It's called a "TOU" service plan, and I've had one for several years now, through San Diego G&E.

It’s been gutted for future customers - https://solarrights.org/savecaliforniasolar/

Home solar installs (and that change) would be NEM, not TOU. California had a mandate to move everyone to TOU a while back, though some might still be on the old plans.

As a residential electricity user there is little reason for me to be on tou unless I also have an Nem for installed solar. All the tou might do is expose me to inconvenience and high costs.

That really depends on your usages. The extreme examples are if you have an electric car that you can charge overnight instead of peak hours, or work any shift that's not 9-5 so that you avoid the 6-9pm peak hours.

And of course the whole point is to incentivize changing usages to using less power during peak hours, which it does better than the old plans. That's always going to be a slight inconvenience to get people to change habits.

It's mainly going to inconvenience the poorest people who have the least amount of flexibility.

I have solar and a battery so it's really very little inconvenience for me, but those who can't afford that (and it's harder to afford now), will pay the worst costs.

By disincentivizing residential solar, the private utilities maximize their profits and decrease renewable energy installation.

The poorest people still won't be able to afford residential solar even with the greatest incentives. And the old rates that forced the electric company to buy electricity at 1:1 retail rates which was never sustainable. Those rates include grid maintenance, not just power generation. Unless you have a battery, your peak demand is likely to be when solar generation is low, so you're still reliant on the same grid during peak hours. This is the duck curve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve

Under the old plan, if you have solar and no battery and exported enough power during the day to cover your electricity costs at night, how much are you paying for grid upkeep? Basically zero. So who is going to be paying for the grid? Those who cannot afford to get solar. That would become a huge problem when the majority of people have solar panels.

https://youtu.be/C4cNnVK412U?t=1048 talks about this subject in-depth more. Timestamp at the relevant part to our discussion.

But they don't buy at retail rates, so that's a fallacy. The CA utilities pay a fraction of retail rate for residential grid energy inputs with even the old NEM. And I am charged a separate grid connection fee with that setup, so nothing of what you're saying seems to align with my direct experience nor with the policy coverage I've read.

In my experience, any excess you generate is given to you in 1:1 credit. Any excess in the credit after a year is paid in a fraction of rates, yes. Sure I have a daily basic charge, but that's on the TOU plan, not NEM. Otherwise what did you think NEM 3.0 changed if NEM 2.0 was already a fraction of retail rates? Which power company are you on and what rates are you getting?

Even the CPUC's website says "retail rate (including generation, distribution, and transmission components)": https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/NEM/

The grid has to be built to handle peak power, and if you don't have a battery, solar doesn't help with that. But it's not fair to split up grid fees evenly, say in the daily basic charge I have in my TOU plan, because poorer people will use less power and contribute less to peak. And you've brought up points on why raising prices during peak is no good either, then it'll be only affordable to the ones who have solar to offset it. And any fees only to solar customers disincentivizes solar.

So how can you incentivize residential solar without passing grid fees to those who cannot afford solar?

Utilities are actually incentivized to charge more per kwh in order to capture profits at an allowed percentage of that kwh. That really serves nobody but the shareholders of the private utilities, and it certainly does not serve the poorer customers. The poorer customers would be served by the fastest move to renewable energy, as pollution from fossil fuel generation also disproportionately affects their health due to placement of generation in their neighborhoods disproportionately.

I found this podcast interesting in terms of lower cost technical solutions as well as community control of their own microgrids, but it's really unclear how to push back private utility lobbying to get there.

https://theamphour.com/630-renewable-energy-policy-with-ari-...

Those are completely different topic than residential solar though. I don't disagree, we should be moving to renewables. But even in a community microgrid, is each person responsible for the solar panels on their own roof? Or does a community control manage it and can just intrude onto a homeowner's roof to fix the panels if something is broken. Or should the community build standalone solar power stations so there's no worry about a broken roof here and there, or trees or snow blocking the panels.

And there's still the issue of what do you when the sun is down and the duck curve hits? You wouldn't want a fossil fuel generator in your community microgrid. But batteries are still expensive, who in the community wants to pay for it? A grid is going to beat a microgrid in economy of scale.

It's not a completely different topic. If a microgrid interface is allowed, for example, then different community and investment models can be considered on a per microgrid basis. If only utility models exist, then most likely a much narrower set of models exist - and likely under serving many communities and groups in addition to higher pricing.