failing, in an open and free market.

The internet was funded by the government until it got big enough. Solar panels were, wind turbines were. Many things aren't cost competitive in the beginning. The free market isn't good at funding something for 20 years to get it price competitive.

You can argue about how long the subsidies should go on for. But they demonstrably work.

[chris222]

Australia has been a great success for solar and battery storage.

Your statement about a wealth transfer is putting no value on climate change or good air quality which benefits all.

[cam_l]

The issue in oz, is that energy investment by power companies is locked in with decades long contracts - raising power prices for everyone. But investment by individuals is subject to bait and switch.

Most people bought in with the expectation of a 12-15yr break-even, but the dropping feed in prices, and increase in grid costs have meant that break-even will probably never materialise.

Meanwhile, we keep paying excess costs for power companies to produce dirty power, and subsidise mining companies to sell off our gas and coal overseas, without even getting a benefit through taxes or royalties (or barely any).

Makes sense people are kind of pissed off about this (even if their reasoning is batshit-skynews-crazy).

[hahahaa]

EV, Battery, Solar, Heat pump, Amber. Maybe be give it a tech abbreviation like HBASE? :)

Ok this may squarely be in the upper middle class and up for now but prices will come down and change everything. Almost to the point of off grid being feasible for suburban and rural areas at least.

Then build solar and wind farms and batteries and hydrogen production/consumption for base load.

Edit: changed to inc. solar

[perpetuallunch]

Why?

Why should Australians continue to tolerate a government that gives half our gas exports away, and exports at least as much coal as it uses.

But not build any modern tech coal and gas for cheap reliable base load and load following power? And nuclear too, we export all the uranium we mine, and at least some of that to nuclear armed states. Yet prohibit both on our own soil.

Why must we continue to be told we should, ever increasingly, rely on a) energy technologies that have proven to be more expensive and unreliable, and b) unproven technologies with unproven costs.

Fortunately there are other political options on the table.

Queue the continued downvotes for a reasonable comment that offers an option contrary to the received wisdom.

[xbmcuser]

Today, building new solar, wind, and batteries is cheaper than building new coal or gas plants, let alone the fuel costs. Building new coal and gas would actually be stupid. Running older plants without caring about pollution might be cheaper in the short term, but not by much.

And what do you mean by "new technology"? We've had solar power for over 50 years and wind power for centuries. Australia was a pioneer in grid-scale batteries over a decade ago with Tesla.

Even if you wanted to build gas and coal plants, where would you get the turbines? There's a massive shortage, with deliveries supposedly 5 to 7 years away that is even before the current AI based demand surge. Nuclear will also take decades to build. The only fast, cheap option left is solar, wind, and batteries. Which can be up and running in under 12 months.

[Turskarama]

The thing you're missing here is timelines. The reason renewables are expensive is because it requires a grid upgrade to make it work, whereas replacing the old coal generators with new ones wouldn't so much. The kicker is though that once that upgrade is done, maintaining it will be very cheap whereas fossil fuels will continue to get more expensive (both sticker price and the cost of dealing with climate change). It's not like installing more fossil fuels halfway through helps either, we can't use coal to eliminate the duck curve without massively overbuilding it for a huge up front cost. We would need to build enough of it to cover when there is no renewables... which would be enough to never use the renewables at all.

There is a lot of evidence in fact that we have _already_ reached the point where just going all in on renewables is cheaper. People like to point to the last 40 years or so to say fossil fuels are cheaper but that was a time when the rate of new power generation wasn't very high and most power stations had already been built. We are at a point now where just about all of our coal power stations need replacing, and actually doing that would be more expensive than the renewables roll-out.

As for nuclear, the average cost to install and run it _in countries with existing industry_ is also higher than renewables. Despite the costs renewables are actually the cheapest method to get power, even if you add in all the extra associated costs.

If you're actually interested in reading up on this then I can suggest going through the GenCost report https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/Ele...

Of course if you think the CSIRO is full of paid shills then this won't help, but you should probably have a hard think on who is actually spending the most on lobbying money, which you can also look up quite easily.

