Just for factual background, engaging data has a new infographic about California energy production that is useful [1]
Worth noting that there isn't a lot of room for growth of solar that isn't battery-backed. California exports a ton of energy during the bright months. As a practical matter, the era of sending excess rooftop solar generation to the grid is over.
If you look at that graph for a whole day you will see a huge kick-in of power company owned battery storage in the evening. There is no reason the grid cannot operate batteries at scale to absorb excess rooftop generation. NYT: https://archive.is/t1uPj
For profit utility participants are desperately afraid of their return on equity being crushed by the new energy model, hence the need for strong political response from the citizenry. The grid can absolutely operate in the manner you describe, but profits will be diminished and investors will struggle to reach for previous profit potential unless you're in a non profit config (coop and whatnot).
Shades of "The Innovator's Dilemma" and what not. Incumbents do not care for their gravy train being taken away.
> Investor-owned utilities, or IOUs, are large electric distributors that issue stock owned by shareholders. Almost three-quarters of utility customers get their electricity from these companies. IOUs are most prevalent in heavily populated areas on the East and West coasts. In 2017, 168 IOUs served an average of 654,600 electric customers. The two largest IOUs are in California: Pacific Gas and Electric, with 5.48 million customers, and Southern California Edison Company, with 5.07 million customers.
No, not exactly. "the era of sending excess rooftop solar generation to the grid is over" is the OP's statement I disagree with. "They can't take any more solar input", yes they can, by adding more grid battery, which is currently happening.
> Worth noting that there isn't a lot of room for growth of solar that isn't battery-backed. California exports a ton of energy during the bright months. As a practical matter, the era of sending excess rooftop solar generation to the grid is over.
They are referring to the last sentence in the paragraph you referenced.
I know BC hydro buys cheap power from other utilities to keep the reservoirs as full as possible. If California has excessive Solar power it could be used to keep the hydro reservoirs in BC, Washington, Oregon, and northern California full for other times.
Electricity prices in California are 3x higher because of PG&E's monopoly on distribution combined with their wildfire risk liability from reckless power line building standards, not because of higher generation costs.
Correct. That's the difference between the wholesale spot price on the open market and what PG&E charges consumers on their bill.
There's lots of supply and less demand at noon in June compared to 6 pm in January. You're not going to get anywhere near average retail price for exports in either case, but especially not in the first one.
Out of state buyers don't care about PG&E's liabilities either, they are choosing from competing suppliers. They are not captive to PG&E's monopoly the way consumers are, so PG&E has no hope of charging them their retail rate.
It seems like the next major energy invention we need is long-term storage. Batteries have gotten much more cost effective, but you still need to amortize their costs over hundreds of charge-discharge cycles to get a payback. They're too expensive to store summer energy for the winter.
If you had an energy storage technology that could store energy with a very low storage cost, even if it were very inefficient, you could make use of the massive coming excess of summer solar power.
> A controversial energy project in south central Washington is one step closer to breaking ground. A federal commission released its final environmental review for the Goldendale Energy Storage Project — to the consternation of several tribes and environmental groups.
> The project is part of a potential solution to one of the biggest problems for renewable energy development: the variability of wind and solar. As the Northwest transitions off fossil fuels, power will need to be stored for when the sun doesn’t shine, and the wind doesn’t blow.
It's very difficult to come to simple conclusions that are accurate in the case of California power generation.
One of the reasons it's so complicated is that the State in California intervenes in the market in so many (sometimes contradictory) ways. The incentives are often perverse and exactly the opposite of what you would expect.
In attempting to protect consumers, California in the long run has created a market with almost the highest prices in the nation. Simultaneously, and surprisingly, those high prices have not translated into some kind of futuristic or resilient grid. California has not had power outages not because California is better than Texas in terms of technology ... rather California is blessed with a climate that doesn't really suffer state-wide extremes.
As bad as California's public schools are, I think within twenty years we will realize that the thing Sacramento politicians fucked up the most was not the schools ... it was the power grid. Talk to anyone that runs a power intensive manufacturing enterprise in CA. They have already moved their facilities to another state or they already have a plan to do so.
California imports from other states all the energy-intensive inputs and exports its pollution and smugly pats itself on the back. All while taxing its citizens with some of the highest residential power pricing too.
> California has not had power outages not because California is better than Texas in terms of technology ... rather California is blessed with a climate that doesn't really suffer state-wide extremes.
This is a consequence of California's grid being in the Western Interconnection, so there's a lot of capacity to import/export to other states. Texas's grid is mostly isolated in order to preempt federal regulations; they have very limited ability to import/export power.
