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CPUC NEM 3.0 discussion

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what is considered a "waste" of money is highly subjective ... i can say buy 10 starbucks drinks a day everyday and it would not affect my lifestyle / retirement etc ..(I actually only go to coffee houses few times a year just not my thing) but if someone wants to spend their earnings on that who am I to criticize their choice ..
My point is if people want to spend money on something they can afford,is legal, is taxed / directly or indirectly employees people then who cares? why are people bothered by that ? Does it directly negatively hurt any of us? 🤷🏻‍♂️
I see plenty of airplanes down at the local airport that sit and sit. Same with boats and jet skis, vacation homes, etc. You can't take it with you.
 
yea i agree i like coffee but feel like an idiot paying $4.50 for a plain coffee .. so to me one coffee house coffee a week is a waste of money (yes i know people drop a lot more than that on a single starbucks drink .. thats just what I order when i get dragged there 😝)

I used to do Starbucks drip on the road when it was $1.95 for a Venti(largest), but now it's more than double. Inflation did not go up 100%+ in the last 10 years.
 
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Over the past two decades Newsom and his wife have accepted over $700,000 from PG&E, its foundation and its employees, The Washington Post recently reported. Newsom received over $200,000 from PG&E during his most recent campaign for governor; and that same year, a political consultancy group that helped run Newsom’s campaign, received more than $1.1 million from PG&E, The New York Times has reported.

 
Allow me to go down in flames once again on the fault with using this "ROI" concept, which in solar land means at what point is the system "free" to the adopter to the extent that total purchase price is paid off by that time with what would have been the actual payments to the utility.
What I wonder about in CPUC's ROI argument is this: In the same terms, what is PG&E's ROI?

This article (link)says PG&E's return on equity has been running 10.4% per year. An the future value of an investment retiring 10.4% would double in 7 - 8 years.

Is this equivalent to CPUC's calculation? When the cumulative "savings" are equal to the system purchase price, the system still exists, so the value of the savings plus the cost of the savings is double the cost.

So PG&E is asking CPUC to increase our payback to longer than PG&E's? Talk about the big producer getting unfair advantage over us small producers. No to mention it'll kill the solar installation industry.

Fun fact, the Lookback Study, on which all the arguments are based, used data ending in 2018. Now, in 2022, PG&E is turning on it's own massive storage battery in Moss Landing. I wonder what ROI PG&E is going to see from that...

I've heard that CPUC regulates PG&E's ROE and profit on revenue, but where do they get the authority to regulate the ROI on our investments in solar?

SW
 
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Over the past two decades Newsom and his wife have accepted over $700,000 from PG&E, its foundation and its employees, The Washington Post recently reported. Newsom received over $200,000 from PG&E during his most recent campaign for governor; and that same year, a political consultancy group that helped run Newsom’s campaign, received more than $1.1 million from PG&E, The New York Times has reported.
Some random pie-in-the-sky thoughts follow. I've been stewing over NEM3 for too long, I suppose.

There are 1.3 million homes in California with solar already installed. (link) If we each gave $1 to Newsom, that $1,300,000 would be more than PG&E. We need a residential solar owner's union - Imagine if dues were $10 per year.

Speaking of collective action, I wonder what would happen if all us residential solar owners all shut off our systems on the same single day. A day without solar. Or maybe only one hour, from 3 to 4 pm on a hot summer day. Hmm... 1.3 million homes, maybe 5kW average, that would be a 6 GW spike in demand at the time of highest grid load. Calif grid demand at peak is around 38 GW, so this spike would over 15%. Enough to trigger a state-wide blackout, maybe? A brief simulation of what the NEM3 plan would cause, when we decide to go no-export and opt out of NEM3.

With NEM3, utilities are essentially saying they don't want our solar export. Perhaps a taste of what the IOUs are wishing for would "generate" enough publicity to wake up the politicians the IOUs are trying to manipulate.

SW
 
Over the past two decades Newsom and his wife have accepted over $700,000 from PG&E, its foundation and its employees, The Washington Post recently reported. Newsom received over $200,000 from PG&E during his most recent campaign for governor; and that same year, a political consultancy group that helped run Newsom’s campaign, received more than $1.1 million from PG&E, The New York Times has reported.



Lol PG&E is getting such a good ROI on their investment. Why doesn't PG&E say this is unfair? Since they're all about equity and fairness.

All they have to do is bribe Newsom for $900k, then get him to appoint a head of the CPUC that will help crush the residential solar industry in California! $900k to get billions extra into PG&E's perpetual bottom line.

And PG&E complains your solar array ROI is too high. Hypocrites.
 
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Lol PG&E is getting such a good ROI on their investment. Why doesn't PG&E say this is unfair? Since they're all about equity and fairness.

All they have to do is bribe Newsom for $900k, then get him to appoint a head of the CPUC that will help crush the residential solar industry in California! $900k to get billions extra into PG&E's perpetual bottom line.

And PG&E complains your solar array ROI is too high. Hypocrites.
I would argue that using the ROI calculation is as ridiculous for PG&E as it is for rooftop solar, even worse.

"ROI" is, l believe, most accurate and useful when comparing two different investments. Such as, should I put my money in the stock market or buy an apartment building, or buy government bonds?

What is PG&E supposed to do with their money other than spend it on infrastructure? They ought to have a friggen Zero "ROI" ........ oh, sorry me, I already missed the boat where somehow they are allowed to be investor owned utitlities. Nice dumb move.

Used in the same way as any other investment, i.e., if I spend $50K on solar system or $50K on a bond, the solar investment is great. For my approximately $50k I get electricity worth about $6,000 per year, which is a nice >10% return.

