You cant charge your EVs during peak hours, and your excess electricity from solar panels will be compensate with less and less money as your Chinese-made solar panels rot, but hey, we love the planet. In commiefornia, they tax the weather, and now they want to tax your sun.
Previous drafts of the plan slashed the value of rooftop solar blaming rich solar-owning Californians for a utility cost shift to less wealthy residents. A new study by Berkeley Labs showed that middle-income and working-class Californians were by far the largest buyers of rooftop residential solar.
In California, there has been a multi-year war waged over the fate of a mechanism called net energy metering (NEM). The process involves customers sending their excess solar-generated electricity to the grid and receiving a credit on their utility bill at a retail rate for all exported electricity.
A new revised NEM proposal is set to be released after the elections on November 8, 2022. It will be watched closely by Californians as utilities now argue that the enactment of the Inflation Reduction Act will make fair net metering rates unnecessary.
Net Energy Metering has been a critical policy in launching the California rooftop solar market, which has grown to a robust 1.3 million homes covered in panels, representing about 50% of the US residential market. It also helped launch distributed commercial rooftop projects, another key part of California’s race to electrical decarbonization.
It came under threat when a new investor-owned utility-backed proposal, NEM 3.0, was placed on the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) desk. The proposed decision included roughly an 80% reduction in the payment for excess solar energy sent to the grid, and tacks on an $8 per kW monthly charge for all solar customers, regardless of whether they have battery energy storage or not. A common-sized 8 kW system would be charged $64 a month, a fee that makes solar a non-option for most customers.
In fact, at the time of the proposal, a survey of 4,000 active home solar shoppers found that 95% of homeowners were no longer interested in buying solar after viewing the cost assumptions of the new rate plan. Laura Deehan, state director Environment California condemned the proposal as “a tax on the sun.”
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