California’s AB 1139 – hyperbole vs nuance?
I’m seeing opposition from environmental groups to California’s new net metering legislation, claiming it is a profit grab and will kill roof-top solar.
bill – https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220AB1139
opposition letter – https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FIeVaF43hRW5l8prznV-2cr0SWnSWB6tykvgCNjGCWQ/edit
A blog at NRDC has a nuanced response but I’m told they are the only environmental group that isn’t opposed to the bill.
https://www.nrdc.org/experts/mohit-chhabra/ca-solar-bill-ab-1139-improving-more-work-needed
Article cited by NRDC has some good responses I think:
https://energyathaas.wordpress.com/2021/06/01/rooftop-solar-inequity/
My instinct is the opposition is more driven by solar installation industry and generally wealthier homeowners who could afford to install solar.
Thoughts?
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Reading the opposition letter, one thing jumped out at me and shows the ignorance of the people writing it, as far as buisness goes. The letter states "the utilities charged $20 bilion for transmission line projects" and then "made $20 billion profit". If the utility spent $20 billion and got $20 billion from rate payers, then they made zero dollars profit.
A lot of people don't realize how much it costs to build utility infrastructure. Since I work in the telecom industry, which is related to the power industry in a way, I'll mention some costs here. I know people have told me they think it costs "$500/mile" to build fiber optic cable, but we typically budget (in suburban areas, cities can cost a lot more) about $100,000/mile for underground, and around $35,000/mile for aerial installation on existing poles. The power guys stuff costs a whole lot more. My local ISO has a cost estimation document for transmission lines here:
https://cdn.misoenergy.org/20190212%20PSC%20Item%2005a%20Transmission%20Cost%20Estimation%20Guide%20for%20MTEP%202019_for%20review317692.pdf
A typical 500kv transmission line, whic is typical for much of the long haul lines in California, is around $5 million per mile to build. My guess is that in some of the more remote areas that can cost more, since it's more difficult to access. What that means is that $20 billion in transmission projects is pretty believeable.
Grid tied solar is using the utility like a battery, and it DOES have a cost to the utilities. The utilities need to have the same amount of generation and infrastructure as they would have always needed to support the load of their customers, but now they are only getting paid for it during the times when solar isn't producing -- and that's a lot more than just at night, since solar doesn't produce at peak power for the entirety of the daylight hours. The only thing solar might save is some fuel costs for the power plants -- all of the transmission infrastructure and generation costs are fixed.
Transmission costs are also fixed, solar doesn't save anyone any money on that part of the system. Solar may save a rate payer on their electric bill, but it really does cause problems on the utility side. I suspect you are correct that the solar installers are opposed to this, since they tend to make their money leasing systems, and justifying the cost of the lease with the net metering payouts the rate payer may receive. That's a sort of cost shifting, and not a good thing. There are some very real complications of large-scale distributed solar in terms of grid operations that the solar installers don't seem to understand, or don't want to.
Solar, I think, makes perfect sense WITHOUT net metering -- for the rate payers. Not so much for the installers and their leased systems. Solar is good for what is known as "peak shave", where the installed solar system will offset your home's grid load during the times that it is producing. This doesn't have any of the complications of net metering, cost structures, reverse power flow, or any of that -- it just supplies your home locally when it can, cancelling out your home's load on the grid. Net metering is mostly about financial incentives, not practical issues with the solar systems themselves. It is my opionion that net metering is primarily of usefullness to the installers of the systems, and not so much to the rate payers. I'm not a fan of the "net zero" concept, at least not in it's usual forms, because that IS a problem for the utilities. That's not to say such a concept (net zero) can't necassarily be made to work, it's just that it's not as simple as many would like to think.
Bill
[ I suspect you are correct that the solar installers are opposed to this, since they tend to make their money leasing systems, and justifying the cost of the lease with the net metering payouts the rate payer may receive]
-Win. Their business model depends on continued receipt of direct subsidies. Of course they're not the only one. Eventually the system will run out of other peoples money.
Residential scale solar is usually a quite inefficient path to greener energy - so I'm with the last link. But ending net metering needs to be combined with the utilities taking the money saved by not subsidizing residential solar and spending it on more wind and utility scale solar.
I'm not aware of any numbers, but residential solar probably has been effective at raising awareness.
Yeah, it never seemed like a scalable solution to have a system where the homeowner has to monitor production, and when there's an issue a guy with a 40-foot ladder has to come and climb on his roof.
Thanks for replies. Reading more, this article was referenced by an opponent to the bill increasing fees on residential solar:
https://www.volts.wtf/p/rooftop-solar-and-home-batteries
"Some groundbreaking new modeling demonstrates that the value of DERs to the overall electricity system is far greater than has typically been appreciated."
It would be good to see if this is validated by other studies.
