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SolarCity Will Eliminate Over 550 Job Due to State’s Anti-Rooftop Solar Decision

solarthermalmagazine.com

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Re: SolarCity Will Eliminate Over 550 Job Due to State’s Anti-Rooftop Solar Decision

#101

Post by blisterpeanuts »

twoodfin wrote: post #30
ndonnellan wrote: post #9

This article seems to have a more thorough explanation: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/is-this-sunny-state-trying-... snip ----------------------- A little-understood billing mechanism called net metering is at the heart of the Nevada controversy. Net metering means that residential and commercial solar customers are billed for their “net” energy consumption. They are allowed to send back to the grid the electricit…

Can we change the link from the one-sided (and deliberately unclear!) press release to this article or a similar one?

One-sided and unclear, and with a TYPO in the headline!

Re: SolarCity Will Eliminate Over 550 Job Due to State’s Anti-Rooftop Solar Decision

#102

Post by jacquesm »

msandford wrote: post #84
jacquesm wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. But that's effectively the exact same thing as net-metering, only with a lot more fixed costs. And batteries wear out as well. The grid is a lot better for this, unfortunately that requires cooperation of the grid operators and owners. There is an alternative to this, the equivalent of a credit union but for power where a number of people band together to do their own little grid, but the complexities and dange…

I've thought for a long time that a neighborhood 48V DC exchange might be viable. You'll have to pull thick copper of course, but $1/foot for wires is pretty cheap compared to battery prices. Here in the US the NEC says that anything under 50V isn't really regulated because they don't want to get involved in people's path lighting, phone, ethernet, doorbells, thermostats, garage door opener signaling, etc. The other…

You'll want to think long and hard about how you're going to deal with fuses. For the kind of currents that batteries can put out it can be quite expensive to properly fuse things.

50V was a fairly arbitrary voltage deemed to be 'safe', however there are cases known of people dying from 50V and even lower (in particular, one very nasty accident involving a Swiss ham in pre-internet times).

A bus made of thick copper wire would be stolen here pretty much on the day that you installed it (copper theft is on the order of the day).

I'm not convinced of the need to have any of this though, I got my power usage down to the point where a fair sized house ran year round from 16 solar panels and a small windmill. The year that we only had the solar panels we still needed the genset with some regularity but the year the windmill went up we used it only twice (when I was running a 12KW plasma cutter from the battery pack they tended to deplete a bit too quickly...).

Re: SolarCity Will Eliminate Over 550 Job Due to State’s Anti-Rooftop Solar Decision

#103

Post by vinceguidry »

phkahler wrote: post #98
vinceguidry wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that simple. Solar is only really practical if it fits into the grid system, otherwise there's no real point. The energy it gives you goes up and down, and not in sync with your own household needs. So you need something to do with excess capacity. All by itself, units of power aren't all that expensive. But a solar installation is very expensive. You need to amortize the cost of the installation, the people…

>> Solar is only really practical if it fits into the grid system, otherwise there's no real point. The energy it gives you goes up and down, and not in sync with your own household needs. >>So you need something to do with excess capacity. The simplest solution is to push it onto the grid. With net metering you can get the energy back later at not cost. It's like using the grid as a battery. The alternative of cours…

> The simplest solution is to push it onto the grid. With net metering you can get the energy back later at not cost. It's like using the grid as a battery.

That's effectively making the power company pay retail.

Re: SolarCity Will Eliminate Over 550 Job Due to State’s Anti-Rooftop Solar Decision

#104

Post by jacquesm »

mikeash wrote: post #87
jacquesm wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'll charge a fixed fee just for the hookup, and it can be quite a large percentage if your consumption is minimal.

Isn't it on the order of $10-20/month?

Depends on your location. Here it's more than double that. 'Vastrecht' as it is called for me is about 50 euros right now.

It's one of the more sneaky tricks pulled in order to extract more money from people that have managed to successfully reduce their consumption. After all if you paid just a per KWh and per cubic meter price for electricity and gas then your efforts to conserve energy would pay off much more than with the fixed base cost for the hookup.