The page on interties [1] is awfully hard to read, but I think it says socal can get ~ 4 GW from norcal via Path 26 (which can get 4.8 GW from oregon via Path 66), and socal can also get 11 GW from the east via path 46, and 3 GW from Washington via path 65.
Tres Amigas was cancelled, but was proposed to have 5 GW from each of the three grids (Western, Eastern, Texas), to the other two. I can't find a list of capacity for active ties between Texas and other grids.
Yeah, not only have we had unplanned outages, but PG&E has preemptively shut off power in large urban areas during weeks of high fire risk. Happened multiple times, but I specifically remember the 2020 rolling blackouts.
> rather California is blessed with a climate that doesn't really suffer state-wide extremes.
No the reason that California doesn't have capacity outages is because we've executed steadily on the most ambitious battery energy storage project in the nation, and now have over 8GW of said batteries. And because the CPUC regime despite the vocal whining of a few impacted industries has also walked a fine line giving us a huge installed base of rooftop solar.
Texas has 6.3GW of battery capacity installed largely in the last three years and is on track for another ~15GW (a bit over 20GW total) by the end of 2024. There's 141GW of battery projects in the queue for connection to ERCOT, with a large chunk of that coming online in 2025 and 2026.
If 8GW over several is the most ambitious, what's 160GW in five years?
Yes, I give TX full credit here. However, you'll note that Texas uses way more grid electricity than California, so in terms of load served from battery California is far ahead and will remain that way for several years barring changes in strategy.
Yes, but not having capacity outages is a very low bar in the developed world, whereas the prices Californians pay for electricity is much higher than most places.
Two separate problems. PG&E is guaranteed a return on capital, so the prices are just going to be what they are until the state unwinds that bad deal. It doesn't have much to do with anything else.
The two "problems" are related in that California's not having capacity outages does very little to offset the fact that whoever decided how to provide electricity for Calfornia did a bad job.
no, not really accurate.. more outrage than details.
fifty years+ ago, PG&E operated an engineering marvel, built and managed by engineers with a mission and expanding economy post-WWII. Decisions were made with reliability in mind, great feats of large scale building were accomplished and made stable.
Then, things changed inside PG&E regarding upper management and their goals. Engineers retired or elbowed out by business-oriented Cxx level. The lure of continuous income coupled with a de-facto alignment with ultra-conservative political forces, castling up against the tides of 1970s-80s politics. Supervision by regulators was compromised repeatedly. Insider politics entered at all levels but not "the politicians" it was multi-stakeholder command and control making alliances and payoffs over time.
All of this was moving along as a juggernaut when de-regulation entered. Instead of a democratic market for competing providers, in came Enron. As genuine panic spread due to the first ever blackouts, legal actions were taken that drew back the curtain from the insider deals. PG&E management had found loopholes to use company money to buy out of state assets for profit. Cost-cutting ruled over safety (tree trimming, long haul line insulators).
After emergency maneuvers to regain the grid and Enron was rendered harmless, then some of the rant above applies, yes. Recent events (death and destruction) are out of the control of any faction or individual. New rate increases are evidence of Big State politics tied with Homeland Security and budget creep and a thousand other factors. With all that said, yes this is a political problem by definition, agree.
source: attorney on the Enron case for California; book Scorched Worth by Joel Engel; public news
Another reason we haven't had those blackouts is that electrical efficiency is increasing, even as we increase demand. For example imagine all the CRT screens, street lights, and incandescent bulbs that were all replaced with LCDs.
New construction is also often tied to more generation and higher efficiency. Even a brand new McMansion uses less power than a 40 year old house that's half the size. There's also even odds that new McMansion was mandated to have solar.
this is physically impossible. You can't have more demand in terms of kw-h, joules, amps, watts or whatever yet also not have more demand. The device could have 0.0001% efficiency or 99.99%. If demand goes up, demand goes up. What the device does with that power is not relevant.
An LED lamp puts out more lumens per watt than a fluorescent or incandescent lamp.
Similarly, an induction motor controlled by a variable frequency drive can use much less energy by varying its speed instead of using a fixed speed motor starter. VFDs typically get signals from building automation or process control systems and adjust the motor speed accordingly. An arbitrary example would be a fan running at 50% speed generating 50% airflow but using only 25% of the electricity needed to run at 100%.
> You can't have more demand in terms of kw-h, joules, amps, watts or whatever yet also not have more demand.
You can have a demand for more lumens of lighting power... but if you previously used incandescent bulbs and now go for LED, you can expend less electrical energy than you did with the old bulbs.