Of course, in solar salesman world, its not how much the system produces, its whether it produces it at a cheaper cost than you would otherwise buy it at, which is nothing like any "ROI" calculation I have ever seen.

It does produce energy at a cheaper costs than buying it, duh. The kick in the nuts is that the only reason for that is that you avoid the cost of the grid, which is most of the cost of electricity.
 
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Funny (or sad) thought for the day... someone on Next Door posted this bill for their electricity costs in my neighborhood. Everybody is posting "you need to install solar". The knee-jerk response today advises people to reduce what they from PG&E by simply producing energy at their home.

No wonder PG&E wants to kill the residential solar industry. PG&E wants the knee-jerk response to change from "get solar" to "sit in the dark and stare at a blank wall with no AC running." Since they know people will continue to use electricity anyway, then PG&E can blame the homeowner for their sky-high electricity bills.

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Funny (or sad) thought for the day... someone on Next Door posted this bill for their electricity costs in my neighborhood.
Something is weird here. Their usage for July actually went down year to year (85kWh > 80 kWh) but their costs seemed to almost double (~$600 > $1125). No wonder they are pissed. If they are on a TOU plan then they need to seriously consider adjusting their consumption habits to reflect pricing where possible (ie washing clothes, setbacks on heating/cooling, turning off or changing light bulb types). They could also be on the wrong plan for their lifestyle too (maybe they have an EV but don't have an EV plan?).

Solar would only help these people if most of their consumption is during daylight hours I am afraid, otherwise PG&E will just shift the costs until they get what they want.
 
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Something is weird here. Their usage for July actually went down year to year (85kWh > 80 kWh) but their costs seemed to almost double (!$600 > $1125). No wonder they are pissed. If they are on a TOU plan then they need to seriously consider adjusting their consumption habits to reflect pricing where possible (ie washing clothes, setbacks on heating/cooling, turning off or changing light bulb types). They could also be on the wrong plan for their lifestyle too (maybe they have an EV but don't have an EV plan?).

Solar would only help these people if most of their consumption is during daylight hours I am afraid, otherwise PG&E will just shift the costs until they get what they want.


In one of my many rant-threads about PG&E sucking (hah there are so many!) I pointed out that the new shift to TOU rates was going to really nuke people who were very peaky in their consumption. PG&E has been pushing some absolute garbage recommendations to people who contact them about their energy bills being so high.


These issues were about to get worse. When PG&E did their proposal/model of shift people from tiered to TOU, they assumed a fairly aggressive daily usage pattern (it didn't follow the CAISO daily demand curve much). Basically even if a homeowner were in Zone X (which is inland and would likely have AC), PG&E would message to the homeowner that the shift to TOU was net neutral. What PG&E failed to do was to explain how if a homeowner didn't curtail their peak AC usage, their costs could go up considerably.

Today, the homeowner posting this bill will contemplate going solar. Tomorrow, this same homeowner will need to stop using their AC, turning off their TV, and eating cold cuts instead of cooking.
 
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Funny (or sad) thought for the day... someone on Next Door posted this bill for their electricity costs in my neighborhood. Everybody is posting "you need to install solar". The knee-jerk response today advises people to reduce what they from PG&E by simply producing energy at their home.

No wonder PG&E wants to kill the residential solar industry. PG&E wants the knee-jerk response to change from "get solar" to "sit in the dark and stare at a blank wall with no AC running." Since they know people will continue to use electricity anyway, then PG&E can blame the homeowner for their sky-high electricity bills.

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IMHO, This household is using a massive amount of electricity at 80.23 kWh/day or 2,407 kWh for the month. Pre-solar my peak was 9,100 kWh for the year or 25.0 kWh for day for a 3,500 sqft two story house. They need an energy audit first to understand their usage and the impact on their rate (tier vs TOU) plan to stop the bleeding and then solar long term.
 
IMHO, This household is using a massive amount of electricity at 80.23 kWh/day or 2,407 kWh for the month. Pre-solar my peak was 9,100 kWh for the year or 25.0 kWh for day for a 3,500 sqft two story house. They need an energy audit first to understand their usage and the impact on their rate (tier vs TOU) plan to stop the bleeding and then solar long term.


Yeah, my first guess is the homeowner has the AC similar to what I purchased in the home in 2019... 30 year old 6 SEER units (two of them) that basically run continuously 8 hours a day in the summer.

I just know it's unrealistic to expect a new homeowner to have $30k lying around to overahaul their HVAC. Have you seen recent transaction prices on homes? It's insaaannneeee. They said a family needs to be making about $300k per year just to afford a 80% LTV mortgage on a 3 bedroom house in San Jose.
 
Yeah, my first guess is the homeowner has the AC similar to what I purchased in the home in 2019... 30 year old 6 SEER units (two of them) that basically run continuously 8 hours a day in the summer.

I just know it's unrealistic to expect a new homeowner to have $30k lying around to overahaul their HVAC. Have you seen recent transaction prices on homes? It's insaaannneeee. They said a family needs to be making about $300k per year just to afford a 80% LTV mortgage on a 3 bedroom house in San Jose.
Eye balling the month charges it looks like $6,200 over the last 12 months, with $2,000 in the last two months. The lowest month was mostly November and that was still $300 which is a crazy.

Maybe they need a new HVAC or maybe they need to switch a backyard full of 60W incandescent bulbs to LEDs and then to turn them off when they aren't out there to enjoy them or maybe they are on EV2A and are charging their EVs during peak instead of off-peak, that's why they need to due an audit to figure out where and when the energy is being used. Once that is understood they can decide what to do and hopefully the investment in changes would be paid for by reduced bills.