Electric-Light
Senior Member
Not exactly. it's setup to pay for solar industry profit by passing the cost onto every electric user.
let's talk about battery banks- I reckon the "they aren't worth it" thing is wrong
- Thread starter PVfarmer
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Not exactly. it's setup to pay for solar industry profit by passing the cost onto every electric user.
ggunn
PE (Electrical), NABCEP certified
- Location
- Austin, TX, USA
- Occupation
- Consulting Electrical Engineer - Photovoltaic Systems
Yeah, we know, root of all evil. It's a huge conspiracy.
SolarPro
Senior Member
- Location
- Austin, TX
Like LEDs. Everyone knows that's a big government mind-control conspiracy sham a lama ding dong. :slaphead:
I suppose there were also plenty of people who were kicking and screaming and gnashing their teeth as the steam era came to a close.
Electric-Light
Senior Member
I think it's reasonable to say that a monthly meter charge of under a dollar, a monthly baseline kWh quota that wouldn't hold a reasonable household usage and a high kWh favors solar and seasonal homes to stay lit at minimal costs while unoccupied.
Well, that means the every day people that live there usually end up paying 30 cents/kWh.
Well, that means the every day people that live there usually end up paying 30 cents/kWh.
PVfarmer
Senior Member
- Location
- Newport County, Rhode Island, USA
So people are being overcharged for PV installation+systems ...AND everybody else is also being overcharged for energy?
Sounds like America to me!
But how exactly did it become "setup that way"?
It can't be a conspiracy if it's actual news, can it?
I mean, of course things are going to be a mess- we're talking about gov't subsidies here! I get NRG ads on TV and they don't even operate in my state.
And the part about the APS employee writing the letter in the third link here?
Um... ok, sure...
And comparing solar to OBAMACARE?
Give me a break!!! That's just plain ridiculous!
The American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a membership group for conservative state lawmakers, recently drafted model legislation that targeted net metering. The group also helped launch efforts by conservative lawmakers in more than half a dozen states to repeal green energy mandates.
"State governments are starting to wake up," Christine Harbin Hanson, a spokeswoman for Americans for Prosperity, the advocacy group backed by billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch, said in an email. The organization has led the effort to overturn the mandate in Kansas, which requires that 20% of the state's electricity come from renewable sources.
"These green energy mandates are bad policy," said Hanson, adding that the group was hopeful Kansas would be the first of many dominoes to fall.
The group's campaign in that state compared the green energy mandate to Obamacare,
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-solar-kochs-20140420-story.html#page=1
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The largest recipient of federal grants and tax credits was a Spanish energy company, Iberdrola, which received the federal subsidies by “investing heavily in U.S. power generation facilities,” Good Jobs First reports.
Another six—Dow Chemical, Lockheed Martin, NRG Energy, Sempra Energy, SolarCity and United Technologies—are among the top 50 recipients of state subsidies and federal grants.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...-the-biggest-corporate-winners-in-each-state/
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There's a Fight Brewing Over Who Profits From Solar Power
APS is an unlikely solar patron: In the summer of 2013, the Phoenix-area utility launched a campaign to weaken Arizona's net metering rule, which requires utilities to buy the extra solar power their customers generate and provides a major incentive for homeowners to install rooftop panels. A few months later, APS admitted giving cash to two nonprofits that ran an anti-solar ad blitz in the state. Early this year, the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting revealed that a letter criticizing the solar industry's business practices, sent by members of Congress to federal regulators, was originally authored by an employee of APS. And a couple weeks ago, APS asked state regulators to let the company quadruple the fees it tacks on to the monthly bills of solar-equipped homeowners.
It makes sense that the company would be worried about solar's epic takeoff. In many ways, the solar boom poses an unprecedented threat to big electric utilities, which have done business for a century with essentially zero competition. In the first quarter of this year, applications for solar permits in APS's service area were 112 percent higher than the same period last year, and every one of those is one less customer for APS's regular power supply, 40 percent of which comes from coal. Now the company thinks it has found a solution to the problem: It wants to start owning its own rooftop solar.
Electric-Light
Senior Member
It's a double jeopardy to the public. To pay for solar installation profit as well as subsidized buyback rate
Money collected by solar sales companies = out of pocket+subsidies.
Rate structure to justify consumer's out of pocket expense = passed onto other customers.
It's the solar industry who's griping about the reduction of subsidies or removal of regulations compelling power companies to pay premium prices for solar power.
You sound like a lobbyist or a politician. You're quite conscientious of solar capital cost, show concerns about transformer losses that connect to solar, but talk as if utility infrastructure are naturally exiting objects that maintain themselves. If you're totally self supporting, including day/night power and demand capacity you can go off grid, but this isn't really practical for most people out there.
This makes sense. It would reduce the losses that the pubic has to bear on soft cost.
jaggedben
Senior Member
- Location
- Northern California
- Occupation
- Solar and Energy Storage Installer
Oh, well, geeze, let's not start to talk about other energy industries, eh? One word: Fracking.
We are all going have to pay for a different energy structure, somehow, someway.
ggunn
PE (Electrical), NABCEP certified
- Location
- Austin, TX, USA
- Occupation
- Consulting Electrical Engineer - Photovoltaic Systems
Irrelevant to the point.
mivey
Senior Member
That is a perfectly valid question and you are right on target. However, you will never have a meaningful discussion about it until you discuss it with people who understand utility cost allocation. Bonbright's "Principles of Public Utility Rates" is a great primer. NARUC has a cost allocation manual that explains the fundamentals.Come on you know this.
