Because most people cant get financing to do what you are talking about. They can get solar on their roof for zero money down. Sure if everyone had equity in their home to draw out cash to do what your talking about that would be a different story. The hard working middle and lower middle class always get the shaft. Sure if you have cash and the know how do exactly what your talking about,, then do it. Unfortunately, most dont have the skill set to do that. You do, but would you be willing to put it in and volunteer your labor and time for all your neighbors. I doubt it. Thats why the zero down is so appealing. Even if it is a little more. Its still a good choice when it comes to solar.

“There is no sense in reimbursing those at market rate at 12pm for excess power when the grid doesn’t need it.” . . . . . If “the grid doesn’t need it”, it won’t take it – you can’t put more energy into the grid than what is being consumed at the moment. Therefore, there is no “reimbursement” because nothing is being supplied at that time. If the grid does take the energy from homeowners at 12pm or whenever, then the utility is reducing their use of energy coming from burning coal, gas, or oil, by the same amount, and therefore homeowners should be reimbursed for supplying it.

Peak summertime rate from 4:00 PM to 9:00 PM is 49 cents per kilo watt hour minus the tier 1 – 9 cent discount. The lowest tier 1 rate in the mornings and after 9:00 PM is 26 cents per kilo watt hour. When you are a net generator, they pay you in tier 1 automatically. A 20% loss means you pay 26 cents plus 5.2 cents for the loss or 31.2 cents to get back 40 cents under NEM 2.0. This is why grid connected solar with batteries forbid the homeowner from charging their solar connected battery off the grid. However, you can get the special discounted 16 cents charge rate from 1:00 AM to 11:00 AM for an EV separate meter that could also be plugged into one’s solar panel system to feedback from 4:00 PM to 9:00 PM with a 20% loss on 16 cents of 3.2 cents or 19.2 cents per kilo watt hour doubling the value when sold back from 4:00 PM to 9:00 PM every evening at 40 cents per kilo watt hour. If you feedback 10 kilo watt hours per hour times 5 hours, you have 50 kilo watt hours making 20 cents per kilo watt hour or $10.00 per day for the months of June through September or 153 days or $1,530.00 profit off the EV battery every summer. N02 if you charge it with the solar panels instead, the amount will double to $3,060.00 per year just selling power from the EV to the grid during the 5 summer months under NEM 2.0.

Exactly correct. If utilities are adding storage to neighborhoods for both better distribution and potential power failures, then every customer, with a utility meter, should pay into the program equally since they all benefit. Singling out rooftop solar users or any other demographic population because they have larger homes, is just not fair to those who made the larger investments and pay the higher taxes. The 75% utility steal of rooftop solar is quite unfair since the infrastructure is only 40% of the outstanding costs outside of long-distance transmission costs that do not apply to the local output and use of rooftop solar. If the utility took 40% and left the homeowner 60% plus allowed the homeowner to install a larger system capable of being a net generator plus having the winter reserves, this would have been a fairer outcome. 75% is just a “power Grab” and many will just not send any electricity to the grid in protest and install batteries so they can use 100% of their own power. Existing systems get to stay on NEM 2.0 until their contract ends and then will have to add batteries and decide if they wish to remain a grid tied system or go off grid with heir rooftop solar panel system.

“This ruling is forward-looking”

The problem is not that encouraging batteries isn’t forward-looking — it is, and we need to move in that direction; the problem is that the avoided-cost calculation used by the CPUC is heavily utility-biased, leaving out many of the long-term benefits of distributed generation to the grid. This is because those benefits tend to reduce the long-term profits of the IOUs, so they focus only on the *instantaneous* avoided cost. There are many resources and articles about the large body of independent university research which was effectively ignored by the CPUC. It’s easy to search for and I don’t have time to list it here, but the CPUC should be held to task for this since it is biasing policy toward a private industry rather than fairly between industry and the public that it is supposed to protect.

Ideas like this are what many in the solar industry were advocating, but the CPUC was far more influenced by the utilities than the public or the solar industry.

” Buy from them low, use it when they price the power high”

The interesting thing is that this is actually good for the grid, and it’s what grid-scale storage aims to do. The only thing is that you do have something like a 20% charge+discharge efficiency loss that eats into your savings a bit, but the difference in rates is usually greater than that.

