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Comment by bowlofpetunias | Hacker News Reader

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", since libertarians will undoubtedly be against the whole principle.)

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.

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Yep. But it's not. The difference is that utilities are especially regulated because they have monopolistic operations. Part of the quid pro quo for going forward with the monopoly is that they have to be open to buying power back from other producers. I don't have the Oklahoma legislation here, but given the available facts, I'm going to bet that's the case. In other words, this taxation isn't a matter of treating residential power generation like any other business, it's about the utility using the legislators to claw back a commitment they now regret making.

I'm extremely intrigued by the co-occurrence within a span of 3-4 sentences of

> 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"

with

> 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?

Keep in mind that it's not a charge for selling power back, it's a charge for connecting it to the power grid. Not everyone running solar sells back to the grid.

Your first sentence needs an addendum starting with "because..."

I think that's how the second sentence is meant to function. It should be taxed like any other business because it is substantially like a normal business transaction.

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