New California rules would crush rooftop solar for renters

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/new-california-rules-would-crush-rooftop-solar-for-renters

by shallowbay • 3 years ago

29 16 3 years ago

kelnos• 3 years ago

Yet another fantastic example of regulatory capture. When the last round of net-metering rules changes was up for public comment last fall, I joined the live stream of the proceedings, and called in and commented as well. I listened to a good 2 hours of comments, and every single one of them was vehemently against the changes. (Well, aside from one comment that was mostly off-topic; the caller used the time to rant about the lack of nuclear power.)

Of course, the commissioners still voted for the changes, and they've been in force since mid-April of this year (and I'm no longer considering rooftop solar due to the poor deal available now). I fully expect these changes to pass as well.

How do we get these clowns out of office? Seems our governor is hesitant to get involved at all.

tristanb• 3 years ago

It's utterly ridiculous.

tannedNerd• 3 years ago

I have seriously been considering trying to start a petition to make the CPUC a voted office again.

If you look at where the CPUC members end up after their time “protecting the public” you wouldn’t wrong to be infuriated. In fact they have not denied a rate increase in the last 25+ years. They rubber stamp everything for the utilities so they can get their 200k+ jobs with them after!

polski-g• 3 years ago

Looking PG&E's net profit margin for the past 5 years, it looks like the rate increases are not large enough-- In fact they've lost money.

https://investor.pgecorp.com/financials/sec-filings/default....

AtlasBarfed2• 3 years ago

That is Citizens United in action: soft money corruption, and probably hard money corruption these days.

Rooftop solar is a "socialist" solution to power. Noncentralized, empowers the end user, undermines large corporations, bypasses government control of power. Oh wait, that's ACTUALLY almost purely libertarian, but of course it's going to be branded as hippy socialism to undermine it politically.

Republicans should (ideologically) be falling over themselves to get rooftop solar pushed out. As if ideology means anything.

seehafer• 3 years ago

We’re talking about California here, which is functionally a single-party state, and that party is not the Republican Party.

opo• 3 years ago

...Rooftop solar is a "socialist" solution to power. Noncentralized, empowers the end user, undermines large corporations, bypasses government control of power. Oh wait, that's ACTUALLY almost purely libertarian, but of course it's going to be branded as hippy socialism to undermine it politically.

I don't think I have ever heard of anyone outlawing rooftop solar. The problem with rooftop solar is that it is very expensive compared to utility grade solar.

…Rooftop solar photovoltaic installations on residential buildings have the highest unsubsidized levelized costs of energy generation in the United States. If not for federal and state subsidies, rooftop solar PV would come with a price tag between 147 and 221 U.S. dollars per megawatt hour.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/493797/estimated-leveliz...

If we want to subsidize a renewable energy source, why should we subsidize rooftop solar when we could subsidize utility grade solar or wind? Money is fungible and not unlimited - a dollar that goes to subsidize residential rooftop solar is a dollar that would go much, much further if it was used to subsidize utility grade solar or wind. Rooftop solar subsidies are also unusual in that much of the subsidy is often paid by less well-off households to subsidize their wealthier neighbors - sort of a reverse Robinhood scheme.

JumpCrisscross• 3 years ago

Citizens United in action

Are there PACs that specialize on CUPC policy? If not, Citizens is likely irrelevant.

Analemma_• 3 years ago

You, the other commenters on the call, and the people replying to you are all wrong. I really wish people would bother actually learning about these issues before jumping to uninformed rants about government corruption or Citizens United or whatever.

Net metering is/was acceptable when solar was a tiny oddity, but at any kind of scale it's a horrible idea. At best it's a regressive tax on the poor, and at worst it's a doom loop that can kill the grid completely. Utilities have massive fixed costs, which have to be distributed over all rate-payers; when wealthy people install solar and get paid back at retail prices, those fixed costs remain the same and power rates have to go up on everybody else not fortunate enough to drop $20K on rooftop solar panels.

The reason you were blown off on the call is because a representative democracy is supposed to represent all voters, including the ones who are harmed by net metering, who- being on average poorer- probably don't have the leisure time to show up on a call and argue on their own behalf. This is why "local community meetings" are antithetical to democracy: they amplify the voices of people with tons of spare time to show up and yell at community meetings, which is an utterly unrepresentative segment of the general public.

earleybird• 3 years ago

Those same wealthy folks will install a battery component (just because they can) and will pay their own cost to produce have about the same effect as retail consumption/production. Tying fixed costs (infrastructure) to variable costs (power production) will always favor one group or another. Low consumers infrastructure costs are subsidized by higher consumers. It costs just as much to provide the grid access for 1 KWh/day as it does for 100 KWh/day.

p1mrx• 3 years ago

I generally think it's fair for utilities to pay wholesale prices for dumping excess solar energy onto the grid, but the situation in this article is more subtle.

If you have a building with solar and 10 apartments, at a given moment the building could be supplying 100% of the residents' energy demand, yet the residents still have to pay the "retail minus wholesale" price because utilities can't be bothered to write the software to measure what the building is actually doing.

That is an injustice.

You could sort of argue that the energy is traversing "the grid" when it bounces off the local utility-owned transformer, but the additional maintenance cost is basically zero.

hgsgm• 3 years ago

Why isn't there an affordable technical way to route rooftop power directly to the building's internal appliances?

Something like a battery buffer to merge inputs from rooftop solar and utility AC?

mapmap• 3 years ago

Yes, you can use a battery to firewall off your solar from the utility and still have grid power as needed.

First arrange your breakers so that all load comes from your battery powered inverter. Second, charge the batteries with your solar. Third, charge the batteries with a grid connected charger at off peak times or as needed.

You will lose a few percent in the power conversions. Also affordability is left as an exercise to the reader.

New California rules would crush rooftop solar for renters

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