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Comment by hbarka | Hacker News Reader

Assuming you are grid-tied, the reduction of electric bills is predicated on net metering, where the utility company gives you (ideally) 1-for-1 credit for the electricity you produce. In California, this was called NEM 1.0 and NEM 2.0. Every few years the California utilities lobby the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) to chip away at the NEM program. This year the PUC voted unanimously to cut net energy metering and any new solar owner will fall under the NEM 3.0 rules. Net energy metering is essentially dead in California. In addition there are additional fixed fees customers have to pay. This will disincentivize solar-only installation. If you want fair compensation of what you generate you’ll have to store it and pay yourself.

PG&E will find a way to keep their profit margin.

https://www.npr.org/2022/12/15/1142927418/california-plans-t...

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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.

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

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?

$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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

For home solar power, does your PG&E metering meter "power generated" separately from "power consumed"? I'm not sure if that's what you're saying or not.

Do you have details on how home solar is or will be metered in California, with regard to credits for power generated, and if it will be different depending on whether it's "net negative" or not?

I don't have solar. But, I read up on the solar rules changes because I can imagine getting solar later. We're not in a hurry because it will need to be a bigger "electrification" project to make it worthwhile.

With the right kind of grid-tie, you should be able to consume your own solar on-premises and have effectively no grid consumption charges during productive hours. If you had a net excess to supply back to the grid, that net would be credited at the applicable wholesale rate. If your solar was insufficient for your load, your net load on the grid would be billed at the applicable retail rate.

Think of all of this as "instantaneous" net metering. If you want to time shift your production and consumption, you need your own on-premises battery and accept your own charge/discharge efficiency losses. Your 1 kWh of excess solar will end up giving you less than 1 kWh of overnight power due to losses in the converters and battery chemistry. The old net metering rules allowed people to act like the grid was their perfectly efficient battery and consume 1 kWh of nighttime load for 1 kWh of daytime solar excess.

Another proposed rules change was rejected. It would have placed an additional fixed grid connection fee only on solar homes. It was an attempt to add a connection fee for homes that might hit net zero consumption, without restructuring the rest of the non-solar rate plans where the infrastructure costs are tacked onto the marginal energy price.

The other thing to understand about PG&E billing is that some of the new time-of-use rate plans have a "baseline allowance". In a recent bill, we were charged $0.37 or 0.39 for 1 off-peak or peak kWh. But, there is an offset of $0.09 per kWh for the first 281 kWh used in the month. This effectively gives you tiered pricing but without calling it out as such. I don't know why they did this instead of publishing tiered, time-of-use rate schedules.

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.

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)

You've actually done this recently, so probably you are right, but I'm still doubtful. Are there two separate unidirectional meters involved? And the solar panels aren't hooked into your electrical panel or in house electrical system in any way? What you are describing isn't impossible, but it's an odd default, and would seem to be a terrible deal for homeowners now that net metering is being phased out. While it's usually true (especially in California) that you can't keep your house powered while the grid is down, I don't think I've ever heard of a case where all locally generated power was sent 100% to the grid. I've only heard of this being done in cases where the same owner has generation happening at a different place on a separate electric account. Can you confirm?

TL;DR you're probably right :)

Ah, I see what you mean now. Sure, I can't absolutely confirm that, from a physical point of view, all locally-generated power is sent out and comingled with grid power. Rather, from an _administrative_ perspective, it's the case that I don't have any "exclusive claim" on the power that I generate, and my house's power is not independent of grid outages. It's quite possible - likely, I agree! - that the power that I generate is locally consumed; but, from an administrative and practical perspective (esp. lack of independence from the grid), the system "behaves as if" that is not the case.

So - yes, you're probably right!

> would seem to be a terrible deal for homeowners now that net metering is being phased out

Whether you're right or not from a physical perspective, this is absolutely the case from a numerical perspective - which is why I'm extremely glad that I got mine installed in the grace period during which NEM 2.0 pricing is still in effect despite NEM 3.0 being approved (and becoming active in April).

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

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)

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.

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...

