California CPUC is out of control.

They wanted the state to impose a tax on people using solar panels.

https://krcrtv.com/news/chico-residents-on-possible-solar-pa...

Solar net metering is a weird subsidy. The solar panel owners are not paid for the full value of the electricity they provide. The utility is not paid for the full value of the electricity distribution they provide (you can pull 240V x 200A on demand).

Net metering can only form a small part of the retail market before the fixed costs of distribution get concentrated on remaining customers in a death spiral. A population that is generally less able to take advantage of tax credits (because their tax liability is not high enough), and has less access to capital in the form of homeownership or financing for the solar system.

This is analogous to the "problem" of fuel efficient car owners paying less fuel tax. Some states have added higher registration fees on hybrids and EVs to offset the "lost" revenue. Another similar situation is water utilities that encouraged efficiency through higher rates. Customers saved water and then the utility had to increase per unit rates to maintain enough baseline revenue to cover fixed expenses of maintaining the distribution network to every home.

I don't think that is correct. With net metering residential solar owners are overpaid for the value of their power. More than commercial solar plants selling at the same time.

Homeowners may get paid less than their panels cost, but rooftop solar is tremendously expensive and there is no way that it would recoup the cost at actual market prices

It's somewhere in-between: residential solar, when feeding back into the grid, is only using a small fraction of the transmission compared to a commercial solar plant (in terms of length of wiring and number of transformers used to transmit a given amount of power). In fact, it will generally be (unless in a neighbourhood where nearly every house has solar installed) reducing the overall load on the grid. So it's not reasonable to expect that the value of that electricity is the same as that of the same amount coming from a large utility, but it's still probably not worth retail prices, either (though maybe it is, in certain circumstances. In cases with a very overloaded grid it may conceivably be worth more!)

the grid is a fixed cost, which is needed unless we are willing go without power every night and winter. Once it is in place, it costs the same if it is sitting idle or being used.

There are absolutely no savings from an unreliable local power source.

California was paying rooftop solar owners far too much. Poor people who couldn’t afford solar were subsidizing the grid for solar owners.

Yes, this is what the CPUC said but was a ridiculous argument in favor of raising profits moreso than helping lower income people.

The climate should take precendence over everything else. Incentives for rooftop solar should increase, incentives to help lower income people should increase, electricity record profits should not be a thing.

This is entirely due to regulatory capture, not some "good will towards poor people" that the electricity industry is pushing.

It doesnt make any sense to force utilities to pay retail prices for electricity when wholesale prices are 10x lower. There are much more efficient ways to encourage renewables.

Net metering actually increases both costs and profits.

Power companies have a fixed margin of 10% and a captive market.

If power costs them $1, they make $0.1. If power costs them $5, they make $0.50.

Rooftop solar costs 10X what commercial solar does. Every kw of rooftop power they buy means 10kw of commercial solar isnt built.

> electricity record profits should not be a thing

Unless the electricity consumption is falling faster than inflation, I'd expect the regulated-profit electric utility to be having record profits essentially all the time.

> The climate should take precendence over everything else.

That's an argument for moving from rooftop solar subsidies into storage subsidies, because its already at the point where renewable output sometimes exceeds 100% of demand. (And the strong solar mandates will contnue to add supply without subsidy, especially—and this adds to the pile of reasons that this needs to happen—if housing construction stops being held back by zoning constraints.)

I guess they fixed the glitch by moving to income based utility bills

Which is simply a hidden tax hike, and a wild market distortion.

which is basically incetivizing even more electricity usage by subsidizing large electricity users and punishing electricity savers.

there's nothing more evil than forcing people to pay flat rate for services (electricity) that we should all be cutting back on, not using even more.

The proposal is to set the fixed portion of the bill to vary with income. The usage portion is still billed per kWh.