I don't know why your first point is relevant, the marginal cost of billing is incredibly minute. The second point is interesting but calling it poaching is tendentious. No one is saying power stations, transmission lines, distribution networks, voltage support, frequency regulation, or any of the other myriad features of modern electricity grids are free. The point is how do you distribute the costs of those goods fairly (i.e. in proportion to use). Utilities are saying netmetering is unfair because it results in stranded costs that must be born by non-solar customers and I am saying that they are overestimating their stranded costs to the extent that they don't count the increase in the efficiency of their ability to serve load (because solar gen is basically already made and delivered electricity they bill for but don't have to buy). It is a really really hard question to know by how much they are overestimating stranded costs.
IMO this is about aggregate demand and the stranded cost thing is a red-herring.
Sources please! There's more to retail than just billing. Off the top of my head there's advertising, acquisition of customers, creation of plans/pricing/campaigns, getting consumption information (which in New Zealand is from 50+ local distribution companies, each with their own formats), there's purchasing from the wholesale market in such a way that you're not losing money all the time, there's setting up a call centre to service those customers, there's meeting regulatory requirements such as a government disputes process, those are just the ones I can think of sitting here.
And I'm not saying that those costs should be massive, I'm just saying those costs exist. Someone must pay for them. Considering I've observed that the margin on retail electricity customers is not much (like $2K of customer lifetime value over 10 years), it's not like in New Zealand electricity companies are rolling around in cash from profit per customer, it's really just a volume game (the company I worked for had 430,000 retail customers).
BTW, the value chain in energy from generation to transmission to meter to cash is full of lots of participants. In New Zealand, the generator, wholesaler, retailer, national distributor, and local distributor are all separate entities. To say "Utilities ... are overestimating their stranded costs to the extent that they don't count the increase in the efficiency of their ability to serve load" ignores the reality of this value chain. At best, this really only benefits the local distributor.
I was coming at it from a US perspective. In the US retail is still dominated by natural monopolies with service areas and captured customers so those costs are low. There is a huge push toward the kind of retail competition you are talking about of course, however, while the growth in the sector is huge the vast majority of customers still behave as captives. https://ei.haas.berkeley.edu/research/papers/WP252.pdf
As for the value chain you are right that I am simplifying but we are on an internet comment board not writing a white paper. However, the simplification doesn't matter. Whether it is vertically integrated utilities or deregulated and unbundled electricity service, the point still stands that stranded costs are overestimated to the extent that they don't account for the fact the netmetered kWhs tend to be high value, are resold at retail, and do not have to be purchased or delivered by the seller. Adding more middleman or more costs just adds accounting wrinkles (and which I think are inappropriate for the forum).
If your point is that the harm is caused by a reduction in aggregate demand then that is a completely different argument.
Asking for sources for a rebuttal to your opinion is a bit underhanded given that you provided none to backup your claim.
And no, your comment isn't more than an opinion because you've worked in the industry. An informed opinion sure but asking for someone to provide sources to their argument would be a bit hypocritical unless you are going to step up as well.
So the topic of debate is whether its fair to charge a retail price for solar buybacks, or a wholesale price. I argued that a retail price is unfair, because energy utilities have a bunch of retail costs, of which billing is one of. The counter argument is that billing is a minute component of the retail cost. You've suggested that I have an informed opinion, but need sources to back up my argument.
Contact Energy have a management paper that discusses energy costs. A definition of Netback from Contact Energy (2015) is:
Netback is calculated by deducting the network, meter, levy and cost to serve costs from customer tariffs. This enables the performance of the retail channels to be measured without using an energy cost. The netback is meant to cover, inter alia, the cost of energy, capital return, risk margin and a retail margin.
Cost of Energy was $994M, while Cost of Transmission and Metering was $621M, and Cost to Serve (such as billing) was $118M for Contact Energy for the year ending 30 June 2015 (Contact Energy, 2015). The remainder, as EBITDAF was $484M.
As you can see, $118M for Cost to Serve is 11.8% of the Cost of Energy. This doesn't change with solar buybacks. The cost of energy is from a different source (your personal solar panels), but there's still costs of transmission and metering, cost to serve, and depending on the utility you connect to, some sort of EBITDAF (unless they're a not for profit). So that's $0 (your solar panels) + $621M (transmission/metering) + $118M (retail/billing) + $484M (earnings before income, tax, depreciation, amortisation, and changes in fair value of financial instruments).
Do check out McNicol (2013) for an interesting article on this.
tl;dr - Electricity networks are expensive, and the cost of energy is about half the total costs of running the system. Who pays for that, if the utility has to pay the retail rate to you because you're using solar panels?
Here is my point, suppose a kWh costs 10 cents retail. This represents an average cost of maybe 1 cent of profit, 1 cent of admin costs, 3 might be transmission costs, and 5 might be generation costs.
In a 1-1 net metering scheme, I generate 1 kWh in the distribution grid, it goes to my neighbor, the utility bills my neighbor 10, and credits me 1 kWh. When I draw that 1 kWh, the utility loses 2 cents on average. But they also saved 8 cents by selling my kWh to the neighbor. The summing works like this:
10 from my neighbor to the utility
0 from me to the utility
-10 for the utility to provide me that kWh
8 to the utility for avoiding the cost of generating and distributing the 1 kWh that went from my system to the neighbor.
The net to the utility is 8 cents. Ouch. But we are talking about the average kWh. It might cost the utility 3 cents to buy an off-peak kWh and 8 cents to buy an on-peak. If that is the case, they are already losing 2 cents for every on-peak kWh they are selling me but making up for it with off-peak (I am likely to use more off-peak anyhow).
In this case, netting might look like the following:
10 from my neighbor to the utility
0 from me to the utility
-8 for the utility to provide me an off-peak kWh
11 to the utility for avoiding the cost of generating and distributing the 1 kWh that went from my system to the neighbor.
The net to the utility in this case is 13 cents.
13 cents is better than 8 cents but it is worse than the 20 cents they would have made if I just consumed without generating.
Whether you credit at wholesale or do a .75-1 netmetering or whatever depends on evaluating the stranded costs and whether they are reasonable. Insofar as you look at average kWh prices and not the value of actual production from solar, you inevitably overstate the stranded costs.
IMO this is about aggregate demand and the stranded cost thing is a red-herring.