> The problem is when there are long stretches of little to no power generation. Fully covering those gaps with batteries would require very large (and costly) storage.

Perhaps local solar installations could be incentivized to include their own smaller scale storage...

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epistasis 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

California has done this with their latest version of net metering for residenial solar, NEM 3.

It makes solar a very financially unattractive option unless there's storage attached to the system, and has drastically reduced the rate of residential solar deployment.

NEM3 was justified under the proposition that lower-income households were "funding" the higher income households to get solar. So as solar finally gets cheap enough for the lower income households, they changed the rules again so that only those rich enough to afford batteries and solar can save money.

NEM3 has a few nice things about it when looked at narrowly, but overall seems pretty disastrous for the state.

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hamdingers 19 hours ago | parent [-]

Disastrous is an oversimplification you can only make if you don't understand the broader context. Grid stability is more important than some homeowners saving some money, it turns out those extra kWh being dumped onto the grid were literally costing the operator money to deal with. Those costs got passed on to _other_ consumers because of the sweetheart deal.

Residential solar installs are way down, that's correct, residential isn't the only venue for solar, and within residential storage capacity is skyrocketing and it's already having a measurable effect on the early evening peak. Lower peaks means less capacity needs to be built just to handle a few hours. This is good.

The unequivocally negative impact I don't have an answer for is the job losses for solar installers.

	▲	epistasis 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Grid stability is more important than some homeowners saving some money, it turns out those extra kWh being dumped onto the grid were literally costing the operator money to deal with. Those costs got passed on to _other_ consumers because of the sweetheart deal. If that was the concern they literally did nothing to stop it. Instead of dealing with backfeeding from a distribution station, they went entirely the other direction. Those grid costs, if they actually existed, were in isolated areas with high levels of solar, and NEM3 will continue deployments of solar in exactly those areas. Solar is not "savings for some homeowners" it's literally keeping grid costs down for everyone, keeping our grid reliable on the hottest hardest to run days.

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EnPissant 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It sounds like you are alluding to NEM3 here. If so, I'm not sure that was meant to incentivize small scale energy storage. They recently tried to implement a flat fee that would have killed residential solar entirely, even with batteries. That did not happen, but I think it shows the motivations. I'm also not sure batteries even change that much for the grid. You still need to have the capacity for lulls when all the batteries are empty.