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posted by takyon on Sunday April 19 2015, @09:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the home-power-is-killing-energy dept.

Diane Cardwell reports in the NYT that "many utilities are trying desperately to stem the rise of solar power, either by reducing incentives, adding steep fees or effectively pushing home solar companies out of the market."

The economic threat has electric companies on edge. Over all, demand for electricity is softening while home solar is rapidly spreading across the country. There are now about 600,000 installed systems, and the number is expected to reach 3.3 million by 2020, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. In Hawaii, the current battle began in 2013, when Hawaiian Electric started barring installations of residential solar systems in certain areas. It was an abrupt move — a panicked one, critics say — made after the utility became alarmed by the technical and financial challenges of all those homes suddenly making their own electricity. "Hawaii is a postcard from the future," says Adam Browning, executive director of Vote Solar, a policy and advocacy group based in California.

But utilities say that "solar-generated electricity flowing out of houses and into a power grid designed to carry it in the other direction has caused unanticipated voltage fluctuations that can overload circuits, burn lines and lead to brownouts or blackouts."

"At every different moment, we have to make sure that the amount of power we generate is equal to the amount of energy being used, and if we don't keep that balance things go unstable," says Colton Ching, vice president for energy delivery at Hawaiian Electric, pointing to the illuminated graphs and diagrams tracking energy production from wind and solar farms, as well as coal-fueled generators in the utility's main control room. But the rooftop systems are "essentially invisible to us," says Ching, "because they sit behind a customer's meter and we don't have a means to directly measure them." The utility wants to cut roughly in half the amount it pays customers for solar electricity they send back to the grid. "Hawaii's case is not isolated," says Massoud Amin. "When we push year-on-year 30 to 40 percent growth in this market, with the number of installations doubling, quickly — every two years or so — there's going to be problems."

 
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by tathra on Sunday April 19 2015, @10:36PM

    by tathra (3367) on Sunday April 19 2015, @10:36PM (#172957)

    this is exactly why anything that is basically required to live in the modern world - running water, electricity, internet, etc - or any governmental functions should not be handled by for-profit companies. i really wish that modern society had not been sold off to profiteers and rent-seekers decades ago, and continuing on to this day; "privatization" is one of the worst thing to ever happen. private probation [hrw.org] companies have brought back debtors' prisons, [wikipedia.org] which were supposed to be abolished over a century ago, private jails/prisons [aclu.org] have turned arrests and convictions into paychecks (via increased stock value, although private prisons are guaranteed to get paid for 100% capacity [alternet.org] even if they're empty), privatizing half the military means its no longer self-reliant and full privatized armies pocket billions every year from the government with no oversight, and not to mention we have the worst and most expensive healthcare [theatlantic.com] system in the world, etc, and despite all the promises of privatization being cheaper, in reality it costs way more [washingtonpost.com] so it turns out to just a transparent way for politicians to funnel money to their friends for decades to come while making public transparency, something we need in our government, completely impossible.

    i wonder if its even possible to buy back or regain control of our government. even getting money out of direct politics won't matter because there'll still be plenty of ways to pocket billions and funnel money to your financiers thanks to most government functions and all utilities being used to extort money from everyone. yes, extort is right, because living in this day and age without electricity or running water or even internet is an absurd idea. i, for one, am sick of paying significantly higher prices for significantly shittier services with no hope for oversight or transparency, yet "subsidize risk, privatize profits" is the motto for this century and most of last, and there's no hope of changing that because from the day you're born you learn that the all-mighty dollar rules all, and its extremely obvious that the best way to ensure future profits is to buy the lawmakers, especially now that they're so ridiculously cheap.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Monday April 20 2015, @12:29AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 20 2015, @12:29AM (#172974) Journal

    i wonder if its even possible to buy back or regain control of our government.

    Yes, but it will require cooperation rather than the idea of individualism and competition (which the corporations makes sure they're sponsoring as social manifestation: the divide et impera serves perfectly their purposes; the "individual American dream" led to this generalized nightmare).

    Start at the "grass roots"; e.g. incorporate a home owner corporation (or a cooperative) and pool the money to build a community energy [windpowerengineering.com] storage [businesswire.com]

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford