In California, some customers who install solar systems and battery arrays are finding themselves cut off from grid
By Jon Queally/Common Dreams
In the nation’s largest state, California, the major utility companies are trying to limit growth.
Of rooftop solar panels, that is.
According to reporting by Bloomberg, the state’s three largest utilities—Edison International, PG&E Corp. and Sempra Energy—are “putting up hurdles” to homeowners who have installed sun-powered energy systems, especially those with “battery backups wired to solar panels,” in order to slow the spread of what has become a threat to their dominant business model.
“The utilities clearly see rooftop solar as the next threat,” Ben Peters, a government affairs analyst at solar company Mainstream Energy Corp., told Bloomberg. “They’re trying to limit the growth.”
According to Peters, as the business news outlet reports, the dispute between those with solar arrays and the utility giants “threatens the state’s $2 billion rooftop solar industry and indicates the depth of utilities’ concerns about consumers producing their own power. People with rooftop panels are already buying less electricity, and adding batteries takes them closer to the day they won’t need to buy from the local grid at all.”
Citing but one example, Bloomberg reports:
Matthew Sperling, a Santa Barbara, California, resident, installed eight panels and eight batteries at his home in April.
“We wanted to have an alternative in case of a blackout to keep the refrigerator running,” he said in an interview. Southern California Edison rejected his application to link the system to the grid even though city inspectors said “it was one of the nicest they’d ever seen,” he said.
“We’ve installed a $30,000 system and we can’t use it,” Sperling said.
The utilities argue that customers with solar energy-storing batteries might be rigging the system by fraudulently storing conventional energy sent in from the utility grid, storing it in the batteries, and then sending it back to the grid for credit. The solar companies say there is no proof that this is happening.
What environmentalists and solar energy advocates see is the utility companies putting barriers up to a decentralized system they will not no longer be able to control or profit from.
As Danny Kennedy, author of the book “Rooftop Revolution” and co-founder of solar company Sungevity in California, said in an interview with Alternet earlier this year:
Solar power represents a change in electricity that has a potentially disruptive impact on power in both the literal sense (meaning how we get electricity) and in the figurative sense of how we distribute wealth and power in our society. Fossil fuels have led to the concentration of power whereas solar’s potential is really to give power over to the hands of people. This shift has huge community benefits while releasing our dependency on the centralized, monopolized capital of the fossil fuel industry. So it’s revolutionary in the technological and political sense.
As this Sierra Club video shows, the idea of a ‘rooftop revolution’ is fundamental to what many see as the most promising development in terms of undermining the dominance of the fossil fuel paradigm in the U.S.:
The tensions between decentralized forms of energy like rootop solar or small-scale wind and traditional large-scale utilities is nothing new, but as the crisis of climate change has spurred a global grassroots movement push for a complete withdrawal from the fossil fuel and nuclear paradigm that forms the basis of the current electricity grid, these tensions are growing.
As this segment from a PBS profile of the work of Lester Brown shows, a future of a society based on renewable energy shows what’s possible:
But the resistance to these changes is coming strongest from those with a vested interest in the status quo. With most focus on the behavior of the fossil fuel companies themselves, the idea that utility companies will be deeply impacted by this green energy revolution is often overlooked.
Earlier this summer, David Roberts, an energy and environmental blogger at Grist.org, wrote an extensive, multi-part series on the role of utilities in the renewable energy transition, explaining why understanding the politics and economics of the utility industry (despite the grand “tedium” of the task) will be essential for the remainder of the 21st century. Robertswrote:
There’s very little public discussion of utilities or utility regulations, especially relative to sexier topics like fracking or electric cars. That’s mainly because the subject is excruciatingly boring, a thicket of obscure institutions and processes, opaque jargon, and acronyms out the wazoo. Whether PURPA allows IOUs to customize RFPs for low-carbon QFs is actually quite important, but you, dear reader, don’t know it, because you fell asleep halfway through this sentence. Utilities are shielded by a force field of tedium.
It’s is an unfortunate state of affairs, because this is going to be the century of electricity. Everything that can be electrified will be. (This point calls for its own post, but mark my words: transportation, heat, even lots of industrial work is going to shift to electricity.) So the question of how best to manage electricity is key to both economic competitiveness and ecological sustainability.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License / Originally posted at Common Dreams
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We have to look at current technology and make decisions on how much power can be generated from alternative power. Right now a square meter (10.8 square feet) of land devoted to solar power, generates 20W. Nuclear power generates about 1,000W a square meter. With San Onofre being decommissioned, it will take huge amounts of real estate to generate equivalent amounts of power generation.
