They just killed solar in WI
Last Post 02 Apr 2015 11:02 AM by BadgerBoilerMN. 28 Replies.
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cnote75User is Offline
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27 Nov 2014 08:42 PM
Allow me play devil's advocate-

By having a grid connected PV array, you essentially want the utility to be your "battery". You sell excess energy to them at peak times and buy it from them when necessary. That is a valuable service they are providing. So what is it worth? I'd guess $30/mo is probably 1/3 or 1/4 what a battery system would cost a month over its useful life, but that's just a guess.

That said, I admit what's happening in Wisconsin is just plain wrong. I can somewhat understand a connection fee for that energy storage service, but then they get to buy your electricity at wholesale and sell it back to you at retail? That is BS. I'm sure their logic is "why should we pay retail"? Power around here (Tennessee) is a mix of coal, hydro, and nuclear. All are incalculably subsidized by taxpayers and land use rights. So that wholesale rate is not the true market price of the electricity they are buying.

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28 Nov 2014 03:49 AM
Posted By cnote75 on 27 Nov 2014 08:42 PM
Allow me play devil's advocate-

By having a grid connected PV array, you essentially want the utility to be your "battery". You sell excess energy to them at peak times and buy it from them when necessary. That is a valuable service they are providing. So what is it worth? I'd guess $30/mo is probably 1/3 or 1/4 what a battery system would cost a month over its useful life, but that's just a guess.


You are right, in many cases the utils are used as a battery. I can also imagine a grid tied system that never (or very rarely) buys back power. It depends on how the PV is dimensioned.

If I want to live off-grid my system has to be dimensioned for the worst case scenario. That's the month December because the panels generate least power in that month. The panels generate 2.8x that in the best month (May). I could sell that power and never buy it back. In that case I don't use the util as a battery at all. I guess the devil's advocate then will say they provide a service that allows me to earn back my investment sooner. That would be true.
Many arguments of the util companies are valid. They are just very one sided. They never mention they buy at wholesale and the sell it a greenpower rates, or any other benefits they have from this deal.
Connersville IN - Lat 39.64 N - Zone 5A (near zone 4)
pbraneUser is Offline
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03 Dec 2014 09:07 PM
For anyone interested in the subject, Wisconsin Public Radio is doing a show on Thursday. Listen live or via archives on their website wpr.org

01:00 PM - The Kathleen Dunn Show - Are Energy Companies Penalizing Solar Customers?:
Rooftop solar panel use is on the rise across the country, which has forced some energy companies to raise rates. Many renewable energy users are saying utility companies are waging "war" against them. Kathleen's guests will discuss these energy trends and try to forecast where the industry is going.
Dana1User is Offline
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04 Dec 2014 02:26 PM
EVERYBODY uses the grid as their battery, not just PV owners.

The fundamental problem in "grid fairness" is in the bundled block rate structures that ignore the true cost of peak draws, charging on an energy-use-only basis.

There is one municipal utility in Arizona currently considering applying across-the-board demand charges to all residential customers while reducing the energy portion of the bill dramatically. They still want to ding PV customers another $12/month or something just for being hooked up, but that's not a given. PV customers would be better positioned for avoiding excessive demand charges if they time their peak draws to the peak output of their PV, but all customers could avoid demand charges by timing/staggering their "big gulp" loads rather than running them simultaneously, and this could easily be automated (say, locking out the hot water heater and clothes dryer's power while the central AC is running, etc.)

http://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/2014/12/01/srps-proposed-rate-hike-targets-new-rooftop-solar-customers/19753373/

When regulatory impediments to customer-side battery storage are resolved, demand charges (and the grid infrastructure costs that require them) will shrink.

While the AZ case may seem anti-solar, it is in fact a more transparent and fairer distribution of the grid costs to those who actually (ab)use the grid with monster-sized short-term loads. The rationale for the $12.50/month fee for PV owners isn't clear, but assessing demand charges and selling the energy at-cost injects a modicum of fairness into the system. It might as easily be viewed as "anti-air conditioning" or "anti electric-heating", but it's really a proportional user-fee for how much grid-capacity the customer is taking up. That grid-capacity requirement is not equally weighted on total-energy-units-used basis (the way it has traditionally been billled)- it is dependent on peak energy-units-PER-MINUTE. A demand-charge fee better reflects the true infrastructure cost that a customer is imposing on the grid.

Demand charges have been standard fare for commercial rate structures for some time now, and there is no clear reason why that level of cost transparency shouldn't be applied to the residential sector as well.
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04 Dec 2014 02:53 PM
Posted By pbrane on 03 Dec 2014 09:07 PM
For anyone interested in the subject, Wisconsin Public Radio is doing a show on Thursday. Listen live or via archives on their website wpr.org

01:00 PM - The Kathleen Dunn Show - Are Energy Companies Penalizing Solar Customers?:
Rooftop solar panel use is on the rise across the country, which has forced some energy companies to raise rates. Many renewable energy users are saying utility companies are waging "war" against them. Kathleen's guests will discuss these energy trends and try to forecast where the industry is going.
In many cases that is exactly true. Vertically integrated utilities with sunk costs in their own generating assets view solar (rightly) as competition. 

