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Comment by vondur | Hacker News Reader

Here in California, they drastically cut back on the price that you get for solar powered electricity from homeowners. It used to be around $0.30/kWh at any time of day and now it's can drop to $0.00-$0.05/kWh during the day when the state is sunny. If you can afford to have a battery installed, the rates are far better as you can either run off the battery when rates are the highest in the evening, or you can export it back to the grid when prices are much higher.

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The price is signaling that additional solar power production during the day isn't very useful; and additonal solar power production in the early evening when demand is high and the sun isn't shining and you need a battery system to have already been accumulating energy during the day is useful, albeit more expensive and complicated to build and run.

With falling battery prices this should be an addressable problem. Soak up the locally generated excess energy and sell it later in the day when the need is there. Electrical arbitrage seems like a win/win solution for the utilities their customers.

That’s because net metering is a transfer from people who can’t afford solar to the rich people who can. https://energyathaas.wordpress.com/2024/04/22/californias-ex...

Which is true. But it's a rug pull for people who spent money on their panels expecting an RoI. Were existing installations grandfathered in?

Yes, existing installations get 20 years of grandfathered rates [1].

Which makes it more of a ladder pull than a rug pull...

[1] https://www.sce.com/clean-energy-efficiency/solar-generating...

The first round of people paid way more for their solar panels though, and those higher prices helped bootstrap the industry. Should people who paid much less for panels get the same reward? I'm having trouble getting outraged about this, it seems to be incentives working exactly as they should.

I agree, and maybe my "ladder pull" comment comes off as too negative. Most early solar buyers were either in it for environmental reasons or for a modest return on investment. I don't think many were expecting a windfall.

That's fine. If we have enough X then stop paying people to build more X.

Late thought: we continue to reward those who built more X when we needed more X, and that's fine too.

Solar has become all about ROI these days just like home ownership has become an investment.

Residential solar is completely counter-productive right now in california. Just take a look at the CAISO price maps during the day when the sun is shining. There's so much power they are paying people to consume it. It's a negative force for grid stability. Getting paid for making the grid less stable is ridiculous. Until there is widespread battery storage or massively improved transmission and distribution systems grid-tied residential solar is a solution in search of a problem.

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