Customers that have invested in solar under NEM 1.0 and 2.0 may be forced into a regulatory scheme that would threaten their return on investment, based on guidance from the California Public Advoc…
You’ve articulated well a lot of good points, but you’re missing a few key considerations. One elephant in the room is that the Investor Owned Utilities (which cover the vast majority of accounts in California) are abusing their monopoly powers as much as possible (including regulatory capture). That is sadly inextricably linked with the resentment felt by their solar customers, even as it is also felt by all of their non-solar customers.
You’re talking about the kind of tradeoffs that make sense in an ideal system, pricing things according to what they actually cost to provide. But the IOUs price things at “how much can we get the CPUC to allow us to charge?” And they love to stoke class warfare politically when it suits their business purposes. It’s just one more area where the actual problem is the billionaires (or just call it capitalism) against the 99% but they keep the water too muddy for most people to see it.
I believe it’s also still generally either illegal or at least infeasible to disconnect from the grid entirely in most of urban and suburban California, because it’s tied to occupancy permitting. I think the best hope of ending the madness does lie in that direction though. Solar customers tend to be much wealthier than non solar customers, which in aggregate means many of them will have the means to go full battery off grid as the pricing disparity continues to grow. This loss of legally-mandated captive market is the only chance to force monopolies to behave better.
You’ve articulated well a lot of good points, but you’re missing a few key considerations. One elephant in the room is that the Investor Owned Utilities (which cover the vast majority of accounts in California) are abusing their monopoly powers as much as possible (including regulatory capture). That is sadly inextricably linked with the resentment felt by their solar customers, even as it is also felt by all of their non-solar customers.
You’re talking about the kind of tradeoffs that make sense in an ideal system, pricing things according to what they actually cost to provide. But the IOUs price things at “how much can we get the CPUC to allow us to charge?” And they love to stoke class warfare politically when it suits their business purposes. It’s just one more area where the actual problem is the billionaires (or just call it capitalism) against the 99% but they keep the water too muddy for most people to see it.
I believe it’s also still generally either illegal or at least infeasible to disconnect from the grid entirely in most of urban and suburban California, because it’s tied to occupancy permitting. I think the best hope of ending the madness does lie in that direction though. Solar customers tend to be much wealthier than non solar customers, which in aggregate means many of them will have the means to go full battery off grid as the pricing disparity continues to grow. This loss of legally-mandated captive market is the only chance to force monopolies to behave better.