Of course I may be proved 100% wrong, but I think by pushing PW with solar only, Tesla is quietly inching towards VPP in the future but with no future for dirty power. PG&E and the like may not like it but Earth would be happier and our children and grand children will be breathing cleaner air and with a few animals being saved along the way. Do you like Polar bears? I do.
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Is 1 PowerWall better than No PowerWall?
- Thread starter KHYE
- Start date
To look at it another way, at 1:00 today in California 75% of the energy was from renewable sources, probably 80% of which was solar. I did not find the breakdown between residential solar and solar plant solar, it looks like it could be as much as 25%.
With those numbers on a state wide scale one can just skip ahead to batteries now and save time. At this rate, remembering that without ESS systems solar has to go somewhere, pretty soon we will be at 100% at midday on good solar days.
Now, that means that all of the incentives are working. It does not follow that non-solar customers are getting screwed. It does mean that the next incentive ought to be for batteries.
With those numbers on a state wide scale one can just skip ahead to batteries now and save time. At this rate, remembering that without ESS systems solar has to go somewhere, pretty soon we will be at 100% at midday on good solar days.
Now, that means that all of the incentives are working. It does not follow that non-solar customers are getting screwed. It does mean that the next incentive ought to be for batteries.
Ok, this is where it lands. I even read the underlying report on which the relatively sloppy bill summary was based.
I have not idea where this ends up, however, the value of solar during the middle of the day is not going to get more valuable.
Given how poorly the investor owned utilities behave, NEM credits are only going to get less generous (regardless of this bill) and peak energy needs are what they are.
If I did the math right, though, about 3, 000 PWs, used daily, would eliminate the need for about one peaker plant. The Vaca Dixon plant t puts out about 10 megawatts at 6 pm and you would need 3,000 pws at 3kwh per to equal that.
Maybe someone ought to point out that you could just forget about us wealthy solar adopters and give free powerwalls to CARE clients, who could charge them when rate are low and then not pay peak rates anyway.
Which, come to think of it, is what we pretty much proved in this discussion!
Lol, but if they gave free Powerwalls to the CARE and FERA people, how will they be able to bribe a law/policymaker with a peaker plant in their district? The plant creates construction and operations jobs. Plus the plant allows PG&E to divert a metric crap ton of resources into various do-nothing projects and enter into inefficient energy contracts that it will have a guaranteed profit in 100% instances.
The batteries just help solve a problem. You never want to solve a problem without creating more jobs jobs jobs jobs jobs. Didn't you listen to Biden and his critics? Biden is simultaneously creating a bazillion more jobs while he's killing a bazillion jobs.
BTW, CARE and FERA people already have access to free Powerwalls basically if they apply. I've reviewed the SGIP stuff and attended their webinars. The SGIP and PG&E even has a program that literally fronts the value of the SGIP-eligible battery to the installer so there is literally no working capital involved to the disadvantaged person. They just need to qualify, and an installer just needs to put the bastard battery in.
The problem is most CARE/FERA people are low income renters and they can't get the free battery subsidy anyway. SGIP literally cannot find contractors willing to divert valuable resources (inventory and people-power) the disadvantaged residential projects. I mean, if you're CARE or FERA, then your energy rates are already so low. The Powerwall kind of makes no sense and is tough to sell. The only people who are making a lot of progress selling to the disadvantaged are those shady solar companies that abuse the PACE loans. Unfortunately there are no free solar (just discounted solar).
The only area of SGIP bucket that seems to have a lot of good traction is the one that subsidizes batteries for municipal/non-profit buildings in low income areas. These projects helps those operators save on energy costs over time and the projects are large-scale enough that they have subscribers. There's quite a lot of activity for these B2B sales and they diverted a lot of money from the residential large-scale (regular income) bucket into that low-income bucket.
IMO, the utilities and that Lorena Gonzalez lady are basically saying the incentives worked to help people get solar, but the wrong people are benefitting.