Many states have "decoupled" generating services from the local utilities, where the utility compensation is not based on kwh sales, but on other factors. In some states  (MA inlcuded) decoupling basically separated the power generation biz from the distribution grid operation biz, and the local utilities typically buy power from generating companies and passing that cost to their customers, but many smaller utilities still own & operate some of their generating assets, which still puts them at competitive odds with privately owned PV. 


Wisconsin is a decoupled state, but not all of the utility operators (or even the state regulators) have fully adjusted to that reality.

http://www.rmi.org/Content/Images/KnowledgeCenter/RFGraph/Map_utilities_decoupling_for_electric_utilities.jpg


The corporate mindset of utilities comes from a history of being a regulated monopoly with guaranteed returns on their capital assets- their decisions around building generation & distributions assets are on 30-50 year basis, with some assumptions about demand growth etc.  But in the current US environment demand is NOT growing while unanticipated competition from PV is growing, which puts their existing assets (and shareholders) at financial risk.  It is not irrational for them to want to protect those assets from having to be written off, but they don't necessarily "deserve" profit guarantees on every asset purchase decision ever made.

It's up to their regulators to sort this out, but in many cases (as would seem to be the case in WI), the regulators may be a bit too clubby with the entities they are supposed to regulate.  It's up to the voters (and press) in WI to fully sort THAT problem out.

On the subject of failing utilities succumbing to competitive threats from renewables, Hawaiian Electric Industries just cut a deal to sell out to NextEra Energy, an investor owned company vested in renewable energy, with backing from CitiGroup.  This is particularly interesting because Oahu is one of the few places in the US that has already run into mid-day backfeeding & overvoltage conditions due to the sheer size of the privately owned PV hooked onto their grid. It's hard to think of a more appropriate buyer, since NextEra has a strong interest in developing the grid controls necessary for managing massive but intermittent renewable sources. HEI's grid area is the right sized test bed for getting those kinks worked out.
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04 Dec 2014 10:47 PM
I hate them for killing solar. We should protest. Where's the justice in killing an unarmed alternative energy?
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23 Mar 2015 04:37 PM
Our power is "interrupted" at peak load times, saving us roughly 60% on the heating and cooling bill.

Persuasion, through information, is the key to cooperation. No hate or ugly politics necessary.

http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/electricity-distribution/
MA<br>www.badgerboilerservice.com
Dana1User is Offline
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01 Apr 2015 06:11 PM
Looks like they just SAVED PV in Hawaii, with inverter software fixes, now that NextERA has taken over HECO from prior management.

With improved inverter control they are now allowing PV to be as much as 250% of the mid-day minimum load on any given circuit while still maintaining grid stability.  This is in advance of smart electric vehicle chargers being installed to help manage the mid-day overloads, but that's coming too.

The recent solar eclipse affecting heavily solarized Germany on the sunny morning of 20 March proved to be a not such a big deal too.  It was a much anticipated stress-test on how to manage the rapid down & up ramping of a large fraction of the grid sources, but it came off nearly flawlessly.  The biggest perturbation was in line frequency, which dropped to 40 hertz from the 50 hertz nominal during part of the down ramp. Voltage & power flows were otherwise all normal. 

The old-school utility hand wringing about how difficult & expensive it is to manage high penetration rates of distributed solar are all looking a bit overwrought in the face of real-world experience.  It's proving to be neither difficult nor expensive to manage.

BTW: Morgan, you get that the IER is a fossil-fuel industry financed organization with a definite (and ultimately political) point of view, right?  They may not be shrill, but there is definitely a slant, a slant against competition from small scale independently owned generation resources. Not all utility operators agree with their point of view- it's a matter of how it all fits in with their business model, and whose assets may ultimately get stranded.  As long as the utility operators can figure out how to make money under a different mode of operation, there are no insurmountable or onerously expensive technical issues here. It's primarily a regulatory environment issue.
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02 Apr 2015 11:02 AM
I couldn't agree more. Decentralization is almost always beneficial for strategic, economic and environmental issues. Corporations are organic and strive to survive. Politics can make dogs quack.

The more localized the energy policy, the more viable and efficient the results. No sense in hydro-power credits for the denisons Texans or wind credits for denizens of Oak Ridge TN.

Humans are reluctant change as there is always a cost, the value of which is often hidden, intentionally or not.
MA<br>www.badgerboilerservice.com
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