Imagine the increase in demand without the efficiency improvements. Improving everything that pulls power significantly decreases the growth curve, meaning more time to increase available capacity.
They export heavily when the sun is in abundance and import heavily when it isn't. Their move to an electricity market instead of just having regulated utilities was one of the first in the nation and most of the early ones all had big issues as the experience just wasn't there in the design of the market. Now, each market region has a market monitor that looks for the things than Enron did (example: physical withholding to make prices rise). My belief is now that you should never be a first mover on those kinds of things.
The CA home solar subsidies read to me like we've given up on fixing our utilities. Like it's our job to generate our own power from our roofs now, not a power company with access to dedicated facilities that can be far more efficient. Some of my coworkers in the Bay Area even invested in whole-home UPS like Tesla Powerwall because they've been hit by too many blackouts, as if it's not the utility's job anymore to provide reliable power.
We have a similar trainwreck of horrible utility policy in south Washington where the state is sunsetting hydro & solar power at the same time they are banning natural gas.
It makes me think that the goal is to reduce capacity and increase cost to reduce demand.
Policy makers seem to think the grid is like the freeway and if capacity is reduced, demand will be reduced as well.
> is like the freeway and if capacity is reduced, demand will be reduced as well.
Reducing freeway capacity does not reduce demand. It just displaces people who can least afford to be on the road fully off the road. It's effectively just a form of regressive taxation.
It reduces demand in the long term but not without a reorganization. The rich people who work in the city move to the city, reducing traffic demand. The poor people who ideally don't work in the city move away from it, reducing traffic demand. The "inner cities" gentrify. Traffic demand is reduced though.
Look at real estate price patterns in Munich vs Berlin. Berlin's pricing is relatively flat, because it's spread out and has lots of public transportation options. In Munich, prices peak a lot higher in the center, then taper off more quickly.
Meanwhile PSE is throwing so many subsidies at homeowners for improving energy efficiency to try to delay building another dam. For a bunch of insulation and duct work I had quoted last year, I was eligible for a few hundred in subsidies, now it's a few thousand or more.
based on the gigawatts of reduced capacity i'm guessing these subsidies are a distraction. In the same way that recycling helped the industry avoid high redemption fees
As a domestic p.v. owner, I do consider p.v. ONLY for self-consumption, simply because on scale current grid can't sustain it. Harmonic perturbation and quick output variations are too big issues for today, while for self-consumption p.v. is a very good match:
- I use my energy when I can, pushing me to shifting loads as much as I can, I spend less, witch at today grid rates, at least here in France, it's already sufficient to pay back the investment (with an important note, below);
- the grid get less loads in peak moments, at least in the current state of things, where most loads happen during the day most of the time.
Now the important note: I self-made my p.v. because here it's legal to do so and I spent 11.500€ for a 5kWp/8kWh (and I regret not to have choose 10kWp) while the cheapest offer from a local p.v. company was ~30.000 and the highest ~50.000€. This is simply RIDICULOUS. If we price p.v. at reasonable rates and impose self-consumption current state of things makes p.v. viable and contemporary solve the "issue" of p.v. plant in agriculture and in nature in general, if you can't self-consume you do not install them.
The energy "model" is done just for speculation and does not work for a green transition. We need to push cheap p.v. for self-consumption and focus on load shifting (for instance with serious design of most home appliances) and storage. This or there will be no green new deal in general.
This is quite editorialized. A different way of putting this is that the government has reduced solar subsidies (reduced rates for excess) and won't be passing a bunch of new restrictions on the industry. These sound like good things. Let the market work.
That would be great if it worked both ways. I don't have a choice, I have to use PG&E. They have no incentive to lower prices when their energy prices drop. The point of all those regulations is to force them to pass on their savings to consumers who have no choice in energy provider.
If we have so much solar generation during summer, why isn't my energy free or nearly so? If the market worked correctly, they would be paying me to use energy in the summer.
But instead PG&Es profits get to go up, because I have no choice but to use PG&E.
> If we have so much solar generation during summer, why isn't my energy free or nearly so?
In general, as variable renewable energy penetration in grid increases, the cost will be more dominated by distribution of electricity, not wholesale price of generation of electricity.
That's what s1artibartfast is saying. They want things to be very expensive because that's how they make the most money. Lowering expenses means they need to lower their prices which lowers their revenues which lowers their profits.
The same is true of healthcare insurance in the US. The Affordable Care Act instituted an 80/20% rule for insurers. Naturally, the best way to increase profit is to drive up the cost of healthcare.
