Quote:
Originally Posted by plzd0nate
So what are all the ways they have been stopping solar?
Even just a few years ago a problem with rebates would kill solar. In SoCal there are several municipal utilities along with SoCal Edison. They pretty much all had sometime where funding for rebates dried up. Now solar is cheap enough that a rebate (in addition to the tax credit) is unnecessary and most of the utilities, including Edison, don't have one anymore. The tax credit ending probably wouldn't kill solar anymore either.
Net-metering is the biggest issue for residential solar. If you produce more power than you are using at a given moment, like during the day when you are gone, your meter spins backwards. It functions as a credit to your account for that energy and when you use more later it spins forward. You are billed on the net. Essentially (at least the way the utilities see it) this is them buying power from you at retail prices. (note: in general you are supplying power when they need it the most and using it when they have excess, so it's good for them).
So, they want to put you on a program where they sell to you at retail and instead of crediting you for energy, they buy from you at a much lower price if at all.
The other thing is a lot of utilities have added large monthly fees for solar. I think Florida was looking for something like $50/mo just to have solar. For someone with a giant house and a $700/mo electric bill, that might not kill the deal, but for a lot of customers, that's a big part of their electric bill.
Some are just kind of slow. For a while it could take like 6mo+ just to get permission to turn your system on from Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP).
At one point, a long time ago, LADWP was trying to make it so you had to use their approved union installers.
Some states like Nevada have a ton of utility solar, but are killing customer owned solar. It still works for the environment of course.