>I agree with the electric companies on this point. If they dont need the electricity, why should they be forced to buy it?
A) Because they are operating a utility monopoly. We are forced to be their customers. They should be forced to be ours.
B) They could use it, but they would rather sell you the output from their oil fired power stations because the profit is higher for them. That is why they don't want your solar panels hooked up - not because your neighbors couldn't use the electricity they generate - because it challenges their monopoly position and eats into their profit margins.
If this were truly about electric companies not needing the electricity (as opposed to them viewing any challenge to their monopoly as a 'free market evil'), then they would be arguing for market pricing for your solar generated electricity. They are not. They want your solar panels to be completely disconnected. Ideally you shouldn't even have them at all.
>Yes, its nice to sell back electricity to the grid, but that feels like a very hackish way to use 'solar'.
Your argument for how energy policy should be set are informed by what you think "feels hackish"?
I'm really surprised people on HN don't see the complexity of having distributed power generation that you have no visibility on. I don't really think this is as trivial a problem as people seem to think it is.
As for the situation of selling power back to the grid, I would argue the solar users are still the customers. The power companies don't want it because the changes need to be paid for by current customers but only benefit ex-customers. The solar users are using the grid as a giant battery and an insurance policy for cloudy days.
If the power companies are paying what they charge, then the laws of physics say they are losing money due to losses to heat, etc. So of course their margins are higher on their power.
>I'm really surprised people on HN don't see the complexity
I never said it was a trivial problem. I said that it was a problem that the utility companies have a vested interest in not solving.
I'm really surprised that people on HN are blind to this.
>The power companies don't want it because the changes need to be paid for by current customers but only benefit ex-customers
This is false. The power companies do not want it even if it is paid for by current customers because even if it is, it eats away at their profit margins. Every kwh generated by a home owner's solar panel is not a kwh they are being paid for, even if they just use it themselves and don't transmit it across the grid.
At least in Hawaii there are a lot of independent energy producers, so your statement is appears to be wrong that they only want to sell their own power. While the majority is their own, it looks like 35%ish is independently generated.
They don't want to buy back power at the same rate they sell it, and since they can't control the nodes - the power from solar panels on homes is less valuable than that from larger independent producers since it costs more to control a distributed system. I'm sure they would buy it back, but people will be very angry about what they're willing to pay.
People are also free to get batteries if they don't like what the market prices are for buying electricity.
> I never said it was a trivial problem. I said that it was a problem that the utility companies have a vested interest in not solving.
They probably would solve it, but they know that the cost of solving that subtracted from the rate they pay their energy producers is low enough that people will complain and it's not worth it. They probably come out ahead by not solving that problem, I'm not sure how you can mandate they solve a problem so people that want to go "off grid" don't have to buy their own batteries. That's really what they're trying to avoid - there is nothing preventing people from going completely off grid, they just don't want to buy their own batteries.
>At least in Hawaii there are a lot of independent energy producers, so your statement is completely false that they only want to sell their own power.
They're not doing that because they want to.
>They don't want to buy back power at the same rate they sell it
They don't want to buy power at all. Certainly not if they have existing capacity that they would rather use. Definitely not if it is a future threat to their bottom line.
>People are also free to get batteries
Batteries are a much more inefficient way of using power than selling it to your neighbor.
>They probably would solve it, but they know that the cost of solving that subtracted from the rate they pay their energy producers is low enough that people will complain and it's not worth it.
Let's not pretend they're not solving the problem for our benefit. This is about their profits.
>I'm not sure how you can mandate they solve a problem so people that want to go "off grid" don't have to buy their own batteries.
Because they are a monopoly and a utility. We mandate they solve problems because otherwise they will just milk their monopoly for all its worth and the only party that benefits from that is them.
I think you hit the nail on the head. Their monopoly is in jeopardy and they aren't happy about it.
Hawaii tried geothermal, but for some odd reason it made a loud whistle sound when letting off exhaust. People didn't like that, so the idea stopped cold.
I'd have just had some shitty engineer spend ten seconds proposing an easy fix for that, but then again if the power company gave me millions NOT to do that, why would i?
> then they would be arguing for market pricing for your solar generated electricity. They are not.
Market pricing is exactly what a lot of utilities in the EU are now pushing for. Solar panel owners don't like it, because market prices now frequently dip below zero when solar and wind peak simultaneously.
The second issue is the cost of providing and maintaining power transmission. Traditionally, the utilities just tack on transmission costs on the electricity costs. When everyone buys all their electricity from the utility, this is a reasonable compromise. However, when you get rooftop solar, the cost of providing power transmission to you doesn't go down at all, yet your electricity purchases do go down.
A fairer way to price electricity transmission would probably be by your maximum draw from the grid, or by the size of the fuse that connects you to it.
A fairer way would be to treat electricity transmission as the natural monopoly that it is and to ensure that companies that do generation are not involved in transmission and vice versa.
Transmission would be better handled by local government. If they want to favor homeowners' solar panels, so be it. If they want to favor the local power plant, again, so be it.
If you let generators run the grid then they will do everything in their power to kill any forms of competing power and they will succeed thanks to their monopoly power.
There is no intrinsic reason why rooftop solar shouldn't be given subsidies (direct or indirect), also. It is greener than almost all alternatives, after all.
> A fairer way would be to treat electricity transmission as the natural monopoly that it is and to ensure that companies that do generation are not involved in transmission and vice versa.
That's exactly how it works in Finland and a lot of the rest of Northern Europe. I buy transmission and electricity from different companies.
If the entire point of installing solar is to offset the cost of your own electricity, it seems like a incredibly stupid investment.
You are basically paying tens of thousands of dollars to shave $100 off your electricity bill every month. You would do far better investing your money in normal things and just using the profits to pay your electric bill.
If you want solar to not be reliant on the grid, you need batteries. If you want solar to be a investment that gives you xx$ of benefit a month, you should look into doing something besides solar.
A) Because they are operating a utility monopoly. We are forced to be their customers. They should be forced to be ours.
B) They could use it, but they would rather sell you the output from their oil fired power stations because the profit is higher for them. That is why they don't want your solar panels hooked up - not because your neighbors couldn't use the electricity they generate - because it challenges their monopoly position and eats into their profit margins.
If this were truly about electric companies not needing the electricity (as opposed to them viewing any challenge to their monopoly as a 'free market evil'), then they would be arguing for market pricing for your solar generated electricity. They are not. They want your solar panels to be completely disconnected. Ideally you shouldn't even have them at all.
>Yes, its nice to sell back electricity to the grid, but that feels like a very hackish way to use 'solar'.
Your argument for how energy policy should be set are informed by what you think "feels hackish"?