Note that this news outlet has a history of sending lawyers to harass people who post paywall-bypassing archive links. So don’t do that on this post.
Don’t post the article then?
I’d rather post it and let people figure out how to access it themselves.
You could find an alternative source for the story rather than put other members of the community at risk or inconvenience.
I appreciate you posting it, but I tend to avoid media like that.
These are some of the first page results of a mojeek search in Firefox on android for the phrase "steep decline in California solar ".
I didn’t find any fancy graphs, but neither did I hit a paywall, possibly because I’m likely a first time visitor to those sites.
I don’t vouch for any of those sites. I just popped in to see if they had a paywall and seemed to be covering the same story.
https://lostcoastoutpost.com/2024/jan/26/whats-happened-since-california-cut-home-solar-pay/
https://calmatters.org/environment/climate-change/2024/01/california-solar-demand-plummets/
lol come at me, sfchronicle. Let’s see how your American lawyers do in Europe.
The deal was, if you installed solar panels you could pump the power back into the grid and get credit for it. This subtracted from your power bill. The ‘refund’ rate for the generated power was enough so solar installation companies made bank.
Last year, they reduced the credit from 20-30 cents to 5 cents per KWh and added an extra ‘grid participation’ fee that could run $500 extra per year. So the math for installing solar that fed back to the grid no longer made sense. Hence the drop in demand.
None of this had to do with solar + batteries. With batteries you could get off the grid completely but the batteries cost $$$. Given current interest rates, financing was tough. If the cost of batteries drop and interest rates fall, the return on investment will make more sense and the graph will shoot back up.
If California wants to get even more solar adoption, they could incentivize batteries. But that would affect revenue to the power companies (who have lots of lobbyists) so not sure it’ll ever happen.
Meanwhile, at least one power utility jacked up their rates by 13%: https://abc7news.com/ca-pge-bill-rate-increase-2024-energy-rates-electricity-bills/14173599/
In regards to PG&E’s rates, for those interested in how much that 13% brings it up to:
