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.