My local paper, the San Jose Mercury News, published an editorial supporting the proposal from the California PUC to revise net metering for residential solar and impose new tariffs and fees. I felt this missed the boat, not just by accepting the utilities cost figures at face value, but even more so by accepting without question the utility model of how to provide electric service to the public. I tried to write a response as a letter-to-the-editor, but I couldn't manage to restrict the argument to the 150 word limit. Here is that letter:
The problem with your Dec 22 editorial and with the surrounding discussions of various disputed cost analyses regarding the PUC proposal for the 3rd generation of solar net-metering rates is that it presupposes the current model of electric utilities and lacks vision as to the grid we might want to have in the future.
Sure, the cost per kW-hr might be cheaper with a concentrated solar plant in some remote location, but that necessitates reliance on expensive transmission lines that are prone to starting fires in our increasingly combustible conditions. Wouldn't we be better off with solar generation and storage embedded within the locations of demand? It doesn't take very much imagination to picture a world where every electric car has enough storage to power a house for 3 days and where solar roofs and parking structures are so widespread that the excess daytime power can continually keep all these batteries charged. Rather than every individual house needing all of these resources, grid-sharing can optimize their use. Power generation and storage would then neatly scale with population and demand. In this model, there would be no need for large-scale power outages when equipment fails, as well as a reduced need for long-haul transmission lines.
We must not limit ourselves to the presumption of the current utility model when analyzing the benefits of rooftop solar. Sure, we may need to tweak the time-of-use periods and rates to tune the incentives for new solar installations and for new storage batteries, but it doesn't make sense to halt the rapid growth of distributed solar just because the current utilities are losing money. It is better to rework the structure of electric utilities so as to get the future electric grid we want than to give up on rooftop solar, which is one of the most rapidly growing sources of renewable energy in our current energy mix.
Tom Pavel
San Jose
