The Utilities are complaining about net metering, that the rooftop solar owners are getting back too much money so the non-solar customers must be charged more to make up for the utilities’ losses. They say this is unfair to non-solar customers. To me, this looks like the utilities have a flawed business model. They should not be complaining about the electricity that comes from rooftop solar because it reduces the amount of electricity that the utility must generate from thermal plants.
But the biggest problem with their change to net metering is that it removes incentives for customers to get rooftop solar, and slows down the changeover from fossil fuels to renewables. Also when we look at the overall view, the utilities want to change to utility scale solar or wind, which costs them *zero* for fuel. Rooftop solar costs zero for fuel, but the utilities lose control over generation – the homeowner can go off-grid and be independent of the utility. The utilities want the customers to be dependent on them for electricity, they don’t want to lose customers.
The most important thing for the future is that the utilities *must* be required to change from fossil fuels to renewables plus storage. We, the whole Earth must end fossil fuel burning and change to renewables – we must stop climate change.
As a customer without rooftop solar, I see that this law will have some benefit for me. But it’s a killer of changing from fossil fuels to renewables, and that must not happen at any cost because of climate change. Lawmakers must include a proviso in the law that the utilities *must* speed up the transition to renewables plus storage.
