The withering dream of a cheap American electric car

I'm not fully sold on this reasoning.

Electricity on the local distribution node has a value equal to the cost of generation plus the distribution. That's the value of it, what we pay. So by supplying the kWh locally to neighbors, the grid costs have been avoided. But the value is still the same.

Now, the T&D infrastructure has already been built, and the utility wants to get paid no matter what, but if they were a private company and not a monopoly, they wouldn't have a right to get compensated for their investment no matter what, because every company buys capital at risk. And that's for the good of the economy.

There needs to be some sort of forcing function to incentivize this cheaper form of power delivery, that avoids a lot of transmission and distribution costs. And that forcing function is the price that we pay those who generate the electricity.

The utility of course loses on every kWh they don't generate, because they want to sell more electricity. However, since they have a monopoly, we need other regulation to ensure that innovation that results in lower overall costs actually results in lower prices for consumers.

So far, the utilities have snowed the public and the PUCs such that they get away with murder on this transition. We need a grid, but we do not need the utility. And if the utility can not come up with a business model that works as a regulated monopoly when we have local generation, then we need to change the regulatory model, most likely eliminating the monopoly.

There's a lot to learn from Texas here for the rest of the country.

Your excess solar power is not worth the retail power cost because it is not as reliable or plentiful as utility power. If you think your neighbor would pay you the same rate for your unreliable excess power as they pay the utility, you should start a power company!

The infrastructure has not “already been built” - it is constantly under expansion and maintenance, and the bonds used to fund construction also need to be repaid.

I think your mind frame is that the reason the grid is not smart enough to pay you what you think your excess unreliable power is worth (which you stated to be the entire retail cost of power, including transmission and distribution) is because of incompetence and corruption of the utility monopolies. I think that is a pretty uncharitable take. It’s a hard problem and people generally want reliable and cheap. You can’t make microgrids reliable and plentiful without a ton of diverse generation (which already exists on the macro-grid) OR a ton of storage, both of which are very expensive. It is a problem worth solving but it needs to be considered with a realistic view on what people are actually paying for when they pay their power bill.

My frame of mind is that residential solar has the potential to dramatically reduce transmission and grid costs, but there is no way to force the utilities to shift to that model, because they will make less money. And regulators are asleep at the wheel and beholden to the utilities they regulate.

Grids are sized for peak, and without solar that peak is midday in most places, meaning that distributed behind-the-meter solar makes the grid cheaper.

Utilities, when they argue that solar is worth less, are not arguing on the merits of the issue but only selectively advancing arguments that benefit them. They will never present the totality of the issue.

It is up to others to push back against utilities' narrow views with a more complete view of the picture and what's possible.

Eliminating the delivery of kWs doesn't change the grid costs one whit. Grid costs are driven mostly by the number of customers, the max demand that the grid has to support at one time, maintenance, and the distance the lines have to travel to reach you. Just like a water main or sewage pipe, reductions in demand only change the cost of distribution when they are large enough and prolonged enough to allow for smaller equipment and fewer lines.

Having a residential power connection from the grid allows you to demand up to 200Amps of power, at any time of day or night, 365 days a year, with zero notice. The power company has to build the lines to support that potential demand, whether you use it or not. Over all of California, distributed solar probably has reduced the expenditures we would have need to have made on new transmission and generation facilities compared to a world without distributed solar, but that doesn't affect the baseline cost of a ubiquitous grid that serves from Crescent City to the border with Arizona at Yuma, and all points between.

> So by supplying the kWh locally to neighbors, the grid costs have been avoided.

No they haven't. The grid cost is to build and maintain the wires and equipment. Your solar output isn't reliable enough for them to downsize the grid, so even though selling to a neighbor bypasses the grid it doesn't reduce the cost of having a grid.

What you could do is split out the grid cost, make it be a fixed fee per location instead of per-kWh. That would drop the price of buying a kWh until it's much closer to the price of selling.

But if you do that, someone with a lot of solar panels would end up with even less money in their pocket, since their reduced kWh purchases used to let them skimp on grid fees, and now that no longer happens.

Peak load without solar is not midday. Here's an NYT article from 1975 about introduction of Time of Use billing describing peak rates being in the morning and evening:

> Mrs. Wells changed her housework habits because for part of the year it costs her more than six times as much to use electricity from 8 A.M. to 11 A.M. and 5 P.M. to 9 P.M. as it costs during the rest of the day.

https://www.nytimes.com/1975/06/29/archives/experimenting-wi...

Current CAISO data shows that overall demand still peaks in the late afternoon to early evening. I picked a day in mid-august, and demand at 7pm is 40% higher (39GW) than at solar noon of 1pm (29GW).

https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook

I think you've still got too much of an "us vs them" mentality about the utilities, its not so much that they are refusing to shift to that model per se, these shifts are ongoing and happening today (which is why you're getting paid 10c per kwh for unreliable solar, IMO definitely more than it's worth), but I think a lot of people have unrealistic expectations with how far things can be shifted without addressing the implicit assumptions, such as the reliability of the power. Like, if we downsize the transformer between your subdivision and the grid by too much, that subdivision will have brownouts on cloudy days. In order to avoid that, we could deploy industrial scale battery packs, which also costs a ton of money and requires ongoing maintenance; at that point, it's probably cheaper to just use a bigger transformer to connect to the greater grid, where we have nuclear, hydro, wind, commercial solar, and hydrocarbon generation, which can all be used in different situations to match the grid demand with supply on a larger economy of scale.

