How should net metering affect your electric bill?

> it minimizes the need for heroic personal sacrifice with respect to preserving the environment

The dirty secret is that plenty of technology exists that can actually increase your quality of life while lowering your energy consumption. I'm not just talking about EVs, but electric buses and trains, heat pumps, sealing up drafty houses. But these things require changing how we do things, not necessarily how much we consume of things.

> This is the same workflow that commercial entities go through but employ an army of lawyers as expensive lubrication to keep the process moving.

And? How does that make it any more defensible in the context of the point I was making there? What is that replying to?

> Forgive me if I'm wrong here, but I think you're classifying regulations as primarily for safety reasons.

No, I was referring back to your own claim[1] that some of them are for that reason:

>>> The primary things the utility (both transmission and generation) wants to avoid is backfeeding and islanding — the former is dangerous to linemen, the latter is dangerous to your neighbors’ equipment.

And then using that in a hypothetical to clarify what I would vs would not count as Kafkaesque processes intended to scare off solar users (vs satisfy an inherent domain constraint).

I don’t know what, once read in context, would give a different impression.

> This might be a bit of hyperbole, but it's probably because the end goal is to eliminate net metering[3].

Yes? That was my point all along? That rather than make token efforts to get the incentives in alignment, they’re just stubbornly fighting things that would benefit solar because “sigh, more work [as things currently stand]”.

> Yes, the regulations are fully meant to scare off anyone who isn't diligent (or the word they would prefer is "compliant").

You’re mixing two separate issues there. Yes, we want people to comply with regulations. No, we don’t want to trick people into not selling their solar because they failed to keep calling and escalating their tickets to an agency that ghosts them. I was referring to the latter, and for some reason you’re redefining the point to refer to the former, and then acting like I don’t understand why we’d want people who can follow regulations.

> Hoo boy, look at page 4 and 5 of that TX PUC document[3] where the regulators make a decision to disallow the utilities from using meters that would allow for net metering due to time bands.

I’m not sure what that means since it’s not a coherent claim, as I understand the original issue, which was whether you can apply credit for power supplied in one time to power drawn at a different time *on your bill.

So “crediting you for your power contribution” is an accounting-level concept, not a hardware-level concept. You trade energy at one time for energy at another time via accounting; you don’t need special meters for it beyond their ability to know when the power passed through. (Unless you’re saying that they prohibited meters with any awareness of time, which is doubtful since they still would need to use billing periods.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30195749

But why conserve? If they find a use for that excess power then they could better their life or the lives of others.

The annoying thing about this is that, if the new California metering rules do end up passing, I will definitely not be installing solar on my roof, because it will end up either costing more in the long run, or the break-even point will be so far out that it's not worth it to me.

Now, as the article says (or at least hints at), maybe there are better things we can do as a society to reduce carbon emissions than have individuals install solar panels on their house, to the point that it doesn't make sense to subsidize it quite as much as we do today. I don't think I've heard regulators and utilities make that argument, though.

I do agree that the generation and transmission infra needs to be paid for, and if I'm giving the grid excess power instead of money, that reduces the utility's ability to maintain their infra (and PG&E is already lacking in that area). And if I do get much lower utility bills (from a solar installation), then that means that eventually utility rates will have to go up. And then essentially lower-income folks, who can't afford solar panels, will be subsidizing people like me who can... which is not remotely fair.

However, if we do believe that residential rooftop solar is something that we need to be promoting and incentivizing, then the current/old net metering rules need to stay. And to make up the difference on the infra side, one of two things needs to happen: 1) utility prices should go up, and the government should offer subsidies and credits to low-income folks, or 2) the government should just fund maintenance of the grid directly.

Net bandwidth is somewhat similar.

During the first dotcom bubble back in the 1990s, the colocation companies (predecessors to today's cloud companies) sold bandwith based on peak bandwidth usage. It was called the 95/5 plan. It worked like this. They measured my egress data and stored it for every five minutes in the month. At the end of the month they'd calculate the 95th percentile of all those five-minute measurements and then charge me for that.

In other words, I paid for peak egress. Now AWS just bills US$0.09 per gigabyte. Their billing algorithm doesn't care about my peak load. And I have to pay just as much for the rest of the year as I would pay on Cyber Monday, when Amazon's bandwidth is spoken for by their own servers. That's a dislocation.

Lots of stuff works that way. Electricity, water, sewer, highway tolls.

Regulated monopoly electric grid operators traditionally get their rates set as a percentage of the value of their accumulated capital physical plant: turbines, poles, cables, transformers, switches, the land they sit on, and all that. Part of that cost is fixed, but most of it varies with the amount of power they sell.

Net billing for domestic solar electric panels isn't fair to the electric grid operator. When I connect to them on a net-zero tariff, I basically get 100%-efficient power storage for free. They're my battery, and a fine battery they are.

The local grid has an excellent pumped-storage hydroelectric rig. It's about 70% efficient, and it's about 70 miles from here. Shouldn't I pay something for all that if I use it? (The Northfield Mountain storage facility was originally built to store the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant's overnight output for peak load, and it outlasted the nuclear plant.)