Existing California solar customers may get blindsided with net metering cuts
Customers that have invested in solar under NEM 1.0 and 2.0 may be forced into a regulatory scheme that would threaten their return on investment, based on guidance from the California Public Advoc…
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It doesn’t really seem like net metering is sustainable. Say for example someone generates the same amount of electricity they use, in that case they pay $0 for electricity even though the grid has to take the burden of storing the electricity until they use it later in the day.
It doesn’t really seem like net metering is sustainable.
Not sure why you think that.
Say for example someone generates the same amount of electricity they use, in that case they pay $0 for electricity even though the grid has to take the burden of storing the electricity until they use it later in the day.
The grid isn’t storing their energy - it’s sending it to other customers, meaning that non-sustainable, polluting energy sources don’t have to be generated.
The only time that’s not true is when the net load on the grid dips below zero. According to the duck curve graph from the article, it does appear to be very briefly dipping for a very brief time period each day. At that point it could make sense to store the rest, but if the grid doesn’t have storage capacity then any excess is “wasted,” but at that point the grid engages in a process known as “curtailment,” which means it rejects the excess, meaning that nobody gets credit later for energy that isn’t used now.
Also, curtailment is often not because the grid itself is over-supplied, but because specific regions are over-supplied and the grid lacks transmission lines from them to regions where demand is higher.
in that case they pay $0 for electricity
True under NEM 1.0, but NEM 2.0 also includes “non-bypassable charges” - components of pulling from the grid that cannot be offset by what they contribute. Those charges are roughly 5% as far as I can tell, meaning that if they pulled $300 worth of energy from the grid and sent back $300 worth (or more), they’d still owe $15.
Sure, but if everyone does it then it wouldn’t work (no one would be drawing excess when the solar is at peak), so that makes it not very sustainable. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, just that it can’t continue to work if adoption becomes near-universal (it doesn’t seem to be for now). I guess these non-bypassable charges will fix that, but that sounds a lot like what they are talking about (only getting paid some large percentage of the price for energy sent to the grid).
Sure, but if everyone does it then it wouldn’t work (no one would be drawing excess when the solar is at peak)
If everyone did it then electric companies could prioritize investing in batteries and capacitors and further reduce their reliance on fossil fuels.
If everyone did it, then even without extra storage capacity, net metering would still work. You don’t get credits for generating energy, just for sending it to the grid. All they have to do is the same thing they already do - curtailment.
Finally, it’s impossible for everyone to be on net metering because NEM 3.0 doesn’t have net metering and NEM 1.0 and 2.0 are only available if you’re grandfathered in.
If oversupply were really a concern, then you’d think the prices during oversupply would reflect that, dropping to basically nothing. They don’t. If they did, then EVs could be charged for super cheap when solar power was flooding the grid.
that sounds a lot like what they are talking about
What they’re talking about is revoking the law that grandfathered people into NEM 1.0 and 2.0 contracts. Keep in mind, the people who purchased solar under NEM 1.0 and 2.0 did so under the presumption that they would be able to stay on it for at least 20 years (because that was codified in law).000
only getting paid some large percentage of the price for energy sent to the grid
NEM 3.0 reduces the way credits are calculated to, on average, 25% of what they were before, and that are not the same as the retail rate.
https://aurorasolar.com/blog/explaining-and-modeling-californias-net-billing-tariff-nem-3-0/ has some examples. At the same time that electricity from the grid costs $0.44/kWh, solar sent to the grid only returns a $0.05/kWh credit.
5 cents is not a large percentage of 44 cents.
If your neighbor has solar and you charge your EV in the middle of a sunny day when your neighbor is at work, you’re probably using your neighbor’s electricity to do so. That’s gonna cost you $15 and net your neighbor a $1.71 credit.
Under NEM 1.0 and 2.0, if you import from and export to the grid in the same hour, those amounts are netted, even before NBCs come into effect. But under NEM 3.0, you could get billed for importing in the same hour even if you exported far more than you used. If you imported 1 kWh from the grid, you’d need to export 9 kWh to break even.
Again, this doesn’t make sense. Someone is paying $0.44/kWh for the energy you exported, but you’re only getting $0.05 credit for it.
If your solar system has storage, you can strategically export energy to the grid when the compensation is higher. That’s something you can consider when installing your solar system… but that’s not true for the people who are grandfathered into NEM 1.0 and 2.0, who knew they were grandfathered in by law.
And from what I’ve heard, even that doesn’t actually help that much, because the credits don’t apply to the largest part of the bill - they apply to “generation,” not to “delivery.” I haven’t found a reliable source confirming that, but if true it just adds insult to injury - if you pay the added cost to install an intelligent storage system and configure it to return money to the grid when their costs are highest, you get a credit equal to the cost you helped them avoid, but then the credit’s actually only usable on a small portion of your bill. If the calculations are based on avoided cost, you should get those credits even if it means the electric company is paying you.
I agree that there’s no problem now, and also that the percentage they are trying to pay is overly low. I think they should be paying somewhere in the vicinity of 50-70% of the buy price, so that is a terrible rate.
Everything you're saying is wrong.
We only have a stable grid now because the hottest days produce the most solar to power ac. Our grid would have collapsed otherwise .
In the past we had huge demand swings during the course of a single day, as factories and offices burned power, then people went home to cook food and run their laundry.
Solar helped that greatly, coupled with fracking gas which allowed us to plant ge90 turbines everywhere for nothing and have we extremely dispatchable power for load following.
Especially since bulbs went led and now might generation is much more manageable.
But mentally defective utilities can't do the sane thing and write an API so that EV's can coordinate charging to balance load.
The problem with utilities is that they're stuffed to the gills with the idiot relatives of politicians who couldn't get jobs anywhere else.
I didn’t say net metering isn’t useful now, I said it wouldn’t work if a large majority of people did it. I don’t see how what you said contradicts that.
They literally changed the time of day charges so power is a fraction of the cost during the daytime when solar is available.
All they'd have to change is to make the ToD follow solar output if they wanted to keep NEM going.
But that's not what they want, they own the lines, and they want to TAKE every penny they can.
We need to break PGE, sell their lines to regional providers, it's a curse on california.
They can pay for the grid maintenance and storage if they’d like to set it up that way. NEM sort of addresses this but they’ve planned it poorly.
Ah yes, the “burden” of free energy. 🙄
No, the burden of providing free energy storage.