In conclusion, the retail price of your electricity includes the engineering and infrastructure required to make your power delivery reliable most of the time, which is much more valuable than the raw kilowatts coming off of your solar panels.

Peak is not usually midday; peak is in in the evening when people get home from work. So in places like California and Hawaii, you get the opposite problem where the solar drops off right before peak demand and you have to ramp up other generators to make up for it. It's called the duck curve problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve

The United States electric grid data is freely available and pretty neat: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr... Choose a grid or a state to get regional time and you can see that region's peak will usually be 4-7pm. You can even see that weekend peaks are a bit lower, and that there's a second peak at ~10am when people get to work.

You're making a blanket statement about peak time which is incorrect.

Historically in Califorinia, peak load has been in the afternoon, which I count as midday. At least, it's when solar panels are still pumping out a ton of power:

https://www.caiso.com/Documents/CaliforniaISOPeakLoadHistory...

You're posting a random day in winter in California, where overall consumption is low even at its highest, because there's very little demand for cooling. True peak for the California grid is ~50GW, not 25GW like today. You're also omitting all the residential solar that never gets on the grid that drives down midday demand in that graph.

Texas also has midday peaks, here's today and you'll see that even though its winter and very little AC is needed, peak is midday:

https://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/loadForecastVsActualC...

My statement was qualified with "most places." There will undoubtedly be some places with other peaks for which solar will not shave the peak. But in most places distributed solar will shave the peak.

I think you are giving the utilities far too much credit. They were bemoaning solar being even 5% of the grid, complaining that it would bring down everything. Seriously!

And if you didn't know that, and think that I'm too "us vs. them," then you should go look at the arguments made in regulatory proceedings and IRPs etc.

The utilities invoke preposterous technical arguments all the time. Yes, the grid should be reliable, but making it more decentralized and adding storage all over will make it far more reliable.

Industrial scale battery packs are quite often cheaper than new transmission lines. And we're going to need a lot more transmission or transmission alternatives in the future as more of our energy needs are electrified.

I don't dispute that some distribution might need to be upgraded to fully take advantage of the cost savings that distributed solar and storage present.

But you'll never find the utilities making the case for engineering a more reliable cheaper system, if that system is cheaper, because they will make less money. It would be financially irresponsible for them to make that case, and in fact they must try their hardest to increase the amount of money that is spent on fixed grid assets, that they can directly rate base.

This is not being overly "us vs. them" this is simple economics and incentives of regulated monopolies. Utilities are great at responding to the financial incentives put before them. Sometimes those financial incentives are making the grid reliable. But I don't know of a single regulated monopoly that has been financially incentivized to lower grid costs.

My sentence was "and without solar that peak is midday in most places." Remove the solar and California has a huge midday peak. Watch it shift over the years into the evening as more residential solar was added to the California grid:

https://www.caiso.com/Documents/CaliforniaISOPeakLoadHistory...

(Note also in your visualisation that all times are Eastern and should be adjusted for different localities. And if you go to a summer week rather than a winter week, you'll find the true peak, which is much higher, and which has a pretty standard curve with a peak that overlaps sunlight hours.)

If you keep reading to the next few sentences I point out that the utility has sunk costs, so I understand you point quite well already.

Transmission savings are the big thing with distributed solar and storage. And transmission is the bottleneck for most projects looking to connect to the grid right now. Not only is it expensive, it's slow to build.

That's why I said choose a region to get regional time. California's chart shows the time in Pacific time: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr...

They have this summer's data too, though no way to link directly, and it still peaks at ~7pm: https://i.imgur.com/16mssuH.png . Using the 16th as an example, a peak demand of 44,008 megawatthours @ 20H PDT. Comparing that to their generation graphs, which you can separate into sources, like solar. On the 16th, peak solar generation is at 11 @ 13,201 megawatthours. By 6PM, it's down to 853 megawatthours. By peak time, it's nothing. My own residential solar matches that curve on that date.

> If you keep reading to the next few sentences I point out that the utility has sunk costs, so I understand you point quite well already.

It's not that they have sunk costs, it's that they have ongoing costs. The grid cost does not drop when you send excess solar to a neighbor. To actually avoid grid costs you need to reduce your max watts in a way that the power company can rely on.

> Transmission savings are the big thing with distributed solar and storage. And transmission is the bottleneck for most projects looking to connect to the grid right now. Not only is it expensive, it's slow to build.

Storage can save on transmissions but it has to be set up the right way. Solar and storage working together can do even better, but also have to be set up the right way. Solar by itself doesn't make a big difference in peak transmissions.

> peak load has been in the afternoon, which I count as midday

Mid day is the middle of the day, as in noon. You might as well be arguing that you define three as five.

5PM is not "mid day". So you're cherry-picking time frames, making up definitions for things, and still not showing a mid day peak energy use, you're showing a late afternoon energy use.

> You're posting a random day in winter in California, where overall consumption is low even at its highest, because there's very little demand for cooling.

You're just seeing the data for today. You can select any day you want.

Let's look at a really generous day for you, the peak annual usage from 2020: 47,121 MW on August 18 @ 15:57. On this day, the peak was indeed at 15:57. However, the demand remains high for hours past that. Demand is above 99% of peak until 5:30pm and above 90% of peak until almost 9pm. Solar production is down to under 1000MW by 6:45pm. Thus we have over 2 hours of near-peak demand when solar is not helping at all. No amount of additional solar (without batteries) will ever cover that 6:45-9pm period of high (if not peak, but it's close) demand.

https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook