CA state mandated rate restructure July 2024

[Reid1boys]

One way is to sum up income reported on form 540 by address and cross-reference that with billing address on the POCO bill

Agree... but now you will need a whole new level of govt workers to do this. And now we will have people appeal it and say no no... they dont live here. They just need an address since the are actually homeless....lol

[J.P.M.]

That is a good question, and as of today, it has not been answered. The state tasked the big 3 to make proposals and the state legislature is to vote on a final proposal , I believe, in summer of 2024 and the plan is supposed to take affect in 2025. The plan is for TOTAL household income. So my wife and I could not go and put the bill in my kids name and think we could get around it. I wouldnt anyway because if I did put the bill in someone elses name we would lose our NEM 1.0 status.

The electric companies have already stated they do not want to be tasked with verifying income. My guess is the state will share tax info?? BUT, how the hell will they be able to know who is or isnt living in a single house. We no longer claim our kids... we have them file separately and we keep their return as they make too much money to be able to claim them... yes, we do keep their return(up to what the deduction would have been) because we can no longer benefit by claiming them due to our income, so thats how we do it. But, since we dont claim them, how can they know who lives in my house?

This is wrought with problems and it hasnt even begun yet.
You know darn well bills will be put in kids names... and so I assume the electric bill police will be saying... no, no, no... we see your parents income tax info and it shows they live at this address. Do we want to live in a state like this????? This is nuts IMO.

As I wrote, all this jaw jacking we're doing may be a premature.
There will be a lot of iterating and dealing before any of this B.S. makes it into law - but that doesn't mean it'll be going away or be good for residential PV owners once the dust settles.

[J.P.M.]

That's a very vague generalization. I thought you were referring to some survey or research specific to the grid. At least for California I doubt the generalization is valid regarding public utilities.

More or less valid or not, I'd bet a lot more CA ratepayers would not mind more gov. intervention in the form of utility ownership if they were more aware of the disparity in rates between the I.O.U,s and the municipal utilities.

[RichardCullip]

The electric companies have already stated they do not want to be tasked with verifying income. My guess is the state will share tax info?? BUT, how the hell will they be able to know who is or isnt living in a single house.

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One way is to sum up income reported on form 540 by address and cross-reference that with billing address on the POCO bill

[Reid1boys]

So our tax information will be sent to SDGE?

How are homes with multiple renters going to be figured?

That is a good question, and as of today, it has not been answered. The state tasked the big 3 to make proposals and the state legislature is to vote on a final proposal , I believe, in summer of 2024 and the plan is supposed to take affect in 2025. The plan is for TOTAL household income. So my wife and I could not go and put the bill in my kids name and think we could get around it. I wouldnt anyway because if I did put the bill in someone elses name we would lose our NEM 1.0 status.

The electric companies have already stated they do not want to be tasked with verifying income. My guess is the state will share tax info?? BUT, how the hell will they be able to know who is or isnt living in a single house. We no longer claim our kids... we have them file separately and we keep their return as they make too much money to be able to claim them... yes, we do keep their return(up to what the deduction would have been) because we can no longer benefit by claiming them due to our income, so thats how we do it. But, since we dont claim them, how can they know who lives in my house?

This is wrought with problems and it hasnt even begun yet.
You know darn well bills will be put in kids names... and so I assume the electric bill police will be saying... no, no, no... we see your parents income tax info and it shows they live at this address. Do we want to live in a state like this????? This is nuts IMO.

[solardreamer]

Says roughly half the country. I am not going to get into politics, but a very large group of people want nothing to do with government, and want it small enough (in their words) to drown in a bathtub. They oppose all expansions of government roles.

That's a very vague generalization. I thought you were referring to some survey or research specific to the grid. At least for California I doubt the generalization is valid regarding public utilities.

[TSHRED]

So our tax information will be sent to SDGE?

How are homes with multiple renters going to be figured?

[J.P.M.]

Says who? IOU's? TVA looks like they are running things 100x better than PG&E or SDG&E.

Well, 2 orders of magnitude better might be a stretch.

However, the municipal owned utilities in CA which provide about 25 % or so of the state's electricity seem to put out a product comparable to that of the I.O.U.'s for a lot less $$ cost to their customers but a lot of the time those provider's NEM's aren't as sweet as the I.O.U.s' NEM agreements used to be.

Fact is (or maybe the handwriting is on the wall), that now (or soon) will be the end of the sweetheart days and deals of residential PV net metering for the I.O.U.s, at least in CA.
Anyway, It's about time the training wheels got kicked off the PV industry's bicycle, it (the PV industry) put on its big boy pants and competed in the energy market/business with the rest of the players.

[jflorey2]

Says who?

Says roughly half the country. I am not going to get into politics, but a very large group of people want nothing to do with government, and want it small enough (in their words) to drown in a bathtub. They oppose all expansions of government roles.

In a practical sense, I don't see government as much different than a publicly owned utility. Same reduced accountability, same insulation from market forces. Some do it well (TVA) some don't (ERCOT, PG+E.)

[solardreamer]

A regulated government operation to install and maintain a power grid, with anyone able to sell in and anyone able to buy on an open exchange? That gets rid of the conflict - but no one wants to put the government 100% in charge of that infrastructure.

Says who? IOU's? TVA looks like they are running things 100x better than PG&E or SDG&E.

[J.P.M.]

Definitely not. . . . There are no easy answers for any of this.

Agreed. Like I wrote: FUBAR.

I once mused - back in the early days of PV around 2005 or so (about the time I stopped going to alternate energy conferences) - what would happen if a scheme something like the POCO's or maybe some quasi-governmental agency governed by state PUCs or such were to own all the PV generation equipment and put it on leased portions of rate payer's roofs or other parts of their properties, maintain the equipment and pay a portion of the value of the produced power to the property owners who would then be treated like every other POCO customer except for the revenue stream from the produced PV.

Looking at it now, besides perhaps getting around some of the issue of the well off getting most of the benefits of NEM, that may have been one way to avoid all this ill will and angst about who pays for what and who's getting screwed.

I'm sure a lot of details would need to have been worked out (making this little more than one of another of what I derogatorily call a "you could just" idea), but if the POCOs got into the PV distributed ownership business at the homeowner level, at least power generation would be back in the hands of those who know how to do it and manage it.

Seems to me that wouldn't be any worse than the boondoggle we find now.

[jflorey2]

I also understand, probably better and with more detail than most that the state's renewable goals were partially met and incentivized by mandated NEM legislation that forced the I.O.U.s to buy NEM customers' non excess product at the same prices they (the I.O.U.s) charge their customers for that very same product.
Last time I checked, that's not how capitalism is supposed to work - that is - buying back your product for the same price you sell it at. I don't think that's a good way to make a profit.

Definitely not.

But it's not capitalism. Public utilities exist in a no-man's land between capitalism and socialism. They have a guaranteed monopoly, so they can't work as a purely capitalistic industry, They also have to make their shareholders happy, so socialism doesn't work there. They instead embody many of the properties of a private company while being regulated by government (usually a PUC appointed by the government,)

Thus mandated programs like lower cost power for poor people or people with disabilities are forced upon them as a cost of being able to keep that monopoly. And government being government, they often don't make great decisions.

The problems of DG has brought this to the forefront. Government wants more people to install solar, because people elect politicians who promise more solar. As you said, there is no way that the utilities want that; they are effectively incentivizing people to make their own power and not pay for it, which is the opposite of their business model. While solar was just for weirdos and freaks that wasn't much of a problem. Now that everyone wants it, it is.

Every solar/storage conference I've been to in the past 10 years has had talks that lament the death of the traditional utility model, brought about by that very DG and storage. There are a dozen proposals for what comes in its place. A regulated government operation to install and maintain a power grid, with anyone able to sell in and anyone able to buy on an open exchange? That gets rid of the conflict - but no one wants to put the government 100% in charge of that infrastructure. A more private system, with more than one utility allowed to use public rights-of-ways? Then you get back to what New York looked like in the 1920's, where you could barely see the sky for all the wires everywhere. But maybe a more regulated system could work there. Utility ownership of DG? Utilities love it, homeowners hate it. Just say F it and let grid abandonment start being a big thing? That starts a death spiral for utilities, where every person who leaves due to high prices jacks up the prices for the remaining customers.

