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from the defeating-lobbyists-for-non-renewable-energy dept.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports
Gov. Brian Sandoval said [June 5] he intends to sign a bill that supporters expect will bring the rooftop solar industry back to Nevada.
During a ceremony to sign the major bills implementing the two-year, $8.2 billion general fund budget, Sandoval said he will be signing Assembly Bill 405, a bill making it worthwhile for homeowners to invest in rooftop solar and participate in net metering. Net metering is where people with rooftop systems get a credit for the excess energy they return to the grid.
[...] The passage of AB405 has been praised by the solar industry.
A statement from Tesla said the bill will not only bring back solar energy to Nevada and enable the industry to innovate and grow sustainably, it will create thousands of jobs and bring millions of dollars in economic benefits to the state.
"Tesla will begin selling rooftop solar and residential storage products in Nevada, and we look forward to bringing even more jobs to the state in the years ahead to help provide residents with affordable rooftop solar and energy storage choices", the statement said.
GlobeNewswire adds Sunrun Announces Plans to Re-Enter Nevada Solar Market
"The near unanimous bipartisan support for legislation to reinstate net metering and establish a bill of rights for solar customers is a reflection of overwhelming public demand for affordable, clean energy options", said Lynn Jurich, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Sunrun. "Thanks to the hard work of Governor Sandoval and Nevada State Legislators, we can now say with confidence that Sunrun is coming back to Nevada."
Nevada's solar industry came to a halt in late 2015 when new rules limited the credit rooftop solar customers would receive for the clean energy they provide to the grid. The abrupt shift in regulations forced Sunrun to cease operations in the state, leading to the elimination of hundreds of local jobs.
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Nevada Regulators Reject Request to Halt New Rooftop Solar Rules
(Score: 5, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Friday June 09 2017, @12:26AM (3 children)
Aside from the fact that the utilities make a considerable profit on any extra power produced via grid-tied local production, and that most industrial customers and most individual households are probably a very long way from self-supply, you've raised an interesting point.
So looking back, we could have said "If ICE vehicles don't require horses, then this causes a death spiral for saddleries, stables, buggy whip manufacturers, blacksmiths, tack manufacturers, wagon manufacturers, carriage manufacturers, feed suppliers, veterinarians, etc. so we'd better not allow ICE production." But we didn't. The reason we didn't? ICE vehicles were a (much) better idea, economically speaking. And better WRT transport rate. And comfort. And available power. And so on. Lots of benefits horses couldn't provide, or provided at a much reduced level.
There's an assumption being made that home production (basically solar, wind... and production as opposed to installation manufacture) is cleaner than utility production. Inasmuch as a lot of utility production is non-green (coal, petroleum) there's some truth to that at this point in time (and the regulatory hurdles for nuclear power are such that in the US, anyway, new nuclear's really not happening.) There's also the fact that distributed production is both harder to hack to failure, and considerably less prone to large scale power failures. There's also the fact that "the grid" is a huge consumer of land and right-of-way, and telephone poles, and transformers, and both low- and high-energy transport systems/support, and wire, and insulation. And street lights as implemented now have taken the sky from us, so I'd just as soon they'd die anyway. Just as an aside.
On the other side of the coin, there's also the fact that self-supply doesn't have to be grid connected at all, other than "because it's the rule" in some jurisdictions. Utility company can't make a profit off installations like that, so that's a net loss of customers. OTOH, they don't have to concern themselves with that connection. Small compensation. To some extent, power supply can be tax-supported, and I expect it will be near the end of the move to non-distributed power. And also right now, energy storage in non-production regimes is seriously expensive, has a short lifespan, and is a polluter all on its own. The utility companies could attempt a move into storage, which should work as long as no one figures out a convenient, reliable, cost-effective way to store energy at home (ultracaps might step in there, for instance. Or some currently unknown mechanism.) Of course, that leaves everyone still vulnerable to widespread failures. But barring a new storage+redistribution based economic model, eventually, too few customers will indeed result in failure of the existing power company economic model. But by then, the writing will have been on the wall for some time, and power production will be part of the assumed costs of getting any installation, commercial or private, up and running.
Also thrown into this is the question whether any particular industry or business model deserves artificial support. I've set up and run a number of businesses. No one came out of the woodwork to help or protect me when tough times came about. Some of those were fatal. Amazon killed my bookstore, for instance. (I'm not complaining, just noting that it happened. I'm an Amazon Kindle fan, frankly.) What's the argument that protection should be provided indefinitely for Big Power Inc.?
Aaaaand, automation is going to throw a monkey wrench into all this eventually, and that could be very disruptive, just depending on how far and how fast it hits. If it doesn't cost anything to make power and maintain the system, will that change the picture in time to save the grid itself? Or will it kill the grid that much faster?
Long term, my feeling – and it's only a feeling – is that we'd be better off if the economic process is allowed to proceed. If the people want local power, then that doesn't seem unreasonable based on the obvious benefits to them, and so I am of the opinion that legislators should support that insofar as such is reasonably possible. I'm very interested in arguments that we should not move in this direction. I really haven't heard any good ones as yet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 09 2017, @08:41PM (2 children)
Fixing your ICE/horse vehicle comparison, which was really horse or not (there existed early electric vehicles and steam vehicles), you need to cause unpaid expenses for the horse farms and/or horse vehicle manufacturers.
For example, horse births get taxed to pay for carriages, and then the carriages are given out for free. Every time you buy a horse, you're supporting the provision of carriages via the tax. Somebody invents a way to operate a carriage without a horse. (ICE, steam, electric...) People start buying engines and attaching them to the free carriages. Since the carriages still need to be supported by the horse tax, we have to increase the horse tax, but then horses become even more unpopular due to the increased expense. Pretty soon nobody can afford a horse, nobody is paying the tax, and there is no way to provide free carriages.
That is the problem with grid-connected solar. The cost of maintaining the grid is traditionally built into the utility rate. If you don't buy electricity, then you aren't paying a share of the cost to maintain the grid. That cost must be split be the people still without solar, so their cost goes up. They then convert to solar. Eventually everybody is on solar, the utility goes bankrupt, the grid is not able to be maintained, the grid fails, and thus there are blackouts every night.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Friday June 09 2017, @09:35PM (1 child)
I think that's a little simplistic. Here's why:
There are plenty of non-per-KWH costs on my electric bill. If I'm grid connected, I'll get to pay those no matter what. And if the grid cost, which is relatively constant, is reflected in a constant fee, I have no problem with that. It certainly shouldn't be folded into a per-KWH rate, inasmuch as that has little bearing on the grid cost, so I outright expect it to be a separate fee. Zero power consumption, grid-connected... you'd still pay for that.
Seriously, there are many ways to do this without being unreasonable to any party. I still think we should let it happen.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 10 2017, @02:06AM
Your electric bill is not normal.
If you actually pay the full cost of your share (one house worth) of the grid maintenance, then things are at least sort of fair. You also shouldn't be getting retail rates when you generate.
Most people don't pay a separate fee. They don't even have a single power rate. There is a base rate, intended to let poor people at least run a few small appliances cheaply. That rate is severely subsidized. There is the normal rate. There is the heavy-user rate, intended to rake in the profit from rich people and to discourage waste. The more you use, the higher your rate will be.
Details vary by location, obviously. There might be 2 rates or 5 rates. Normally, residential rates ignore time-of-day and power factor. ("power factor" has to do with loads that are unbalanced between capacitance and inductance, incurring an extra charge for industrial power customers)