[hahahaa]

I am up for nuclear actually. And some gas as backup but not base. I just thing that global warming is a threat and every country needs to combat it.

[perpetuallunch]

No it hasn’t.

What it has done is resulted in ridiculously high electricity prices, such that manufacturing anything in this country has become progressively less viable.

The Net Zero story sold to Australians is, and always was always will be, complete bs, as evidenced by three facts:

1) It’s no longer the narrative, because “data centres”

and

2) even when it was the narrative, it was always bs because Australia exports huge amounts of gas, and a metric ship load of coal, so other countries can have affordable electricity. So why don’t we just use it. There’s only one atmosphere.

and

3) Australia could double or triple its emissions and it would have approximately no additional impact on total atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.

We haven’t reduced our emissions, we’ve merely exported them.

In before you say “shut up Pauline”, yes I did vote One Nation at the last federal election.

And if you’re so sure I’m just drowning in koolaid, how certain are you you aren’t?

Remember the good old days when governments weren’t to be trusted and we criticised them when they laid out idiotic policy?

[vvbull]

Australia emits 1-1.5% of greenhouse gases. Tripling that would absolutely impact global concentrations, especially over human time scales.

But agree, Australia exporting fossil fuels should be reflected. If you counted their export of fuels it would be closer to 5% of global emissions.

IMO, getting to zero would knock over a whole integer percent off the global goal, that's notable. And if you stopped exporting oil, we'd be 1/20th of the way to the goal already!

[perpetuallunch]

Your argument seems to boil down to:

What we’re doing isn’t working, so let’s do more of it.

There’s a cost of living crisis in this country effecting the majority of Australians.

So let’s make energy more scares, more expensive.

I’m with Gad Saad here, in that the one thing that astounds me the most about other people is their inability to change their opinions in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

[hahahaa]

Yeah every non-China nation can say "everyone else should do it, we is little, China should do it"

Problem with pollution is it is easy to overpollute but in the other direction realistically zero is the limit. Unless we go wartime funding on recapturing carbon.

[benj111]

On the other hand you could just not export the coal and leave it in the ground?

Unfortunately that will piss off others who want the income. But then those same people won't plan for a time when there's no buyers for coal, so.....

[perpetuallunch]

And all the people who rely on that energy?

What about them?

Some of that coal is coking coal, used to make steel.

What of it?

[techbrovanguard]

shut up, pauline

[theshackleford]

> Wild

Calm down Murdoch.

[perpetuallunch]

Very convincing argument.

Thank you for your contribution.

[jampa]

The new rule here requires you to pay for part of your imports (up to ~60%), even if you export more. I know people who installed batteries in the inverters because of this. It is more expensive overall (hybrid inverter + LFP batteries) but has other benefits (blackouts are not a problem, most months you don't even use the grid). I imagine that once sodium-ion battery production scales and costs decline, this will become the "default" option for a solar installation.

[Aurornis]

In more well-run locations, power companies are providing incentives to install batteries because they help reduce the load on the grid.

These are plug-in solutions, though. The whole idea is that a permit isn’t required. If approved in your area, you don’t need to work with the power company at all. You just buy one and plug it in.

The plug-in stuff doesn’t play by the same rules as the big installs.

[skew-aberration]

Yes, and non plugin-in batteries don't just need a permit - typically the power company also directly controls the battery, via a web API that the manufacturer provides (at least in Australia, this is a condition for access to the incentives).

[appplication]

The solar situation in CA is truly mind boggling for a state that is ostensibly progressive.

[labcomputer]

It’s not just solar.

Property taxes increase at a rate legally-mandated to be less than inflation. Not just that, you can inherit your parents (or grandparents) property tax rate.

Didn’t have parents who owned property in 1978 (shortly after racial covenants were declared unconstitutional)? Well, why don’t you just go fuck yourself?

Everywhere you look are policies that are ostensibly progressive, but actually quite regressive.

[hparadiz]

That doesn't really matter when you're buying a house in CA. It's a relatively small percentage of a difference in my overall mortgage. I'd rather have Prop 13 even if that means some people inherit a tax break. Homes that stay in a family have less administrative churn and keep neighborhoods more stable in the long term.

