And with the proliferation of battery technology, eventually the solar owners (and increasing numbers of them) may just disconnect from the grid and then the numbers really won't work.

My off the cuff solution here is that energy providers/plants/etc. need to invest in storage capacity, or eventually the economic incentives will win out and people just won't buy energy from them in states where solar + battery works.

If you are a net producer of energy, the only calculus that makes sense (unless you want to pay for access to the grid as a form of insurance) is that you get money for providing energy back to the grid. Otherwise you just disconnect and figure it out afterward.

With renewals, decentralization of energy production, and battery proliferation we're going to see some interesting market dynamics play out here soon. We probably need a general energy market accessible to producers as small as a single person all the way up to a nuclear plant. Perhaps you should be able to log in to an energy market like you do your brokerage and buy or sell energy.

> may just disconnect from the grid and then the numbers really won't work

Which works until everybody is off the grid and then collapses.

Everybody relies on the fact that the grid is ubiquitous. Street lights, traffic lights, water pumps, etc. When the grid isn't ubiquitous, you lose all manner of things we take for granted.

We've seen this before in California. Some suburbs made a point of being in unincorporated land to avoid being associated with LA. Well, they found out really quickly that their infrastructure was horribly expensive when they had to pay for it all themselves.

In other words, the grid is part of critical infrastructure. As such, it should be a governmental function supported by taxes, rather than a product invested in by private companies.

The lack of energy storage is the issue. If the utilities could pay users to deploy the energy when they needed it there wouldn’t be an issue. The problem is solar energy peaks and there is nothing that can be done with that energy because power plants take time to bring on and off line. Natural Gas is relatively quick to bring online, but it still takes time and money.

We no longer have a renewable energy production challenge. If we wanted to we could produce more than enough energy with wind and solar energy cheaply. The problem is we don’t have good affordable energy storage solutions.

> I don't know what the right answer is.

You have to unbundle the two different costs:

1) Infrastructure cost. It costs a fixed amount to connect someone to the always-on grid. This needs be set.

2) Consumption cost. It costs a different amount to consume produced electricity.

The problem is that the panel owners are going to get very cranky (as you see in this article) when that happens because maintaining the grid is quite a bit more expensive than the production costs and they're going to lose their cost benefit.

Panel owners aren't the only group that would get cranky about unbundling. Some non-solar consumers also reap effective subsidies from bundling costs into per-unit charges. Rural customers in low density areas would have higher bills if they paid for infrastructure explicitly. So would customers in dense areas who consume only a little electricity each month but still need the infrastructure to work around the clock. Customers who live in urban or suburban areas and consume a lot of electricity would see their bills fall. Since this latter group tends to be more affluent than the previous two groups, charging each customer proportionally to their incurred costs is also likely to be perceived as unfair.

If we are going to subsidize certain groups, let’s make it explicit and subsidize the poor instead.

> Solar is cutting into the margins that the plants need to be profitable.

There is more supply, the utilities should be dropping their prices and excess, high cost production drop out of the market. Ofc ourse that assumes that it is a f free market.

> So the utilities try to soften the costs by taxing the solar owners.

Oh how noble of them to look out for the little guy. There is a small chance that they are just opportunists gauging as much money as possible out of any avenue they can. Of course it would be unheard of for a big business with a practical monopoly over a basic human necessity to do such a thing.

I mean - regressive taxes are bad. And this situation is essentially a regressive tax bundled into your power bill.

Those with less means are forced to continue buying power from utilities that are faced with shrinking customer bases, and which have high, long-term costs (Building power plants ain't cheap, and the costs to amortize the initial construction can't just be waved away because "there is more supply"...)

Does that mean utilities aren't also angling to make the most of the situation? Of course not - they are businesses.

But it does mean your black and white approach isn't really useful here - unless you're fine with poor people getting fucked. Maybe you are.

You're describing a death spiral, like has happened with car insurance in some places. As the costs on those still in the market go up and the costs of getting away from it come down, you can expect more and more people to go for the exit. Which sounds great, except it eventually leaves the few who can't get out stuck with the bill for the whole thing.

I suppose the question is what we expect to make of the electrical grid in the future and how to pay for it. If the goal is to stop having a grid, the death spiral seems like a reasonable way to get there.

I suppose that may be the case - although I don't really see much solar specced for true off-grid use.

I think the main point is that there are some negative consequences to allowing folks to opt out of what were previously shared utilities. Intentional or not - we had a form of social contract around pricing utilities, and that contract falls apart if the wealthiest can buy their way out of future payments.

That doesn't mean I agree with the way that california (and many other states) are trying to hamfist those who buy solar into subsidizing utility companies, but it does mean there's a real conversation to be had that's not as simple as "Fuck the poor - I have mine".

It's a similar conversation to the one around gas taxes. EV owners avoid paying them, but gas taxes are primarily funding road infrastructure, which is still shared by EV owners. So we had a social contract that worked, and we have to find a replacement. That's a real discussion, and not some simple black and white "They buy EV, they pay less" talk.

My black and white approach works just fine, I am more than happy to see the poor shareholders get fucked. Take away their monopoly and allow competition. It turns out it is already happening as community choice aggregators (CCAs) are all over the place and CEOs of companies with monopolies have proven worthy of their massive salaries by driving their business into bankrupcy.

There is a reason for governments to exist beyond writing and regulating the creation of monopolies for private citizens to get rich. The costs to amortize the initial construction can't just be waved away because they paid all the money out in dividends and executive bonuses. These companies raked in money in bucketloads, agressively wrote down the construction costs and still had money left over to pay fat dividends.

OP did say poor people, not poor shareholders. Those least likely to own solar panels, i.e. those with less wealth (don't own their own houses, can't afford the capital for installation) are the ones who bear the cost of higher power plant prices.

Who spoke up for those people before the shareholders stopped getting their fat dividend? Nobody. Now that the big corporations (and their shareholders) are struggling the crys from the rooftop is "wont somebobdy think of the poor people".

How about putting back some of the excess profits from the monopoly that were taken every year till now?

Utility pricing is one of the most regulated things in the country.

They don't "regulate the creation" of a monopoly for something like power - it's the definition of "natural monopoly". They regulate it so hard because capitalism DOES NOT WORK for this. Texas still tries it, and we're all seeing how well their underfunded, poorly maintained utilities blow up the second you get a slight perturbance in the natural order (ooops - hope joe blow likes his 16k power bill this month!)

Also - Even if you were to buy true off-grid solar and completely avoid the grid for your home, there is literally no way you are not taking advantage of power provided by the power companies. It's in your street lights, your cell towers, your stores, your gas stations, your schools/libraries/gov buildings. It's running the pumps for your sewers, the traffic lights for your roads, the signage at your DMV. It's EVERYWHERE - And you are using it.

So do I think this particular legislation is the right way to solve it? No - probably not. But I'm not an angry child who's unable to hold a real conversation around how we structure society.

The utility company using their scale to build their own cheap utility scale solar farms and give everyone bargain energy at sunny times? Thus making microgeneration uneconomic and restoring the communal system?