The local utility just imposed rate changes that effectively kill solar PV. They're now charging $3.79/mo for each KW of installed solar (in my case would be about $20/mo) and the buyback rate is now 4.2 cents/KWH. They also raised the monthly connection fee (for everyone)from $9 to $16/mo. And I'm in the process of building my all-electric house. I had the intention of adding solar next year to make it net-zero. Now my dreams are dashed.... at least until storage gets cheaper. Then I can go off-grid! -michael

The last time I checked, WI was a red State with one of the reddest Governors in the States. So why would you expect anything different? Just be happy that they are not yet fining you for not attending church on Sundays.

That's the approach they took in Australia too, but they may live to regret it soon, driving people with the means to shed the grid entirely, now that their standard retail residential rates are north of 30 cents/kwh, and they're paying PV owners 0-8cents/kwh, and tacking on fees. The incumbent grid operators are even coming up with inflated estimate propaganda of what it costs to defect from the grid, but with such preposterous assumptions that they're (almost) laughable:

http://reneweconomy.com.au/2014/networks-fret-over-threat-of-mass-grid-defections-86169

Even with the onerous fees it may be worthwhile to install PV (grid attached or not), but it sure makes it a tougher case.

One can't expect incumbent power producers to just roll over and die, but shame on the regulators who approved this level of gouge.

There seems to be some hanky-panky going on with mayhaps a too-cozy relation ship between the regulator & regulated on the WI power grid too:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-24/wisconsin-utility-sought-solar-fees-after-regulator-advised-ceo.html

And it doesn't stop there- Wisconsin seems to be going after those deadbeat plug-in car owners with fees:

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/wisconsin-becomes-latest-to-propose-fee-on-evs-and-hybrids

Any chance of a regime change in the next election cycle?

The notion that PV operators are freeloading off the grid and need to be charged for grid access should also be viewed in the context of homes with large air conditioning systems, which require at LOT more grid resources than other homes to support those intermittent but heavy loads. Are those folks getting dinged for their actual grid costs? Commercial customers are typically assessed "demand charges" to cover the grid-cost of their highest 15-30 minute (sometimes hourly) draw from the grid, but residential customers are not. In a more transparent transaction those costs WOULD be assessed, as would the actual grid-resource costs of PV owners. But the fixed rate obscures all of that, lumps it into a single per-kwh rate (or often, block rates with break points in pricing at different levels of monthly usage.)

The Wisconsin PV fee thing may have some pretty stiff blowback (and soon!), given how egregious it is, and the whiff of potential corruption under which it was approved.

Had they taken a VOST approach as in neighboring MN there would be at least an acknowledgement of the value distributed solar brings to the grid.

We used to be blue, then purple, now red ( or brown, like a turd). Two of the 3-person board on the public service commission were appointed by our wonderful governor Walker, the other by previous democratic governor Doyle. The vote was 2 to 1 along party lines.

With one of the 2 under a cloud of scandal related to improper communications with the utility she was charged with regulating...

driving people with the means to shed the grid entirely,

If this gets even slightly popular, there will be a mandatory charge. For a similar example, I can't opt out of water and sewer and 2/3 of my charges are fixed fees (vs usage).

Down with monopolies (gov or business).

Like I said, Politics will twist and bend the fundamentals in the way that best suits their own interest!

Posted By pbrane on 25 Nov 2014 03:09 PM
The local utility just imposed rate changes that effectively kill solar PV. They're now charging $3.79/mo for each KW of installed solar (in my case would be about $20/mo) and the buyback rate is now 4.2 cents/KWH. They also raised the monthly connection fee (for everyone)from $9 to $16/mo. And I'm in the process of building my all-electric house. I had the intention of adding solar next year to make it net-zero. Now my dreams are dashed.... at least until storage gets cheaper. Then I can go off-grid! -michael

Horror stories. But a deal compared to the $26 I pay (for an 18kW connection) Well at least here we don't get a 3.79 for each kW of installed solar I think going solar requires some planning on when you use most electricity. For example washing and drying your clothes should be done at times you can directly draw from your PV panels. Try to avoid selling your over capacity at 4 cents and buying it back a few hours later for 12 cents. If you use up (almost) all your PV capacity there is nothing left to 'upload' to the grid. Then the you maybe don't have to pay the $20/m ?