Re: SolarCity Will Eliminate Over 550 Job Due to State’s Anti-Rooftop Solar Decision

#106

Post by pkaye »

OliverJones wrote: post #69
eli wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has to do with net metering rates, that is how much indidivuals and small business get paid for putting electricity back into the grid for others to use. See http://www.utilitydive.com/news/nevada-regulators-approve-ne... (disclaimer: I'm co-founder of the linked news site)

Interesting. This Utility Dive article points out that the rate change is to be phased in over four years. It's not a cliff. That should mitigate large-scale sudden incentive changes. Where I live the electric energy company has separate rates for energy and for distribution. I think it's like that everywhere. In the most naive pricing model net metering ignores that distinction and simply run the meter backwards whe…

I think we need a pricing model that scales with the % solar installations with net metering and supporting the infrastructure costs connecting to the grid. Imagine if everyone was using solar but still connected to the grid. Someone still has to pay the infrastructure costs.

Re: SolarCity Will Eliminate Over 550 Job Due to State’s Anti-Rooftop Solar Decision

#107

Post by cowkingdeluxe »

ndonnellan wrote: post #9

This article seems to have a more thorough explanation: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/is-this-sunny-state-trying-... snip ----------------------- A little-understood billing mechanism called net metering is at the heart of the Nevada controversy. Net metering means that residential and commercial solar customers are billed for their “net” energy consumption. They are allowed to send back to the grid the electricit…

What is the actual cost to the grid of a solar home which only uses power at night from the grid and maybe delivers some to it during the day?

In any of these anti-solar positions about grid costs I've never seen a factual statement of what it actually costs the power providers.

Re: SolarCity Will Eliminate Over 550 Job Due to State’s Anti-Rooftop Solar Decision

#108

Post by Armisael16 »

ethbro wrote: post #96
inthewoods wrote: post #70

Seems like they need a middle ground - not selling at wholesale prices or full retail. Putting the price at wholesale doesn't take into account the costs for the homeowner (or a 3rd party company like SolarCity) to invest in solar panels. Selling at retail doesn't take into account cost of grid maintenance for the power companies. It also doesn't make a lot of sense to me that they charge higher fees to connect to th…

I don't see where the argument against retail (possibly minus a small amount) comes from. Effectively, they're deleting load from close to the end user from the utility's books. If that load hadn't been deleted, the utility would have charged retail pricing in order to generate it. The small negative adjustment from retail would come from the fact that the utility is still servicing the solar user as a retail user. S…

The utility also has to be prepared to provide you with the power that you aren't using (if there's a solar eclipse or something). The marginal cost of power generation is very low, so you save them almost nothing by not using the power.

Re: SolarCity Will Eliminate Over 550 Job Due to State’s Anti-Rooftop Solar Decision

#109

Post by mikeash »

jacquesm wrote: post #104
mikeash wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it on the order of $10-20/month?

Depends on your location. Here it's more than double that. 'Vastrecht' as it is called for me is about 50 euros right now. It's one of the more sneaky tricks pulled in order to extract more money from people that have managed to successfully reduce their consumption. After all if you paid just a per KWh and per cubic meter price for electricity and gas then your efforts to conserve energy would pay off much more than…

Ouch. Does that reflect their actual costs at all, or is it just a money grab?

Re: SolarCity Will Eliminate Over 550 Job Due to State’s Anti-Rooftop Solar Decision

#110

Post by JoshTriplett »

vinceguidry wrote: post #81
CWuestefeld wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that's a long reach to get to the OP's "de facto ban on rooftop solar". If we take the OP at face value, then, it seems to be declaring that solar energy is completely impractical, and can't survive without life support. I realize that other forms of energy generation are all subsidized in various ways, so it's clearly not as serious as my above interpretation, but still, it doesn't speak well of solar.

It's not that simple. Solar is only really practical if it fits into the grid system, otherwise there's no real point. The energy it gives you goes up and down, and not in sync with your own household needs. So you need something to do with excess capacity. All by itself, units of power aren't all that expensive. But a solar installation is very expensive. You need to amortize the cost of the installation, the people…

> What this is all about is the power companies are suddenly deciding they want to pay wholesale for excess power. Why should they pay wholesale?

The power companies (normally) have enough power to supply everyone; they buy that power at wholesale prices and sell it to the customer at retail prices. So why, if they can always buy power at wholesale prices, should they deliberately pay retail prices instead? Doing so increases their costs, which then potentially raises rates for others.

So, asking power companies to buy power back at retail rates amounts to having power customers pay to subsidize the solar power generated by other power customers.

Looking at it as a subsidy, though, suggests a useful way to bring it about. Many power companies have a program where you can pay extra per kWh for "green" power, paying for the use of wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric, and other renewable zero-pollution power sources. Why not use a program like that to allow customers to subsidize solar power if they want to, and use the resulting funds to pay customers higher-than-wholesale rates for solar power?

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