I do not believe that this is accurate. California Investor Owned Utilities (IOUs) have had their profit decoupled from revenue since 1981. [0]
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) allows for an equity rate of return on assets of approx 10% (9.3). [1]
As a result, California IOUs don't have an incentive to sell more power, but do have an economic incentive to build more assets. Asset construction is driven by growing peak demand. Or under-investment in O&M.
I believe there is a distinction between profits for "transmission" specifically and for electric utilities more broadly. The FERC ruling that you reference is for PG&E's transmission assets, i.e. high voltage lines and transformers and such. I assume that their retail electric business is regulated by CPUC and has a different profit/revenue/whatever arrangement.
Sure. No one is asking for that amount though. Every utility bill has the breakdown of the costs. Just pay me the per unit cost listed in the “generation” part of the utility bill. I’m pretty sure even then, I’d be at a disadvantage, assuming PG&E would have a lower cost advantage in generating electricity in bulk.
I wonder how many home/commercial/community solar systems (battery-backed or not) have the equipment needed to (a) generate their own 60 Hz sine wave (of good-enough quality to sync to the grid), (b) automatically disconnect from the grid when it loses its connection (to prevent backfeeding during outages), and (c) properly reconnect (including syncing) when the grid comes back.
I remember, at least in the beginning, smaller systems were unable to provide their own sine wave, and would rely on the grid for that. And even today, if full net-metering were in place (with the possibility of export), I would expect the grid to still provide phase synchronization (when solar is not exporting), and a path to other consumers (when solar is exporting).
Enphase IQ8s have grid-forming capabilities since they came out in 2021 [1], and they're one of the major vendors. Same with the SolarEdge EnergyHub since 2020 [2], the other major U.S. vendor. Globally, Sungrow [3] and Huawei [4] both support grid-forming in their inverters, and their sales dwarf the U.S. manufacturers.
If you relax condition a), it's an even larger percentage. I've got IQ7a's and a PowerWall (installed 2020) and they transparently switch over to battery whenever there's an outage and switch back. I just looked at my Tesla backup history and there've been 5 power outages in the last year, and I haven't noticed any of them.
The sine wave syncing is probably the only real issue.
There have existed automated transfer switches for years and years. My FIL, when he lost power, would very loudly start a countdown from 60 to 0, where his system would kick over to natural gas via the detection of a power-loss event, via an automated transfer switch.
So the people against it argue, good faith or not, that it violates federal law, and the article arguing for it mentions this repeatedly but chooses not to tell us what federal law it is so we can read it and form an opinion ourselves. I don't appreciate being manipulated.
Doesn't new construction mandate solar PV (or similar) on all structures? I can't see a public utility sitting idly by and allowing that to cut into their profit.
I think it has less to do with profit and more to do with balancing generation. CA is already capped out at solar usage unless you are storing that solar energy somewhere.
Simple policies are easy to understand, easy to comply with and have more predictable externalities and second order effects.
The PG&E poppycock is hard to understand. Even I do not fully understand their BS like net metering.
Just make solar panels cheaper so that a lot of people see benefit in buying them to meet their energy needs and lower the energy costs in a way it benefits PG&E too.
If I understand correctly, installing a better + solar panels might solve a lot of these problems for some homes.
If you neglected the labor costs of installation, along with the inverters, racking, permitting, etc., they'd pay for themselves in _under a year_ in PG&E territory, which lists a 43c/kWh rate on their website. And that's before any tax or feed-in tariff incentives.
"Better" (efficiency) is completely irrelevant to this math problem.
The way it works here in Washington is that when you generate excess power during a billing cycle you get energy credits for it rather than money. During subsequent billing cycles when you use more than you generate the credits are automatically applied.
Hooking up your own power to the grid is always going to be politically complicated. The places where it isn't are the places where there isn't enough of it for anyone to notice. When you introduce a special pricing structure that tries to prevent certain people from paying for certain power (51% of solar power must go to low-income people?) that just makes no sense according to the known laws of physics and it's no surprise it's problematic.
Presumably non-grid-connected projects are unaffected.
The BIPOC and LGBTQ communities are disproportionately impacted by the unjust distribution of electric potential so I don't see any problem with California requiring that PG&E work to achieve Electron Justice and ensure that those electrons whose voltages were created by clean solar energy are distributed equitably.
I couldn't read much after this line which deliberately ignores the totality of the issue:
> In 2022, the California Public Utilities Commission drastically slashed the rate that utilities pay homeowners with new solar panels for excess energy sold to the grid — cratering demand for residential solar and sparking thousands of layoffs of solar workers.