I'd like to think that if you were never an instantaneous net producer of power (ie, feeding into the grid), you wouldn't have to pay anything more than a customer without solar panels. Grid-tie electronics can easily implement such a policy.

I really hope so. But I can imagine their reasoning is something like: Your PV is connected to the 'grid' in your house and that grid is connected to our grid. So all PVs are connected to our grid.
It's likely the same sort of reasoning why the $3.79 has to be paid. It's because they have to maintain a power grid the PV power goes trough. Sounds logical but the person buying your PV power from them pays the same maintenance fee. That's $3.79 profit. Their profit is 12-4=8 cents on the power itself.

dana1 is convinced the prices will drop, who am I to argue with that :-)
I think he/she is right but in the long run but the next few years every consumer generated kW is to be paid by people who buy from the grid.
Next step for the lobby is to get rid of all tax credits for alternative energy :-)

Next step for the lobby is to get rid of all tax credits for alternative energy :-)

Except for the big business ones that should go away - like corn ethanol.

Posted By jonr on 25 Nov 2014 07:18 PM

driving people with the means to shed the grid entirely,

If this gets even slightly popular, there will be a mandatory charge. For a similar example, I can't opt out of water and sewer and 2/3 of my charges are fixed fees (vs usage).

Down with monopolies (gov or business).

It's legal to live off-grid, (even off the sewer & water grid, as many with private wells and septic systems can attest).  In urban areas on small parcels it can be very difficult to install a code-legal septic system & wells with sufficient drainage & the required distance between septic & well.  I know of a community originally developed as summer-cabin space where septic systems were condemned for those reasons,  at which point several owners opted to install composting toilets and greywater treatment systems rather than pay the huge money to hook up to the sewer system (which had not even been installed at the time they condemned the septic systems, rendering some of those properties unsalable.)

I can't imagine requiring people who live near the grid without being connected to it to pay a fee simply for proximity to the grid passing any sort of state-constitutional test. As long as the house meets code, they can't force you to hook up to the grid, or charge you for the mere presence of that grid.  To disconnect a house from the power grid there may eventually be a set of standards for reliability of the home-system to meet some new code provision, but those standards & codes don't yet exist.

Posted By jonr on 26 Nov 2014 09:21 AM
I'd like to think that if you were never an instantaneous net producer of power (ie, feeding into the grid), you wouldn't have to pay anything more than a customer without solar panels. Grid-tie electronics can easily implement such a policy.

Feeding power to the grid from pipsqueak power generator does not add to the grid-hardware costs. The peak DRAW from the power system does, but isn't currently being assessed that way in the residential electricity rates. 

A house whose maximum instantaneous draw is 2000W (say, running the hair drier while the toaster is running) pays the same fixed charges and the same per-kwh rate as a house with an 8-ton air conditioner with a peak housedrawing 40,000W  (running the AC to keep the multiple large screen plasma TVs from cooking the 2-dozen people you have over for a video game marathon party).  The traditional rate structures obscures this issue, but it's very real.  Rate structures for commercial clients  DO charge for max-power draws, a billing line item for "demand charge", which is often the single largest line item on a mid-sized commercial building's electricity bill.

By ignoring peak demand at the residential level it becomes a cross subsidy from power-sippers to power-gulpers in a much more egregious way than net-metering a sub-10KW PV system is being cross-subsidized when they're net-zero.  The fact that the PV system is relieving grid load in the local-grid during air conditioning peaks means that it is REDUCING rather than increasing the amount of grid infrastructure required in the neighborhood.  This remains true up until the point where there is enough PV on the local grid that it's back-feeding the larger grid, but that is quite manageable with only a small amount of smarts between the inverter & grid. 

