201–210 of 510 posts
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/topic/7?agg=0...
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Perhaps instead of being angry that people are using taxes that come from the working class, instead you should ask why the wealthy aren't paying their share of the taxes? And nobody pays for anything with inflation. That's not how inflation works.
"The top 1 percent paid a greater share of individual income taxes (38.8 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (29.2 percent)."[1] How is that not paying their share? [1] https://taxfoundation.org/publications/latest-federal-income...
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Just bake new panels into the cost of a new roof. It's probably time for both after 25 years.
Eh? My crappy roof was installed in 1945 and has some life left. What sort of roofing lasts 25 years?
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It sounds like they have a good net energy metering plan that is crediting them for their solar being put back to the grid. (So they don't have to pay for charging the electric car in the evening when solar stops working) I wonder if Texas is working to walk that back like California is right now.
almost certainly. Net metering is ultimately unsustainable. Realistically we should be paying homeowners wholesale electricity rates + an amount to cover transmission savings + whatever incentive we decide on for the energy they produce (along with time of use based consumption charges). This would likely incentivize storage, and could be extremely valuable with V2G technologies that are incoming.
Slightly off topic, but is there a service that would quote out a new roof + solar install? We're waiting on doing solar until we need a new roof as ours is ~9-10 years old, and not near EOL.
You could consider getting a solar roof! I have no particular expertise here, but a guy down the street from me got one, and he loves it so far (~1.5 years into it). Here's an article about it with a few vendors, including Tesla, that might help: https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/solar/solar-shingles...
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Over the last 8 quarters their average profit margin is a whopping 3.25%. If you think that’s just too high I’m not sure what to tell you. An alternate way to look at the CA rule change is that CA needs more installed storage to shore up the shitty grid, and incentivizing people to install solar alone via net metering isn’t a great idea anymore. Remember that peak power demand is right around and just after sunset.
> Over the last 8 quarters their average profit margin is a whopping 3.25% This is the trade-off you take when you become a quasi-government company. You get a low, but nearly guaranteed profit. Executives still get their bonuses, employees get paid, etc. If they want more variable rates of return then they can drop the public protections and go full private like any other regular company.
Or, the California grid when Enron was doing market manipulations like paying power companies to shut down and induce a brown/blackout.
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Net metering is a regressive tax on the poor, because when rich people get solar panels and sell back to the grid at retail prices, the utility has to raise rates on everyone else to pay their large fixed costs. It may have been a good idea at one point when residential solar was so rare as to be effectively nonexistent, but now it has to be abandoned.
In my state, generation is still pretty "regulated" and the cost of generation is a separate line item on my bill, technically from a different company, from distribution. There's no reason at all I shouldn't be paid the same price per kWh for generation.
I am surprised at these power bills, at least in my area the implied "savings" are 2-3 times what my bill is on any given month. Huge house maybe?
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I'm not affiliated, but Solar Wholesale is a DIY that can be 1/4 the cost of hiring a contractor: https://www.solarwholesale.com Even the wiring is DIY. Most people think this requires a lot of skill, but you are just adding an input to your panel board on your house.
I would love to DIY but that website is a complete turn off for me. In my opinion, a good DIY solar company site would have transparent pricing and ability to buy components. I understand there are variations in installations and pricing may be different, but they should have a pricing catalog.
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Hottest month for me was aug, I paid around 161 ~$135 1190kWh (charged at ~$0.114 / kWh) ~$10.50 tax ~15.50 other fees/riders which can not be recouped with panels OP is somehow paying ~25c/kWh, though I have to believe they are counting the connections fees etc in their estimate, based on natl averages they would be an outlier for most states. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/
That's wild. I live in an extremely hot and humid part of the country, in the Gulf Coast; probably the area with the highest AC demand in the summer. I routinely exceed $300 a month in the hotter months. Do you have a particularly small or recently-built, well-insulated house?