“PG&E’s proposal would result in more families having SOME financial incentive to go solar, but would dramatically reduce the number with a HUGE incentive to do so.”

The northern part of the state isn’t quite as sunny as San Diego County, but there’s still a strong economic reason to go solar if your marginal price for grid power is $.30. By proposing to reduce baseline quantities by about 9%, PG&E’s proposal would result in more families having SOME financial incentive to go solar, but would dramatically reduce the number with a HUGE incentive to do so.

However, that math looks much better, if you supply it with solar (that amounts to about $0.12 – $0.25 per kilowatt hour) to charge it. A solar powered EV would be cheaper than a gasoline car to run.

Eventually things get so out of whack that the system becomes an obstacle to choice. Two families sharing the one home pay 4x the electricity cost of two families in two homes. Self employed and working at home – forget about it when your work and home costs get grouped together and you pay double the usage at double the rate. My family’s electricity costs skyrocketed out of proportion to our additional usage when we had kids and my wife started spending the days with them at home.

Finally, thinking about an electric vehicle? At $.50/kwH the fuel alone is more expensive than gas. Of course, PG&E could make exceptions for all these things but I’d prefer not to turn my electricity provider into the IRS.

Going solar is a great way for homeowners to take control of their electricity costs and help the environment at the same time. I hope this proposal remains just that – a proposal!

They want to reduce that amount to only three times the base rate of 11 cents a kilowatt hour – to 30 cents a kilowatt hour, dropping almost 20 cents.”

One of these numbers is wrong; a cut from 4x to 3x 11¢/kW·h is only 11 cents.

The fact that DSIRE (N.C. Solar Center and the Interstate Renewable Energy Council) say something, doesn’t make it necessarily true.

[No ECD, DSIRE is actually the Database of State Incentives for Renewables & Efficiency. (Not the North Carolina something something)

It is from the US Department of Energy. As such it is a reliable source of data.]

“AB 510 essentially doubles the number of people able to go solar in California. Before today, the number of Californians able to take advantage of this net metering program was capped at 2.5 percent of a utility’s load. So, as soon as a utility got 2.5 percent of its electricity from net metered solar customers, it was no longer obligated to sign new net metering contracts. Now that cap stands at five percent”. (link)

But I agree that some of that DSIRE category of net metering-eligible entities is business-installed solar, (and not to supply a utility like under the SDE distributed solar plan).

But since businesses have very low rates for the same kwh as homeowners, this price pressure for hot regions falls only really on homeowners.

I don’t know the rates for large businesses, but I found when estimating solar that a small business with A1 rates might only pay 10 cents a kwh, even with 2,000 kwh a month bill – hardly an incentive to add solar instead.

In most regions a homeowner with usage that high would pay over $500 a month.

EIA tells us that CA’s net electricity generation was 205 million MWh in 2009. PV Solar cumulative installation in CA is about 1GW. 1GW in CA generates about 1.3 million MWh. 1.3 divided by 205 is 0.6%, not 2.5%!

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table1_6_b.html

Why do you say then that “homeowners’ solar now supplies more than 2.5% of the power on the grid?”

This is my experience in SCE’s service area, where, last I knew, Indio, CA (middle of the desert) is their highest baseline area in the summertime, somewhere around 2000kwh vs. my ~500kwh (FOUR times higher!?), 12 miles from the coast. People have a choice in where they live. We shouldn’t have to subsidize their choice. Flatter rates = bogus to me.