The thing is that with net metering, solar power users are effectively using the grid as a giant battery that they charge up during the day and discharge during the night.
The grid is not a battery, it is a generation system only. The power plants must stay hot for when solar/wind power drops.
There is no decommissioning of plants or even shutting them down, they have to pick up the slack far too fast.
The current system lets the home owner use the power grid as a battery, storing excess energy for later use. And this battery is free. But it's not free - someone has to pay for the power lines, meters, and generation or storage capacity that makes it work.
Electric bills have two components, the supply cost and the delivery cost. The supply cost is what the electric company should be paying for electricity it buys from the home owner. But the electricity the home owner buys back should include the delivery cost.
In effect, the utilities are subsidizing home generation, which may make sense for now, but is not a plausible end game.
Very good post. Add a few things: - Solar (or wind) requires maintaining active power plants with full capacity. They have to stay operating for when solar or wind stops. They are not a battery, they have to stay running.
- In some high penetration areas in places such as HI where electricity is very expensive, local areas have had a problem not having the capacity to handle reverse feed. Who is gong to pay to upgrade the grid? In this case, the street transformers and local grid don't count as "delivery costs", they have to be based upon peak reverse feed. Even items in the distribution network such as power factor correction somehow need to become dynamic.
- Denmark already cut back their extensive onshore program as they realized they still had to operate their conventional plants running hot enough to pick up ~100% of the load.
- Offshore wind is more consistent but how would that scale to the US? Massive long HV transmission lines, pretty vulnerable to tornadoes and terrorists.
Real Users find the one combination of bizarre input values that shuts down the system for days.
