They’re making that increasingly difficult. Basically, as more and more people get solar it becomes economically impossible to maintain the grid with millions of people being paid to connect to it.
The result is a higher and higher percentage of your power bill not be for “use” but for some other bullshit.
Because of the crazy power rate spikes during one of the Texas freezes, my power bill gets like a bunch added to it as a recovery fee for like the next 15 years. Then there’s the connection fee, maintenance fee, etc. My bill is like $300-400 a month before the first milliwatt is calculated, which makes solar less-viable. I’m paying a huge power bill no matter what (illegal to disconnect from the grid entirely), so payments towards a $50,000 solar setup would just make it more expensive.
I might save 20-40 bucks on my electric bill, but the extra $250 in payments for solar would kill that.
Yeah that’s been an anticipated problem, since home solar is essentially a lost customer for the utility, but infrastructure maintenance costs don’t change. Honestly the power grid shouldn’t be a commercial enterprise, even if it’s under shit tons of regulation. It’s so absurdly critical to society we should have nationalized the power companies a long time ago.
Yeah… Right now California residents are paying massively inflated rates because the utility board decided that PG&E, a company that is literally a convicted killer, can pass the cost of the fines on to customers.
Yeah, if it’s a problem that our power grid is having distributed green energy connected all over the place, we need to make the damn utilities change.
Here in the Netherlands, the panels are wired into the grid so you’re always delivering back and not using that power directly. What happens is, they basically deduct the power generated from the power you’ve used. This crediting system will eventually disappear, as too many people are feeding back solar power.
For all intents and purposes, as long as we generate more than we use, we’re paying nothing except grid charges and taxes. So if you’ve got a low energy use day and plenty of solar, there’s really no reason not to run an AC (or a washer/dryer, etc)
Can’t sell your excess power to the grid?
They’re making that increasingly difficult. Basically, as more and more people get solar it becomes economically impossible to maintain the grid with millions of people being paid to connect to it.
The result is a higher and higher percentage of your power bill not be for “use” but for some other bullshit.
Because of the crazy power rate spikes during one of the Texas freezes, my power bill gets like a bunch added to it as a recovery fee for like the next 15 years. Then there’s the connection fee, maintenance fee, etc. My bill is like $300-400 a month before the first milliwatt is calculated, which makes solar less-viable. I’m paying a huge power bill no matter what (illegal to disconnect from the grid entirely), so payments towards a $50,000 solar setup would just make it more expensive.
I might save 20-40 bucks on my electric bill, but the extra $250 in payments for solar would kill that.
Yeah that’s been an anticipated problem, since home solar is essentially a lost customer for the utility, but infrastructure maintenance costs don’t change. Honestly the power grid shouldn’t be a commercial enterprise, even if it’s under shit tons of regulation. It’s so absurdly critical to society we should have nationalized the power companies a long time ago.
Yeah… Right now California residents are paying massively inflated rates because the utility board decided that PG&E, a company that is literally a convicted killer, can pass the cost of the fines on to customers.
Yeah, if it’s a problem that our power grid is having distributed green energy connected all over the place, we need to make the damn utilities change.
Kind of like our railroads? Or the internet?
Here in the Netherlands, the panels are wired into the grid so you’re always delivering back and not using that power directly. What happens is, they basically deduct the power generated from the power you’ve used. This crediting system will eventually disappear, as too many people are feeding back solar power.
For all intents and purposes, as long as we generate more than we use, we’re paying nothing except grid charges and taxes. So if you’ve got a low energy use day and plenty of solar, there’s really no reason not to run an AC (or a washer/dryer, etc)