The fight over California community solar: ‘It’s everyone vs. utilities’

If this was actually above board and helpful, they wouldn't need any kind of coalition to do it, they would just build solar and sell it. But no, they are trying to do the easy part, and let the hard part fall on others.

And it doesn't help that they have requirements relating to the income of the end consumer! That's a sure sign of something that isn't useful on its own, rather they have other goals.

Why should I be sympathetic to the profits of some random company?

Let the market figure it out. Suppressing community solar is suppressing the free market. It's not right.

This is not a consumers vs producers zero-sum issue. There are always more uses for cheap power. Desalination, agriculture, extracting water from air etc. The cheaper the energy we can produce, the better off everyone will be.

I currently pay a bit over $40/month for a natural gas connection and a bit under $0.40/month (total) for the actual gas consumed by our stove top, our only gas appliance. (We'll probably go induction eventually, but it works for now.)

Of course, I don't generate gas and sell it back to the utility, but the point still stands that the electric utility could fix their pricing to correctly charge for availability and usage.

This works very well because you rarely need it and propane has a fixed, predictable cost. Unfortunately, it doesn't work in CA due to their rules about generators.

Look at the proposals of the past few years to see it. These proposals say things like helping under served communities or combating wealth inequality, but similar to “Save the children” bills, the titles rarely have any relevance to the content. Every proposal has been about nothing other than protecting and increasing utility company profits.

From my view as a consumer and constituent, the government has failed. The simple fact that we allow for profit companies to manage and profit from essential utilities is ridiculous. That we are allowing these companies to write laws that increase their profits at the expensive of society and the environment is a tragedy.

Simply put, sdge, pge, and friends, need to be non profits run by the government. CA state should nationalize these companies and reduce profits to zero while actually promoting roof top solar.

(Almost) every utility should do this. It more accurately reflects the real cost structure of grid maintenance, which doesn't depend on how much energy you use so much as on your peak usage during peak hours. In a world where home solar installations are common it's especially important, since you don't want people relying on the grid for backup power during period of low sun without paying anything to maintain that infrastructure. That's unsustainable in the long term.

The CA legislature actually required that a change be made with AB 327. The details were ultimately up to CPUC, but CPUC was attempting to meet the broad goals of the legislature in making this change.

Additional power produced during times of peak solar insolation is not very useful to the grid because of all the existing solar and is most useful during the late afternoon and early evening when demand is high but solar output is low. Maintaining the grid costs money independent of the cost of electricity generation and under the old rules solar customers were effectively subsidized by non-solar customers. Since non-solar customers are on average poorer than solar customers (owning your home is generally a per-requisite after all) this amounted to a regressive transfer.

EDIT: Fixed wording in sentence about customer cross-subsidy

If you feel very strongly about politics in California, you know, run for an elected office.

I know two ways to fix this. First, obviously, you didn't say "unrestricted". There are various ways to restrict spot pricing to alleviate these issues, e.g. guarantee each home a particular amount at a fixed rate, and overages are at spot rates. Second, the "knowledge" angle can be attacked -- if you know that's happened, you can turn down your thermostat.

I don't think it's really reasonable for households to pay the raw spot pricing. Someone else (utility company? government?) should be backstopping the prices for them. Time of use pricing based on typical prices seems reasonable enough.

For large industrial consumers, sure; let them pay based on actual costs, and they'll adjust their peaks to save money, which helps even out the supply/demand, which is great.

For electricity producers, spot pricing isn't really enough either, though. There needs to be some compensation for available capacity as well as generation.

I agree that it makes sense to try to decouple solar and storage though. Storage's ability to move capacity from peak generation to other times is valuable and should be compensated, and there's no reason to tie it to generation.

Raising those rates too much would just be raising rates for everyone, just so those who are rich enough to afford solar panels and batteries make more profit.

On demand side, I think fixed price contracts could be allowed. It is then up to those contract providers to buy enough future contracts at lower price to generate profit. Or just ride it out and hope their math was correct.