As an electrical engineer in renewable energy, it’s a lot more complicated than that unfortunately. To trot out the often-used water analogy, net metering is a bit like pumping water back into your water main and then billing your water utility for it. The grid isn’t really designed to allow power to flow backwards and it causes all kinds of problems when it does. Distributed generation CAN work, but because of its challenges net metering isn’t realistic. Even wholesale power prices aren’t realistic, because utilities would much rather buy that power from conventional power plants. Requiring net metering or the market rate for rooftop solar is fine to promote solar, but it’s a market distortion and at that point I would rather they just have a conventional subsidy.
HubertManne@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
how about grid stabiliation though. like technically if you bought batteries you could buy low and sell high. I feel like encouraging that would be nice to.
LaLuzDelSol@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yeah batteries are cool, especially if you’ve already got them (i.e. an EV). I could definitely see that happening. A real-time market for individuals/homeowners is a really cool idea, but people just have to be cognizant of the fact that in a pure free market the prices they get aren’t going to be as good as the prices utility-scale generators get. To the current administration’s credit while they did gut a lot of subsidies for renewable energy they left the battery ones intact (for utility scale). I’d like to see the same subsidies for individuals as well.