I find it easier to look at things if we magnify the issue.
For the sake of argument lets say 100% of the customers where on net metering producing what they each need for electricity. They ship it to the utility during the day and they take it back at night resulting in a Kwh charge from the utility of $0.00.
Under those circumstances where does the utility get the money to maintain their infrastructure?
The same thing is happening in reduced scale with some of the customers on net metering. The utility is getting less $ to maintain the infrastructure that is being used as free storage to those folks.
Please don't say 'they have to do it anyway' of course they do but now they have to do it with less income or much more likely raise their rates across the board.
There are quite a few more good references but I doubt you will find a factual discussion in an open forum, at least that is what I have seen the majority of the time. If you want an exercise in frustration, then carry on.
mivey
Senior Member
You are smarter than you look.I am punching out of this one, its like trying to talk politics or religion. Every person that posts has their own agenda and straw man arguments making it impossible (for me anyway) to rationally discuss this.
mivey
Senior Member
Correct, at least they are not charged demand on a separate line item. Demand is one of the three fundamental costs. Traditionally, residential demand is modeled based on a load shape that assumes that the demand quantity correlates reasonably well with the energy quantity. Using that, the demand charges were rolled into the energy charges and we could reasonably bill demand using the energy metered. FWIW, many times some customer costs (the $/month costs) were rolled into energy charges as well, which is another problem.
Loads are no longer reasonably consistent within the residential rate class so rates need to be modernized to have appropriate rate components.
When this has been tried, most of the time people complain, sue, march, etc. Naturally the biggest complainers are the ones that were being subsidized. They never want to believe the true costs.
I have also noticed a lot of complainers in the DG community. Is it any wonder? As soon as they found a way to beat the system, someone wants to close the loophole and they don't like it. The only explanation many will accept is that someone is trying to take advantage of them rather than someone is trying to close a subsidy loophole.
For the hornets that just left the nest, I have wasp spray so don't bother.
ggunn
PE (Electrical), NABCEP certified
- Location
- Austin, TX, USA
- Occupation
- Consulting Electrical Engineer - Photovoltaic Systems
By the same token I have noticed a lot of complainers in the non DG "community". They seem to be terrified that someone is going to take a nickel out of their pocket that they somehow don't deserve. PV system owners are not "beating the system" or exploiting "loopholes", they are making an investment that they hope will pay off.
DG owners complain, and rightly so, when they make an investment based upon a financial picture constructed from a set of rules, and then the rules change after they have spent their money.
mivey
Senior Member
You don't worry about your own finances? Then start donating nickles out of your own pocket to "the cause".
{with nozzle pointed at the screen}Pssssspt! Pssssspt! Away with the dreamy and on with cost fundamentals.
and they do so by exploiting weaknesses in the system. Back in the days when loads were simple, the billing system was simplified to save the end user's money. The simplified rates do not work with complex loads. Times change. If one wants to understand the changes they need to understand utility costs.
I agree that better information is definitely needed. Keeping old rates does not send proper price signals but we also can't ignore cost causation. Too bad that many people believe in the sales speech rather than trying to understand fundamentals. Unfortunately, some of those that do not understand costs and rates also work at the utility so change can be too slow.
Rates change and have throughout the history of our industry. Rates are not the rules but are supposed to reflect the rules. Some of those rules are:
Purpose of Rates:
Collect revenues
Allocate & recover costs
Generate profit (for IOUs)
Support public services (for non-profits)
Send price signals
Recognize cost causation
Rate Principles:
Reflect costs / revenue goals
Fair
Reasonable
Stable
Understandable
Non-discriminatory
Proper price/usage signals
As much as possible/practical rates should be updated/modified as needed to keep reflecting these rules. To understand what may change, one should understand the underlying costs. Some DG suppliers understand these fundamentals but are pushing the "loophole" solutions so they can make a buck. It may be "just business" but when the industry corrects the error, the DG supplier's customers can be left holding the bag.
I believe a well educated consumer is the best consumer.
I have said this before and I'll say it again: The utility will meet costs on the product or they will find something else to do (and it may go that way in the future but who knows). If they make too much on one customer and subsidize another it really does not make a difference to them in the end so all this nonsense about all utilities fighting DG or other niche solutions is crazy. Most utilities are just trying to adhere to rate principles and charge each customer fairly. DG and other solutions have a role to play but it needs to be done with realistic numbers and with as little subsidy as is practical. Now that is probably dreamy too!
PS: and with that, I'll leave you to it.
In regards to OP....way back when..... 42 pages ago:
Is the real point of the TESLA battery bank to allow PV GRID TIE installs to continue beyond the utility determined net metering caps.
In other words, PV can currently only be up to a certain percentage of the grid, because PV output coincides with daytime in a non controllable manner. It can overload the grid if not needed....at that moment of solar production.
However...... A battery system could "store daylight" and sell it when needed.... or when safe/possible".
I assume, in an internet world, these could all be switched on and off by utilities depending on grid demand.
I apologize if this was discussed.
Is the real point of the TESLA battery bank to allow PV GRID TIE installs to continue beyond the utility determined net metering caps.
In other words, PV can currently only be up to a certain percentage of the grid, because PV output coincides with daytime in a non controllable manner. It can overload the grid if not needed....at that moment of solar production.
However...... A battery system could "store daylight" and sell it when needed.... or when safe/possible".
I assume, in an internet world, these could all be switched on and off by utilities depending on grid demand.
I apologize if this was discussed.
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