You mean they don't allow rich solar panel owners to get their grid battery subsidized by poor folks who lack the capital for their own solar?

This is a good thing. No power company should be forced to pay retail for power. It is a regressive tax on those that can least afford it. I don't think it was inappropriate to offer to get the industry off the ground, but it's quickly approaching the time to do away those subsidies - especially those that come directly from other rate-payers.

Nor should the power company force customers to buy the power that they generated themselves at the utility's price.

They already paid the capital costs for generating their own power. You want them to pay again? For the transmission lines and peaking plant that they aren't using?

Certainly, when the net usage is negative, the utility should pay only the wholesale cost of that portion of production in excess of local usage. When the net usage is positive, the customer should pay the retail price of that portion of usage in excess of local production. But it is nonsensical for the customer to sell the power they generate at wholesale, and immediately buy it back at retail. Immediate use should not be metered in either direction, and time-shifted use should account for peak vs. off-peak.

Otherwise, all you are doing is forcing the customer to use bigger batteries to route around your obnoxious local generation policy.

That "grid battery" is actually the natural gas fuel supply at the peaking plant that does not need to be used to supplement the baseline plant. Fuel that stays in the tank instead of being burned is the best "battery" we have right now. If you encourage people to use their own redox reaction batteries, you're lowering the efficiency of the entire system, and everyone loses.

The article is an advocacy piece andit turns out isn't telling the entire story. The rules are described here: https://www.tva.gov/Energy/Valley-Renewable-Energy/Dispersed...

There are 3 options:

>Self-Generation The electricity produced serves the facility’s needs first. Any excess electricity is delivered to the power grid without payment. If the facility needs additional electricity, it must be bought from the local power company.

>Self-Generation and Dispersed Power Contract The electricity produced serves the facility’s needs first. TVA purchases any excess electricity that is delivered to the grid. If the facility needs additional electricity, it must be bought from the local power company.

>Dispersed Power Sell-All Contract All of the electricity produced and delivered to the power grid is sold to TVA. The facility buys all of its electricity from the local power company. (Two meters—one for electricity purchased by the customer from the local power company, and one for electricity generated by the customer and sold to TVA—are required.)

So no one would ever choose option 3, and no one would choose option 1, unless the installation was so small that the capital cost of the dual-channel meter would never be recovered. If it were truly the customer's choice, this would not be an issue, because the customer should always prefer #2 to #3.

So what does TVA do (if anything) to get customers to pick #3, or force them into it?

Also note that net metering is not an option. #2 uses a dual-channel meter to track outgoing power separately from incoming power. Net metering is not necessarily the optimal metering solution, either, but TVA doesn't even offer it.

Hmm, I think you may be confused/arguing against a strawman here, but I'll bite.

> Nor should the power company force customers to buy the power that they generated themselves at the utility's price.

No one is forcing customers to do this. I'm not sure where you get that from? If you are using more power than consuming, it does not leave your local premises. Only the excess power you are not using at that point in time is being sent. That's kind of the point of net metering.

> Certainly, when the net usage is negative, the utility should pay only the wholesale cost of that portion of production in excess of local usage.

Which is precisely what they do. Some are forced to pay retail - which was a temporary subsidy both to spur solar development and honestly was adopted largely due to billing convenience if nothing else 20 years ago. Easy to just let a meter spin backwards and bill/pay based on those numbers vs. developing entirely new billing software but everyone knew at the time it was temporary and financially nonsensical.

> When the net usage is positive, the customer should pay the retail price of that portion of usage in excess of local production.

Currently the case.

> But it is nonsensical for the customer to sell the power they generate at wholesale, and immediately buy it back at retail.

This isn't the case anywhere I've heard of, and definitely not the TVA. Even the linked article very clearly describes the situation as net metering as defined everywhere else. Customers are not sending all their generated power out their meter, then putting load on the "grid" on another meter back in. That would indeed be absurd.

> Immediate use should not be metered in either direction, and time-shifted use should account for peak vs. off-peak.

Completely agreed.

> That "grid battery" is actually the natural gas fuel supply at the peaking plant that does not need to be used to supplement the baseline plant. Fuel that stays in the tank instead of being burned is the best "battery" we have right now.

Yes and no. You might be surprised solar load does not match up nearly as well with peak power demand as is reported. This of course is a fine point to debate, and generally is in your favor.

My main point is that power companies being forced to operate a free battery for rich solar customers is immoral when think of who is subsidizing that free battery. Rooftop solar may be about the least valuable form of power to a power company as they can do nothing to schedule production, and the rest of the rate-payers shouldn't be forced to pay retail rates to the rich few who prefer to save $15k on a local battery pack so they don't need the grid battery at night.