In some communities it’s not an option to not be connected to the grid. So even if you produce enough for 100% of your needs, you still need to pay a monthly minimum amount. I like having options anyway, in case of storm damage, etc.

I went off grid but did not tell them to stick it. I still use their lowest priced electricity to charge my batteries, when it is convenient. Buy from them low, use it when they price the power high, and you can say…”no thank You” to peak tiered pricing.

I did that in 2007 and built up a system from 700 watts to 8,200 watts. It is fun and can save money. Just look at the RV systems that can be ramped up in size to power the whole home with 12 volt Deep Cycle Marine/RV batteries. Everything you need is available from Home Depot, Lowes and Walmart. Build it yourself for under $2.50 a Watt including the batteries, charge condolers and pure sine wave inverters after the Federal 30% tax rebate.

Correct, John, this would not be built into a normal 5,000 square foot lot and home. This is a community wide decision to have a stand-alone installation and would need utility approval. Even though my entire back yard if full of batteries, inverters and solar panels, I just do not have the room for hydrogen conversion system and a fuel cell generator to use that hydrogen plus the $200,000.00 plus to build it.

John makes a good point. There will always be some things that poorer people cannot afford. The question is whether they are subsidizing richer people. This was the utilities’ argument, but only the utilities’ own research shows this. Everyone else’s (universities, etc.) shows that while this exists, it is a very small effect even in California. What tiny amount of cost shift there is could be easily compensated for by rebates to lower income people.

John, I agree with your comment about rich people putting up solar. In no way would I and my wife be considered rich, we are retired and on ssi. We do have some savings but it’s not endless. We decided several years ago to add solar to our house because it was an investment against a for profit energy provider who keeps raising the rates. My only regret was not adding more panels, so I could tell them to disconnect me.

Equity is not a convincing reason. It was never a goal, so it is a contrived concern after the fact and irrelevant to net zero. Also the “rich people” argument is not really substantiated.

As to storage… multi day backup for the grid simply has to be at grid scale with today’s technology. Pumped hydro and flow batteries for example seem like a long term sustainable solution. But you’re not going to have either at home.

The problem are the hidden rates in NEM 3.0. Forcing anyone with solar to pay their power company $8/month per Kw system installes. Meaning of you install a 10kwh system you will be paying $80/mo + $15/mo to your power company just for the privilege of having solar. This is corruption at it’s best. Next you will need to start paying Honda because you bought a Toyota.

In the long run, something like that may happen with emerging technologies. Still, today the only bright side is that our social justice lawmakers and governor will now have funding to stay in power, and our old utility will have financing to upgrade its infrastructure and pay its fines. PG&E gets reimbursements and credits for building its solar farms, which will make its future brighter in the medium term. Another way to look at it is that solar will have a brighter future if powerful interests are the ones who profit from it.

Point of use solar exporting to the grid firstly reduces transmission losses because the mean distance per Amp is reduced, but also means that the utility can reduce investment in new generation facilities, and phase out out end-of-line plant without replacement (or invest in energy storage).

Every blue state is becoming a corrupt cesspool. I may move to California at least temporarily and self identify as a black man to take advantage of those $220K-800K restitution payments.

Wow, someone in Sacramento made a decision entirely detached from logic and reality? Tickle me surprised!

California always leads the country and world. On 12/15 the CPUC in a new direction showed the world how to dramatically slow new rooftop solar installations. The result. our carbon footprint will be impacted. The California Central Valley will be at risk to rising sea levels and salt water levels.
New Californua Values!

Natural monopolies require private investors…like railroads before state and municipality property taxes forced passenger service into federally subsidized AMTRAK in 1972…now with fed subsidies amounting to $100/passenger. Only private freight survived without government subsidies. Who knew?

So, without investor incentive dividends, you’d be paying smaller scale, more costly and less efficient munies, co-ops or a large scale politicized, unionized state owned & operated utility with myriad rates and taxes. Envision a U$P$ equivilent with $Billion$ in annual operating debt we still pay for…beyond Postage Stamps, despite Amazon’s Sunday deliveries with USPS’s rolling assets.

A federally owned/operated/subsidized grid? ELEKTRAK?
Probably WATT$ coming next…since our president says he rode rode AMTRAK twice daily for centuries…

Florida just tried cancelling kWh/kWh energy credit based NEM, but Gov DeSantis vetoed it since costs shifts of Florida’s puny 0.6% to 1% rooftop PV penetration only amounted to a Starburps Latte Grande or two per year per average non-solar customer. Hence the potentional for Multi-Million$ Cla$$ Action $uits otherwise ~$1/month on average cost shift to utility customers and even less to the LMI.

