It makes sense for PV owners to time shift their loads to match their generation. If they do not, they are just putting a stamp of agreement on the utility view that residential PV generation has little commercial value.
I've learned to dislike NEM. It has enabled a class of entitled, rent seeking homeowners. I would never have guessed that I would agree with utilities about anything. Early adopters aside, the Johnny-come-latelys are really only reasonably eligible for TOU
The cost of climate change is externalized to the energy market. In order to move to renewable sources, some amount of subsidy is required, at least for a period of time. Solar can play a big role, but it's snot stable enough to be relied on exclusively in most parts of state, even with ample battery power. In the past policy encouraged consumers to use their capital to install solar generation with halfway decent economic benefits to incentive deployment. This also lessened the need to build more grid capacity as the generation was local. But fundamentally, it pitted utility generation AND transport against localized power generation.
If you think solar doesn't generate commercial value, then let's schedule a summer day where every homeowner in the state turns off their solar generation and see what happens. The state government set a set of rules to incentivize solar power generation. That meant the utilities had to deal with adapting. Heavens to Betsy! A utility has to adapt and change their business model! OMG! What kind of craziness is that? Every other business has to adapt, and the utilities need to as well.
Now the utilities want the state to change the rules so that the economic basis of all that private capital being invested in solar production (and all the jobs from them) to keep them from having to adapt. You can say tough, but that capital was capital that the state utilities didn't have to raise and transmission lines etc... that they didn't have to build.
Yes, they can't keep doing things the way they did for the last 50 years. My company and most other companies people work for never had it that good. Granted, the state is sort of run by idiots who don't understand fundamental economics, but don't be surprised when the rules that generated ten's of billions of dollars of private investment are being changed to make that investment be heavily non-economic. Consumers are the other side of the equation, and equation that was not just controlled by market forces but state invention to deal with externalities that the market can't correct.
But if this goes through and prices get even higher, that will change the outcomes of elections. Gov Newsome is facing a recall election, and making him pick between cronies at PG&E and the CA consumers who spent a lot of private capital on solar deployment is a perfectly fair thing to ask.
And if prices keep going up, I'd rather spend the energy on home battery storage than EV's, because at least I can choose to stay on gas powered vehicles instead of EV's. Not sure why the state would want that, but economic incentives work pretty well, and may have outcomes people didn't expect.
