This is kind of why I’m a bit iffy on net metering. Yes, it increases solar adoption by making it more affordable and it is fair for the homeowner to be compensated for excess electricity given back to the electric company, but at the same time, the electric company is forced to buy back that electricity at retail rates, during a time when consumption is generally low and production is high. That’s not necessarily too fair for the electric company either.

Now, getting rid of net metering and giving the excess electricity back to the electric company for free would be outrageously unfair to the homeowner. But maybe it should be sold back at some lower percentage of retail since it is being produced during periods of the day when it really isn’t needed all that badly. 50-60% seems fair during non-peak hours. This percentage can be increased during peak hours when demand is high, and this will encourage homeowners to build energy storage infrastructure as well, which is overall a good thing for our transition away from non-renewable sources of energy. Couple this with generous subsidies for homeowners and we’ll have a nice cycle going.

And more on energy storage—it’s really hard from an engineering standpoint to build one big 10 MWh energy storage facility, but it’s comparatively easy to build a thousand 10 kWh energy storage facilities.

Ugh. This would be so much easier if we just nationalised PGE and Pacific Power.