I’m not sure how everyone here feels they are not paying their fair share, I have a 2000 sq. Ft. Home just my wife and I we are all electric have a efficient heat pump system never use the a/c and only have the heater on in the morning in the winter for 2 hours then use a wood stove. We use around 1200 kWh a month and have solar with 2 powerwalls. Our bill last month was $190 and will be more this month, do you not think I’m paying my fair share to Pacific Graft and Extortion.
Yep, the proponents of the IOU proposal simply fixate on the solar customers who put in the largest arrays to offset 100% (or in h2ofun's case 200%) of their annual consumption. They cherry pick the easy low hanging fruit because their entire argument requires they paint every solar customer to be a wealthy fat cat rich jerk. Since the IOUs are pushing a class warfare argument, they naturally need to segment the classes to the extremes and ignore the middle ground.
I agree with you, most solar customers are still paying monthly electricity bills and paying some "share" of the fixed costs. But the IOU proponents need to pretend you are paying zero for their argument to work. As we've seen with Zabe, he'll simply fixate on the very few rich people with mega solar arrays and ignore every single concept that suggests the class warfare cost shift is utter baloney when assessed at large.
Data shows the average residential solar system constructed in California over the last 10 or so years (during NEM 1.0 and 2.0) is around 6 kWp (I'm assuming this is DC since that's how solar is frequently discussed for the general pop). The trend is towards larger systems since costs are coming down, but overall the "100% net out" folks are the minority.
How Much Do Solar Panels Cost in California? We’ve put together this study to give you an idea of how much solar costs in your region of the state.
solar-to-the-people.com
A 6 kWp DC array with normal losses (shading, angle, etc) will only offset around 80% of the average of the EIA's estimated West-region single family detached home's energy consumption of 10,333 kWh.
Types and amounts of electricity use in U.S. homes.
www.eia.gov
So here's the kicker. The IOUs want to say solar is being installed only by rich jerks and not the "average." If you presume that rich people have homes that are larger than average, EVs, and lifestyles that use more energy (eg: AC and pool heaters), then there is no way the "rich jerk" uses the same 10,333 kWh as the average single family home. So with all these stats, it would be impossible to conclude that the average California solar customer has a solar system that covers 100% of annual consumption.
This red herring of "cost shift" is what Dr Faruqui articulated in his response to the CPUC. And we've seen countless examples here on TMC about how the IOU cost shift argument is flawed.
By and large, solar customers are still paying some portion of fixed costs in their volumetric pricing for imports. And by and large it's proven that residential solar installations have reduced demand on the grid at large by distributing generation/consumption to the endpoints.
But it's easy for the IOU proponents to ignore all this since they don't have much else to offer by way of an argument. And since they're the ones paying off the CPUC (indirectly of course), they don't need any other arguments. They just need the imaginary boogeyman rich person to validate their red herring.