[labcomputer]

> Why bother? Power companies will complain they are losing money and regulators will allow them to buy energy from residential solar panels basically for free (NEM 3.0).

The way I would see this working is that you charge the batteries when electricity is cheap (generally, midnight through early afternoon), and then run the house (not supply the grid) the rest of the time.

LFPs are cheap enough now that a strategy like this would pay back after about 2 years.

If they try to adapt with a “NEM 4.0”, the whole thing will collapse because solar and LFPs are so cheap that everyone will just pay their mandatory $50/month grid connection fee and not buy any electricity from the grid.

[pkulak]

If being connected to the grid is a "scam", then disconnect. Buy 100 grand worth of batteries (which still may not get you through the winter), and pull the ol' plug.

[thelastgallon]

Completely agree with you, Govts sacred duty is to protect the super rich and utilities are the biggest monopolized cash cows (Eg: Warren Buffet). However,if people work with their local governments and change the building code to allow plug-in solar and plug-in batteries, that will continuously upgrade every home to become more and more energy independent and with the explosion of products, eventually be grid free. The biggest costs are labor, permits and delays; if its just products that people can plug and play, the adoption will be faster than just rooftop solar (or rooftop + batteries).

Also, most utilities have tiered rates (higher utilization at higher rates), if you can have plug in systems that can bring the total kwh down, it immediately lowers the peak rate.

The only bottleneck is making products that are safe to plug in, and this will happen as building code creates a standard to plug-in.

[alwa]

So… @lazide replied with a hahaha. It got flagged to death, understandably.

If it were anybody but @lazide I’d have flagged it too, but… I can’t help but grimace and nod.

To hazard a loosely-informed guess at their subtext… and politely ignoring your opening salvo of calorie-free populism… I’m not speaking from a place of certainty, but my impression is that there seem to be elements of “not even wrong” here. Some contra- lines of argument:

* code, especially in the huge fundamental aspects, tends to flow from the NEC downward, rather than from municipal experiments in playing with literal fire. Not insurmountable, I guess, but it seems like a pretty big chicken-and-egg kind of obstacle to your proposed course of action;

* individual household demand is several orders of magnitude removed from the considerations informing grid design and operations;

* the last thing a grid needs is a meaningful amount of random feed-in that it can’t centrally (and near-instantly) manage;

* the costs of home-scale labor/permits/whatever are only the biggest ones from the perspective of toting up individual homeowners considering uneconomical projects, not from utility-scale (much less whole-polity-scale) scratchwork… would an army of volunteer homeowners’ labor really still outperform specialist labor installing hundreds-of-homes’ worth of capacity per day at an energy facility somewhere?

* the thing holding back the “explosion of products,” consumerist-salvation overtones aside, seems more likely to be {physics vs the existing built environment} than permits—that, plus the lack of a mass market;

* one barrier to “plug and play” is that said plugs are safe only because of an interlocking set of assumptions upstream of said plugs—which definitely do not contemplate feeding back in whole-home current from a random convenience outlet on your front porch;

* Rate tiers are an economic device to influence consumption patterns under the status quo. As the Californians are learning, there’s a hard floor on the price of “having a grid” vs “not having a grid”; as consumption patterns shift, rate schemes can and must shift too;

* building codes care about safety, grids and ISOs and energy providers care about capacity and stability. Players on grids can realize enormous economies of scale with respect to pretty much any generation or storage technology. The bottleneck you describe is…

I dunno, man… the only bottleneck to energy too cheap to meter is fusion, obviously all we have to do is just go crack fusion and we’ll have a fusion pot on every stove!

I love your sense of empowerment; I’d encourage you to bring it to bear at a scale where it matters— much bigger than a home, much smaller than a whole polity… I think there are benefits to decentralization and to independence but I don’t think those are the benefits you’re emphasizing here.

