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SolarCity Will Eliminate Over 550 Job Due to State’s Anti-Rooftop Solar Decision

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Re: SolarCity Will Eliminate Over 550 Job Due to State’s Anti-Rooftop Solar Decision

#181

Post by r00fus »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #66
ndonnellan wrote: post #9

This article seems to have a more thorough explanation: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/is-this-sunny-state-trying-... snip ----------------------- A little-understood billing mechanism called net metering is at the heart of the Nevada controversy. Net metering means that residential and commercial solar customers are billed for their “net” energy consumption. They are allowed to send back to the grid the electricit…

Wow, that's a long reach to get to the OP's "de facto ban on rooftop solar". If we take the OP at face value, then, it seems to be declaring that solar energy is completely impractical, and can't survive without life support. I realize that other forms of energy generation are all subsidized in various ways, so it's clearly not as serious as my above interpretation, but still, it doesn't speak well of solar.

> I realize that other forms of energy generation are all subsidized in various ways, so it's clearly not as serious as my above interpretation, but still, it doesn't speak well of solar.

If solar had even a tenth the subsidies that coal and oil have gotten for the past decades, it'd be on every rooftop by now (especially the nice flat commercial rooftops) and we'd have as many concentrated-solar facilities as coal plants.

Re: SolarCity Will Eliminate Over 550 Job Due to State’s Anti-Rooftop Solar Decision

#182

Post by protomyth »

maxerickson wrote: post #173
toomuchtodo wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LP tank onsite. Its what most rural folks use for heat when there's no infrastructure available. http://www.missiongas.com/images/500gallonpropanetank.jpg

Sure, that's what we used. It ends up being noticeably more costly than natural gas so I think about them as different things (the price is also less stable, this hit Minnesota hard a couple years ago).

Yeah, and it requires a bit of timing to buy correctly. The chart for ND[1] shows the variance of price in a season. Buying when it is really cold is not a great idea. Also, getting the larger tank allowed keeps you from having to do a refill in the middle of the winter.

1) https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=W...

Re: SolarCity Will Eliminate Over 550 Job Due to State’s Anti-Rooftop Solar Decision

#183

Post by apendleton »

dpark wrote: post #90
vinceguidry wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that simple. Solar is only really practical if it fits into the grid system, otherwise there's no real point. The energy it gives you goes up and down, and not in sync with your own household needs. So you need something to do with excess capacity. All by itself, units of power aren't all that expensive. But a solar installation is very expensive. You need to amortize the cost of the installation, the people…

> Why should they pay wholesale? They're not buying in wholesale quantities from each consumer. Why should they pay retail? As a consumer thinking about solar, I like that, but it makes no economical sense. What business can afford to buy and sell for the same price? You don't sell a car to the dealership for the price they will sell it for. That would be absurd.

> Why should they pay retail?

Obviously under completely free-market conditions, they wouldn't. But under those conditions, power companies would burn nothing but coal and nobody would have any solar. Coal is really cheap. Retail net metering is society actively meddling with the free market to mitigate a societal ill, and forcing big polluters to subsidize cleaner energy. I don't see a problem with that.

Re: SolarCity Will Eliminate Over 550 Job Due to State’s Anti-Rooftop Solar Decision

#184

Post by xenadu02 »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #110
vinceguidry wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that simple. Solar is only really practical if it fits into the grid system, otherwise there's no real point. The energy it gives you goes up and down, and not in sync with your own household needs. So you need something to do with excess capacity. All by itself, units of power aren't all that expensive. But a solar installation is very expensive. You need to amortize the cost of the installation, the people…

> What this is all about is the power companies are suddenly deciding they want to pay wholesale for excess power. Why should they pay wholesale? The power companies (normally) have enough power to supply everyone; they buy that power at wholesale prices and sell it to the customer at retail prices. So why, if they can always buy power at wholesale prices, should they deliberately pay retail prices instead? Doing so…

Because we are talking about offsetting credits here. In most schemes the power company won't cut you a check, they just run your bill down to zero (assuming you overproduce for the entire year).

By paying wholesale when you have excess yet charging retail when you don't they are effectively charging you _their_ profit margin on _your_ own electricity.

Solar customers already pay the grid maintenance charges. Even if we assumed the utilities were entitled to some compensation for providing this service to solar customers it certainly wouldn't be the spread between wholesale and retail rates.

Re: SolarCity Will Eliminate Over 550 Job Due to State’s Anti-Rooftop Solar Decision

#185

Post by beatpanda »

Want to help solve this problem? My company, Genability, builds software to help solar companies and other new energy companies figure out how to make the economics of clean power "pencil out". And we're hiring! http://genability.com/careers/work_with_us.html

Re: SolarCity Will Eliminate Over 550 Job Due to State’s Anti-Rooftop Solar Decision

#186

Post by feld »

vosper wrote: post #144
thescriptkiddie wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A power company is not a normal business, they are a public utility. They aren't supposed to be making money, they're supposed to be providing a public service.

