Comment by MyOpinion@lemm.ee on Existing California solar customers may get blindsided with net metering cuts

I make the investment and then don’t get the return. Sounds about right for the criminals at PG&E and their paid for people in office. Time to turn them into a not for profit public institution.

It’s so weird that a basic public utility is totally owned by a private company. Roads and water are maintained by the government in my county. Why not power?

Water is owned by private business on California too.

Yeah, just speaking for my county. I live in a county that has water and sewage run by a public utility. Also, the county has historically had a reputation for having really fantastic water that tastes amazing.

Power, water, internet, healthcare, education, transit, there’s a lot of things that should be public utilities or at least with a convincing public option because of the clear conflict of interest between private corporations and social benefit, but aren’t, because money controls politics.

Here in europe we’re gonna have to pay the electrical company for the energy our own solar panels generate above a certain amount.

“Can we just turn them off?”

“No 😠”

That is nuts. We need to take back power from these companies.

I’m pretty sure this will break the law of thermodynamics.

One of the few laws that we haven’t sorted out a way to break!

Where in Europe is this? Europe isn’t a monolith, after all.
Here in the Netherlands we (currently) still have the “salderingsregeling” which is used to reimburse people for the solar they feed back into the grid, though that will eventually go away.

Paying people for solar on the roof is a bit tricky in general, and probably not sustainable long term:

The money to maintain the grid has to come from somewhere, and if a lot of people have a bill of zero euros or a negative amount, that system kind of breaks down.
The grid has a maximum capacity (especially in residential neighbourhoods) so you cannot pump an infinite amount of power back into the grid. If many houses in a neighbourhood have solar the grid simply cannot cope.

In the Netherlands we now also have a “terugleveringstoeslag” where you have to pay a monthly fee based on the maximum peak power delivered to the grid over the year. At least, the bigger electrical companies already have it, the rest will soon follow. My coworker (who has way too many solar panels installed) got a letter from Essent that he had to pay 67 euros monthly starting October. So he switched companies, but he’ll have to figure out something else next time.

Because they have to give that energy away in order to keep the grid stable.

Hopefully better battery storage will make this better in the future.

The aim with it is to naturally discourage people from overproducing in such overproduction times - e.g. maybe you disable your solar panels when you predict it will happen, lessening the sudden impact on the grid.

FWIW you could buy a high capacity home battery already to eliminate it yourself (charge the battery in those times), but they’re still expensive.

What happens if you just…don’t pay the bill?

Then you get disconnected.

I thought that was the point of paying so much for solar? To be OFF the grid?

No going off-grid is a substantially larger investment than most people can afford. To be off grid you have to be able to make enough electricity even on cloudy, short winter days. That means your system must be massively oversized for your needs during most of the year. You also need adequate batteries to store energy for overnight.

Instead people get enough solar to offset some or all of the electricity they use - but on average over time. So they produce a ton during the day and then draw from grid at night.

Correct, but that also comes to the main reason why paying people for roof solar isn’t sustainable in the long term.

As solar panels keeps getting cheaper, more and more people will put solar on their roof. Since they get paid / reimbursed for feeding power back into the grid. And they don’t need a battery because they can just draw from the grid. This causes two problems:

During the day far more power is produced than needed, since everyone has solar on the roofs
During the night there is a lot of power draw from the grid, which cannot come from all the available roof solar.

Paying people for their roof solar is a good strategy short-term, but as more and more people have solar on the roof you cannot really keep doing that.

That is not the point. Solar provides most of your power and if you need additional power you can easily get additional power from the grid. That power can come from other people that have solar connected to the grid or other sources. It allows people to not have to spend huge amounts of money on batteries while providing power for themselves and others.

Are they providing support for the things?

They provide no support for the solar. If I have problems I have to go to my solar installer.

Well that’s fucked.

PG&E was literally the villain in the real life Erin Brockovich story.

I made a post with ideas on what initiatives could be proposed here: https://fedia.io/m/VoterInitiatives/t/883352/Electric-utility-company-reform

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Existing California solar customers may get blindsided with net metering cuts(pv-magazine-usa.com)

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