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Or just let him park at your place.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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-...

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.

Hmm? Why guess? Each provider has public sites with graphs of demand and generation. Here's the CalISO one: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx showing a funny camel shape today of an 8AM morning peak (heating) and then a 5:30 PM peak. What we can't see is the demand that would be placed on the grid around solar noon, if it weren't being serviced directly by panels.

Industrial and commercial customers often engage in Demand/Response programs though (primarily for building HVAC), so if there's a likely residential spike, they can shed some of their load.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

No, you'd don't need net metering to make it viable.

In a typical grid-tied system, the setup is such that any demand is fulfilled first by solar capacity, and second from the grid. If your array can fulfill 100% (or more) of your demand, then you pull nothing from the grid.

If you don't have a net metering arrangement and you regularly produce more than 100% of your local demand, then your options are to simply throw away the excess, or use a battery system to store it for later use.

If you have a net metering agreement, then the grid acts like a giant battery, which may or may not have input and output fees (think of it very roughly like Amazon S3 pricing). Ideally you have a 1:1 arrangement, where you can feed energy into the grid for free, and pull back up to whatever you supplied at parity pricing (eg: for free). But, there is no reason a utility company has to offer that arrangement, they could charge you some fee to supply energy if they wanted, and they could charge you some fee to pull energy back.

For the most part, the most cost effective solar systems will supply about 75-80% of your average monthly demand. It almost never a good investment to overbuild your solar system on the premise of making money off of net metering, as the rate you are paid for production is essentially a wholesale price, making you a micro power plant, which is not a very profitable business. Covering the bulk of your energy usage with your own solar supply, and then pulling a minimum amount of power from the grid to fill the gaps will tend to keep you at the best supply pricing tier.

>… the most cost effective solar systems will supply about 75-80% of your average monthly demand

I am not so sure that is true. Seemingly a large percentage of new installation costs are fixed (paperwork, labor, inverters, etc) with only a smaller portion for the panels themselves. For a minor incremental cost, you can fully provision your house.

Over the last 8 quarters their average profit margin is a whopping 3.25%. If you think that’s just too high I’m not sure what to tell you.

An alternate way to look at the CA rule change is that CA needs more installed storage to shore up the shitty grid, and incentivizing people to install solar alone via net metering isn’t a great idea anymore. Remember that peak power demand is right around and just after sunset.

> Over the last 8 quarters their average profit margin is a whopping 3.25%

This is the trade-off you take when you become a quasi-government company. You get a low, but nearly guaranteed profit. Executives still get their bonuses, employees get paid, etc.

If they want more variable rates of return then they can drop the public protections and go full private like any other regular company.

Texas!!!!

Or, the California grid when Enron was doing market manipulations like paying power companies to shut down and induce a brown/blackout.

Does that include all deferred maintenance they had to do after the massive wildfires?

And payouts for the various ongoing wrongful death law lawsuits

Companies can keep profit margin flat by increasing operating expenses such as salary. For PG&E it looks immoral.

https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news-release/2022/10/ratep...

Egregious. Submitted:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34240356

3.25% of fifty bazillion ain't so bad.

> Over the last 8 quarters their average profit margin is a whopping 3.25%. If you think that’s just too high I’m not sure what to tell you.

Profit margin is after deducting all expenses. A lot of corrupt spending can be included in expenses to reduce the profit margin at will while still raking in the cash. So yes, that's absurdly high given how they operate.

Because net metering is forcing the utility to purchase power at the retail rate. It doesn't make any sense. It isn't a profit margin issue. There is a massive infrastructure and expense to deliver wholesale power to an individual customer and it has to be recouped. Either you sell back your power at some percent of wholesale or solar installs need to get a corresponding increased delivery fee.

This is all rather bizarre. If PG&E charges 30 cents/kWh for a marginal kWh delivered, then either something is quite wrong with the pricing model or it really does cost some respectable fraction of 30 cents/kWh to get a marginal kWh through their system into their distribution network where the customer is. If it's the latter, then reduction of 1 kWh delivered should save them the same amount of money.