The comments at the end of the HAAS article I cited before are pretty interesting:
https://energyathaas.wordpress.com/2021/06/01/rooftop-solar-inequity/
I am reminded of I believe it was Mark Twain who said "there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics". A "breakthrough in modeling" doesn't mean much if it doesn't actually reflect reality. A BIG BIG BIG error in that first link jumps out at me too, and it's this (quoted from the article in one spot, but the same error is made over and over):
"...gigawatt of distributed energy storage installed."
This is a meaningless statement. Energy STORAGE would need a time unit, gigawatt-HOURS, or similar. A gigawatt alone is an instantaneous measurement, and is not useful in this case. I frequently see green energy proponents mix these things up, sometimes by accident, but other times to intentionally misrepresent things to make things look bigger or better. This makes the rest of their numbers suspect, since they're claiming to be doing something very advanced -- a "breakthrough" -- but they are missing a very basic fact about measuring units of energy, and they've done it many times in both text and graphs which means it's not just an isolated typo.
Distributed energy has it's place, and for a long time (decade+), I've always said that if it gets cheap enough, it's worth doing. I think solar has probably gotten close to "cheap enough", maybe it's even alreaedy there. I think purchase price now for a system is around $1/watt, which is pretty cheap really. I think peak shave is a good way to handle things, since peak shave is simple, doesn't require huge (costly) systems, removes load on the grid at the best time (close to peak load, which is when the costliest, and often dirtiest/least efficient generation is running), but peak shave doesn't need net metering rules to be practical -- and it doesn't tax the grid.
The biggest issue with cyclic and non-dispatchable generation is storage. I don't see batteries being the answer here, there just isn't enough capacity per unit space, and the batteries have a cycle life which results in relatively short operational lifetimes for most common technologies (but not all, with a tip of the hat to a poster here who posted about it some time back).
I see many porposed energy "solutions" put out by different groups that just don't work at the scale needed. The scale here is MASSIVE, and it's MASSIVE 24 hours a day. There is plenty of room to improve efficiencies, but I don't see a paradigm shift in energy sourcing around the corner with current or near-term technologies.
Bill
Bill --
I read a proposal -- and I wish I could find a link -- from a guy at MIT that sounded plausible to me. Basically eastern Canada -- Ontario and Quebec, specifically -- have a lot of hydro power, which is relatively easy to ramp up and down for fluctuations in demand. The east cost of the US has a lot of wind capacity, and in between is a lot of land that is suitable for solar. His proposal was to use hydro to buffer fluctuations in wind and sun availability. His claim was that if the grid was managed together there was enough hydro, wind and solar to serve the electricity demand of the entire region.
It's hard to really put some numbers in this since the "region" isn't well defined. I think you are thinking of the Northeast region, so new england/new york, mostly, and then Quebec and Eastern Ontario up in Canada too. If you define a region, then it's easier to put in some real numbers since the actual grid load data is readily available from the ISOs.
There IS a lot of hydroelectric power available in Quebec, but they USE it to run stuff -- it's not excess capacity. There is some excess capacity, but not a massive amount. As I understand it, if the rest of the James Bay area was developed for hydro power, this would approximately double the output. The issue is that solar only works during the day, and not even all of the daylight hours (there is a curve that roughly tracks the sun, with solar output increasing up to solar noon, then decreasing again as the sun heads West), and in the winter, overall output is much reduced. Wind is more consistent, but still has some variation.
Grid load varies throughout the day, with about 1/3 more total load during peak time than at the low point at night (I just pulled this from MISO's real time display for today, so it's close, but will vary somewhat day by day and throughout the year). Solar right now is about 0.86% (less than 1%) of the entire grid generation. That's not installed capacity, that's actual production, right now. Wind is about 11.5%. The rest is a mix of hydro/natural gas/coal/nuclear. In MISO, about 72% of system generation is coal and natural gas right now.
Hydro is good for baseload, but there is only so much of it available. I'd have to dig up some more data to be certain, but I am doubtful there is enough excess hydro capacity to do this unless more of the James Bay project were to be developed, and there is a lot of resistance to doing that in Canada, unfortunately.
I just don't see enough generation in wind/solar to completely replace existing generation. Lots of people have talked about how much wind, especially, there is, but the actual production numbers are VERY small relative to the system load. This data is all available on the ISO real time system graphs. The problem is usually that people don't understand the MASSIVE scale of the utility system.
If you can define the region with some more specificity, I can try to put some actual numbers together.
Bill
Note that anything talking about DERs does not necessarily apply to residential scale solar. It's a red herring fallacy. Unfortunately, fiddle with the inputs and definitions until the model supports my argument is common.
Come on just admit it the solar proponents wants the use the grid as a supper battery storing kWh in August and use then in January and pay nothing or next to nothing to do so.
It is I fine plan but at least admit when many thousands of customer do this it does cost the unities money and those costs are shifted to the non solar rate payers.
Seems to me a net metering connection fee should be about 50% of that a battery would cost and the monthly fees should be about 50% of what it would cost to replace the battery every 7 years.
Walta