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Comment by abc_lisper | Hacker News Reader

You are talking as if this is an impasse. There are other things they can do, like fast expiring credits, or give users an ability to charge their car for free at work, when they can generate equivalent power at home, but don't let credits rollover.

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.

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It's not an unsolvable impasse, but it's tricky. Just the technological mechanisms for your example proposals are rather hard; the economic and social problems are even harder.

> This is not a consumers vs producers zero-sum issue.

It's not zero sum, but if we externalize the entire cost of the infrastructure onto people who cannot deploy solar, it will be very inequitable; that's been the default path we've been on.

And it's going to be an issue of significant debate what exactly is equitable and good policy.

Meh. Aren't there industrial, agricultural and public customers for electricity? Already, electricity in CA is among the expensive in the country. We do want to save the planet, right?

> Meh. Aren't there industrial, agricultural and public customers for electricity?

Yes, but someone has to pay for transmission and distribution into (and out of) residential areas.

So the solution is to charge more the people who already pay for their solar? Who now only get 8$ for 300$ for any additional electricity they produce(NEM 2.0, best case, or get 4c worth of electricity for every 1$ of electricity they produce in NEM 3.0)

I don't think you're understanding my comments. I didn't defend current policy. I merely pointed out there's a big set of tradeoffs to be made and in the end it's a normative choice.

Someone has to pay for transmission and distribution in residential areas. If the choice is "residential users without solar panels bear the full cost," you end up with apartment dwellers and the poor paying for all the infrastructure. Hence, IMO you have to do something and think carefully about policy to have reasonable outcomes and avoid unnecessary complexity.

It's not zero sum, but it is a complicated social, technical, and economic problem. If we reach a good compromise, we should expect that few will be happy with it.

> The cheaper the energy we can produce, the better off everyone will be.

This is a good point. But it only holds if the benefits of the cheaper energy accrue to society in general. It does not hold if it goes entirely to the ones who have built the means of generation. Which ironically, unlikely almost every other economic situation, is the small indie consumers! The big players and the grid operators are the ones that get squeezed out and, as a result, causes harm to the majority of normal individuals.

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