If you have a wind, solar, and storage setup on your house that supplies 110% of your household needs... who pays for the hookup and maintenance for your house to be connected to the grid?
With the current approach, that is paid for by everyone. If you are just paying for the net energy used from the grid, and that's 0 (or less) then someone else is paying for the grid infrastructure maintenance (that you are using to push your power out onto the grid).
That in turn means that the people who can least afford to offset their own power consumption by installing rooftop solar and whole house backup batteries are the ones that are paying proportionally more for those who can do rooftop solar and backup to be able to connect to the grid.
And that's where the problem with just net metering is.
If it was net metering + flat infrastructure fee, that would be a different thing.
The sustainability that PG&E is concerned about in this context is the sustainability of the infrastructure itself - not the power sources. California is concerned that the maintenance of the infrastructure (that everyone uses) is being placed disproportionally on people with less means to put up rooftop solar.
In my state, there is a connection fee, and a usage fee. Even if I replace my power 100% with solar generated from my own home, and batteries, I would still pay the connection fee for the meter.
When I lived in the midwest, the interconnect was a seperate group, and I payed 3 fees on my bill:
1. the connection fee
2. the transmission fee (to ATC to operate the 'grid')
3. a usage fee.
In both bills, the usage fee is the one that goes up quickly.
>If you have a wind, solar, and storage setup on your house that supplies 110% of your household needs... who pays for the hookup and maintenance for your house to be connected to the grid?
Presumably people do pay taxes, no? This should get them basic infrastructure as a public power grid - and their house being hooked to it, amond many other things like bridges, roads, running water, and so on.
The power lines are maintained by private companies (PG&E for example). Many of these companies across multiple states. The larger interconnect is not necessarily owned by the same organization that does the last mile.
Is it your suggestion that the power lines and local power (e.g. Alameda Municipal Power) be taken over by the state itself and be made responsible for their maintenance and funding?
Or are you suggesting that California taxes be used to fund the California Independent System Operator (which also operates in Nevada, but not Northern California which is part of WRAP along with southern and central Oregon, south eastern Washington, and a tidbit of Idaho.
As it stands, the electric utility is private - not public. A public takeover of a private company (and multiple private companies) would likely be distasteful to many.
One line owned by PG&E, the next line is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_66 (some of which is owned by PG&E, some of which is owned by other companies).
> Two of the power lines run from Malin Substation southeast of Klamath Falls, Oregon to Round Mountain Substation northeast of Redding, California. One of them is owned by Western Area Power Administration, with the other owned by Pacific Gas and Electric and PacifiCorp jointly.
I agree, but i have come to believe customers are best served by a locally controlled retailer that buys power and then pays someone to transport it.
I don't have a source handy, but if I recall correctly, most local retailers like Sacramento Municipal Utility District (Smud) have substantially lower rates.
Last I checked they were like half of my PG&E bill
> Founded in 1887, it provides electricity to c. 34,000 residential, commercial, and municipal customers at rates up to 20 percent below neighboring communities.
> ...
> AMP has been providing 100% clean energy since 2020 and did so in 2023 at approximately a 35% saving over comparable PG&E rates.
However, my point is one of that the state of California shouldn't be the one owning (and maintaining) the transmission lines. And even if there was a public takeover of PG&E back when it was going through its bankruptcy - there still would have been many transmission lines owned by companies that are not PG&E.
Having taxes go to a hypothetical state-PG&E would also get into issues of the public sector directly competing with the private sector and using money from California for areas that they are not serviced by ( https://www.arcgis.com/apps/instant/minimalist/index.html?ap... ). You can see that Alameda and Sacramento and many other areas are not serviced by PG&E.
Would it be reasonable for California to have bought PG&E and then add to the taxes for California to support the connection fees... and how would you handle the people who live in areas that aren't served by PG&E (like Palo Alto, Santa Clara, Mountain House, Sacramento ... and all of Southern California ... and everything east of the Sierras but still in California)
Eminent domain can be used to acquire the assets if needed. It’s just not a popular idea to libertarian American political sensibilities to use those laws to acquire assets for the public instead of acquire the public’s houses to build shopping malls.
Anyway, there’s no reason you can’t decouple ownership and usage rights anyway. And it probably is the only way to stop the forest fires PG&E repeatedly has caused with their neglectful maintenance strategy.
Who owns the assets right now is possibly one of the least relevant questions in fact. It does not matter in the least, and we should in fact move in a direction that means it matters even less.
Hypothetically, let's do it. Wave the eminent domain wand and poof California now owns all the PG&E lines.