At noon when solar is as high as you said, the "rich solar, home, and tesla owning fat cats" (I'm snarky lame misinterpretation AB1139) are benefitting from all that solar. But your average disadvantaged rate payer is paying to maintain the grid for those fat cats to push solar back to the grid. They want to re-do NEM rules so the fat cats have to pay for the ability to send the energy back to the grid at that time instead of "banking credits" for basically free at that time.
You're right though, the next logical step should be for people to get batteries. But nothing ever goes logically in the land of IOU power companies.
The Gonzales bill cites to a Berkeley reasearch paper that is a heavy lift, to put it mildly. The paper says, in at least three places, that it’s a open question that the investor owned utilities ought to pay for infrastructure through volumetric pricing of electrictiy.
Well no Fing kidding! This also begs the question of why there ought to be such insane peak pricing différentiels in the first place, because if there aren’t such differentials, then even with flawed volumetric pricing the subsidy to solar only would not be as much.
And by the way, I did not see an adjustment in the paper for the obvious fact that volumetric pricing is already progressive because houses, especially larger houses, already cost more in terms of KWh than small apartments. The amount non solar ratepayers were allegedly paying was by kWh translated to dollars, without adjusting for volume of use.
It’s frustrating when the answer to a problem is right there to see.
Anyway, the answer, also in the Berkeley paper- was for government generally to take over the cost of the infrastructure as opposed to utilities attempting to collect via kwhs.
Well no Fing kidding! This also begs the question of why there ought to be such insane peak pricing différentiels in the first place, because if there aren’t such differentials, then even with flawed volumetric pricing the subsidy to solar only would not be as much.
And by the way, I did not see an adjustment in the paper for the obvious fact that volumetric pricing is already progressive because houses, especially larger houses, already cost more in terms of KWh than small apartments. The amount non solar ratepayers were allegedly paying was by kWh translated to dollars, without adjusting for volume of use.
It’s frustrating when the answer to a problem is right there to see.
Anyway, the answer, also in the Berkeley paper- was for government generally to take over the cost of the infrastructure as opposed to utilities attempting to collect via kwhs.
Once you have solar PG&E has no idea what your actual home usage is regardless of having Powerwalls/ESS. They only know what is go through the meter and solar/ESS powering the host loads doesn't go through the meter.
thanks, so there's really no way to track actual home usage? how do we justify needing more solar panels in the future if they based that on past usage history?
I think the Tesla Gateway still tracks all home loads that it metered, so if your installer puts in a whole home backup, or your installer puts a CT on your main service panel that is outside of the backup... then the Gateway will record the data of how much your home used regardless if it was power from the Batteries, Solar, or Grid.
Tesla collects all your data, so they should be able to send this "total energy used" summary to PG&E as proof of what your house consumed.
I have an Emporia Energy Monitor that produces very similar data to what my Energy Gateway records. But I do not believe such add-on devices will work for PG&E. This is because there's no real audit that the cheap monitors are actually used at the home/address that you may claim they are deployed.
If you are replacing the entire solar array then you would need to use the data from the Tesla app that has the full usage for the home. If you are just adding then I guess you would use the annual net positive amount for the year. For instance if your annual true-up bill showed that you exported 6,000 kWh to the grid and imported 9,000 kWh then you have an unmet need of 3,000 kWh and that could be used to justify more panels to get you to at least 100%.
I guess if PG&E likes you... they are supposed to just let you assert that you're buying 2 more EVs, adding a pool pump, and you have a person in your home on hemodialysis... so your usage is going up 200%. It seems PG&E randomly enforces the 110% sizing limit only on homeowners they do not like.
Presumably it's because the stupid homeowners go on internet web forums and post a lot of mean things about why PG&E sucks.
Fairly certain is your last point that causes the headaches with PG&E.
Just kidding on that, but you had way more problems than nearly everyone else.