Who says they can't do both?

The law. Utilities cannot profit on the electricity they sell.

Re: SolarCity Will Eliminate Over 550 Job Due to State’s Anti-Rooftop Solar Decision

#187

Post by feld »

Electricity is much more fragile than people realize. When you flip on a light switch the power to light up your room is being generated instantly. That's the problem. Utilities do not have large batteries. Electricity is generated on demand and the utilities have to estimate exactly how much power they need to generate ALL THE TIME.

When a utility adds wind and solar to their portfolio they also have to hire experts to analyze the weather. These experts need to estimate how much power the wind and solar are going to provide every day. There are times when entire wind farms are shut off because they will be generating too much power! There are other times when they are shut off because of concern that the weather could damage them. This is not easy.

Imagine adding tens of thousands of tiny solar arrays to your grid and then having no knowledge of how well they are going to operate. You can't possibly begin to estimate what the cloud cover is going to be like for all of these installations over your territory. You don't know how well they are maintained. You don't have any clue if they're kept clean. You might not have the infrastructure to accept electricity back into the grid (substation upgrades are not cheap).

The grid would gladly accept your power if they knew it was safe to do so. The fact is that it isn't. If too little power is generated, brownouts or blackouts occur. If too much is generated equipment is damaged and shit starts on fire.

What we need is a SMART grid. It does not exist yet. It will take many years. Large battery installations may be a good stop-gap. But to vilify the utilities is ignorance when you don't really understand how the grid works.

edit: I actually know of a giant private wind farm that was built on the idea that they could sell access to it back to a utility. Unfortunately it has been sitting dormant for a couple years because the cost to get the backhaul to the windfarm was too much, and the private investor had no idea the windfarm couldn't just be hooked up.

Re: SolarCity Will Eliminate Over 550 Job Due to State’s Anti-Rooftop Solar Decision

#188

Post by hnnicker »

inthewoods wrote: post #70

Seems like they need a middle ground - not selling at wholesale prices or full retail. Putting the price at wholesale doesn't take into account the costs for the homeowner (or a 3rd party company like SolarCity) to invest in solar panels. Selling at retail doesn't take into account cost of grid maintenance for the power companies. It also doesn't make a lot of sense to me that they charge higher fees to connect to th…

I have solar panels on my house. During the summer when they produce more than I use, pretty much all the excess power goes into my neighbor's house. So if the utility says "you pay retail when the meter spins forward, but get wholesale credit when it spins backwards", then I could make a deal with my neighbor to run some power lines from some of my panels to his side of his meter and charge him just below retail. That way my neighbor and I both pay less for power overall.

This arbitrage shows that only crediting wholesale prices is the wrong price.

Re: SolarCity Will Eliminate Over 550 Job Due to State’s Anti-Rooftop Solar Decision

#189

Post by JoshTriplett »

polartx wrote: post #176
xavi wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of subsidizing green power, I think it would make more sense that producers of non-green power would pay for the real cost of their power, including the environmental cost, through a carbon tax for example (also suggested by others, https://twitter.com/paultoo/status/672568359033040896 ). Because, it's not that we have to do a favor to green producers, but we should make non-green producers pay for the possib…

The state already taxes electricity consumption, the same way you pay state taxes per your rate of gasoline consumption. People that drive 'green' cars are inherently rewarded with paying few taxes at the pump, because they are buying less fuel. Though they may be using the roads and travel infrastructure (which are partially funded by gas taxes) as much as 'non-green' drivers..is this fair for all? Not really, but i…

> Not really, but imagine the fallout of charging Prius drivers more per gallon in order to increase their contribution to the infrastructure that they're using.

More than one jurisdiction has actually attempted a hybrid/electric surcharge with that exact purported justification: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/nc-lawmakers-propose-50-100-f...

Re: SolarCity Will Eliminate Over 550 Job Due to State’s Anti-Rooftop Solar Decision

#190

Post by rhino369 »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #156
JoshTriplett wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What this is all about is the power companies are suddenly deciding they want to pay wholesale for excess power. Why should they pay wholesale? The power companies (normally) have enough power to supply everyone; they buy that power at wholesale prices and sell it to the customer at retail prices. So why, if they can always buy power at wholesale prices, should they deliberately pay retail prices instead? Doing so…

The people with rooftop solar are providing a subsidy to everyone else, because even at net rates, they're not being fully compensated for the value they provide to the grid. I realise that might sound "crazy" because lots of well paid PR people are telling you the opposite, but it's true.

What extra value are they bringing the the grid.
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