I think the real issue is that the pricing is almost completely divorced from the actual cost structure, so the whole rate system is a kludge that gives everyone the wrong incentives.

Reduction of 1kWh delivered does not save them the same amount of money because the cost of connection is dominated by the 1st kW delivered. Scaling delivered power does have some cost, but the majority of delivery is in being able to deliver power to a particular area in the first place and to the maintenance of the lines providing any power.

Yes and no. If I draw an extra 10 kWh one random hour and export 10 kWh back at some other random hour, this costs the utility essentially nothing. The transformer is already there, and other customers near me will consume it possibly without even involving the transformer.

(I say “essentially” because there is some tiny loss in the system, but that’s maybe 2%, not 70%.)

Absolutely false. Wholesale electricity costs vary wildly with time of day. You’re saying the grid should be forced to act as an unlimited battery for free and that just doesn’t make sense.

The issue is that you have to size the hardware for a multiple of the power draw you expect and the cost doesn't go down because people use less temporarily. You also have to do all the vegetation management and billing and it and billing regardless of the amount of kWh that are used even if a solar install is negative. They might draw today and it has to be available.

> They might draw today and it has to be available.

This is true for non-solar customers too. It may be more true for solar, but unexpectedly high residential loads happen for all kinds of reasons. (A big one is heat on a very cold day, and that tends to be a correlated load.)

> If it's the latter, then reduction of 1 kWh delivered should save them the same amount of money.

The "net metering" policy being changed isn't regarding "saving the grid the money by reducing the amount delivered to a customer." If you don't use the power from them, you don't pay for it. But this is about the utility paying the customer the retail rate for excess generation - aka paying retail rate for something that would offset a cost they'd otherwise pay wholesale rate to generate. This is about the current (not the new) system: https://news.energysage.com/net-metering-2-0-in-california-e...

It's not clear to me at all that it makes sense to compel the utility to purchase your excess power at the retail rate, if you're generating more than you can use. It also seems to gives weird incentives to size and spend on your home setup.

What we need is a fundamental change in electricity billing. The value in a grid connection is in its reliability, availability and demand response (you can demand anything from 1 Amp to 200 Amps at any time, with no notice). The current usage-only billing model is broken.

What we should do is pay a large flat monthly fee for the grid connection, then a lower rate for generation/usage, rather than bundling the delivery costs in. This is how many other utilities (Gas, Water, etc.) are billed, and it makes much more sense. This would also line up better for people with solar panels, as those who choose to leverage a grid connection would lay in line with their utility, or could choose to go off-grid, if they didn't want to pay for the availability of the grid.

I think you’re missing a different piece of the puzzle here which is that if I pay $10 for the first gallon of water and next to nothing for the next 500, I have an incentive to use more water and not less. I’ve paid for it anyway.

When you’re trying to solve public policy problems especially where conservation is concerned the notion of math gets complicated very quickly.

Additionally, the worst strains on the grid are really measured by the peak loads, so if you change billing a way that makes the peak energy less expensive, and therefore disincentivize people to (a) reduce usage at peak times or (b) install solar panels/batteries to mitigate their peak usage, then it actually might make the grid more unreliable.

Water is different in that we really only have usage concerns about water, AFAIK there is never any issue with the water pressure drops at peak times (perhaps thanks to water towers). With electricity the concerns are mostly about the peak usage, and not so much the overall usage.

Yes, that's what you see in the commercial side, where demand charges based on your highest peak usage in a month are common. However, they are un-intuitive and easy to generate big bills for small amounts of power used, so I agree with the general idea that they're not a good idea for residential users.

You could institute something like time-of-day-based fees based on average demand for residential users without having the large unexpected bill problem.

I’m told that Industry gets charged not by how much current they draw but by how much it distorts the grid power waveforms. In fact there are experimental designs out there for power correction facilities that delay the waveforms by for instance 90% of a wavelength (so everything lines up again) and convert the delta to DC to store in batteries. The battery power can be used for their own purposes or to reinject in low voltage situations.

