The world's dumbest idea: Taxing solar energy
news.yahoo.com
news.yahoo.com
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-solar-boom-so-su...
One of the incentives for doing your own power generation is that in most cases utilities are required to buy back the power under the Net Metering deal. This is a good thing, in general, but there are some engineering issues.
When this was invented, I don't know if anyone involved did the calculation of "what if we have tens of thousands of houses generating enough backflow to rival the amount generated by the rest of our system?"
The movement has been so successful that now we can see the possibility that on a very sunny day or windy day or both that these local generation sites are generating enough power that there isn't any where to put it. Voltages rise, breakers trip, sectors go dark.
If you are a utility company, you likely have several energy sources at your disposal: hydroelectric, coal-fired plants, nuclear. For each of these sources, you have at your disposal a knob, generally sitting at 5 or 6 that you can turn down a notch to move the water past the generators and down the stream, turn off a couple of burners in the coal fired plant, or move the quenching rods in a little further to reduce the output of your nuke plant.
If you have a tens of thousand of home pushing energy back up what used to be exclusively the down pipe. There isn't any centrally-located control knob for that.
Certainly part of the reluctance of the utilities is a resistance to the new ways of the world, but it would be imprudent to discount the engineering issues that this is exposing. Yes, the utilities, who are not known for large amounts of imagination, should have been ahead of this and embraced this. But here we are.
So in light of that, if taxation slows this unsustainable growth in home solar installations pushing current up the down pipe, perhaps it is not all that bad as the article makes it sound.
Misleading title. They want to tax people who want to sell the solar energy back into the grid , since joe six pack has to rely on other people's equipment to transmit the energy he captured on his roof. Also there is the issue of joe synchronising his output with whatever is coming down the line from the normal generators.
Maybe it shouldn't be a tax, maybe a fee paid to whoever owns the power infrastructure.
The issue seems to be that PoCos have decided to mix all the infrastructure costs into the variable price of the energy you consume. When your solar power makes you a net producer of energy, that scheme no longer works. But I don't see why we have to institute a new tax to fix their broken pricing model.
Charging a fixed cost for distribution would reduce prices for high energy users and raise prices for low energy users. The low energy users are, in general, the most price sensitive. They would become very irate and try to exert political pressure on the power company.
Of course, that doesn't mean we should let them. But it isn't the power company who causes this; the power company is just responding to politics and the market.
Certainly there is a risk that all these intermittent renewables will end up causing the most dirty of generators to be spun up more often, in the least efficient usage pattern.
The dream has to be a proper demand response system, with electric cars being a key sink for excess generation.
The work of David MacKay at Cambridge University is excellent on this topic: http://www.withouthotair.com/
Yes, but today (i.e., without individual homeowners putting power back into the grid) the grid's control system can assume that the load is always positive except at a finite and fairly small number of known points, the grid's generators, which are controlled by the grid itself.
When individual users can put power back into the grid, the load can become negative at any arbitrary location in the grid, without warning. That greatly complicates the control problem.
The dream has to be a proper demand response system, with electric cars being a key sink for excess generation.
Yes, and who's going to pay for that? (Not the electric cars, but the improvements in the grid that allow it to make use of them as storage.) An obvious solution is to charge the people who are creating the problem by making their connection with the grid two-way instead of one-way.
I was just complaining to my wife not 30 minutes ago about how it's cold here in Moraga today. Sometimes I miss the Oklahoma heat, but that's about it.
If you produce something and systematically sell it for profit it's perfectly normal. It's not your kids' lemonade stand or a garage sale we're talking about here.
The challenge is to do it in such a way that still stimulates the practice, not punish it. Simply calling any form of taxation "dumb" is not constructive.
Also, it's not just the simple "Jimmy has a solar panel on his roof" scenario we're talking about here. Collective solar energy initiatives on residential properties are becoming a real industry.
> Selling power back to the grid is a rapidly growing home industry which, like any other, should be taxed and regulated. (Emphasis on "like any other"
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> It's not your kids' lemonade stand or a garage sale we're talking about here.
I believe close to 100% of lemonade stands and garage sales both completely ignore local regulations (in fact, every so often you read about the police red-facedly shutting down a lemonade stand) and hide all their income for tax purposes. Can you elaborate on why this is a bad thing?