The net metering subsidy just didn't make sense anymore. Solar is "cheap" now and the next step of decarbonization is storage.
From a carbon perspective, net metering was basically paying homeowners to provide useless power to the grid (at the bottom of the duck curve) but be able to cash it in when they actually needed it around 7 pm. This meant generating useless solar power and in exchange for letting burning a ton of natural gas when you actually needed the power.
The next step is pairing solar with residential and grid scale storage. Personally, with how intermittent production can be now, the grid should be more like AWS. Allow for per minute billing and rates that fluctuate for some customers. If you can pair storage with solar (or even just storage if you could buy low sell high off the grid), that would be the next big step in the renewable revolution.
Net metering always had to die for the next step (storage) to happen. With the electric car mandate coming into 2035 so that millions of homes will own a giant battery this will eventually be even more important.
> at the bottom of the duck curve) but be able to cash it in when they actually needed it around 7 pm.
It's only really seems useless during one month in the summer. During the rest of the year it looks like it would continue to have an impact. Today, for example, California never dipped below 10GW of natural gas production even while it had 13GW of solar all throughout the middle of the day. That's still an appreciable gap.
This doesn't even consider imported energy, or the potential misplaced environmental costs of any one particular source.
> The next step is pairing solar with residential and grid scale storage.
This looks to be entirely true. The state is barely cracking +/- 2GW with it's storage system, even though it has demands ranging from 25GW to 50GW. It's either that or we're at the next evolutionary step of "grid tied storage."
> Net metering always had to die for the next step (storage) to happen.
It's wonderful the compromises we get to make when 80% of the market is controlled by three entities.
> With the electric car mandate coming into 2035 so that millions of homes will own a giant battery this will eventually be even more important.
The worldwide market was 10 million in 2022, with just over 500 thousand units in the US overall. California has 17 million private vehicles and 12 million trucks. I think you'd be much better off just building stationary batteries and tying them to the grid, in particular, due to limitations of current technology and worldwide production capacity.
To be clear, net metering was never "paying" customers, but instead providing them a credit for the energy they delivered during the period they delivered it. So, export power during the "off-peak" period, you build a credit at rate slightly less than the retail rate which you can then debit from the "off-peak" bucket later. Generally (with some exception), any remaining credit at the end of an annual billing cycle is lost.
So, the characterization of paying exports for useless power and then getting it back during the 7 PM system peak isn't quite correct.
Strongly agree with you that price signals are important to impact behavior (human or system) which will result in a lower overall price for society, so long as regulators do their work (align price with cost).
From the perspective of the grid/utility it is fairly accurate though. They pay for electricity to be made at wholesale rates at every instant of time to meet demand. During the peak of the day in CA, wholesale electricity prices are near zero, and sometimes even go negative due to overproduction. Then in the evening they shoot through the roof. So they're getting power that can be even worse than useless during the day and having to provide it at the most expensive times to those same customers. The grid operator experiences this as basically buying useless trinkets (daytime solar) for massive amounts of gold (peak power demands that require capital intensive plants that hardly get used).
Yes, that can be accurate in the spring, though with more than 2 GW of batteries now in CA, it's less common. One solution would be for them to charge less for electricity in the middle of the day (as the grid is awash) and thus provide a reduced credit for export in the middle of the day. Fundamentally, it's about aligning price with cost.
There is no practical storage system right now. Have you priced them? They're outrageously expensive, with puny capacity. Not to mention the environmental impact of making all those batteries, and the lifespan implications of using them 365 nights a year.
The dumb thing is that any electric cars made in the last 5-10 years don't have the ability to serve as energy storage. Those are just now emerging.
Tesla stands out as particularly dumb, since they also sell solar systems. Why not a solar + car bundle?
We have millions of electric cars, 10M cars, 40kWh approximately 400GWh. Existing cars should be retrofitted, this is not difficult.
Batteries degrade when they are pushed to their limits, they last when used properly. The ESA has multiple reports on their testing, if you use the battery in the flat part of its discharge curve and don't cook it, they basically last forever.
The reasons they don't is because manufacturers build their devices with less than the bare minimum. 20% better performance for a device that fails and needs 100% replacement, good scam. Battery degradation should be barely noticeable.
We have ways to go before all electricity generated during the day is solar. There were only a few days last year when such a thing happened. In any case, the reason given by them is rich people not paying their due, not what you say. I say this is all a failure of imagination. Give me mobile electricity - if my solar panel is generating 5KW at home, give me the same electricity for free(or nominal charge) at my work, so I can charge my car. Electricity use will increase by a huge %, because of electrification of vehicles. You got to make sure that’s all generated by Green energy, not kill it as whole
10x. I think we should have a target of some percentage being able to be completely met by solar. Until we are literally drowning in free energy we don't know what to do with we don't have an oversupply. There are so many industries which were never electrified that need to be.
This ruling is so damn short sighted for so many reasons. Rooftop solar is the single best way to stave off upgrading the big power distribution lines, generated at the edge, used at the edge.
A year from now PGE is going to say we need XXX billions to upgrade the backbone due to increased electrification.
My central gas heater is running right now, there is no reason that a thermal reservoir couldn't have been charged during the day that I can use a 730am.
5G should have included a mandatory, public cert based low bitrate M2M network.
> Give me mobile electricity - if my solar panel is generating 5KW at home, give me the same electricity for free
Genius! Decouple transit from consumption fully. Greatly increase, mandate even, the points of consumption.
I'd like to see people charge at work, and drive the energy they need overnight back home with them.
From a carbon perspective, net metering was basically paying homeowners to provide useless power to the grid (at the bottom of the duck curve) but be able to cash it in when they actually needed it around 7 pm. This meant generating useless solar power and in exchange for letting burning a ton of natural gas when you actually needed the power.
The next step is pairing solar with residential and grid scale storage. Personally, with how intermittent production can be now, the grid should be more like AWS. Allow for per minute billing and rates that fluctuate for some customers. If you can pair storage with solar (or even just storage if you could buy low sell high off the grid), that would be the next big step in the renewable revolution.
Net metering always had to die for the next step (storage) to happen. With the electric car mandate coming into 2035 so that millions of homes will own a giant battery this will eventually be even more important.