How should net metering affect your electric bill?

Those numbers are actually really close to reality for some of the electrical vehicle rates, which go down as low as $0.21 for off peak, around $0.40 for part-peak, and $0.53 for full peak. Other TOU rate plans only go as low as $0.31 during some seasons, and peak in the mid 40 cent range.

From an information theory standpoint, prices are a very simple summarization of overall costs that throws a lot of information away.

This is useful to do because supply chains are complicated and understanding them would impose a burden on consumers. But it also means we remain ignorant of how goods and services get to us and what the system constraints are.

Also they aren't just about cost, but also about expected demand, and competition to capture that demand. This makes the information about costs a muddy approximation at best.

> The reason is that by having distributed solar and storage, you can massively reduce other fixed cost parts of the grid as they age out.

The article also completely ignores the concept that distributed generation can actually reduce infrastructure needs. If you're generating the power at the "last mile" and sending it to your neighbor, that power doesn't travel through a substation, it doesn't travel through long transmission lines that need to be maintained, it's just generated (roughly) where it needs to be, saving you a lot of infrastructure. So it certainly seems "fair" to offset that infrastructure cost at least somewhat - you are providing value to the utility in terms of infrastructure they don't have to build themselves. And they sell that power that you feed back to customers paying for "green energy" at a premium as well.

(note that despite regular peaks occurring later in the day, annual peaks almost always occur during periods of high solar production - it is aircon during summer heatwaves that blows the grid, not cooking dinner. So you are delivering huge value in terms of peaker plants that don't have to be built to run a few days a year during those heatwaves.)

I don't live in California but in 2020 we had heat waves and my local power company blew up 2 substations in my area from the load. That wouldn't have happened with more distributed power generation, solar production is at its peak precisely during those heatwaves that strain the grid so badly, but the utilities were actually making a big push at the time for net metering to be abolished and solar production to be reduced.

And of course we still pay incredibly high transmission costs - we have 8-9c per kWh electricity but my transmission and delivery charges are approximately 12-14c, for a normal suburban area (I'm not out in the boonies), so obviously that money isn't making it into the infrastructure where it needs to be anyway.

(Compounding this issue, of course, is that there are plenty of people who are out in the middle of nowhere, and I'm sure a good chunk of that cost is going to subsidizing them. If we want to talk about market distortions and ignore the greater social good - how about we move away from these hidden subsidies to people living in the middle of nowhere? Make them pay the actual costs of their roads and electric and other services.)

Big picture it's hard to see the pushback against net metering as being anything other than rent-seeking by an entrenched industry. They're charging huge delivery fees and not maintaining the grid, and they're pushing back against remedies literally at the same time as their infrastructure is failing. They're paying you nothing for electricity fed back into the grid, while charging other customers a premium for "green" electricity. Pick a side, it's either valuable or it's not.

A huge portion of electric bills are paying for wildfire damage/hardening and for expensive transmission lines. Rooftop solar reduces both, but is not being credited for it in NEM 3.0.

When electricity is generated and consumed locally, it doesn't need to be transmitted across huge distances using expensive transmission infrastructure. There's also less wires that can trigger fires. But infra is the only way regulated utilities are allowed to make a profit.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/business/energy-environme...

These increased costs being passed to California consumers could kill electric cars. We're paying $0.30-$0.40 / kwh to PG&E, which pencils out to over $9 / gallon.

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35152087/tesla-model-3-ch...

I just moved into a new construction house in Colorado with a substantial (23kW) solar installation. It’s been interesting to see how much, in the words of the author, ‘feeding bread to pigs’ I have ended up doing.

The solar installation (which is probably larger than optimal) is dictated by the policy for the house to be “net zero”, which in turn is dictated by a policy based on the size of the house. (In practice, solar is the cheapest way for the builder to get all the way to ‘net zero’ after the usual decent insulation, windows, etc.)

So that’s how I got solar, but now I want to turn it on. Well, this is not in the interest of the utility at all (they lose money), but they still by policy get to ‘approve it’. This required a many-month (and many phone call) process of reviews, approvals, etc. which concluded in the utility activating (installing a meter for) the installation. In total it was maybe 9 months from when the solar was all wired up and sitting in the sun until it was producing any electricity for the world!

Now the utility gives me a choice of two billing options. At the end of each month, excess energy I’ve generated can either be put in a kWh bank and rolled over as credit, or it can be paid out. However, the payout is hilariously low (like $0.01/kWh) so of course everyone chooses the bank.

But now incentives are all screwed up! Since I easily generate more electricity that I will ever use (see above for why policies drove us to an installation larger that necessary) my household has no incentive to conserve at all. E.g. I am heating my garage with an electric heater because it costs me zero.

So the net effect of all of these policies intended to promote conservation are:

1) To drive up the price of housing in an area where that is already one of the big challenges the community is fighting

2) To completely disincentivize any actual conservation

3) To have new solar installations laying fallow for 6-9 months

I don’t know what the solution is, but the problems are pretty easy to see.