How should net metering affect your electric bill? • Hacker News Board

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

#301

Post by sagarm » Fri, Feb 04, 2022, 4:22 AM UTC

GravitasFailure wrote: post #272

kelnos wrote: post #267

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…

California requires[0] new construction to have solar now, so while you might not have to worry about installing it you very well may be stuck with a system if you move. I'm not sure I agree with your assertion that increased solar installs will leave less money for grid infrastructure. With the moves away from gas for heating and cooking and the proliferation of electric cars, it seems that demand for residential po…

The California requirements can be met with off-site solar, though this is currently being litigated.

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

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Post by josephcsible » Fri, Feb 04, 2022, 4:23 AM UTC

jupp0r wrote: post #252

The solution to the problem is real time pricing based on the grid's requirements at any moment in time. The current model also disincentives battery installations. If prices were adapted to grid requirements, we'd have negative energy prices during peak solar production hours so customers should be encouraged to charge their own batteries using their solar or even get paid for charging their batteries via the grid.…

> The current model also disincentives battery installations.

Isn't this actually a good thing, at least right now? Wouldn't replacing more ICE vehicles with EVs help the environment more than installing more Powerwalls would, and don't EVs and Powerwalls both share the same currently-constrained battery supply?

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

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Post by 1123581321 » Fri, Feb 04, 2022, 4:24 AM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #93

bmmayer1 wrote: post #3

Good piece...putting on my econ hat here, it would definitely be more accurate to say that prices are signals that reflect the all-in cost of moving products and their dependencies through a supply chain and to the consumer. These signals can be disrupted by many factors, including competition or lack thereof, regulation or tax policy, etc, that often can make things inefficient. But in the examples the author uses,…

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…

Product and service information is transmitted along with price, and insufficient information drives demand for methods to price more granularity without increasing transaction costs. Or to decrease transaction costs to allow research into purchases more difficult to understand.

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

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Post by Panzer04 » Fri, Feb 04, 2022, 4:54 AM UTC

zbrozek wrote: post #160

thatfrenchguy wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It encourages you to use more electricity though, which is not good.

The current system in PG&E territory encourages me to prefer gas to electricity everywhere I'm able to make the choice. That's surely worse.

Only if it means you’d prefer resistive heaters to heat pumps. In home gas is more efficient than a resistance heater.

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

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Post by helpm33 » Fri, Feb 04, 2022, 5:05 AM UTC

Bilal_io wrote: post #219

nomel wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You realize most people love in apartments right? Most apartments don't have fireplaces. No, I mean the little burners you put on top of portable propane tanks, that are usually used for BBQ's or while camping. Searching "campground propane burner" in Amazon shows several hundred results of what I'm talking about. They don't require a campground to operate. > Or fix the damn infrastructure. You and your fear exists…

Thank you for the advise. I will invest in one of those burners.

You have to be careful using these burners in in-building enclosed spaces---they can produce carbon monoxide. They are really designed for open air use.

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

#306

Post by elihu » Fri, Feb 04, 2022, 5:07 AM UTC

paulmd wrote: post #95

epistasis wrote: post #42

One thing that's missing from this is that with current California net metering, for new solar customers, you can't dump a kWh on the grid at noon and then swap it for one at 7pm at the top of the duck curve. New plans are all time-of-use rated, meaning that you can only swap kWh within the same time of use band. At least, that's how it's been explained to me, I have not yet been able to find any explicit rules on PG…

> 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 t…

> 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.

I think that's kind of backwards of what we really need in the long run, though. With renewable energy, supply is variable and a large, well-connected grid is what you need to even out supply and demand. (An extreme form of this would be transcontinental HVCD lines so solar farms on the day side of the Earth can sell to customers on the night side.)

It's nice to have local power generation to keep some/most of the load off the grid in the average case, but I still think that it's important to have a grid that can handle high load during unusual circumstances. (And our use of electricity is just going to keep going up, especially as ICE vehicles are replaced by EVs. This is a good thing, but it requires more infrastructure.)

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

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Post by gwbas1c » Fri, Feb 04, 2022, 5:16 AM UTC

Dave_Rosenthal wrote: post #99

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,…

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

In part, you should only be able to get net metering if you have a battery that the power company can control. Thus you benefit from cheaper electricity, and the power company benefits because they can control when the electricity enters the grid.

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

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Post by HWR_14 » Fri, Feb 04, 2022, 5:16 AM UTC

He omits the biggest issue with net metering. He claims "the utility is acting like a giant battery." But it's not. Power plants don't turn off/on with demand, at least not that rapidly changing a demand. And the grid doesn't store electricity. The reason electricity prices have gone negative is that the grid needs to offload the power somehow. If everyone is producing tons of solar during the day, feeding back to the grid, and consuming at night, the utility is twice fucked over. They have to pay to dispose of daylight power, and then pay to generate and transmit night power, all while making no money.

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

#309

Post by yuliyp » Fri, Feb 04, 2022, 5:23 AM UTC

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #233

yuliyp wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is this mythical $0.40/kWh price for electricity (not transmission) actually occurring? Net metering does not expire after a year. You can continue to get any power you need matching the power you had put in on a 1:1 basis. The 1c/kWh is for the excess. Most of PG&E's infrastructure is transmission infrastructure, not generation. They wouldn't be building power plants themselves, anyway. Net metering allows roo…

> Where is this mythical $0.40/kWh price for electricity (not transmission) actually occurring? The standard residental TOU plan for PG&E peak usage ranges from $0.33 to $0.45 depending on the season. Have a look yourself[1]. But PG&E actually classes your solar power as green energy and sells it to "solar choice" customers at even HIGHER prices[2]. > Net metering does not expire after a year. You can continue to get…

Oh, I guess it'd been a couple years since I viewed the rate tables. In my mind peak prices were closer to $0.30. My mistake.

The point is that the 1:1 ability to exchange power you generate for power to consume is a better deal than anyone else gets: Half of the per-kWh cost of electricity PG&E sells goes toward transmission (aka maintaining poles and cables) and half toward the actual generation. If you produce 1 kWh at noon, and consume one at 8 pm, you pay 0, so contribute nothing toward the poles that provided that electricity to you when you needed it. So in the end, you paid $0 for that net neutral exchange, while PG&E received $0.40 from the other customer. They paid ~0.15 for the kWh they provided to you. Overall that means that they delivered 2 kWh over their lines and got $0.25, which is half of what they would have otherwise gotten for delivering 2 kWh over their lines.

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

#310

Post by danans » Fri, Feb 04, 2022, 5:42 AM UTC

dzhiurgis wrote: post #293

danans wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This typically manifests itself to retail customers the form of free Nest thermostats, time of use programs, and subsidized appliance efficiency upgrades (or rebates). > If they could redirect this money to small generators like yourself and have the same impact, they would drop their demand management programs in a heartbeat The catch is that the power from small solar generators isn't as valuable as demand manage…

At some point if not already batteries are cheaper than grid upgrades

Having recently installed a battery, I'd say they are definitely not cheaper. There is no way that residential battery storage can match the cost per kWh of utility scale storage.