How should net metering affect your electric bill?
climateer.substack.com
How should net metering affect your electric bill?
1–10 of 332 posts
Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?
#2“In practice, it’s often politically difficult to argue for overt subsidies, and we resort to workarounds like net metering.“
The reason we have so many hidden subsidies (also: tax credits) is precisely the sentence above. It’s the difference between policy and politics. Few policies are designed well because the main force driving their creation is political support (or the lack of it).
Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?
#3Good 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, it's not that the price is divorced from cost, it's that the price of video tapes reflects the all-in cost of production, distribution, as well as the cost of fighting piracy. High medical prices reflect the incentives and constraints of the system that has been built around the service. High drug prices reflect the cost of R&D, not the cost of pouring cheap compounds into a plastic mold.
Which is not to say that prices are not truthful per se -- just that pricing signals can be easily disrupted by factors not normally in the consumer's direct field of vision, and can be exploited by "loopholes" (which are just another way to send a signal back to the firm that the price is incorrect).
Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?
#4“In practice, it’s often politically difficult to argue for overt subsidies, and we resort to workarounds like net metering.“ The reason we have so many hidden subsidies (also: tax credits) is precisely the sentence above. It’s the difference between policy and politics. Few policies are designed well because the main force driving their creation is political support (or the lack of it).
"carbon tax" is trouble to enact because you can't expect to rally support for something with the word tax in its name
Then people complain about where will that tax money go. It doesn't matter. The government could burn all the carbon tax money collected (& in fact, this would help against inflation). The purpose is to fix incentives, not find funding
Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?
#5OP hints at this - but the problem seems to be net metering lumps capacity payments in with the cost of power.
Some markets run a separate capacity market that rewards power generators explicitly for their capacity - independently of whether they actually generate any electricity. (California's market (CAISO) doesn't do this)
A long time ago I was involved in setting capacity market prices if y'all have follow up questions.
Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?
#6If some states weren't captured by utility monopolies, then solar users would be legally allowed to disconnect from the power grid, potentially solving the first issue. It's amazing to me that this is illegal anywhere.
Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?
#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 gone, but those 90s CD prices are why we have streaming services today.
Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?
#8I only want solar/wind/etc if I can be off grid.
Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?
#9No post body was provided.
Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?
#10>> 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 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.