If every roof in San Diego were fitted with photovoltaic panels and the excess generation fed back into the grid, the supply would not meet the demand especially at night and on cloudy days. Electricity generation needs to be relatively fixed even though the demand for electricity fluctuates throughout the day and night. Absent fossil fuel generation plants within the service territory and/or wheeling electricity from outside the territory; how do you proposed to manage the amount of power generation needed to supply customers at times during peak load? Don’t forget to forecast the growing number of electric plug-in vehicles that will be charging at night.
My wife and I depended on solar power exclusively starting some 12 years ago, when we were living outside the U.S. and off the grid. We could run a small washing machine with it, and even during the longest winter nights we could read until we couldn’t stay awake using the power of four plaques stored in two truck batteries. We did not do this for ideological reasons; we had no choice.
It was un-American of us, but only accidentally so. In the U.S. we’re constantly being presented choices. A new car or repair the old one? Get rid of some stuff, or rent a storage space? As Miguel G asks of solar advocates, “how do you propose to manage the amount of power generation needed to supply customers at times during peak load?” The energy giants won’t like the obvious answer: cut down on your power usage, so you can live on your own. You might not be able to buy that Chevy Volt but, then, not many of us can afford to, with or without Sempra Energy.
” cut down on your power usage”
You’re right Bob, that is solution, partial, but reduced usage is a solution.
Are we willing to give up our computers, tablets, HDTV’s , microwave ovens, iPhones, etc. ? These are not as expensive as a Chevy Volt, but many of our little “electronic buddies” start to add up. There are lots of people out there who cannot imagine a world without Facebook, Netflix, and microwave food. Are they absolutely necessary so you can live on your own? No. But individuals are going to make their own choices and they may not be choices that help reduce energy consumption.
Hey, Miguel, we’d be expending a whole lot more on fossil fuel instead of what we now spend on the electricity that runs those “computers, tablets, HDTV’s , microwave ovens, iPhones, etc.” your speaking of. We’d still be relying on our cars to get us to the library to look up what we now find on our computers, or driving to the office to do work some of us already do at home via computers, or to a theater for something we can watch on our HDTV, or using up relatively expensive, imported natural gas in our ovens because microwaves didn’t exist.
And don’t forget, cleaning up the environment of emissions from coal- and gas-fired electricity is a socialized cost, too.
Are you saying that conservation will keep us from having to supplement solar with fossil fuel generation and or wheeling electricity from outside the service territory?
Conservation is helpful, but I don’t believe that enough people are going to change their lifestyles to the point that we can rely on solar and wind to meet the demand for reliable electricity.
Oh, forgot to mention…our State government is pushing 1.5 million zero-emission vehicles* [hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) and plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs), which include both pure battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs)] on us by 2025.
Someone is going to cough out the cash to buy the Volt. My guess is it will first be the Silicon Valley high-tech crowd, then the Hollywood actors and finally subsidized buyers.
* http://www.arb.ca.gov/msprog/zevprog/zevprog.htm
I’m thinking the costs of those electric cars is gonna drop once batteries improve and the market for them begins to appeal to the increasing numbers of us who find that we’re considered to be at poverty level when our yearly incomes don’t yet match the price of a Chevy Volt. I concede, it’s not a people’s car, but it took Ford a long time to develop the Model A, which was the VW bug of its day.
I think the attack on solar power’s practicality is not going to last, and certainly won’t do the energy companies any more good than the Republican shutdown of the federal government will do for that party.
You’re right, battery breakthroughs could lower costs and improve performance for electric vehicles and renewable energy storage; but commercializing these new technologies will be challenging. Batteries need to store more energy, deliver it faster and more reliably, and ultimately, cost far less.
Right now current battery technology cannot lower the cost and it may not ever come about. Remember twenty years ago, Cold Fusion (nuclear reaction that would occur at, or near, room temperatures ) claims about power generation raised hopes of a cheap and abundant source of energy? Those claims are now considered dead. Technology has its limits.