They are billed for demand, usage and power factor. They use capacitors to help with power factor.

I was watching this one video where they were talking about how they dropped their electric bill by changing how whatever machine they were demonstrating started up. Instead of off to full on they set it to ramp up slow enough to not push them into the higher peak pricing bracket. Electricity usage was the same overall but the bill was less.

Theoretically, you could add a third type of charge related to the externalities associated with your consumption. I'm not sure exactly how the accounting would work, but maybe an escalating fee based on the amount you consume. My utility actually does this with electricity, where the rate goes up after your first 1000 kWh. Obviously this could get more elaborate.

That’s a fancy way to say carbon tax, which I agree with but also recognize has been turned into a political landmine.

Also I thought PG&E still had the reverse situation, of people voluntarily paying more for green power.

This is effectively similar to the "energy price ceiling" that the Netherlands have introduced for this year: https://www.government.nl/topics/energy-crisis/cabinet-plans...

Note: the most recent English document still describes this as "planned", but it has been approved and has gone into effect with the start of 2023.

The difference is though that the state subsidies the "cheaper" rate. When a customer has consumed the subsidized amount of electricity or gas, they pay the full market price.

Perhaps, but if we want to dis-incentivize usage as a political policy, we can just increase the usage charge above from "next to nothing". For power, generation costs in California run from $150/MWh to -$150/MWh: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/prices.aspx

$0.15/kWh seems like enough to begin the dis-incentivizing of usage, and that can certainly be pushed up more.

So we’re going to reduce the hourly rate and charge a base fee, and then increase the hourly rate back to the old value?

So you’re asking for a regressive rate in electricity.

If your solution to a public policy issue is “why don’t we just” then you don’t understand the issue. I’m just pointing out externalities that you guys aren’t thinking about when shooting the shit about upcharging low income families and allowing the rich to get richer. You are contributing to the problems we complain about.

Certainly such a model is regressive, but it is in line with the actual costs of service. In my opinion, it's better to have a pricing model that reflects the actual costs of service, then an explicit subsidy to repair the regressivity issue, such as the Consumers Affordable Resource for Energy (CARE) Program in California.

Using usage as a proxy for value-received from the grid worked fine when there was a monopoly provider, but with distributed solar being a thing, we have to move off of the model, or we end up with an even more regressive system. As I noted before, we use these systems for water, gas, and other utilities, so we have methods for addressing their natural regressiveness.

Alternately, if you feel (and this is reasonable) that power should be a ubiquitous service provided to everyone, take over the grid, pay for maintenance and development of the grid with tax dollars, and bill only for generation/usage after a reasonable base allocation.

In the Netherlands you a fixed price for being connected. The amount varies on the size of the connection. Usually 1 phase 40A is as expensive as 3 phase 25A. Anything above that easily triples in price. Aside from this you have net metering still and you pay for what you consume. No “usage bundle” is included in the connection fee.

Also, the companies for infrastructure and that provide the actual energy are separate but the energy supplier charges for the infrastructure provider. The infrastructure provider is semi privatised while the energy supplier is fully privatised.

It kind of works, except that we need like everyone else, to upgrade the power grids to deal with increased consumption and we haven’t invested in that.

> Usually 1 phase 40A is as expensive as 3 phase 25A. Anything above that easily triples in price.

That's...not a lot of power. O_o Is it common to get that little amount of power?

I have 200 amps going to my house, but the master breaker on my panel is 160 amps. My car charger alone is 48 amps. When I had an electric stove, that was on a 40 amp breaker.

You have to compare voltage, too.

We run at 230V, although these days with solar panels all over the neighbourhood the voltage is slowly going up to 240.

Only recently, with the introduction of climate goals and ditching gas, houses are getting heavier connections. Electric ovens are typically 16A, although induction cooking stoves are getting 32A or 3phases.

The 22kW car charger is by far the most power hungry device and needs 3x32A.

In Finland system is setup for this.

First you pay for the electricity itself, can be from anyone, as on the level of the country in question electricity is entirely fungible.

