The withering dream of a cheap American electric car

I took advantage of the IRA solar power and $7500 EV credit, now I have an off grid home all electric appliances and excess power for hot tubs and EV's. The Ford Lightning acts as a generator. This was the greatest most life changing and impactful legistlation ever: I've had $0 (ZERO!) in gasoline, LP, and electric utility bills since installation last year.

Does your state pay you retail for your production? And have you gotten your first annual true up bill yet?

That setup is a dream for a lot of people, but it's not always easy to make happen depending on state regulations (and how powerful the utilities there are)...

I disconnected from the grid entirely so there is no bill.

Since the local power company here is only paying 10 cents per kw for solar power (which they resell at greater profit), I decided to run a small crypo miner and I still have excess power on a 22kw system.

I don't know of anywhere where its not legal to be solar powered but there were several thousand in costs associated with engineer plans and permits.

> Since the local power company here is only paying 10 cents per kw for solar power (which they resell at greater profit)

I think this is a common reason for disappointment in solar incentives. At least half of your power bill pays for transmission, and the half that pays for generation needs to be constructed such that the overall supply must meet the demand at all times, rather than simply supplying a number of kWh per day regardless of instantaneous demand. You can’t consider the “price” per kWh that you pay commercially to be the value of supplying a kWh to the grid, it’s much more likely that the utility is making a (subsidized) loss paying you 10c per solar kWh.

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.

> 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.

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.