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How should net metering affect your electric bill?

climateer.substack.com

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Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

#51

Post by lillecarl »

In Sweden there are 2 separate charges, one for infrastructure and one for consumption. The infrastructure bill scales with how big your breakers/fuses (English) are while consumption scales with how many KWh you've used. You often have a different infra provider and power provider.

For someone living in a condo/apt the infra cost is usually higher than consumption while in houses where heating often is powered by some heat-pump system(drill, air, ground) consumption is higher.

Houses with district heating can scale down their capacity to lower the infra price.

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

#52

Post by selimthegrim »

lkrubner wrote: post #35

About this part: "Maybe Some Lies Are Necessary?" In his book "10% Less Democracy" the economist Garret Jones pointed out that politicians make terrible decisions during election years, therefore, if we had longer terms in office, and therefore fewer elections, we'd have better government. https://www.amazon.com/10-Less-Democracy-Should-Elites/dp/15... Likewise, in 1787, Alexander Hamilton insisted that the USA Presi…

Alexander "I helped patroons in Upstate New York put in place a literal feudal system that kept tenants in debt peonage for decades and entailed their land" Hamilton has no business suggesting life terms for anything.

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

#53

Post by EricE »

kbos87 wrote: post #14
sandworm101 wrote: post #7

>> For instance, pricey CDs prevented lots of people from listening to music. Nope. Nobody I knew in the 90s had this issue. In fact, higher prices caused more people to listen to more music. Unable to afford CDs, the kids turned to Napster. After that they had access to more music than any generation in history. This in turn forced the music industry to change, to create online delivery platforms. Napster might be g…

There was a long period of purchasing music from stores before Napster was even an option. Having to spend $12-$16 on a CD you intended to listen to one, maybe two songs on absolutely stunted the amount of music people listened to for a very long time.

You didn't have radios wherever it was you lived? No friends or cassette tapes?

Heck I still have stacks of cassette tapes from the 80's and early 90's - waiting around to record your favorite song from the radio (and cursing DJs that talked over the intro's) and then creating custom mix tapes for friends that we then all passed around to each other was a right of passage.

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

#54

Post by marcosdumay »

hervature wrote: post #22
cletus wrote: post #16

The author here would do well to and understand and use terms like "fixed costs" and "variable costs". There are large fixed costs in the power grid and the author is complaining that the retail price of electricity doesn't reflect the variable costs, leading to distortions and perverse incentives. But this doesn't make prices "lies". > The current net metering system in California is pretty favorable to customers wi…

Perhaps you and I are reading this differently. In my opinion, the author clearly delineates the two to be able to make this claim: > In other words, the direct cost of providing an additional unit of electricity or natural gas is only 23% of overall operating expenses. The way I read it, the author is not claiming the subsidy is the misleading part, just that, once there is mass adoption, the price of everything wil…

There's the marginal cost of electricity, and there's the marginal cost of electricity at peak time.

The second one is much higher, and solar hits precisely it. Yeah, there is still a subsidy and it will go away at some point, but it's not 77% of the costs like the article states.

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

#55

Post by EricE »

jdofaz wrote: post #28
burkaman wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There must have been a lot of people that had access to record stores but not to the internet, and not enough money for lots of CDs. And Napster launched in 1999.

As a 90s kid with no money, the solution was to wait for the song to play on the radio and record it to a cassette tape.

Thank you. And it was rather commonplace. The idea that music wasn't accessible is crazy.

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

#56

Post by paxys »

kevindong wrote: post #44

In NYC at least, electric supply charges are distinct line items from electric delivery charges. Consumers do have the option of choosing who supplies their electricity (e.g. namely if you want to buy your electricity from a green source). But the local monopoly is always entitled to charge you for the service of actually delivering said electricity to you. Both charges fluctuate from month to month. When I still liv…

It's the same in California. The problem is that the delivery charges are also calculated per kWh (so, the cost of delivering a single unit of electricity to your house). But what happens when the net electricity delivered is zero?

You could argue that customers should be charged for both the electricity delivered to their house and the electricity taken away from their house, since they are using the grid and other expensive infrastructure for both. However you are now disincentivising people from installing solar and giving back their excess power.

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

#57

Post by bo1024 »

samatman wrote: post #47

I'm not sure where to start with this article. Ok, how about here: there is no necessary connection between costs and prices, at all, and this is why some businesses go broke and others are worth a trillion dollars. Starting completely over with the basic microeconomics correct, there's surely an interesting question about public utilities which are paying prices for electricity which no longer line up with amortizat…

Possibly right but in an ideal world for maximum welfare, prices should signal costs or externalities.

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

#58

Post by StillBored »

Really, in deregulated markets, a similar concept should apply to wind/solar generators. They should be forced to guarantee 100% reliable production, which means that they are responsible for the batteries or gas plants as well.

Then they won't get to financially destabilize the reliable power producers by shifting the costs of having a plant sitting around idle for most of the year to some other org that has to balance the books.

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

#59

Post by microfen »

People have seen this net metering problem coming from far off. I wrote a very unpolished undergrad thesis on this a while ago. Some standout articles from back then showed how net metering leads to a positive feedback of solar adoption [1] because of how rates are structured throughout this country (and the world for that matter), and it was time to consider modifying the rate setting process [2]. My conclusion was that net metering ends up being a regressive tax on those who can't afford the upfront capital to install solar themselves.

It's been a while since I looked at residential solar tariffs, but there were a lot of ingenious solutions being proposed to deal with the downsides of net metering and poorly set feed-in tariff rates. Minnesota's Value of Solar tariff [3] is the one that comes to mind as being pretty clever.

[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

[2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10406...

[3]: https://www.mnseia.org/value-solar

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