And they actually charge you a fee if you generate. My brother in law unhooked from the grid because back feeding was charging him $100 a month. To give away power.
Oh yeah, yes, after paying all the money to get the electrical hookup he doesn't want or need - yeah, he's gonna be on the hook for around $100/month.
He should’ve done DD on the land and local AHJ restrictions before moving ahead with a plan that wouldn’t work. One call to the local planning and permit office is all it would’ve taken to avoid this problem and find a different jurisdiction.
Friends have a full sized off grid house in the Yukon since 2010. Every modern convenience, stunning location. Never a single power outage in all those years. How many power outages have you had?
Off grid is not somehow sub standard.
Once it’s installed, you’ve got fuel deliveries plus regular maintenance and monitoring. You’re looking at thousands of dollars a year to operate your own generator for a 100A or 200A service. If you’re already installing a propane tank for heating then the costs can be spread between heating and power generation but it’s still a sizable investment.
Generators are nowhere near as reliable as you’re making them out to be. Maintaining and fueling one is a hassle that the vast majority of people would rather not deal with.
They have no diesel generator. No diesel tank. Propane for cooking.
Which utility and plan is this? I'm not aware of any California residential rate plans that charge you for putting power back on the grid, much less $100/month.
That said, wholesale electricity rates are set by high frequency supply/demand markets.
Recent residential net metering rates are closely aligned with wholesale supply/demand based rates, so most utilities will compensate your brother in law near $0 when you are pushing power to the grid when wholesale rates are <= $0, because there are not enough buyers of the power he is generating.
He is using the grid as a battery, which comes at a cost.
This is of course changing as more grid connected storage comes online and creates demand for off peak electricity. In that case, you actually get paid for selling power back to the grid during high grid stress periods. I get paid a few hundred dollars a year in CA for doing that with my measly home backup battery.
The base charge for most customers in PGE territory is $24/month:
https://www.pge.com/en/account/billing-and-assistance/base-s...
> Previously, homeowners received credits for the excess solar energy they sent back to the grid, but the state has since ended that program.
They ended the NEM1.0 and NEM2.0 programs that credited net surplus back to homeowners at retail electricity rates (which includes transmission and distribution costs). Those programs were a subsidy to encourage residential solar PV installation when it was very expensive and rare, not intended to function as long term subsidy programs for PV owners.
The switch to NEM3.0 only affects newer installations -the older installations keep the older rates until a change of ownership in the home.
Under the new net-metering program, homeowners with solar still get credits for net energy sent back to the grid, albeit at the "avoided cost" rate, which while much lower on average at most times, is reflective of the true value of power at the time it is pushed back to the grid, which is close to wholesale electricity rates. During peak hours and days of the year, the compensation rate can exceed the retail rate of electricity.
This incentivizes the installation of energy storage that can be used to move consumption to low-demand times and even arbitrage with stored energy by selling back to the grid at peak hours.