Next is the connection or standing fee. Make sense, eventually you have to pay for the transformer and cabling to your home, even if in some location this is rather high.

And final piece is taxes + transfer fee paid by kWh. Again, you have pay for the local grid and charging by use makes some sense.

There is two prices that vary per use and one that doesn't. And reasonably so. Maintaining existing lines have a cost.

Why do power companies even buy back solar power in the first place? It seems like it's not in their interest to help their customers compete with them.

I do agree there should be a connection fee, like an Internet connection, that covers fixed costs. Watts cost more than bytes, so a usage fee makes sense too.

> Why do power companies even buy back solar power in the first place? It seems like it's not in their interest to help their customers compete with them.

Good question! The more power you generate locally, the less you need to transmit along expensive infrastructure, so it is actually in the interest of utilities to utilize and pay for all of the generation capacity they can as close to the consumer as possible. You can't get any closer to the consumer than paying their neighbor to power their house!

> The more power you generate locally, the less you need to transmit along expensive infrastructure,

This is true, but I don't think the savings on infrastructure scales linearly with the distributed power generated. For example, if you generate 1 MW of distributed power, that reduces the load on wires, transformers and towers across the grid, and may even mean you can eventually use cheaper gear at your next replacement, but it's not going to eliminate the baseline costs (towers, wires, transformer sites, etc.) of serving any particular customer or region.

Eventually you will be able to break large grids into smaller ones and still be as reliable as previously, thus eliminating longer runs of transmission lines and reducing power over the lines you cannot eliminate, which will reduce the sizes and costs of the lines, but not eliminate them. Someday, I would hope that you could tie small neighborhoods together as the grid cells, with very little interconnections needed between them.

I work in the industry, and my vision for the future is less about realtime power transmission and more about pooling energy in smaller grid cells, predicting the usage of the pooled energy in the future, and moving energy to the pools which will need more energy sometime in the future at a trickle rate based on predictions. The ideal situation is to reduce energy transfer to zero over time by distributing the energy generation densely amongst the most dense users of the energy. I don't think the industry is ready for such a step-change in thought yet, but someday electricity will be treated more like water than like it is today.

Water works because there are water towers that buffer usage. Until a thaw happens after a big freeze and drains all of the towers. If you can store electricity then you can increase the reliability and move the store pools around as needed depending on the usage.

They are a regulated monopoly as they have been granted rights by the public to use rights of way. So what hey can and cannot do is determined by politics not just what they think of.

> Why do power companies even buy back solar power in the first place?

Increasing capacity is really expensive.

It’s cheaper for them to do stuff like buy every customer a more efficient refrigerator or insulate their attic than build a new power plant so they go for schemes like that.

Its cheaper to shave peaks than almost anything. A distribution company can spend a normal month's worth of electricity in a few hours at system peaks. Unfortunately people aren't willing to be warm or cold for a bit at peaks to save the utility money. I don't blame them since they will get almost nothing out of it.

> What we should do is pay a large flat monthly fee for the grid connection, then a lower rate for generation/usage, rather than bundling the delivery costs in.

This is the absolutely worst way to bill. It enourages wasteful use and hits very hard the poorest people who can't afford the flat fee.

No (potential) customer is required to make any company profitable.

And should a company be forced to subsidize a customer?

When the company is a utility with a built in monopoly, with legal access to shared resources like land for transmission cables, and is the easiest path to executing policy as important as decarbonization?

Yes, if it helps the implementation of the policy.

Our entire power system lacks proper carbon taxation. So I won't cry over minor things like power companies making a bit less money when the effect is a major avenue to mitigating carbon emissions.

Arguably incenting the grid to switch over from coal/natural gas to wind/solar/storage is more important, but lets try multiple approaches and not stop what is working.

When said company is government subsidized said customer who is also a tax payer, yes. These companies use tax dollars for infrastructure investment and maintenance, at least here in CA.

Those investments theoretically benefit all of their customers.

The question is whether specific customers should benefit more than others, when the activity they are doing probably adds costs for the others.