In Australia many folks tired of getting reamed by the utility with a ~25-30 cent difference between what they are paid for power uploaded to the grid vs. what the utility charges them have kludged up systems that monitor the house load and shunt excess power into the heating elements on their hot water heaters, avoiding most or all of what would otherwise go onto the grid at 0-8 cents.  Thermal storage is cheap compared to battery storage, but is only useful up to a point.  SolarCity has just this quarter moved into the Australian market with residential scale local battery storage (using Tesla's lithium-ion car batteries), after having won the regulatory battle allowing those systems in California (where the net-metering rules aren't NEARLY as egregious), and already having experience with PV + storage in Australia's commercial scale system market.  The financial case for PV + storage in Australia is dead-easy, much easier than in CA at the residential level. In CA the case is easier for businesses looking to reduce demand-charges on peak power draws though.





This stuff is coming, and the utilities have limited means for strangling it in the cradle, (Wisconsin's current attempt notwithstanding.)  SolarCity is willing to spend real money to gain state-regulatory approval for their proven-tested combined systems to be hooked up, and the arguments for denying them are pretty tepid, with little traction.  Within 10 years they intend to install at least some amount of storage with every PV system they install.  But Lyndon Rive (SolarCity CEO) has also recently stated publicly that the UTILITY should be able to control the battery, since the ancillary services for stabilizing frequency & voltage that can be provided by distributed storage have huge value to all ratepayers, and would have near zero extra cost to the PV/battery owner.

Some have (rightly, IMHO) speculated that Tesla's business model isn't to make a margin  on sales of electric cars, but rather, to be paid for the grid stabilization services that their distributed "free for life" car-charging network is providing to the grid.  To "subscribe" to this car charging network for "free" fast-charging services on road trips cost the Tesla buyer a couple grand, which nicely capitalizes much of the cost of building out those car chargers. Even though the power is then at no cost to the Tesla owner, the lumped capacity of super-rapid response grid load/source that those charging stations provide the grid are of immense value to the grid operator, who can then spin down or turn off low capacity factor peaker plants.  The more electric cars & smart-chargers there are, the less valuable the fossil-fired peakers are, since there is a ready made faster-responding system for managing the grid already hooked up.  The estimated return on the ancillary grid services is several times the estimated margin they can actually make on car sales.

A more localized system using that concept is currently being installed at the LA Air Force Base, where the automotive fleet will soon be all plug-in vehicles (both hybrid & all-electric). They too will be paid by the utilities for grid stabilization services, making roughly $100/month per car for those services (!), which will more than cover the cost of the electricity used by those cars.

Vertically integrated utilities who own peaking plants would probably try to stop this stuff from being built since it would strand their peaker plant assets, forcing them to write down the loss, but in many places medium scale PV projects have already successfully outbid peaker plant proposals for relieving capacity issues on substations. Widely distributed storage paid for by home/business owners but under grid-operator control (as recommended by Lyndon Rive) would be like PV on steriods- they won't be able to make ANY sort of financial case for fossil-peakers. (It will be akin to selling buggy whips to car owners.)

"Grid version 2.0" is beginning to form now in NY. In 10 years it'll be obvious even to fairly casual observers what it brings to the table, which is way more than mere carbon emissions reduction.

It's legal to live off-grid, (even off the sewer & water grid, as many with private wells and septic systems can attest).

Sometimes, but not here, at least not without paying. In my case it is enforced through neighborhood deed restrictions (which can limit just about anything), but local building codes and property taxes could do the same.

This stuff is coming, and the utilities have limited means for strangling it in the cradle,

All they need is deep pockets and a supreme court ruling that removes limits on corporate donations/bribes to politicians. Make no assumptions about your rights to remain grid-less or compete with the utility for your $.

That being said, I hope it goes the way you suggest.

