Why do power companies even buy back solar power in the first place? It seems like it's not in their interest to help their customers compete with them.
I do agree there should be a connection fee, like an Internet connection, that covers fixed costs. Watts cost more than bytes, so a usage fee makes sense too.
> Why do power companies even buy back solar power in the first place? It seems like it's not in their interest to help their customers compete with them.
Good question! The more power you generate locally, the less you need to transmit along expensive infrastructure, so it is actually in the interest of utilities to utilize and pay for all of the generation capacity they can as close to the consumer as possible. You can't get any closer to the consumer than paying their neighbor to power their house!
> The more power you generate locally, the less you need to transmit along expensive infrastructure,
This is true, but I don't think the savings on infrastructure scales linearly with the distributed power generated. For example, if you generate 1 MW of distributed power, that reduces the load on wires, transformers and towers across the grid, and may even mean you can eventually use cheaper gear at your next replacement, but it's not going to eliminate the baseline costs (towers, wires, transformer sites, etc.) of serving any particular customer or region.
Eventually you will be able to break large grids into smaller ones and still be as reliable as previously, thus eliminating longer runs of transmission lines and reducing power over the lines you cannot eliminate, which will reduce the sizes and costs of the lines, but not eliminate them. Someday, I would hope that you could tie small neighborhoods together as the grid cells, with very little interconnections needed between them.
I work in the industry, and my vision for the future is less about realtime power transmission and more about pooling energy in smaller grid cells, predicting the usage of the pooled energy in the future, and moving energy to the pools which will need more energy sometime in the future at a trickle rate based on predictions. The ideal situation is to reduce energy transfer to zero over time by distributing the energy generation densely amongst the most dense users of the energy. I don't think the industry is ready for such a step-change in thought yet, but someday electricity will be treated more like water than like it is today.
Water works because there are water towers that buffer usage. Until a thaw happens after a big freeze and drains all of the towers. If you can store electricity then you can increase the reliability and move the store pools around as needed depending on the usage.
> Why do power companies even buy back solar power in the first place?
Increasing capacity is really expensive.
It’s cheaper for them to do stuff like buy every customer a more efficient refrigerator or insulate their attic than build a new power plant so they go for schemes like that.
Its cheaper to shave peaks than almost anything. A distribution company can spend a normal month's worth of electricity in a few hours at system peaks. Unfortunately people aren't willing to be warm or cold for a bit at peaks to save the utility money. I don't blame them since they will get almost nothing out of it.
They are a regulated monopoly as they have been granted rights by the public to use rights of way. So what hey can and cannot do is determined by politics not just what they think of.
I do agree there should be a connection fee, like an Internet connection, that covers fixed costs. Watts cost more than bytes, so a usage fee makes sense too.