“Utilities Wage Campaign Against Rooftop Solar” – But It’s a Bit More Complicated Than That

A friend sent me this piece from The Washington Post with the title above. He writes: I think you know this, but it’s an interesting article.

Yes, this is a challenging issue. It’s hard to argue that solar owners should be able to use the grid as their own battery free of charge. But charging them a fee that encourages them to defect from the grid entirely isn’t helping either, as it raises the price of power for those who remain.

The subject is made even thornier because, as the author mentions, distributed generation means reduced loads at or near peak, which, given the perverse rules by which utilities are regulated, is actually bad for them; it means that the utilities cannot justify the construction of new power plants which they would bill back to the rate payers at a profit.

The whole relationship between regulators, the utilities, and the rate-payers needs to be pulled out by the roots and resown from fresh seed (pictured above). There are so many fundamental differences now than there were 100 years ago when we started all this that what we have now is essentially a makeshift patchwork of bureaucracy and corruption.

Think about this for a second:

• The actual regulations, especially in states like California, are so complicated that even full-time subject-matter experts have told me that even they still don’t understand the laws 100%. Many such patches were added during times of crisis and anomaly, architected to benefit a few special interests and their fantastically brilliant attorneys who were able to make all this happen—at the expense of the consumer, of course.

• Anyone with an honest heart and conscience in the matter sees the imperative for humankind to phase out of fossil fuels, especially coal. Here, in the U.S., we need to have our sights set on decommissioning the 600-or-so active coal plants as quickly as this can practically be accomplished, and, therefore, we need to design our relationships with our utilities so as to provide incentive in this direction. Note that this, in and of itself, is an enormous change from our initial thinking of the early 20th Century when the mandate was: give us reliable power as cheaply as you can possibly produce it. This entire idea is simply no longer applicable.

• To bring this about, we want to encourage all kinds of other things that run counter to the interest of the utilities as they are currently established and configured. For example, we want distributed generation (DG) from renewable resources; the establishment of microgrids based on clean energy resources is obviously a good thing for all of us with lungs. Obviously, there is nothing whatsoever of value here for the utilities.

• Making this happen will require energy storage, which adds value to the grid in several different ways regardless of the existence of DG. Storage is an extremely complicated issue unto its own.

• We want to encourage efficiency and conservation; we understand that negative growth is the bane of a utility’s business, but those of us who care about the quality of the environment are looking for ways to bring about an overall decrease in power consumption.

• I don’t mean to discount nuclear in all this. Per my chapter on liquid thorium fluoride reactors in “Bullish on Renewable Energy,” I’m very hopeful that an affordable incarnation of this technology can come online soon.

Somewhere here, there must be a job for the power utility of the 21st Century. Getting there will take cunning and intelligence, which I know America has in great supply. But it will also take honesty and selflessness. That’s the tricky part.

Let me end with this quote I just came across from a 19th Century Swiss philosopher, poet and critic Henri Frederic Amiel: “Truth is the secret of eloquence and virtue, the basis of moral authority; it is the highest summit of art and life.”

Truth. Yep. Again, that’s the tricky part.