I don't think we should force folks to require battery packs, but I also know that the financial incentives are currently lined up to have us end up with a bunch of rich folks paying nothing for power with solar systems, and a bunch of poor renters paying for 100% of the capex on things like the nuclear baseload plants so the solar folks get power at night.

I feel like you didnt read it.

"Thus, any grid-tied solar system within the TVA region must have dual metering, one to measure power coming off the grid, another to measure power going to the grid. The arrangement with TVA is likewise “buy all, sell all” in that you have no choice but to sell all the power you generate to TVA, then you buy back whatever you actually consume."

That is exactly what TVA does.

That is what "buy all, sell all" means.

http://midwestenergynews.com/2017/01/24/indiana-energy-bill-...

Yep, I was mistaken. I didn't reach the end of the article apparently the first read.

I do agree that is problematic and silly.

> Customers are not sending all their generated power out their meter, then putting load on the "grid" on another meter back in. That would indeed be absurd.

That is exactly what the linked article claims is happening to TVA customers: "Thus, any grid-tied solar system within the TVA region must have dual metering, one to measure power coming off the grid, another to measure power going to the grid. The arrangement with TVA is likewise “buy all, sell all” in that you have no choice but to sell all the power you generate to TVA, then you buy back whatever you actually consume."

How is it crooked? The utility company pays to builds and maintains the grid infrastructure with the expectation they can use the infrastructure to sell power to consumers.

One person selling back some unspecified amount of solar with questionable reliability, without the utility company having any say when the power is provided, isn't exactly a very useful thing for a utility company, so it's surprising they even pay the same wholesale rate.

Why not get a basic battery system and use that to power some loads in your house, instead of buying power from the utility company for those loads?

You're not allowed to use the electricity you generate. _All_ power you produce is sold to the utility at wholesale. _All_ power you consume is purchased from the utility at retail. Two separate meters.

Wait what? How? Is this a Tennessee specific thing? This seems absurd and impossible to enforce.

If I hypothetically spend a couple hundred bucks on a solar panel, 12v lead acid battery, and basic 12VDC -> 120VAC inverter, put those items on a wagon, and drag it across my yard to use power tools where an extension cord won't reach is the power company going to arrest/fine me? Is it only illegal once I use the batteries/inverter under my own roof?

If i understand the article correctly, it's illegal when you wire it to the grid. So, powertools and a battery will be fine. i suppose you could have a big switch outside your house that lets you pick local generation or grid generation, ala a datacenter failover switch.

But nobody wants that. Really, i don't think many people care about selling the power back either. But they've made it already, why waste it? What people want is i'll make the first 5 kwh, and i want to buy any extra from the grid. And i don't want a big switch system for each light in my house. Which seems very normal and sane.

>But nobody wants that.

Oh, that's exactly what I want, and have been researching for myself. I'm taking it even further and planning on being able to switch individual circuits between battery and grid.

If that idea is dumb somehow I'd love to know more resources about why. From my perspective it's a better solution than grid tie, but I value resiliency and reliability as well as pure cost alone. If I still lived in a city where the power literally never went out for years at a time, then having a local backup would not be really attractive.

And considering the regulations, it seems like the system I'm considering would also be able to basically satisfy the desire for "i'll make the first 5khw". Select a circuit that draws at least 5 kwh/day, run it off batteries until the battery bank voltage drops below a threshold, and then switch over to the grid.

> Oh, that's exactly what I want

Hah. Existential quantifiers are hard.

I’m not an electrician, and that’s who you should talk with.

However, it’s way easier to just trip a breaker when the power goes out. The whole neighborhood is drawing from your battery, breaker flips and you are done.

A single meter tie is simple. You use what you generate. Any extra makes the meter run backwards. You draw more, you pay for it. The infrastructure probably can’t handle whole neighborhoods doing this.

IMHO, they should charge a flat monthly fee for the option to connect.

If there's an electrical link between your system and the public grid, you're playing by the grid's rules. If you don't want to play by the grid's rules, you can't connect to the grid in any way.

p.s. Even if buy-all-sell-all doesn't make sense, requiring your electrical setup to meet grid standards does make sense. It's be surprisingly easy to cause a blackout, or to kill yourself, by messing it up.

It’s up to the states to decide I guess. In my state, the local power company lets you use what you need and then sell what you don’t use at whole sale rates.

They will send you a check if you produce more than you consume. I’m not sure if you had to pay for the meter but they would install one.