At the end of the day, net metering simply is not feasible for any electric utility long term, and it's not fair, either: people that can get by on 0-net electricity use pay nothing for the real, significant benefit of being connected to the grid. Also, electric utilities, like many/most businesses, depend on buying a product at wholesale prices and then selling it at retail prices. With net metering it's essentially forcing utilities to buy their power at retail rates. That is simply not sustainable for any business.
And look, as a homeowner, I would love net metering, but who doesn't love getting something (the value of being connected to the grid) for nothing. I'm also not saying that California couldn't have "eased the transition" from net metering better by providing other subsidies, or changing the rate model altogether by charging separately for "hookup" vs. "power" line items. But it doesn't make any sense to simply complain that an unsustainable model was eventually switched to something that is sustainable.
If you have a wind, solar, and storage setup on your house that supplies 110% of your household needs... who pays for the hookup and maintenance for your house to be connected to the grid?
With the current approach, that is paid for by everyone. If you are just paying for the net energy used from the grid, and that's 0 (or less) then someone else is paying for the grid infrastructure maintenance (that you are using to push your power out onto the grid).
That in turn means that the people who can least afford to offset their own power consumption by installing rooftop solar and whole house backup batteries are the ones that are paying proportionally more for those who can do rooftop solar and backup to be able to connect to the grid.
And that's where the problem with just net metering is.
If it was net metering + flat infrastructure fee, that would be a different thing.
The sustainability that PG&E is concerned about in this context is the sustainability of the infrastructure itself - not the power sources. California is concerned that the maintenance of the infrastructure (that everyone uses) is being placed disproportionally on people with less means to put up rooftop solar.
In my state, there is a connection fee, and a usage fee. Even if I replace my power 100% with solar generated from my own home, and batteries, I would still pay the connection fee for the meter.
When I lived in the midwest, the interconnect was a seperate group, and I payed 3 fees on my bill:
1. the connection fee
2. the transmission fee (to ATC to operate the 'grid')
3. a usage fee.
In both bills, the usage fee is the one that goes up quickly.
>If you have a wind, solar, and storage setup on your house that supplies 110% of your household needs... who pays for the hookup and maintenance for your house to be connected to the grid?
Presumably people do pay taxes, no? This should get them basic infrastructure as a public power grid - and their house being hooked to it, amond many other things like bridges, roads, running water, and so on.
The power lines are maintained by private companies (PG&E for example). Many of these companies across multiple states. The larger interconnect is not necessarily owned by the same organization that does the last mile.
Is it your suggestion that the power lines and local power (e.g. Alameda Municipal Power) be taken over by the state itself and be made responsible for their maintenance and funding?
Or are you suggesting that California taxes be used to fund the California Independent System Operator (which also operates in Nevada, but not Northern California which is part of WRAP along with southern and central Oregon, south eastern Washington, and a tidbit of Idaho.
As it stands, the electric utility is private - not public. A public takeover of a private company (and multiple private companies) would likely be distasteful to many.
One line owned by PG&E, the next line is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_66 (some of which is owned by PG&E, some of which is owned by other companies).
> Two of the power lines run from Malin Substation southeast of Klamath Falls, Oregon to Round Mountain Substation northeast of Redding, California. One of them is owned by Western Area Power Administration, with the other owned by Pacific Gas and Electric and PacifiCorp jointly.
I agree, but i have come to believe customers are best served by a locally controlled retailer that buys power and then pays someone to transport it.
I don't have a source handy, but if I recall correctly, most local retailers like Sacramento Municipal Utility District (Smud) have substantially lower rates.
Last I checked they were like half of my PG&E bill
> Founded in 1887, it provides electricity to c. 34,000 residential, commercial, and municipal customers at rates up to 20 percent below neighboring communities.
> ...
> AMP has been providing 100% clean energy since 2020 and did so in 2023 at approximately a 35% saving over comparable PG&E rates.
However, my point is one of that the state of California shouldn't be the one owning (and maintaining) the transmission lines. And even if there was a public takeover of PG&E back when it was going through its bankruptcy - there still would have been many transmission lines owned by companies that are not PG&E.
Having taxes go to a hypothetical state-PG&E would also get into issues of the public sector directly competing with the private sector and using money from California for areas that they are not serviced by ( https://www.arcgis.com/apps/instant/minimalist/index.html?ap... ). You can see that Alameda and Sacramento and many other areas are not serviced by PG&E.