If Sempra Energy stopped its campaign to prevent individual home and business owners from selling energy back onto the grid, solar panels would bloom all over the state and deliver most of the state’s power needs. Night time electricity can be reclaimed from the batteries of millions of electrical vehicles charged up during the day, and as battery technology improves, stand-alone batteries can also contribute to night time energy.. Germany is generating most of its energy needs from solar because it instituted “feed-in tariffs” which incentivize individual homes and businesses to invest in solar. Some farmers are earning as much from their solar farms as they do from conventional farming operations.
It’s the profit motive that keeps us from doing the same. But since California is the most progressive state in the union with majorities in both Houses of the state legislature and a Democratic Governor, there is no reason why the laws shouldn’t be changed to allow feed-in tariffs here.
See “Power to the People or Power to the Corporations?” for more detail.
To “Miguel G”: Please, please assure me that you are in no way affiliated with SDGE, Sempra or any of their subsidiaries or contractors or the build ’em big energy companies, cause your numerous concerns about how solar just won’t be practical or sufficient comes straight out of their playbook.
Let’s start with the “land it takes for solar” argument. We don’t have to put the solar on any undeveloped land. Conservative (read SDGE’s own in the case of rooftop and credible conservative assumptions for parking lot) put the combined capacity in San Diego County for solar on roof tops and parking lot covers at 7,000 Mega Watts. That is over 3 X’s what “SONGS” was producing (2,200 MWs). And yes, the panels stop producing when the sun goes down or disappears behind a storm cloud. But they are pumping out the most when we need it to offset the peak loads from primarily air conditioners.
Which leads us to argument number two. Batteries just won’t cut it. Well, of course not if utilities like Edison get to prevent them from being installed as described in the article. But more important, technology, while it “does have limits” in this case is outstripping the regulatory and political apparatus. Batteries are increasing in efficiency and applicability in much the same way and rate that computers and other electronics have improved. There are other storage media that are being developed — rapidly. But please don’t trot out the “cold fusion” fantasy as anything remotely comparable to batteries or other practical, operating and improving technologies.
Finally, the “we gotta have more gas plants” argument. The facts are that Southern California already has a glut of gas plants. That is why with the thermometer popping this last summer and early fall and the summer and fall before that we have been just fine thank you without San Onofre. And there are already more gas plants approved. So the margin is well beyond what regulators and the independent system operator (CalISO) have specified as needed for reliability.
As was pointed out well in the Queally article, we have an opportunity to invest in and subsidize a technology that can be applied in each and every neighborhood. Solar, storage, energy management and continued investments and increases in energy efficiency in buildings, lighting, appliances (while a huge problem for utilities with last century systems and business plans) are all part of the solution for “us”. Right now, before the utilities take their next step to further inhibit these solutions in Sacramento or with the PUC in San Francisco, we do have a choice.
It basically boils down to: who do you want to subsidize for what end? Do you want to subsidize the fossil fuel cycle dependent system by essentially giving away drilling rights on US land, risk destroying our aquifers and letting them pollute our air and raise the temperature of our planet and pay the local regulated utility a guaranteed rate of return for building and transmitting this power long distances? Or do you want to subsidize your own and your neighbor’s and your local businesses’ ability to use power more efficiently and produce power here on top of their buildings and parking lots and integrate that into the local power distribution system? Which will create more sustainable, long term jobs and help us reduce greenhouse gas emissions?
It we pursue the community-based, renewable and energy efficiency path, we could actually be pumping energy out of San Diego, while bringing jobs and dollars in. I’d like to encourage you to stop looking for ways to tell us how we can’t do it and get on board the local clean energy train. Just a few of many groups working for a new energy future in San Diego include the California Center for Sustainable Energy, Run with the Sun program of local Sierra Club, Solar for All with Environmental Health Coalition and the San Diego Energy District Foundation.
Jay Powell
It does seem that every major household and national decision has been made political, and that Miguel G is just doing a troll walk for Sempra and Edison, et.al. Gotta keep The Bigs Happy, you know.
One of the toughest sells for solar is the delivery question. It shouldn’t be. After all, rooftops and parking lot shelters produce the juice close to the consumer and save all those transportation costs and loss of power over the many miles it takes to get the power through resistant cables. But more money is produced for The Bigs by shipping electricity over huge swaths of land. It takes what we used to call a monopoly to do that.
