Counterintuitively, this wouldn’t be that great for the grid.

If millions of people stop paying monthly utility bills, electric utilities start to run in the red, or have to further raise rates while the grid further destabilizes. This is unfolding in real time in California and a few studies have come out showing that subsidized rooftop solar is doing more harm than good without utility-grade energy storage.

At least the rich people will have power. And if their solar and batteries are down for a while, they'll likely also have their own personal Generac whole-house automatic diesel, gas, or propane generator. Individuals who can afford it will have reliable power.

I snagged a Generac a few years ago, and never looked back; it runs off my gas line and takes zero input from me to work (although you can fiddle with it if you like). That's definitely where anyone with any money at all is going to end up, not just the rich.

I want a propane one myself so it works hopefully even after a modest earthquake

Oh yeah, if I lived in a seismically active region I'd have gone that route as well.

>"At least the rich people will have power."

Phew. I am so relieved. Not a single day goes by when I do not think about how those poor riches manage.

The naive solution to the "people stop paying monthly utility bills" is to charge a high hook-up fee that covers that capital cost of baseload availability and then charge for marginal usage closer to marginal cost. Right now the baseload infrastructure is covered by artificially high costs for each marginal kilowatt-hour to slowly recoup the capital expense. The billing structure doesn't match the cost structure.

But that would make actual use effectively free and disincentivize conservation. So it's a hard problem to solve.

You could perhaps raise the effective price of solar by writing in high per-month fees for any houses with solar, but also waive those fees for homes which prove they have a substantial-enough battery solution to help ease demand on the grid during the relatively high-use hours of 5PM to 10PM.

IIRC the real costs of residential electricity are about half from infrastructure, half from actual energy consumption [1]. If we charged prices proportional to costs, high users would still pay significantly more than average users. The main problem (a political one) is that in a lot of places these costs have been bundled together in a single "per unit" charge that effectively subsidized the lowest consumers. Changing it so that prices go up at the low end of consumption and go down at the high end of consumption would widely be seen as unfair, so it's hard to correct the pricing mistake now that it's ossified into place by tradition.

[1] It's different for big industrial users, like factories operating 24/7; their per-unit costs are dominated by consumption rather than infrastructure. They also get lower prices partially reflecting these lower costs.

Thanks for the more detailed information. I double-checked and it seems you're right for the states I could find data for - industrial users have some extra per-month fees to cover the baseload made available to them (billed per kW rather than per kWh) but these don't offset the far lower rates per kWh that I found.

There is often a difference between "industrial" vs. "commercial" but both seem to pay lower rates than residential.

I wish I had the source for the stats, but I remember reading that a significant percentage (call it more than 1/8th of the total budget) of a electric utilities budget could be spent on -just- tree trimming services. This was discussed in the context of investments by a electric utility to decrease downtime during a storm, and how the (large) investments in the 12mos for tree trimming services is what allowed for so little downtime.

I can't square away this statement with the fact that all of the major electric utilities in California, and especially in southern California, are logging record-breaking profits and issuing record-breaking dividends.

I realize that in your scenario we're talking about millions of people no longer paying utility bills, but surely that could not and would not happen overnight, and I cannot imagine that these companies could not find some wiggle room in their billion dollar profit margins to adapt to a change that might for once lower monthly bills.

Do we have the materials and manufacturing capacity for a massive amount of solar panels right now? Installers?

> Installers

I've long held that, at least in developed countries, we should be ending unemployment insurance and moving to guaranteed employment and utilizing unemployed folks for public service projects such as solar installs.

Yes, of course not for disabled or high skilled folks who just need to transition. But for many many cases there's little reason to give someone hundreds per week for no work.

"we should be ending unemployment insurance and moving to guaranteed employment and utilizing unemployed folks for public service projects such as solar installs."

While I agree with that, it seems the implementation of a program like that would be quite difficult...especially considering how difficult it is to get pretty much anything done.

Are these new workers doing things that other union workers could be doing? Would they have to join the union? Those two simple things would derail any plan like that for one side of the isle in the US, at least.

I agree politically it's a hard change. I'm just speaking about ideal policies at this point.

Perhaps a wide retraining program offering. Something like "Hey you've been unemployed for 2 years, you're losing benefits starting (sometime). To help you along you can take a free solar installer course paid by the tax payer."

>"utilizing unemployed folks for public service projects such as solar installs"

And when suddenly there is not enough of them work for food people? This is how GULAG came to be.

Ok, i guess I was unclear. By guaranteed work I simply meant that people had the choice still. Not forced slavery, but guaranteed optional work for pay, rather than paychecks for nothing.

I'm thinking national projects like hoover dam and interstate highway systems.

"Not forced slavery"

"hoover dam"

Book Recommendation: The Profiteers: Bechtel and the Men Who Built the World https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25814021-the-profiteers?...

Thanks for the book recommendation. added to my list :)

I think a better way to word it is, "hey, are you having a hard time finding a job? If so, we will give you one for the time being." Which Germany kinda does this to my understanding. If your having difficulty finding a job, the state will help find at least a temporary gig for you in the mean time.

Yes, I like this. At least in my experiences in USA / Canada, there's a lot of actually able bodied folks, doing nothing for pay. Even if it's not worth the money, they could at least partially contribute to the work of society by something as tiny as being part of a street cleaning crew, being a volunteer worker with a not for profit etc.

As i understand it having even a little work/contribution can help with holding off depression . It doesnt have to be 40hrs a week, but even a single day of work can help keep normalcy.

In California, power companies are trying hard to disincentivize solar. The worst time for the grid is when the sun starts going down but people are still running AC/laundry/dishwashers. Solar setups just generate power at the times when it's least needed, and utilities haven't built up enough battery capacity to take advantage of it for later.

Another thing we saw with some utilities is that they had to raise rates during the drought to cover their costs. People were so good at reducing their water consumption that the utilities were having trouble covering their large fixed costs. It'll be interesting to see how things go once California implements the income-based fixed electric billing in the next few years.

>utilities haven't built up enough battery capacity to take advantage of it for later.

After Tesla was able to supply a battery pack to the city in Australia after a Twitter bet, I'm really surprised that more storage has not been installed everywhere. Maybe I stopped paying attention to the story too soon, but did this battery buffer not fix the problem?

Battery storage remains constrained by cell availability. There is no spare capacity and it can only be scaled up slowly due to supply chain issues. The battery storage that Tesla sold to Australia is a step in the right direction but capacity is only a tiny fraction of what we would need in the USA to enable a large scale transition to renewable energy.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/08/australia-switches-on-victor...

The California grid operator has a really cool website that shows realtime-ish graphs of supply and demand[1] and even daily battery reports[2]. One big takeaway is that the total battery capacity is kinda wimpy when you compare it to how much fossil fuel the state burns over the day.

The way net metering worked in the past is that people with solar could offload their access generation to power companies and make storage or resale the utility's responsibility. Then 2.0 was a sorta-time of use implementation, and now we're up to Net Metering 3.0 and I haven't bothered to look into how that works. However people I know who have looked into Tesla powerwalls haven't found them to be economical for individual homeowners.

[1]: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html

[2]: http://www.caiso.com/Documents/DailyEnergyStorageReportJun22...

> The worst time for the grid is when the sun starts going down but people are still running AC/laundry/dishwashers

Isn't that trivial to at least mitigate via time-of-use rates?

Do they made solar panels that aren't affected by clouds or trees?