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Don't get me wrong. I'm on your side of the argument. But one thing you say here I don't quite understand. Net metering requires a residence with solar to frequently tap the grid for energy, even if the residence generates more energy throughout the year than they use. When they use that energy, doesn't it use transmission lines along the way? Because when they tap the grid for energy, isn't that process by itself identical to a residence that doesn't have solar? I agree with your greater point. Just am confused on this.I'd like to address your questions.
Your understanding of the situation is understandable as the utilities have spent a lot of money over the years to make the impression that rooftop solar is an expense to the grid and a liability. They have hooked you and gotten their money's worth. The reality is that the utilities' greatest expense is transmission lines, many of them those huge towers traveling across public lands. When a house has solar on it, there is no transmission required, better yet, over production of a solar system travels the path of least resistance right through the neighboring house's meter (making transmission free, high net profit for the utility) and into the home's consumption. So you ask about infrastructure? We solar owners ARE infrastructure!
You ask about "service", I think you mean fees? The proposed fees of $59/month to $86/month connection fees is more than what some solar owner's electric bill were before they bought solar and in most other cases renders the installation of solar a no-go. These fees are off the charts and designed to completely end any further solar implementation. How about those fees to school districts $950 to $3400/mo?
Lastly, the battery helps with daily net metering, that's it. It does not solve outrageous fees nor the fact that the true-up of over/under production becomes monthly rather than annual.
These utilities are investor owned and have had a policy of pushing for ever higher profits since their inception. They do not lobby for policy for the good of the public.
SMUD is also trying to significantly increase grid connect monthly charges. They are using propaganda techniques, claiming that rooftop solar owners are getting cheaper electricity, which is unfair to everyone else. WHAT? We paid thousands to add rooftop solar TO SAVE SMUD REGION CUSTOMERS FROM SIGNIFICANT INCREASES IN ELECTRICITY COSTS, BY PREVENTING THE NEED FOR PEAKER GENERATING PLANTS. We should be honored, not blamed!I don't know about the others but Sacramento's utility, SMUD, has been fighting California's mandate that states all new houses starting in 2020 must have solar on them. SMUD has been fighting rooftop solar since forever.
The only comment I have regarding SDG&E is a profanityI am hoping this can be a sticky thread, so many of us are from California and what happens in California may spread across the country. This fight will last most of the year so a sticky thread would be very nice. The California investor owned utilities are lobbying heavily for NEM 3.0. This will include high monthly fees for solar owners and to top that off, every month will be a true-up month. This means you can not apply your high productions summer months as credit against your low production winter months. The monthly fees will pretty much sink solar in California. California's Public Utility Commission is made of 5 members. Three of them are in the middle "on the fence", one is leaning towards the utilities, and one is heavily pro utility. There is not a single member of the CPUC that is a champion for rooftop solar! For us, the CPUC is not going to be our friend. Gavin Newsome is our only possible chance here.
We have just a few months to have people contact Gavin Newsome. Governor Newsome is our best hope to prevent this new, nightmare NEM 3 from becoming a reality.
There are good guys and bad guys in this fight.
Here are the utility coerced or funded bad guys, this website full of misinformation: Fix The Cost Shift
Please visit: Here are the good guys where you can help out as well as be informed: Save California Solar
Please visit: More good guys here: Stand up for your right to make energy from the sun!
The utilities are asking for these new fees to be retroactive, if this happens your grandfathered rates will be threatened.
Just released a few days ago are these new proposed fees by the utilities:
View attachment 645723
Is Jerry Brown's sister still on the PUC? Gov. Newsom, please state where you stand on this issue before the recall election occurs so we know where you stand and vote accordingly.I am hoping this can be a sticky thread, so many of us are from California and what happens in California may spread across the country. This fight will last most of the year so a sticky thread would be very nice. The California investor owned utilities are lobbying heavily for NEM 3.0. This will include high monthly fees for solar owners and to top that off, every month will be a true-up month. This means you can not apply your high productions summer months as credit against your low production winter months. The monthly fees will pretty much sink solar in California. California's Public Utility Commission is made of 5 members. Three of them are in the middle "on the fence", one is leaning towards the utilities, and one is heavily pro utility. There is not a single member of the CPUC that is a champion for rooftop solar! For us, the CPUC is not going to be our friend. Gavin Newsome is our only possible chance here.
We have just a few months to have people contact Gavin Newsome. Governor Newsome is our best hope to prevent this new, nightmare NEM 3 from becoming a reality.
There are good guys and bad guys in this fight.
Here are the utility coerced or funded bad guys, this website full of misinformation: Fix The Cost Shift
Please visit: Here are the good guys where you can help out as well as be informed: Save California Solar
Please visit: More good guys here: Stand up for your right to make energy from the sun!
The utilities are asking for these new fees to be retroactive, if this happens your grandfathered rates will be threatened.
Just released a few days ago are these new proposed fees by the utilities:
View attachment 645723
Well, lets start with PG&E, which only covers about half of California. Its market cap is $22B, but if you are going to have a buyout, you might have to pay a 20-50% premium. Next there is the problem that it is currently losing $6.8B per year as a continuing business, and nearly all of its customers have had it with the company and would sign up with somebody, *anybody* else if they could. Lets not forget ongoing liability problems and a huge pile of maintenance backlog, and Oh! lest we omit, the tiny $42 B in debt attached to the company.Why don't the solar advocates just join together and buyout one of the bankrupt producers? I mean tsla kicks in 5 billion, advocates kick in 5 etc and then take over PGE or whatever and go whole hog on solar rooftop ?