The "supply" value of the electricity being generated is going to vary widely, it's not at all obvious that fixing it at the average cost of supplying residential electricity is going to benefit everyone buying the electricity (which as the volume of electricity involved becomes larger sort of becomes a requirement).

Another option is to split the fee into a 'connection fee', 'transmission fee' and a 'power fee'.

Have the power fee set realtime by a market. The price might go to zero if there is excess generation.

Have the transmission fee capped by a regulator - and charge it for any kilowatt hours that enter the power network.

Allow third parties to arbitrage and offer 'fixed rate' deals, so consumers aren't at the whims of an electricity market with occasional sky high prices.

Congratulations you invented Enron.

This is sort of how it works in Sweden and probably a few other countries.

Bill is split into market and (local) grid parts. Many consumers have now moved the market parts to realtime pricing, since fixed-price arbitraging has become so expensive.

Finland uses this model. Though the capping of transmission fees is bit iffy.

And lately the fixed rates have been quite variable going from 4 cents to 40 cents. The action by European countries caused some uncertainty. So timing has great effect.

What we need is a nationalism of the electricity grid and power plants. A federally owned and operated electric grid solves this issue.

You have valid points. But it does make sense if you are trying to 1) incentive solar and 2) keep the pricing super simple for the average Joe customer.

We need something that will incent home solar + storage because:

1) it increases resilience in disaster scenarios and a lot of high usage scenarios. I especially think back to Puerto Rico getting hit by the Hurricane, or the Texas icestorms or things like that. Having a lot of homes semi-independent of the grid would help people mitigate impacts, because you can rely on neighbors for certain things while the grid is down.

2) BEVs are going to introduce a huge additional burden on the grid. But if we couple it with a lot of home solar installations, it will reduce the impact to the grid and the grid can focus on more industrial tasks like highway supercharging for semis and those big challenges.

3) aside from the solar panels, home solar means a distributed storage for the grid too.

Net metering is flawed, but there's the baby with the bathwater argument. Let's introduce better incentives before chucking the flawed ones that are working, and I don't see that happening.

And it's hard to price the incentives. Home solar panels are going to change a lot with forthcoming perovskites, and home storage is going to drastically change with production Sodium Ion, high density LFP/LFMP in the next few years, and Sulfur beyond that.

What I think is ridiculous is the pricing of home solar+storage versus what the grid buyers get. If home solar programs could have their panels bulk-purchased along with grid solar purchases and then the grid providers have to get them installed to homes, it would swap the grid providers from opposing home solar to being incented to finding people to allow the installation.

PG&E is a designated as a Utility by law. This means that their profit margin is fixed (at 9? percent). Basically this is the discount they should buy the power from you, which should be fine.

> Because net metering is forcing the utility to purchase power at the retail rate.

No, it doesn't.

I have solar+battery with net metering. I buy from the electric company at ~11.5c/kWh and sell our excess to them at ~2.7c/kWh for a difference of ~4.3x

As the sole entity that you can sell to - short of regulators being involved - they set the rate. And yes, there's already a monthly connection fee.

That is not "net" metering, then. "Net" metering is having an import and an export accumulator meter and charging the customer for the "net" value in the equation "net = import - export". Anything else is marketing bullshit from utility industry organizations.

That's what I thought "net metering" was before getting solar too. Most don't do that.

Unfortunately, billing departments run the world.

That is supposed to be what net metering is, but electric utilities captured the regulators and changed the definition to ensure they could cheat the consumer out of the value of their bought and paid for solar panels.

The term is sort of self defining. Of course it's not surprising that some people just ignore that it means something specific as a phrase. In my state, they don't try to call different rates for demand and generation "net metering":

https://aurorasolar.com/blog/what-to-know-about-dtes-net-met...

https://www.michigan.gov/mpsc/consumer/electricity/distribut...

You don’t have net metering

Consumer rooftop solar is the most expensive way ever thought of to provide electrical power. Money is fungible. A dollar tied up in building a one-off consumer solar installation is exactly a dollar unavailable for building out utility grade solar which can be done at a fraction of the cost.