They are now in competition for transmission with the private entity PacifiCorp that jointly owns some substations with PG&E and spans six states. This gets into tricky situations where the government is competing to provide the same service without any profit motive and able to monopolize its position through enacting laws... something that private entities can't really compete against.
Next, you've got the power lines (and sub stations). What you don't have is the tools (vehicles, equipment) to maintain those power lines.
> Reichert is now a senior fleet engineer for PG&E, which has one of the largest battery-electric fleets in North America. The 49th largest commercial private fleet in the U.S. provides transportation services for the 117-year-old utility provider. Based in Oakland, the company has more than 5 million customers in central and northern California.
> Its fleet includes more than 14,500 vehicles that cover nearly every duty cycle. These include construction and off-road equipment, snowcats, UTVs, and specialty gas and electric utility fleet assets. More traditional assets range from Classes 1-8: light-duty passenger cars and pickup trucks, medium-duty service trucks, aerial trouble trucks, gas welding, heavy-duty gas crew vehicles, electric line, material handlers, and day cab tractors.
Does California suddenly also go and claim 14,500 vehicles that it would need to service the equipment that PG&E formerly had?
And next we're at the people who actually do the work...
> Based in San Francisco, our 25,000 employees work throughout our Northern and Central California service area
25,000 people isn't a small number, and there are 220,000 people working for the state of California ... but we also know how well the public sector pays compare to the private sector.
I believe that it is absurd to think that you could use eminent domain to try to say that PG&E is doing a poor job and that the State of California is taking ownership of its power lines... and all of its assets... and expect its employees to continue to work there.
The State of California is not an organization that is properly equipped to handle the management of some of the power lines in some of the state unless you are also wishing to have CalPower be a department within the state government that rivals CalTrans for quality and timeliness of service.
>They are now in competition for transmission with the private entity PacifiCorp that jointly owns some substations with PG&E and spans six states.
Then they can also acquire the PacifiCorp substations. Even better, make it a public utility thing, and forbid (with some transition plan) private companies handling this infrastructure entirely.
>unless you are also wishing to have CalPower be a department within the state government that rivals CalTrans for quality and timeliness of service.
Since other countries manage to have public infrastructure like trains and power grids and have it work well, perhaps it's not some unobtainable magical goal, but just a specific failure because of the way CalTrans was managed - and can thus change if there's the political will?
Other countries are smaller than California and as countries have more authority over their land.
My claim is that the state of California does not have the funds to compensate multiple multi-state public and private companies within its borders, nor the equipment to be able to maintain that infrastructure (all the way down to the individual houses and the transformers on the pole), nor the manpower to be able to staff it.
If the claim is "caltrans doesn't either - they use contractors for the projects and are only responsible for state highways - the local town roads are the town's infrastructure that the town maintains - not the state"
Then you're going to hand over PG&E's gas and electrical infrastructure to San Francisco for them to maintain?
How does a properly regulated utility company fundamentally differ from the state owning the equipment but allowing the private sector to do what it does?
And if it was properly regulated, then PG&E and the state would be agreement about how to handle the addition of household solar... which is what people are up in arms about.
I still hold that the state of California would be ill-equipped and poorly prepared to be able to assume all the responsibilities for all of the electrical infrastructure in the state (which is far more than PG&E).
>Other countries are smaller than California and as countries have more authority over their land
There are countries much larger than California out there - France (with public rail) is 1.5 times the size of California and over 2x the population.
>I still hold that the state of California would be ill-equipped and poorly prepared to be able to assume all the responsibilities for all of the electrical infrastructure in the state (which is far more than PG&E).
Perhaps. But that's on them. Not some infeasibility to do so with public (state) owned electrical infrastructure.
>It’s just not a popular idea to libertarian American political sensibilities to use those laws to acquire assets for the public instead of acquire the public’s houses to build shopping malls.
What a strange jab. Do you really think libertarians are excited about using eminent domain to seize houses?
>Is it your suggestion that the power lines and local power (e.g. Alameda Municipal Power) be taken over by the state itself and be made responsible for their maintenance and funding?
With the current approach, that is paid for by everyone. If you are just paying for the net energy used from the grid, and that's 0 (or less) then someone else is paying for the grid infrastructure maintenance (that you are using to push your power out onto the grid).
That in turn means that the people who can least afford to offset their own power consumption by installing rooftop solar and whole house backup batteries are the ones that are paying proportionally more for those who can do rooftop solar and backup to be able to connect to the grid.
And that's where the problem with just net metering is.
If it was net metering + flat infrastructure fee, that would be a different thing.
The sustainability that PG&E is concerned about in this context is the sustainability of the infrastructure itself - not the power sources. California is concerned that the maintenance of the infrastructure (that everyone uses) is being placed disproportionally on people with less means to put up rooftop solar.