Well, lets start with PG&E, which only covers about half of California. Its market cap is $22B, but if you are going to have a buyout, you might have to pay a 20-50% premium. Next there is the problem that it is currently losing $6.8B per year as a continuing business, and nearly all of its customers have had it with the company and would sign up with somebody, *anybody* else if they could. Lets not forget ongoing liability problems and a huge pile of maintenance backlog, and Oh! lest we omit, the tiny $42 B in debt attached to the company.
So, yes, lets do that. We solar advocates need to sign on to maybe a $80B expense to get our way. Who is with me? I'll chip in $80, which if I may say so, is mighty generous of me! I just need 1 billion more like minded Northern Californians to sign up too.
It's not a bad idea. Better would be just to replace them with a Public Utility District. For-profit is a poor model for utilities and you've done some good work in explaining why. When an improvement comes along they resist if there is no profit motive to acceptance.Why don't the solar advocates just join together and buyout one of the bankrupt producers? I mean tsla kicks in 5 billion, advocates kick in 5 etc and then take over PGE or whatever and go whole hog on solar rooftop ?
I guess I don't like all the politics of it yet I don't trust the utilities in CA. By comparison Dominion Power in VA is a model of a well functioning utility making an honest profit given the constraints and opportunities. Today VA has some 17GW of solar farms planned, the state plans to be all renewable pretty soon (2035 or something like that) and our grid is not falling apart or causing catastrophic, deadly, wildfires. We'll still have some nukes operating (maybe 5GW) but the 17 GW of planned farms would completely replace all the fossil fuel production in the state and then some. I am guessing some won't get built. Dominion is no advocate of rooftop solar, to be honest I guess they see that as a slippery slope to being irrelevant. So they compromised by agreeing to allow non Dominion entities to provide power and the applications for utility scale power have poured in. Farmers are getting rich renting out poorly thought out pine plantations and marginal farmland as solar farms. So, we don't have a great story for you but the utility is not so terrible like the various CA entities.
So to me I'd burn down the utility ownership. Clearly it is poor. I'd start again with a fresh leadership team, I'd fire every single person in the top 3 layers. Every single one. The culture is terrible there and that starts at the top. Once a new leadership team is in the work would have to go into fixing things. The state would have to agree to help take on obligations such as assume stranded asset costs and pensions associated with them. The utilities built those with the understanding they would be the basis of rate payments. Those contracts should just be eliminated and rooftop allowed as a replacement as so much of CA is densely populated and a long long way from the cheap land to the population zones. On the other hand, you could also remove marginal irrigated lands and replace irrigation with solar farms and solve two CA problems with one bullet. Solar farms don't need to be irrigated. You are killing your streams and causing massive subsidence to support unsustainable irrigation. Buyout an irrigation district and do the solar farms there.
None of Brown's sisters ever served as a CPUC Commissioner. Kathleen Brown is presumably who you are referring to (his other sisters weren't in government) - she served on the Los Angeles Board of Public Works in the 80s and was the State Treasurer from 1990-94.Is Jerry Brown's sister still on the PUC? Gov. Newsom, please state where you stand on this issue before the recall election occurs so we know where you stand and vote accordingly.
As much as I like your idea, buying enough battery capacity to cut the cord is cost prohibitive. I'd need at least 3, maybe 4. Last I looked they are $8K each. In approximate numbers, it would take me 12 years of electricity bills before to recoup a $24K upfront investment. Oh, and that doesn't even count the panels.I don't get why single family home owners just don't buy a few more powerwalls and cut the cord. Anyway, how do the municipal owned utilities feel? Like the various irrigation districts, eastside, trinity, smud
Likewise the year long true up is entirely appropriate
Solar owner do pay their fair share. With PG&E net metering, for example, we pay monthly fees specified for transmission/infrastructure. No freebies here. This on top of everyone else's replies about how solar helps reduce the utilities' costs.Why do you not want to pay your fair share for using the infrastructure? Your complaint reads like you have been spoiled too long getting freebies that your fellow countrymen have been paying for on their utility bills. If you think the service is overpriced get yourself a Powerwall as the gentleman in post #2 is suggesting and cut the cord.
Thank you for posting, and for working in the underappreciated regulatory arena.As someone who works at the CPUC (though I do not work on NEM), I'm disappointed at the opinions masquerading as facts on this thread about how the state is looking at the future of NEM. No one at the CPUC has made up their mind about the future of NEM because the proposals were just filed: the Rulemaking at the Commission - R.20-08-020 - was opened last September and new NEM proposals were only filed last week (March 15, 2021 - see the docket here). Yes, the utilities have issued proposals as is their right, but as you can clearly see in the docket, 17 other parties ranging from environmental groups to public advocates to solar and storage industry representatives have filed NEM proposals of their own, and I see nearly 160 people from a wide variety of businesses, agencies, and organizations on the service list which, in my experience, is a lot for a proceeding (and the docket indicates they are quite active too). Whatever the final result is months and months from now, it will involve meticulously sifting through the input from all these parties to reach a measured decision.
As a solar owner myself, I get that we have a vested interest in the current NEM structure, but that doesn't mean that it's perfect or that it works well for everyone in California. This thread is evidence that there are a lot of voices trying to be heard on the subject. As we learn more each passing year about solar and its use in CA, we should strive to improve NEM to better reflect the evolving landscape. That means, at the CPUC, revisiting NEM every so often to make that evaluation, and that's what is happening right now.
If you truly want to make yourself heard, (1) read what is actually being discussed in the CPUC proceeding and (2) call in to the voting meeting this coming Thursday the 25th (or a future meeting...usually every other Thursday) and make a public comment (use this link) - I know for a fact that the Commissioners listen and that you will be heard. And it's better to make yourself heard NOW when we're fairly early in the NEM debate and nothing has been decided.