So, we get the trolls and Teahadists yelling about government coercion… I can hear them now, screaming, “Socialist! That’s MY rooftop!!”
I’m not talking to you, Miguel G, I’m just sayin…
“It does seem that every major household and national decision has been made political”
I think that’s a problem when you legislate a monopoly (ie Sempra et al). Are you advocating that solar panels be mandated for each property, Bob or simply saying that the legislated monopoly should facilitate those property owners?
Either way is good for me, Brian; government can install solar in a pure buy, or make it attractive to install solar on private property by offering subsidies similar to those given the oil patch. Or it can reward the monopolies with tax breaks if it allows people to get credits for using their batteries to feed the energy grid with power.
If oil and gas can’t compete with solar under the same conditions of subsidization as solar then oil and gas have proved to be outmoded, wasteful, impractical and corrupting of politicians, air and water, which corruption carries a broad social cost.
“or make it attractive to install solar on private property by offering subsidies similar to those given the oil patch.”
Gawsh I hate subsidies but you have a good point. Oil producers have no reason to be rent seekers…but they are
John, Bob and Jay – I’m not affiliated with SDGE, Sempra or any of their subsidiaries or contractors or the build ‘em big energy companies. But I am well read and understand that complex problems like energy generation are not solved with simple answers, Facebook campaigns or “Hope and Change” slogans.
Start with reading unbiased journalism (not found here or on the OB Rag). A good place to go is The Economist out of the UK. They support the legalization of drugs so you don’t have to be afraid of reading The Economist. Their recent coverage on German energy generation is well done.
http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21579149-germanys-energiewende-bodes-ill-countrys-european-leadership-tilting-windmills
http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21571440-germanys-national-energy-project-becoming-cause-disunion-troubled-turn
Left leaning publications would be funny to read if they weren’t so serious.
Miguel G; thanks for the articles. I just read them and conclude that of course implementing change is difficult, but with all the political challenges and U-turns described in the articles, Germany is still the world leader in moving off of fossil and nuclear. Your turn now: read “The Energy Imperative; 100 % Renewable Now” by the late Hermann Scheer, member of German Parliament and President of Eurosolar. I understand the complexities. I also understand the investor owned utilities basic business plan does not allow them to move forward with obvious renewable and energy efficiency systems that best serve the public interest and common good.
BTW, no need to denigrate “hope and change” initiatives. If you think we left-leaners are so biased and “funny to read if we weren’t so serious”…..why are you chatter-battering away on your key board to fill up the SDFP comments section ? Here’s my email if you want to continue a dialogue on efficacy of pursuing a 100% renewables path in San Diego: hcjpowell@cox.net.
Miguel, I would agree with you – to a point, that is – re how one defines “well read.” To me it means, at the very least, getting news and information from a number of sources. Might not completely strain out any perceived “bias” – after all, human beings, not machines, write this stuff (!) – but it can go aways toward balancing things out some. Variety really is the spice of life! :-)
My own daily online-reading list includes, aside from SDFP, the likes of CBS News, NBC News, Reuters and the Los Angeles Times. And yes, I like the BBC too!
As to “Hope and Change” it’s not a mere slogan. It’s an aspiration, what we’d like to be or to achieve. A destination, a goal. It’s up to us, to create the journey.
Well read means reading SDFP, OB Rag, MoveOn.org along with Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and the BBC.
Slogans like “Hope and Change” imply simple solutions to complex issues. The sad thing is that many are serious when they buy into it. That included the Nobel Committee when it awarded Obama the Nobel Peace. With drone killings replacing Guantánamo Bay, do you think they would have still awarded it? Even Obama realized that there are many bad people who are not going to change.
Left-leaning as well as right-leaning (i.e. Tea Party) dig in their heels and don’t consider compromise. “Chatter-battering” is my way of having SDFP readers and NPR listeners pause, THINK and consider alternatives rather than just jump onto the “cause” bandwagon.
You should probably find another hobby Miguel. You can’t win arguments when you tell people here “that complex problems like energy generation are not solved with simple answers.” You know anybody who’d say, “Gee, Miguel G is right; I should have realized the energy problem is complex.”?
Gee, all I need to do is place photovoltaic cells on my roof – problem solved!
You’d probably be better off if you did.