There are no easy answers for any of this.

[J.P.M.]

Thank you for your well thought out response. I do not consider it a rant at all. I do not consider the rest of the non NEM customers as flipping the bill for our tax credits.... well, I guess if you do, then we could do that for everything that is funded with tax dollars. The state makes investments with tax dollars in all sorts of programs fir the betterment of all of us, even though we do not directly benefit from such programs.

Low income students have access to programs that will teach them skills, such as an electrician or an HVAC installer, for free or vastly reduced costs. My kids do not have access to that same program. The state covers these costs as an investment into the future. It better to have this individual with a good job and paying taxes then have them be in state prison. So the investment in that program benefits us all and therefor I do not complain about it being funded for by my tax dollars. For some reason, the funding of the program that incentivized rooftop solar adoption is viewed very differently. Even though the state and its' residents are clearly benefitting in various ways from having so many people put solar panels on their house, the fact that the majority of those same people are in the upper income brackets is why I suspect that it is viewed very differently. Those people are somehow viewed as evil and taking advantage of low income people... even though many of those people are paying zero in taxes and dont subsidize anything in the state.

Once again, I appreciate your well thought out response.

Thank you for the response.
I believe you and I may agree on more things than we disagree on.

J.P.M.

[azdave]

There's no guarantees in life or contracts and I live with that However, my guess is that the political ****storm that will happen if the POCOs are allowed to renege on earlier agreements...

My POCO in Arizona tried to modify thousands of active grid-tie contracts back in 2015 and it didn't go well. They had lobbied and received utility commission approval for all new RE customer contracts but they also wanted to force existing RE customers into the new contract terms as well. That change would have moved me onto a "special" plan designed only for RE customers that was more expensive with higher monthly base fees only for solar customers plus a single mandatory TOU plan that reduced credit for production during the peak of the day. My ROI would have moved from 7 years to over 11 years. They quickly did an about-face though. All I can guess is that some well-known lawyers were on grid-tie agreements at the time and probably promised to litigate because in less than a week, the utility sent out a retraction and apology assuring all current RE customers than their contracts would not be modified in any way until after the contract period had expired.

[Reid1boys]

I understand this: The 20yr. NEM 1.0 agreement that SDG & E has with me and my system started 10/13/2013. As of this writing that agreement is good until 10/13/2033. So far, nothing of that part of the agreement has changed although the fine print of my agreement in the NEM says it may be rescinded or changed by appropriate legislation. There's no guarantees in life or contracts and I live with that However, my guess is that the political ****storm that will happen if the POCOs are allowed to renege on earlier agreements would be onerous enough to them to make them very reluctant to try to crap out on it, but I'm under no illusions that it might happen. I'm not quite that naive or simplistic.
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Take what you want of the above. Scrap the rest.

Rant mode off.

Thank you for your well thought out response. I do not consider it a rant at all. I do not consider the rest of the non NEM customers as flipping the bill for our tax credits.... well, I guess if you do, then we could do that for everything that is funded with tax dollars. The state makes investments with tax dollars in all sorts of programs fir the betterment of all of us, even though we do not directly benefit from such programs.

Low income students have access to programs that will teach them skills, such as an electrician or an HVAC installer, for free or vastly reduced costs. My kids do not have access to that same program. The state covers these costs as an investment into the future. It better to have this individual with a good job and paying taxes then have them be in state prison. So the investment in that program benefits us all and therefor I do not complain about it being funded for by my tax dollars. For some reason, the funding of the program that incentivized rooftop solar adoption is viewed very differently. Even though the state and its' residents are clearly benefitting in various ways from having so many people put solar panels on their house, the fact that the majority of those same people are in the upper income brackets is why I suspect that it is viewed very differently. Those people are somehow viewed as evil and taking advantage of low income people... even though many of those people are paying zero in taxes and dont subsidize anything in the state.

Once again, I appreciate your well thought out response.