But critics insist the costs of those solar panels are beginning to outweigh the benefits.
Incentive payments to homes with solar, they say, have led to higher electricity rates for everyone else — including families that can’t afford rooftop panels. If so, that’s not only unfair, it’s damaging to the state’s climate progress. Higher electricity rates make it less likely that people will drive electric cars and install electric heat pumps in their homes — crucial climate solutions.
The solar industry disputes the argument that solar incentive payments are driving up rates, as do many environmental activists. But Newsom’s appointees to the Public Utilities Commission are convinced, as they made clear Thursday.
“We need to reach our [climate] goals as fast as we can,” said Alice Reynolds, the commission’s president. “But we also need to be extremely thoughtful about how we reach our climate change goals in the most cost-effective manner.”
When I am having a stroke, I don’t stop and calculate of the most cost effective treatment options. I go to the emergency room. We could have done this calculation in 1970 and acted, but that ship has sailed.
You’d think so, but companies like PG&E have spent the past 50 years not maintaining their infrastructure. As a result, they’re not equipped to handle multi-input supply efficiently, and are now having to add a bunch of expensive equipment to their network where they’ve spent the past 50 years getting subsidies that went into management bonuses instead of building out the grid.
It’s not like they didn’t know this was coming; the 1970s were the start of the solar revolution, and the incumbents have fought it every step of the way, for years refusing to take excess energy into the grid because they weren’t set up for it. But when the government responded with “why not? What have you been doing with the money we’ve been giving you to do precisely that?” they grudgingly complied and demanded more money.
So this is all about the downsides of privatization, just like all the fires caused by unmaintained electrical equipment.