This, of course, is in addition to the big investment that solar owners have already made.
This request highlights a stark disparity between a large utility company that has a monopoly over the grid infrastructure and power market, and a homeowner who produces the same product, electricity, but gets nowhere near the same compensation.
It is time for California to evaluate the real value of rooftop solar if we are serious about reducing pollution, creating jobs in one of the only growing sectors and meeting California's ambitious clean energy goals.
To highlight the current disparity, SDG&E currently charges its residential customers from 14 to 31 cents per kilowatt-hour. Yet, if those same consumers have rooftop solar and sell energy back to the grid, SDG&E pays them less than 4 cents per kilowatt-hour.
SDG&E is not alone. Pacific Gas and Electric's residential rates range from 14 to 34 cents per kilowatt-hour. PG&E customers who generate excess solar energy are also paid less than 4 cents per kilowatt-hour.
Since it is based solely on the average cost of purchasing energy in the wholesale spot market, this low rate ignores the many benefits of rooftop solar generation. SDG&E's more recent request to charge rooftop solar owners money to connect to the grid only exacerbates the current disparity.
California agencies that are examining what solar energy producers will be compensated should reduce this disparity. Pursuant to decisions by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, small rooftop solar energy generators should be compensated for the utility's savings, or avoided costs, when small local renewable resources, such as rooftop solar, generate power for the system.
Reliance on local renewable resources has many concrete advantages for the operation of a grid, which should be taken into account to fairly value their contribution.
Power purchased from rooftop solar is clean energy that can benefit public health by reducing pollution, and it saves the utility from having to control pollution, and possibly buy pollution credits, due to the operation of a dirty fossil-fuel facility.
Rooftop solar also has the benefit of producing energy during the hottest part of the day, which also tends to be the period of highest energy demand and highest electricity value.
As SDG&E's website admits, small solar projects are "clean, renewable power closer to the areas of greater demand." Due to this, reliance on rooftop solar can reduce the need for building new expensive and polluting fossil fuel facilities to meet this peak demand. None of this is taken into account when rooftop solar owners are paid less than 4 cents per kilowatt-hour for the surplus energy they produce.
Furthermore, the utility actually saves money on transmission by relying on rooftop solar. This reality is completely at odds with SDG&E's proposed transmission and distribution charge on rooftop solar owners. Due to the good match of rooftop solar output with the electricity demand, as the Public Utilities Commission has found, it can allow a utility to "defer or avoid the need for network transmission infrastructure development."
SDG&E's recent request not only has this issue backward, it demonstrates a disregard for the key benefits that local, or distributed, solar offers.
California has embarked on a goal to produce 33 percent of its energy by 2020 from renewable resources, and Gov. Jerry Brown has announced a goal of installing 12,000 megawatts of that energy in the form of distributed generation. To meet this goal, California needs to acknowledge all the economic benefits of local renewable generation by not deferring to utility resistance that is driven by parochial financial interest.
Source: http://www.sacbee.com/2011/11/13/4048786/home-solar-owners-deserve-a-fair.html
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