BTW: If all our 133 million US households switched to LEDs, utilities’ annual revenue loss could total $30-Billion and only a portion (~1/3rd) of that would be offset by fuel savings (cost). Nothing can prevent that or other electric bill cost savings from reducing one’s usage, rate adjustments in arrears take it into account. But Rooftop PV is too extreme at 10%+ penetration (Eg: Hawaii’s NEM suspension in 2015) for non-solar customers to bear.

With politicized eco-maniac tax funded state rebates and credits on top of it, spawning rooftop PV growth had mostly benefitted those with mean$ to afford it AND obviously their electric bills.

Hence the growing pushback from lower income electorate feeling robbed by rooftop solar. Reality is..most only believe in $aving real Greenback$, not sea level hype. Besides, fossil fuels are predicted to start running out by the end of this century…something newborns will have to face…with all of its national and global consequences. It will be coal and nuclear carrying the nighttime load batteries can’t handle, especially after days of stormy weathet.

Costs of large scale solar farms are largely land lease or rental fees, typically 30 to 35 years, the service life of arrays. So owners/lessors can rethink their land use options when replacement time comes. Installed utiluty scale array costs are 1/4th that of rooftop PV and bifacial single-axis tracking panels are 30% more efficient. Hence fuel cost offsets should be reflected in future rates along with repayment of solar farm build out costs. Solar benefits will be for all customers, not just rooftoppers.

Land Lease costs are factored into rates that everyone pays for their share of usage from utility scale solar farms. And that INCLUDES 88% of Cali customers who don’t own rooftop PV, or even their roof for that matter.

Those who do will get the same $/kWh credits for their solar excess under NEM-1 or NEM-2. But only 25% of it under NEM-3 if they install after April 14th, 2024. So Cali’s NEM-3 is a pretty severe but still more generous wind-down, unlike Hawaii’s total NEM shutdown for new customers in October 2015. Something to keep in mind.

Hence, if utility scale solar farms lower future utility rates with fuel cost savings, your rooftop payback period will increase proportionately in addition to any damage$ done by NEM-3 for future rooftop PV owners.

NOTE: NEM-3.0 is not retroactive. Based on the current timeline, this new net metering policy will only apply to homeowners that submit their solar interconnection applications after April 14, 2023.

$ooo…Better Getter Done…this time…or fogetaboutit!

Pure fiction. Non solar customers are not subsidizing solar customers grid maintenance. That maintenance is part of your basic bill and solar customers that are tied to the grid still pay this base bill. The only difference is non solar customers see this charge monthly vs annually for solar customers. I have a solar lease and this how my bill works.

I believe this will mandate better battery storage and operating without the need for connecting to the utilities. The utility is there to serve a property, so the best reaction to the commissioners and the utility would be for the property owners to become independent from the utility. That should make a better green future for the California.

Put solar on the rental properties, increase the rent, and the landlord keeps any utility profits. I agree.

As pointed out above, while it can be good for private owners to develop power sources, it is political corruption to allow rent seeking monopolies of public infrastructure.

What is the extent of these cross-subsidies? How do they compare to the utilities own-future cost of expansion (capital cost, transmission expansion, etc.)? Do they account for impact of transmission and generation expansion imposed on community lands (poor communities)? In their cost-benefit analysis, do they account for future gains from accelerating distributed solar systems, including meeting climate targets, and increasing resilience to climate disasters? Are utilities only tracing losses to current NEM payments? Assuming there’s rapid and mass adoption of self generation plus storage despite the long payback (from reduced NEM rate) what economic impact would this pose on utilities long-term?

Great job. Grid tied solar is foolish. Not being able to store and use power that’s generated on your roof makes no sense. Partnering with the grid is foolish, it’s a conflict of interest. This battle is only going to get worse. I foresee retail electricity rates hit dollars per kwh in no time. People are going to be forced to install solar + storage + heat pumps. It’s about time.

In Vermont, the utilities were given 20% and not 75% and that covered the costs but with the bankrupt California utilities, they want it all and that will eventually make everybody disconnect from the greedy, privately held Utilites and self-generate. Remember; Vermont is not sunny, mild winters California.