Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The next time the wall wtreet journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

You cannot shame the shameless.

This blog will pay for itself.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

The willow is too close to the house.

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

John Fetterman: Too Manly for Pennsylvania.  Paid for by the Oz for Senator campaign.

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

“But what about the lurkers?”

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP

I really should read my own blog.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

You are here: Home / Science & Technology / Energy Policy / Do It Yourself Solar

Reader Interactions

32Comments

  4. 4.

    Felanius Kootea

    Pretty cool – hope it catches on in other rural communities across the country. I’m confident that homeowners being able to generate some income by producing energy will help this spread.

  5. 5.

    cathyx

    There probably aren’t too many parts of this country that need something like this more than rural WVa.

  7. 7.

    The Moar You Know

    Our local utility (SDG&E) has abandoned plans – for the moment – to charge all grid-tied solar users a “users fee” for the unimaginable crime of selling power back to the utility. The fee being contemplated is high enough to negate most of the fiscal advantages of going solar in the first place.

    It’s not subject to state or federal law, so it’s not a question of “if” but rather “when”.

    The utilities are about to declare full jihad against solar. The made-up Solyndra bullshit was simply the opening salvo. These bastards are not going to roll over and accept any loss in revenue.

    EDIT: I might add that SDG&E is the worst utility I’ve ever dealt with, and yes, I have been a PG&E and Duke Energy customer as well.

  8. 8.

    Julia Grey

    “people automatically assume we’re anti-mountaintop removal”

    Horrors. You wouldn’t want people to think you were a HERETIC!

  9. 9.

    Julia Grey

    Our local utility (SDG&E) has abandoned plans – for the moment – to charge all grid-tied solar users a “users fee” for the unimaginable crime of selling power back to the utility. The fee being contemplated is high enough to negate most of the fiscal advantages of going solar in the first place.

    Oh, fer….

  10. 10.

    cathyx

    My favorite part of the article is that some officials think conserving energy isn’t very patriotic.

  12. 12.

    The Moar You Know

    RE: my above post. The proposed “network use charge“.

    Words fail at expressing what a dick move this would be. And it is coming, maybe not this year but SDG&E WILL be doing this.

  13. 13.

    jl

    Thanks, Cole. Sounds like good stuff.

    I was waiting for them to talk about how to deal with the upfront costs, and looks like they got a system to amortize the up front investment for people short of cash.

    I hear commercials by home solar power companies all the time in CA and NV. The installation requires no cash investment for the homeowner, and then the company gets a cut of the savings over the next X years. Not sure how much of that is subsidized by state or feds.

    I tried to find out exactly how the money works on deals like that, but not familiar enough with the industry to know. Wikipedia has some good articles.

    Solar Power in the United States
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_States#Solar_America_Initiative

    Power Purchase Agreement
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Purchase_Agreement

  14. 14.

    jl

    But not sure how all the regulatory and tax credit stuff in Wikipedia article works out in for deals like this one.

    ” SolarCity has revolutionized the way energy is delivered to your home by giving you a cleaner, more affordable alternative to your monthly utility bill.
    Free Installation
    SolarCity will install your solar system for free!

    Save on Monthly Electric Bills
    With SolarCity’s SolarLease® you simply pay for your solar power by the month—just like your utility bill—only lower.

    Instead of buying the equipment, you simply lease it. SolarLease is the most popular solar financing option in the country! ”

    http://www.solarcity.com/residential/solar-lease.aspx

    Except I guess I was wrong, the Solar City cite says you pay a monthly payment, and with PPA you pay a lower rate per kWh. Guess that is in addition to lower utility bill, and you figure you lock in lower rates?

    I guess, not quite the dream deal I imagined.

  15. 15.

    patrick II

    The Clinton Climate Initiative is retrofitting the Empire State Building and it could save over $4 million a year in energy bills. During a time of idle workers, low interest money and a stagnant economy it would make sense to do more of this. It would lower energy costs for the country, cut foreign debt and help with climate change, and help the economy. But for those very reasons it seems to be impossible for our current congress to get behind doing any of this on a larger scale.

  16. 16.

    jo6pac

    Thanks John I’m just finishing my greenhouse and I think I’ll try and build a few panels myself. I would love to be able to run the well on solar. You can use old sliding glass doors also.

  17. 17.

    PurpleGirl

    @The Moar You Know: I’m generally cynical about utility companies but when I worked as a paralegal I handled an arbitration case involving a power purchase contract between SDG&E and another company. I’m not surprised by this move on their part at all. While my client company was somewhat sleazy, SDG&E was very sleazy, even with their own staffers.

    The arbitration hearings were held outside Phoenix; they made their in-house legal staff return home for the two weekends. Granted, I was coming from NYC but my client company approved all legal staffers to have their own rooms and we didn’t need to keep work or do work in our rooms. SDG&E made their people work in their rooms.

    I think the New Vision Solar Project is great. I hope it becomes a model for lots and lots of rural areas to help people live better lives.

  18. 18.

    jl

    @The Moar You Know:

    ” EDIT: I might add that SDG&E is the worst utility I’ve ever dealt with, and yes, I have been a PG&E and Duke Energy customer as well. ”

    There are utilities worse than Peculation, Goofs and Explosions? Hard to believe.

