After California cut solar electricity payments in April, installations plunged 80%, and 17,000 workers lost their jobs. What does it mean for green energy?

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  • fubarx@lemmy.ml
    6·
    5 months ago

    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/