Would it be reasonable for California to have bought PG&E and then add to the taxes for California to support the connection fees... and how would you handle the people who live in areas that aren't served by PG&E (like Palo Alto, Santa Clara, Mountain House, Sacramento ... and all of Southern California ... and everything east of the Sierras but still in California)
Eminent domain can be used to acquire the assets if needed. It’s just not a popular idea to libertarian American political sensibilities to use those laws to acquire assets for the public instead of acquire the public’s houses to build shopping malls.
Anyway, there’s no reason you can’t decouple ownership and usage rights anyway. And it probably is the only way to stop the forest fires PG&E repeatedly has caused with their neglectful maintenance strategy.
Who owns the assets right now is possibly one of the least relevant questions in fact. It does not matter in the least, and we should in fact move in a direction that means it matters even less.
Hypothetically, let's do it. Wave the eminent domain wand and poof California now owns all the PG&E lines.
They are now in competition for transmission with the private entity PacifiCorp that jointly owns some substations with PG&E and spans six states. This gets into tricky situations where the government is competing to provide the same service without any profit motive and able to monopolize its position through enacting laws... something that private entities can't really compete against.
Next, you've got the power lines (and sub stations). What you don't have is the tools (vehicles, equipment) to maintain those power lines.
> Reichert is now a senior fleet engineer for PG&E, which has one of the largest battery-electric fleets in North America. The 49th largest commercial private fleet in the U.S. provides transportation services for the 117-year-old utility provider. Based in Oakland, the company has more than 5 million customers in central and northern California.
> Its fleet includes more than 14,500 vehicles that cover nearly every duty cycle. These include construction and off-road equipment, snowcats, UTVs, and specialty gas and electric utility fleet assets. More traditional assets range from Classes 1-8: light-duty passenger cars and pickup trucks, medium-duty service trucks, aerial trouble trucks, gas welding, heavy-duty gas crew vehicles, electric line, material handlers, and day cab tractors.
Does California suddenly also go and claim 14,500 vehicles that it would need to service the equipment that PG&E formerly had?
And next we're at the people who actually do the work...
> Based in San Francisco, our 25,000 employees work throughout our Northern and Central California service area
25,000 people isn't a small number, and there are 220,000 people working for the state of California ... but we also know how well the public sector pays compare to the private sector.
I believe that it is absurd to think that you could use eminent domain to try to say that PG&E is doing a poor job and that the State of California is taking ownership of its power lines... and all of its assets... and expect its employees to continue to work there.
The State of California is not an organization that is properly equipped to handle the management of some of the power lines in some of the state unless you are also wishing to have CalPower be a department within the state government that rivals CalTrans for quality and timeliness of service.
>They are now in competition for transmission with the private entity PacifiCorp that jointly owns some substations with PG&E and spans six states.
Then they can also acquire the PacifiCorp substations. Even better, make it a public utility thing, and forbid (with some transition plan) private companies handling this infrastructure entirely.
>unless you are also wishing to have CalPower be a department within the state government that rivals CalTrans for quality and timeliness of service.
Since other countries manage to have public infrastructure like trains and power grids and have it work well, perhaps it's not some unobtainable magical goal, but just a specific failure because of the way CalTrans was managed - and can thus change if there's the political will?
Other countries are smaller than California and as countries have more authority over their land.
My claim is that the state of California does not have the funds to compensate multiple multi-state public and private companies within its borders, nor the equipment to be able to maintain that infrastructure (all the way down to the individual houses and the transformers on the pole), nor the manpower to be able to staff it.
If the claim is "caltrans doesn't either - they use contractors for the projects and are only responsible for state highways - the local town roads are the town's infrastructure that the town maintains - not the state"
Then you're going to hand over PG&E's gas and electrical infrastructure to San Francisco for them to maintain?
How does a properly regulated utility company fundamentally differ from the state owning the equipment but allowing the private sector to do what it does?
And if it was properly regulated, then PG&E and the state would be agreement about how to handle the addition of household solar... which is what people are up in arms about.
I still hold that the state of California would be ill-equipped and poorly prepared to be able to assume all the responsibilities for all of the electrical infrastructure in the state (which is far more than PG&E).
>Other countries are smaller than California and as countries have more authority over their land
There are countries much larger than California out there - France (with public rail) is 1.5 times the size of California and over 2x the population.
>I still hold that the state of California would be ill-equipped and poorly prepared to be able to assume all the responsibilities for all of the electrical infrastructure in the state (which is far more than PG&E).
Perhaps. But that's on them. Not some infeasibility to do so with public (state) owned electrical infrastructure.
>It’s just not a popular idea to libertarian American political sensibilities to use those laws to acquire assets for the public instead of acquire the public’s houses to build shopping malls.
What a strange jab. Do you really think libertarians are excited about using eminent domain to seize houses?