[thelastgallon]

> * code, especially in the huge fundamental aspects, tends to flow from the NEC downward, rather than from municipal experiments in playing with literal fire. Not insurmountable, I guess, but it seems like a pretty big chicken-and-egg kind of obstacle to your proposed course of action;

UL 3700 exists. Local efforts are underway to let anyone use plug-in sola without contractors, permits, utility approval: https://pluginsolarusa.com/

> individual household demand is several orders of magnitude removed from the considerations informing grid design and operations;

The grid connects millions of individual homes. I'm not sure what you are trying to say here?

> the last thing a grid needs is a meaningful amount of random feed-in that it can’t centrally (and near-instantly) manage;

Plug-in solar or batteries do not feed in to the grid. They are for consumption within the home.

> the costs of home-scale labor/permits/whatever are only the biggest ones from the perspective of toting up individual homeowners considering uneconomical projects, not from utility-scale (much less whole-polity-scale) scratchwork… would an army of volunteer homeowners’ labor really still outperform specialist labor installing hundreds-of-homes’ worth of capacity per day at an energy facility somewhere?

There is no work involved other than just plugging it in. There is no volunteer home owners labor. Even if there is, it is their own home. When you turn the lights on, do you add that to your spreadsheet of volunteer home owners labor? Or do you consider plugging a cable into an outlet a big task that should require contractors, project managers, managers, directors, forecasts, estimates, daily standups? If thats your view, thats understandable, most enterprises work that way.

> the thing holding back the “explosion of products,” consumerist-salvation overtones aside, seems more likely to be {physics vs the existing built environment} than permits—that, plus the lack of a mass market;

plug-in battery uses existing built environment. Thats the whole point.

> one barrier to “plug and play” is that said plugs are safe only because of an interlocking set of assumptions upstream of said plugs—which definitely do not contemplate feeding back in whole-home current from a random convenience outlet on your front porch;

I don't know what you are trying to say here. It sounds like corporate speak: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QmAbQMukB4

> Rate tiers are an economic device to influence consumption patterns under the status quo. As the Californians are learning, there’s a hard floor on the price of “having a grid” vs “not having a grid”; as consumption patterns shift, rate schemes can and must shift too;

Rate tiers are a politically convenient way to hide cost-recovery problems, cross-subsidize favored groups, and extract revenue while pretending the underlying cost structure of the grid is volume-driven when large parts of it are not. California homeowners are buying record numbers of home batteries to pair with solar panels. If the rates are entirely unreasonable, homeowners will go offgrid. California homeowners are smart enough to figure out how to freeze property taxes close to zero, I'm sure they will figure out the right laws when electricity rates become unreasonable.

> building codes care about safety, grids and ISOs and energy providers care about capacity and stability. Players on grids can realize enormous economies of scale with respect to pretty much any generation or storage technology. The bottleneck you describe is…

Yeah, just leave it to the utilities and regulators, they have nothing but consumers best interest at heart.

> I dunno, man… the only bottleneck to energy too cheap to meter is fusion, obviously all we have to do is just go crack fusion and we’ll have a fusion pot on every stove!

plug-in batteries are impossible and require home owners volunteer labor, but fusion, it can manifest from thin air!

[searealist]

NEM 3.0 is more fair. The grid is expensive and just as expensive if it is needed to be fully utilized 1% of the time or 100% of the time.

The problem is California forcing new construction to buy overpriced solar from builders that makes little sense compared to commercial solar installations + grid.

[dghlsakjg]

These are problems not inherent to solar, but to places that are underdeveloped and under-regulated.

Plenty of places in modern and developing countries don’t have these issues.

[fortran77]

When we got our solar system in CA, our electric bill went to zero. We calculated the payback to be 9 years. Eventually, they stopped buying back electricity and changed the way they metered and our bill was as high as ever. We save a bit because we're able to charge our electric car at times of peak PV output.

We left California last year for this and many other reasons. They just don't want anyone to be productive here.

[aaomidi]

Literally one of the most productive states of the entire world btw

[hparadiz]

It's not even close too.

[chris222]

Dishonest post. When you bought your system you were grandfathered into either NEM 1 or NEM 2. Please provide proof that your arrangement changed.

[hparadiz]

NEM 2.0 doesn't pay as much anymore but that could just be increased grid electricity costs.