With net metering, wealthier home owners are essentially paid the retail rate for the electricity they sell to the grid which causes higher electricity bills for those who can't afford to put panels on their roof - sort of a reverse Robinhood scheme. I recall reading that with net-metering, non-solar households in CA pay an estimated extra $115 to $245 per year to cover the subsidies given to their wealthier neighbors.

> Money is fungible. A dollar tied up in building a one-off consumer solar installation is exactly a dollar unavailable for building out utility grade solar which can be done at a fraction of the cost.

This makes the false assumption that those “fungible” dollars are somehow earmarked for solar and the homeowners wouldn’t just spend them on some other, non-solar, goods.

No, I am not making that assumption in any way.

I might not have been clear enough. I am saying that it is incredibly wasteful for the government to directly subsidize consumer solar when installed and then later forcing less wealthy consumers to subsidize their wealthier neighbors. If the government wants to encourage the development of solar power, those subsidies should have gone to encouraging grid based solar which costs a small fraction of the cost of one off consumer solar panel installations. A dollar tied up in building a one-off consumer solar installation is exactly a dollar unavailable for building out utility grade solar.

It's a nice incentive, but you shouldn't need to be paid the retail rate for solar when selling it back to the utility. Especially when the retail rate is from PG&E and contains a lot of non-paying-for-electricity things like covering past liabilities for wildfires.

And you can perfectly well size your solar appropriately so that you aren't net-positive pushing electricity back to the grid at all (or only a little).

This incentivizes storage and time-shifting usage to solar peak times, which seem to be needed in California. Does anyone know if there are pricing signals to help with that? For example, if I (as a power-plant operator or whatever) found a way to sell electricity right as the sun is going down, am I rewarded for that?

As an individual with a solar install, I think this also encourages people to use the energy they produce directly, which also seems beneficial. For example, if your house is well-insulated, you can probably pre-cool it a few degrees while your solar is producing so that you don't need as much cooling during the peak times. If you can be home during the day time, you could set your car to only charge during peak times.

> This incentivizes storage and time-shifting usage to solar peak times, which seem to be needed in California. Does anyone know if there are pricing signals to help with that? For example, if I (as a power-plant operator or whatever) found a way to sell electricity right as the sun is going down, am I rewarded for that?

NEM3.0 incentivizes exactly that. It prices exported electricity at the avoided cost rate. During the late summer and early fall, between 7-9PM that can be more than $1/kWh, or 3x the average NEM2.0 rate [1]. Of course to maximize that rate you need to store energy and sell it back at the optimal time.

The average rate with NEM3.0, however, is much lower.

1. https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/-/media/cpuc-website/divisions/energ...

Net metering is a regressive tax on the poor, because when rich people get solar panels and sell back to the grid at retail prices, the utility has to raise rates on everyone else to pay their large fixed costs. It may have been a good idea at one point when residential solar was so rare as to be effectively nonexistent, but now it has to be abandoned.

In my state, generation is still pretty "regulated" and the cost of generation is a separate line item on my bill, technically from a different company, from distribution. There's no reason at all I shouldn't be paid the same price per kWh for generation.

That depends what "generation" includes. It probably also includes the transmission and stepping up and all of the equipment to deliver it to the distributor. If you are grid tied, you are still using that system as a backup at minimum and should contribute to its upkeep. Therefore you should be paid accordingly. I don't think there is much objection to paying for solar excess at the bulk rate.

Transmission falls under distribution charges, not generation.

If there’s no net-zero metering, aren’t they incentivizing people to be completely disconnected from the grid, or at least not incentivizing them to be connected? (Which is bad for the grid.) Why would I fuck around with the utility at all if I’m installing enough solar/battery to power my needs?

because very likely you won't have enough solar/battery to power your needs...

"Why would I fuck around with the utility at all if I’m installing enough solar/battery to power my needs?"

This is exactly my sentiment and is the reason that we have made ourselves independent from the grid.[1]

However the math gets very difficult if you need to charge an electric car ... it's a tremendous amount of electricity to keep one, not to mention two, cars topped up after daily use.