>Is it your suggestion that the power lines and local power (e.g. Alameda Municipal Power) be taken over by the state itself and be made responsible for their maintenance and funding?
I can't figure out from the article whether the rate changes being proposed are reasonable. Depending on the details, some adjustments might be okay.
However, I'd like to point out that it's also not "sustainable" to get energy from dirty power plants and leave future generations to deal with the consequences. If the long-term effects of releasing carbon into the atmosphere were priced into the cost of energy, I suspect PG&E would have no problem paying today's "retail" rates.
Put another way, we should have a carbon tax, but we don't, so I am in favor of subsidizing clean energy via whatever scheme is politically achievable.
They'd probably still have a big problem paying retail rates. They'd much rather buy from solar farms that have a much lower price of generation in that world.
But they'd have no problem paying today's retail rate. In this alternate universe, the actual retail rate would be higher.
And that would suck for consumers, but it would also reflect the real cost of electricity, which someone is going to pay one way or another.
Right now, we effectively subsidize dirty energy by allowing utilities to ignore the consequences of releasing carbon into the atmosphere. So it's okay—good, even—to force the utilities to pay more for the cleaner energy instead.
I really don't get the point you're trying to make. If there were a carbon tax, net metering of retail solar would still be unsustainable, just with different price points. The spread between wholesale and retail rates would still exist, and having a grid connection but no net usage would still be a large benefit at no cost.
The source of the rest of the power on the grid just isn't the relevant consideration for this particular issue. It's a very relevant consideration in general, just not for this specific question.
> If there were a carbon tax, net metering of retail solar would still be unsustainable, just with different price points.
If there was a (correctly priced) carbon tax, I wouldn't be making this argument. Clean forms of energy would naturally win in the market, because they are in fact much cheaper when you take the long-term consequences of dirty energy into account.
We don't do that, so we need to subsidize clean energy production instead. The free grid connection is a reward for performing a social good.
And, it is not "unfair" to make PG&E pay extra for clean energy when we let them release carbon into the atmosphere for free.
Yes, it has to turn off industrial solar production on sunny days. Less frequently, it has negative wholesale prices where it pays other states to take the excess power.
Yeah this is exactly why the new version of the policy (attempts to) incentivize storage in addition to solar, because that makes the excess solar power more useful, by allowing it to be time-shifted to times when there is a dearth instead of an excess (ie. when the sun goes down). The big subsidy of net metering for stand-alone residential solar is no longer beneficial; there are better things for the system at large to be spending its resources on, like storage, and also transmission and distribution improvements.
> people that can get by on 0-net electricity use pay nothing for the real, significant benefit of being connected to the grid
What's stopping them from changing their pricing structure to something that makes sense in a world with solar? Example: My gas bill is $30-40/mo in summer months when I'm only using maybe $1 worth of actual gas for cooking. They need to pay salaries and maintain the pipelines, etc, fine by me.
Why can't PG&E do the same and charge $x/mo + $y/kWh? (where $x is a flat rate and only $y could go to 0)
This would be the best solution, but other low-usage customers (retirees, low income workers) have come to rely on the implicit subsidy granted by not charging explicit infrastructure fees. The solution to that second order problem is to grant some sort of government financial aid to low income customers with low monthly electricity consumption. That way most households pay for infrastructure proportional to infrastructure costs, but the most vulnerable are protected against financial hardship.
It's already moving in that direction. You will have a $100/mo hookup fee and a $1 charge for usage.
It will be fair with respect to actual costs, but the state hates it because it is less favorable to the poor. This is why they are implementing income based service pricing.
Edit: it seems like there is some skepticism, so the law requiring it was AB 205, which was passed, and CPUC has approved the plan.
> (the value of being connected to the grid) for nothing
PG&E has a Minimum Delivery Charge of $10.12. If a customer uses 0 KWH for a month, they pay $10.12. Is that not the value of being connected to the grid?
This $10 isn't nearly enough for actually maintaining it. For customers without net, it's not just $10. It's $10 plus some per-kWh cost to try and scale it based on your actual load on the grid equipment. If it was a flat rate for all customers it would have to be a good bit more than $10.
There's a fixed cost and another cost that scales with usage. For instance, the California E-1 rate (non-time-of-use) is about 42 cents per kwh. Of that, 25 cents is transmission (long distance lines) and distribution (local lines), and 17 goes toward generation (if someone switches to another electricity provider, it's this 17 cents that would go to that other provider.
Scaling the cost of the grid with usage serves as a price signal for people to conserve power, as opposed to it being jumbled behind a more comprehensive tax or a larger flat fee.