    Good luck down there.

  19. 19.

    Martin

    Regarding the charge by the utility to sell back, there’s a good reason for a one-time costs, not so much for a recurring one.

    When linemen need to work on the lines, in a conventional setup it’s pretty easy to switch off the upstream source so you can work on the lines safely. But when consumers can become power sources, there are now multiple up-stream sources, and the equipment currently deployed doesn’t deal with that. As a result, in a lot of places, people with solar need to have a circuit at the panel to prevent power from moving back up into the grid. If you want to allow consumers to sell back, you need to install a lot of new equipment on the grid itself, and you’re doing that so that consumers can eliminate the revenue they pay you, so the utility is both losing revenue and having to invest a lot for the privilege. Now, that can offset the cost of expanding power production, but in markets like CA, there is no such cost because we’re not expanding production, we’re just reducing consumption. So, I think it’s reasonable that if you want to be able to sell back to the utility, that you pay an up-front cost or accept some kind of rate differential that allows the utility to recover at least some of that cost.

  20. 20.

    trollhattan

    @The Moar You Know:

    Good to know. I’ve been trying to follow this from upstate because it would set a dangerous precedent for the rest of California.

    Anything utility-related from San Diego I presume has Pete Wilson’s fingerprints on it and thus, eeeevil (“Don’t touch it!”). Enron rolling blackouts, anybody?

  22. 22.

    Martin

    @trollhattan:

    I’ve been trying to follow this from upstate because it would set a dangerous precedent for the rest of California.

    I don’t see how the state would approve of anything like that given how energy is regulated here. In fact, the utilities have an incentive to support sell-back here because their rate structure and therefore revenues are ultimately based on consumption/customer. The more they can drive that down, and to switch to renewables, the more they can increase rates.

    If you live in CA you’re in a race with your neighbors to drop your consumption in order to keep your bills low, because if they drop theirs and you don’t, your rates will increase and so will your bills.

    Now, the problem CA has is that because residential solar builds out so fast, the utilities have trouble dealing with the impact on the grid, so there are a lot of places out here where you can’t sell-back. The regulators are working to change that, but my guess is that rather than allow them to charge you a fee, they’ll be allowed to generally tweak rates in other ways.

  23. 23.

    Roger Moore

    @trollhattan:

    Enron rolling blackouts, anybody?

    God, don’t remind me. My employer had moved onto the voluntary interruptable plan to save on power bills. They figured that, being a hospital, they had emergency generators enough to power the whole organization and all the vital equipment was plugged into uninterruptable sockets, so they could get cheaper power without any major disruption.

    What they didn’t consider was that they didn’t have switches that would transfer the load instantaneously, and they had never bothered to buy UPSes for all the scientific equipment in the research side of the organization. Of course, anything that depends on a computer can be disrupted by even a very short outage, which included just about everything in my lab. I spent a whole goddamned year glued to the California ISO web page checking to see if there was a risk of high power demand, living in fear of my pager going off telling me that we weren’t going to be able to do any work that afternoon because the power could go off at any time and destroy our experiments. I hope Ken Lay is roasting in Hell.

  25. 25.

    Ruckus

    @Roger Moore:
    I hope Ken Lay is roasting in Hell.
    If we include the whole list that’s a pretty big pig roasting pit we’d have going there. But seeing all of them on spits, slowly rotating over a nice fire…. now that’s heaven.

  28. 28.

    trollhattan

    @The Moar You Know: Is he no longer a playah there? I haven’t read anything about him since he helped Megs on her path to victorah!

    Anybody wishing to take a whiz on this statue has my blessing, and I’m buying first round beforehand.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pw.statue.jpg

    Energy deregulation, deferred infrastructure maintenance, term limits, three strikes…I don’t think any one person has done more harm to California, more even than Swinging Saint Ronaldus on a trapeze.

  29. 29.

    Chris T.

    @Martin: That’s simply not true: UL1741 (which is pretty much required and automatic these days) provides built-in “anti-islanding”. If the grid side of the home-based PV solar system goes down, so does the home side.

    If you want your home to stay powered even though the grid has gone dark, you must install a transfer switch, same as if you have a generator. (Since PV power production fluctuates you normally want to put in batteries as well, which means using a more expensive inverter with built-in battery controller.)

  30. 30.

    Commenting at Ballon Juice since 1937

    This is very cool and probably a trend. I’m old enough that stuff I did twenty years ago (and still do), my wife thought was strange, and now is normal – recycling, buying recycled stuff, bringing your own bag to the store, etc. The fact that everybody can generate their own power will have vast appeal to the American psyche once it starts to be common, and it is in rural areas – especially small wind mills. Check out Jeremey Rifkin’s “The Third Industrial Revolution” to see where this is going.

  31. 31.

    Roger Moore

    @trollhattan:

    Energy deregulation, deferred infrastructure maintenance, term limits, three strikes…I don’t think any one person has done more harm to California, more even than Swinging Saint Ronaldus on a trapeze.

    OTOH, he was mostly responsible for Prop 187, which has done more to drive Republicans out of office in California than any other single thing, and didn’t actually hurt that much because it was ruled unconstitutional. So his legacy isn’t 100% negative.

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