Everyone paying taxes is paying the subsidies.
That is not anti solar.
When I worked for a large TO, I worked extensively in energy markets, independent power production, and distributed gen. The problem that is not identified in this discussion is how muddy the waters are here. In reality the way the subsidies are administered are the problem because too many people have their hands in the pot and make the solar developers look like the bad guy for actually getting the incentive check at the bottom of the funnel.
The reason that the narrative is anti-solar isn't because it isn't true but because the entire reason it is true is because of people pulling strings in the background manipulating the economics. Secondarily, distributed generation isn't part of the energy markets on a project-by-project basis until you are big enough to be considered an IPP, which makes you no longer distributed gen (generally speaking). PV doesn't have the opportunity to establish generation at a market rate the same as other power plants, so you are comparing apples to monkeys.
For the first point, the thing is during rate cases, in many cases, it has been uncovered that the utilities that are charging "lost revenue adjustments" and have PV/Energy Efficiency subsidies built into their rates, are also profiting from arbitrage on PV, so they are triple dipping. They collect admin fees for administering these programs as part of that charge on your rates, they are allowed to increase rates to make the same profit they would have had the customer no longer using grid power was still consuming the same amount,
and, now here is the kicker,
they are general able to sell the net metered power for more than net metering costs them (which is not factored into the lost revenue recovery, its just money in a separate hand that nobody considers). So, our utility companies are merely increasing their profit margin by eliminating net-metering, they aren't reducing their rates either as they still place this as reduced revenue so its free money x 2.
The second one is pretty clear, especially when you see the shift from behind the meter generation to directly fed in generation. A generator gets paid to generate, the PV does not, the incentives in many cases are simply providing that PV with a fair market rate for generation. This is of course complicated because PV is neither dispatchable, nor reliable baseload. This is why if people actually cared to solve the problem they'd start here by doing a better market analysis at the ISO level and having that set fair rates for PV (while considering energy diversity and storage), while cutting out the middleman with their hand out (the EDC). In New England, for example, take a look at how much Millstone is subsidized, in fact they qualify as renewable generation and have soaked up many of the large bids for power (20MW+) and get paid that subsidy. Their excuse is that NG power is too cheap for them to compete on a must-run basis. Energy markets are super complicated, and nobody wants to simplify them because everybody is making money hand over fist. There is a reason that Enron got away with it for so long. Everyone is still doing the same thing, except Enron forgot the cardinal rule of "Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered."
On top of all of that, costs are increased by too many cooks in the kitchen, and poor regulatory/legislative oversite. They allow the utilities to be the
Wolf in Sheepskin. In CT for example, in most cases there is no additional subsidy besides the privilege to net-meter, and the ITC. Both that "privilege" and the ITC are going away. They are going to a "buy-all" structure and are requiring absolutely absurd infrastructure to implement these projects. They distinguish it from a feed in tariff simply because they want to tie it to a customer so they can force you to upgrade that customers infrastructure to modern utility standards - we are talking moving meter banks for apartment buildings outside on a 100kW project which simply isn't feasible. At the same time this project is generally required to run a new secondary out to the utility transformer so is not touching the existing infrastructure at all. On top of that every person you talk to from within that same utility or other utility territories is doing it slightly different. This makes the entire thing extremely complicated and volatile for developers which adds
cost and this is above and beyond the ridiculous cost of the infrastructure to begin with. One minor example is the utility required us to do a 480V cold sequenced gang meter bank, sized with the PV as a system
load, and required our main breaker match that load, which essentially doubles the size of the utility infrastructure (xfmr, pad, secondaries) and triples the size of the gear. This could have been 2 self-contained meter sockets with fused discos ahead of it for 10k, but instead was a 100k piece of switchgear installed for metering. That soaks up literally 25% of the buy-all "incentive." I put incentive in quotes because this is not offsetting a customer load, this is directly fed into the grid, so that's the actual return on the project. So, if a normal business has a 20% margin, the utility themselves just took away that entire profit margin and then some for a frivolous request.
So of course this is crystal ball prediction that is strictly MHO, but my guess is the elimination of subsidies is just going to eliminate small projects and, in a few years, when nobody is doing them, the utility is going to get legislative buy-in to go all in on putting in distributed generation "for the sake of the environment" and customers are going to be footing the entire bill as CapEx that gets built into rates.
TL;DR: PV is overly "incentivized" because the incentives aren't properly regulated to be going into the right person's pocket. Programs like MA SMART program attempted to eliminate how much money brokers were skimming off the top, but also didn't consider way too many other factors when they made it so complicated. Nobody is looking at the EDC's impact on these costs both from nonsense requirements and overly complicated administrative processes. Nobody is thinking about the future of who gets to build it when the incentives go away, and if it actually saves us anything.
On an entirely separate note though, all taxes are subsidies if you want to look at it like that. I sit at home working most of the time and still pay the same amount as everyone else for roads, I have kids in schools and others that don't still pay taxes for the school systems. I pay for the tax breaks that major corporations get anyway for writing off corporate jets, lavish executive suites, and the list goes on for all of the tax breaks. The concept that the average middle-class person gets to get a tax break on something, yet that is a subsidy, is a slight of hand by the wealthy to get you to look the other way for how subsidized their lifestyle is by the taxes paid by middle-class America.