The extra panel and battery requirements for cars are such that it really does make sense to be grid-tied and arrange your charging on off-peak hours, etc. That is what makes this so frustrating for typical homeowners - there's an obvious and sensible symbiosis here that would work well for (most people).

[1] That, and the fact that I hate PG&E with the burning fire of 1000 suns.

If the grid is smaller, then it is good for the grid because it reduces capacity and complexity requirements. Also if the net human experience is better, the grids can as bad as what enables that.

> Why would I fuck around with the utility at all if I’m installing enough solar/battery to power my needs?

What will you do when it has been raining/cloudy for weeks straight like it has recently in California? For this period, wind has dramatically outproduced solar [1]. Even in the summer/fall, when there was severe wildfire smoke in the area, my solar+battery barely produced anything.

Sure, you can set up a propane generator (very expensive at the size needed for a full house backup), but then you are dependent on the propane-distribution grid. The dirty secret of "no-sacrifice off-grid" lifestyles is how much they are dependent on propane for heating and electricity.

Also, the grid's up-time is going to be better than your home battery setup up-time both because it is constantly maintained and it has access to a greater diversity of energy sources (wind, nuclear, fossil, large-scale storage) that are firmer than anything you can attach to your house.

The fact is that modern living standards (cars, TVs, comfortable temperatures) require a much larger amount of energy and energy-availability than most people can produce on their properties with solar. The additional energy has to be imported somehow, either from the electric grid or as liquid or gaseous fuels.

1. See Renewables Trend at http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html

You may be able to afford a night time battery (several hours of power) but there's no way you can afford a winter battery (several months of power).

Was the California grid always private or was it run by the state government at one point? To me it makes no sense to privatize services where no competition is possible. You just end up with perverse incentives to do stuff like the above.

The vast minority of utilities in the United States, by number of customers served, are investor-owned; publicly-owned and co-operative utilities only cover 50m people.[1]

Theoretically, the grid is supervised by the California Public Utilities Commission, which has wide latitude to set standards and regulations for PG&E and others. The Public Utility Code is the highest law in the state of California[2], so IMHO a large part of the blame for PG&E's failures fall on CPUC's failed oversight[3][4]

[1]: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=40913

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Public_Utilities_Co...

[3]: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/CPUC-head-Michael-Peev...

[4]: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/pge-probation-lift...

A few data points as the picture is murky and mixed:

The wider "grid" is managed by CAISO - the independent system operator.

LA's utility is municipally run, in contrast to the big 3 IOUs in the state - PGE, SDGE, SCE.

SDGE had a 50 year exclusive franchise agreement with the city of San Diego that recently renewed under slightly different terms. Notably, and I'm paraphrasing: the city has the option after 10 years to terminate under certain conditions. [1]

Enron lobbied for, contributed to, and profited off of utility deregulation over 20 years ago. [2]

[1] https://www.kpbs.org/news/midday-edition/2020/07/27/sdges-50...

[2] https://www.consumerwatchdog.org/newsrelease/lesson-enron-el...

In the US, a lot of the electrical grids were corporations (e.g., Con Edison on the East Coast is from Thomas Edison's company). I'd never looked it up before, but the predecessor to PG&E in San Francisco was the San Francisco Gas Company [1].

Of course, in 1896 an Edison company merged with the derivative of the original San Francisco Gas, to become San Francisco Gas and Electric. By 1905, that merged with something else to become PG&E.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Gas_and_Electric_Compa...

There is also the savings from the solar your house produces and uses directly instead of pulling from the grid at the price per kWh.

Does that also apply if you're not sending surplus energy back into the grid?

Would a good tl;Dr summary of things in CA be that if you didn't need solar before and got grandfathered, it doesn't make sense to get solar now?

How does that work with new homes being required to have solar installed? Is it just a net giant win for pg&e?

You need a battery to efficiently use your solar. Why should pg&e be forced to buy at an inflated retail rate when they can get wholesale electricity for 70% less?

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