Tag Archives: net metering

LEDs Pose Same Threat
 As Solar & Net Metering
 For Utility Ratemaking

What is the difference between LEDs and residential solar panels? Plenty, clearly, but for a utility executive worried about slow or no load growth they amount to exactly the same thing—trouble.

I have written extensively about the broad utility-led campaign to quash state net metering programs (see these posts here and here). In general, this effort is based on the premise that net metering unfairly benefits residential solar users (by overpaying them for their generation) and shifts costs onto non-solar customers (by forcing companies to charge them for the fixed costs no longer being paid for by the solar customers through their electricity purchases). But that premise is also true of LEDs if you think it through.

This week I decided to replace a bank of six aging incandescent lightbulbs in my home’s master bathroom with new LEDs—something homeowners are doing with increasing frequency around the country. In years past, this would have been a non-event, but with LEDs’ vastly improved efficiency and lengthy lifespan the equation has changed significantly.

I did a little back of the envelope calculating about the switch: The six bulbs I pulled out consumed 260 watts of electricity when turned on (for reasons unclear to me I had five 40W bulbs and one 60W bulb installed in the bathroom), the new ones just 66W total (and they are brighter to boot, but that is another story). So, every time I turn on the bathroom light switch I am saving 194 watts. That’s an admittedly small amount of power, but if you figure the lights are on for three hours daily that adds up to 582 watt-hours per day. That’s still not much, but over the course of a month, these six lights could save me on the order of 17.5 kilowatt-hours (30×582=17,460 watt-hours or 17.46 kwh).

Continue reading LEDs Pose Same Threat
 As Solar & Net Metering
 For Utility Ratemaking

The Solar Scenario:
 Utilities Can Profit
 By Embracing The Future

The utility industry has been waging a spirited campaign against state net metering policies for months (see my earlier post here), arguing that these programs unfairly benefit residential solar users and force new costs onto both non-solar customers and the companies themselves. However, judging by a recent report from the Rocky Mountain Institute, those arguments are largely moot—solar is going to win regardless. The real question, RMI said, is whether the industry is going to continue fighting the last war—or start figuring out how to profit from this new reality.

The RMI report, The Economics of Load Defection (which can be downloaded here), modeled the costs of solar and solar plus batteries and compared them with today’s utility costs and expected cost increases going forward. What they found was eye-opening:

 “Smaller solar-only systems are economic today in three of our five geographies, and will be so for all geographies within a decade.”

The five areas studied by RMI were Westchester, NY, Louisville, KY, San Antonio, TX, Los Angeles, CA and Honolulu, HI. The residential results from the study are shown in the chart below.

RMIResidentialChart

Continue reading The Solar Scenario:
 Utilities Can Profit
 By Embracing The Future