Net metering was always a subsidy to kick start the solar PV industry. It feels kinda kick started.
Myself I'd be interested in a map of the cost per customer for PG&E. Because I suspect customers in dense to medium density area's are heavily subsidizing Potemkin rural customers. Meaning very low density pretend rural suburbs where the cost per connection is high, the power delivered is low and the risks are high enough they bankrupted PG&E twice.
The root problem here is that the market structure for energy should change to adapt to new technologies and new climate realities, but we have a century of regulation, infrastructure, and entrenched incumbents that have a vested interest in preventing the change.
I could believe that we need some form of a grid to smoothe out demand across consumers, and some form of time-based demand pricing. It is probably not the grid that PG&E owns, and it is probably not the rate structure that CPUC approves. Renewables generally have much smaller economies of scale than fossil-fuel based generation - you can craft and install solar panels in much smaller modules than a single power plant that services tens of thousands of homes, and you have much more flexibility where you put them. At the same time it's becoming much riskier and more expensive to run transmission lines through tinder-dry forests and burn down another city every few years.
I think the future is microgrids and municipal grid defection. We'll still have electric grids and electric companies - but they will likely service and be owned by the city-states that they serve. To the extent that we have a rural population, they'll setup their own rooftop & community solar, and back it with generators and iron-air batteries. The grids won't interact much - people in say San Jose are unlikely to want to subsidize the tree-clearing needed to run wires out to say Petrolia.
We also need much more transparent time-of-use pricing, to encourage demand shifting back to daylight hours. You actually don't need huge battery setups: well-built homes with energy-conscious owners draw only a couple hundred watts at night, vs. several kilowatts during the day. You do need a couple things that have passed under the radar screen so far: 1) workplace EV charging, so all your vehicles get charged during the day, and 2) better insulation, so you run your heat pumps during the day. Shift those loads from nighttime to daytime and you'll end up consuming 90% of your energy usage while the sun shines.
In France we have a fixed grid monthly fee depending on the maximum feed power (usually 3, 6, 9, 12 kVA in single phase and up to 36 kVA in triple phase) and a variable part proportional to the kWh consumed.
As of now the official rate "tarif bleu" available to all consumers are 151.2 EUR per year (12.6 EUR/month) for grid free of a 6kVA feed and 0.2516 EUR/kWh.
Average electricity consumption of a household in France is 5681 kWh/year.
For homeowner with solar when you export to the grid the excess you are paid (currently) 0.1301 EUR/kWh so less than the consumer price per kWh. There is also a small annual fixed fee for grid injection (24.36 EUR/year currently).
> On my bill (ISO-NE region/market) there is a separate generation and transmission fee.
Same here, on the Peninsula of the Bay Area: Generation comes from generation owned or contracted by SVCE [0], which is then delivered via PG&E (both transmission and distribution).
Billing is handled by PG&E: My bill has a section for PG&E charges, and a section for SVCE charges. The PG&E section has a generation credit, that effectively removes any costs of non-SVCE power generation, leaving the costs of transmission & distribution.
>> people that can get by on 0-net electricity use pay nothing for the real, significant benefit of being connected to the grid.
Unless one is a rural resident you cant get to net zero and legally disconnect from the grid. You will pay PGE for something even if you dont draw power from them in most of their service area.
> With net metering it's essentially forcing utilities to buy their power at retail rates
The retail rate for electricity is getting to ZERO at points during the day. Transmission is the biggest cost/factor here and PGE has decades of not doing any upkeep on that aspect of the system. Color me less than sympathetic to the situation.
Sorry but PG&E can go fuck itself. It is backwards at best and greedy at worst.
My wife is a biologist and her income is evidence that PG&E does invest in transmission upkeep. You may not like the bang for the buck you get, but consider that part of that might be because PG&E has to pay her to drive to various remote locations to monitor construction workers doing maintenance lest they step on some valuable mushrooms (only a slight exaggeration).
California's politicians are corrupt and incompetent. PG&E is a great example of this. PUC of California is supposed to protect consumers but consumers right now are paying record high energy prices in California for a third rate service.
People focus so much on Congress' representatives, The President, and maybe some federal agency heads.
But these states are the size of countries and economies larger than almost all of them, with a far easier, cheaper lobbying path and often times less transparency. Even if there is transparency, less people to care.
Worth noting that there isn't a lot of room for growth of solar that isn't battery-backed. California exports a ton of energy during the bright months. As a practical matter, the era of sending excess rooftop solar generation to the grid is over.
[1] https://engaging-data.com/california-electricity-generation/