Posted By Dana1 on 26 Nov 2014 02:28 PM

Posted By jonr on 25 Nov 2014 07:18 PM

driving people with the means to shed the grid entirely,

If this gets even slightly popular, there will be a mandatory charge. For a similar example, I can't opt out of water and sewer and 2/3 of my charges are fixed fees (vs usage).

Down with monopolies (gov or business).

It's legal to live off-grid, (even off the sewer & water grid, as many with private wells and septic systems can attest).

It is legal to own a garden and drink coffee. But it's illegal to use coffee against snails in your garden because all pesticides need to be registered.

It's legal to have dinner with your family of 12. But when you start a cooking club with 11 friends and every month one cooks a great meal and others come to eat at your place, you suddenly are a commercial restaurant and need all sort permits.

Regular light bulbs are banned because of energy usage. European companies can't compete with the Chinese energy efficient (which actually used more counting 'blind current') so 200% import tax is added. Pull a similar stunt with PV panels and less people will buy PV panels

That's the reality I live in. :-(

Posted By jonr on 26 Nov 2014 03:34 PM

It's legal to live off-grid, (even off the sewer & water grid, as many with private wells and septic systems can attest).

Sometimes, but not here, at least not without paying. In my case it is enforced through neighborhood deed restrictions (which can limit just about anything), but local building codes or property taxes could do the same.

I'm sure you speak the truth but at the same time you don't.... :-) Just stop paying your electricity bill and see how fact you are off-grid. Maybe your neighborhood deed restrictions force you to have a "grid ready" house. But can they force you to actually buy from the grid? Or do your neighborhood deed restrictions forbid PV panels because they are ugly?

Posted By Dana1 on 26 Nov 2014 03:28 PM
and the arguments for denying them are pretty tepid, with little traction.

I'm sure you are right Dana1, but keep in mind it's not scientists that need to be convinced. People with paid/political agendas need to be convinced. I don't know the situation in USA but I think it doesn't differ too much from across the ocean. Politicians get elected because of smooth talking. Not for brains or skills. And even if they have brains it doesn't mean they know what they are talking about. A highly qualified brain surgeon regulating the energy sector. A mediocre nurse regulating healthcare. I've seen it all.

My totally unqualified medical advice to you Dana1: Keep believing because people with a positive look on live live longer! (so they can pay more taxes) :-)

Anyway, keep posting because I learn a lot from you.

Posted By Dana1 on 26 Nov 2014 03:28 PM Rate structures for commercial clients  DO charge for max-power draws, a billing line item for "demand charge", which is often the single largest line item on a mid-sized commercial building's electricity bill.

By ignoring peak demand at the residential level it becomes a cross subsidy from power-sippers to power-gulpers in a much more egregious way than net-metering a sub-10KW PV system is being cross-subsidized when they're net-zero. 

I think it's best for almost every consumer there will never be a "demand charge" on their bills. I've seen similar things here (not energy related BTW). In the energy sector it will look like this: Right now all consumers pay a equal and hidden demand charge. All 300 million US consumers pay $10. Totalling 3 billion. After they implemented the honest and fair demand charge it varies between $7-15. Sounds fair so far. The real motive is revealed when adding things up. The total demand charge has become 5 billion.
Yep I'm a pessimist. Note: All numbers are just examples.

Posted By Dana1 on 26 Nov 2014 03:28 PM
Thermal storage is cheap compared to battery storage, but is only useful up to a point.

That's a very interesting remark Dana1.
Here water based heating (floor or wall) is very popular. Almost always using natural gas for heating. The water is just circulating all day. It's heated on demand and has no buffer. I have no idea how much water is needed but I can imagine a system with 1000 gallon boiler that is heated by the PV during daylight hours. At night the temp in the boiler slowly drops but that's compensated by the thermostatic valves allowing more water to flow through the system. Ideal would be if the water could also be used as tap water. Do such systems exist?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.




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.

I hate them for killing solar. We should protest. Where's the justice in killing an unarmed alternative energy?

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/

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.

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.