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but what happens when the sun dies?
but what happens when the sun dies?
CPS backs away from plan to slash solar incentive
CPS Energy announced Thursday that is backing away from its proposal to slash a key subsidy for customers with solar power systems in the wake of protests from affected customers and local solar installers.
The city-owned utility said it would delay making changes to its net-metering program for a year while it works with local solar customers and installers to come up with an “equitable solution.”
“We've heard the industry's concerns on a number of issues,” Cris Eugster, CPS Energy's executive vice president and chief strategy and technology officer, said in a statement made on the utility's blog. “We're looking forward to working with them on a program that will allow for a viable rooftop solar industry, while at the same time being fair to all customers.”
Solar San Antonio executive director Lanny Sinkin declared victory in a statement released to the Express-News on Thursday morning.
“Now the real work begins of choosing a group, setting an agenda, and conducting productive discussions,” said Sinkin, who serves as the de facto spokesman for local solar installers and CPS' solar customers.
However, CPS spokeswoman Lisa Lewis reiterated the utility's desire to reduce the payout it gives to solar customers for their electricity generation.
“We are going to walk away from this process with something that is different from what we're doing today,” she said. “We don't know what we're going to end up with.”
Under the current “net-metering” program, customers with solar power systems are allowed to count each kilowatt of solar energy they produce against each kilowatt of energy they consume from the grid, sometimes zeroing out their CPS Energy bills.
However, the utility says the arrangement is unsustainable because it means that solar customers aren't paying their fair share to help maintain the utility's infrastructure: its wires, poles and substations.
It proposed replacing the net-metering program with “SunCredit” — a system that would credit solar customers a fixed amount for each kilowatt of solar energy they produced. Under the new system, the solar energy would be worth a little more than half of what it was worth under “net-metering.”
About 1,000 CPS customers eventually would have been affected by the program, although some would have been phased in.
Under the proposal, existing solar customers and those who turned in their paperwork to install a solar system before April 27 would be grandfathered in the net-metering program until 2023. Solar installers and solar customers protested, and the utility pushed the deadline back to May 31.
As the protests continued, the utility announced another concession: Customers with solar systems or those who met the May deadline would be allowed to remain in the net-metering program for the life of their solar systems.
The latest announcement comes six days after the utility held a contentious public meeting to seek feedback on the proposal.
http://mobile.mysa.com/mysa/db_28310...l=true#display
Conservatives never miss a chance people everywhere to please BigCarbon.
In Australia:
WA solar shocker could be foretaste of an Abbott government
The Conservative government in Western Australia has stunned solar households in the state and industry bodies after announcing that it would retrospectively slash the feed in tariff that it had introduced in 2010.
In another potential foretaste of the treatment of renewable energy sources by a federal Coalition government, WA said the 40c/kWh export tariff from around 75,000 households would be cut to 30c, and then to 20c next year. The decision was announced in a few lines of the state budget, delivered on Thursday afternoon.
Its decision to make a retrospective cut follows a similar move by the O’Farrell Coalition government in NSW in 2011. That decision was overturned after a huge backlash. It is yet to be seen whether solar households in WA will fight the decision with a similar determination.
However, while the NSW Coalition acted to correct what it saw as bad policy making by a Labor government predecessor, the WA Coalition’s position is all its own work. It was the LNP government that introduced the tariff in August, 2010, after entering a bidding war with Labor in the state election campaign.
The LNP was warned by industry bodies at the time that the tariff was too generous and a sliding scale would be more appropriate, but it ignored the advice and ploughed ahead anyway, and eventually lost control of the scheme before closing it to new applicants less than a year later after it had soared above the initial 150MW cap.
The decision raises fears that further retrospective policy action could be taken. Since the premium feed-in-tariff ended, another 65,000 households have added rooftop solar in the state, seeking to offset the soaring cost of grid electricity.
There has been speculation – so far denied – that the state government is considering a “bi-directional” tariff, which would mean that households would have to pay the grid operator to put solar back into the grid. A similar decision was taken by the cash-strapped government in Spain recently at the urging of its influential fossil fuel lobby.
Numerous industry bodies spoke of the “sovereign risk” that was created by the decision, be it for residential or even large scale developers, and the potential for further rule changes after an investment is made – and all for the sake of saving an estimated $50 million. The issue of sovereign risk is an important one for investors and developers, because the fear of sudden and retrospective policy changes, usually raises the cost of capital – adding to the cost of a project.
The state-owned network operators have been complaining about solar and its impact on the grid – there is currently 310MW of rooftop solar in the state – accounting for up to 10 per cent of generation at certain hours on sunny days.
But unlike Vector, the network operator in the New Zealand city of Auckland, which is encouraging customers to install solar and battery storage because it can reduce network costs and investments, the installation of battery storage in areas controlled by Western Power is not allowed.
WA’s newly appointed Energy Minister is Dr Mike Nahan, a former head of the notoriously anti-renewable conservative think tank, the Ins ute of Public Affairs. He recently expressed surprise at the rapid take-up of rooftop solar by the state’s households – and was quoted as saying that 2,000 households were applying to install solar each week (although official data suggests it is 2,500 a month)
He said recently solar PV is ”actually putting downward pressure on electricity costs” because people were using less power and generating electricity themselves, and causing less electricity to be generated from coal. But at the same time he warned of further tariff changes to try and recover some of those costs. He flagged a possible interest in fixed charges to households as one answer.
The LNP government has not been an enthusiastic adopter of renewable energy – particularly large scale. WA has made it clear that it believes it has enough fossil fuel capacity in the state and is not encouraging any new large scale wind or solar farm, despite the state’s excellent resources. On the opening of the Greenough River solar farm last year, the Premier said he hoped that the renewable energy target, which provides the primary incentive for such projects, would be removed.
http://reneweconomy.com.au/2013/wa-s...vernment-65081
nasty stuff, BigCarbon and the assholes who run BigCarbon, just like in USA
Last edited by boutons_deux; 08-09-2013 at 05:20 AM.
The fact is, solar has been one of the nation's fastest growing industries for the past several years, now supporting more than 100,000 jobs at 5,600 companies operating in every state in the nation. With the rate of utility solar installations more than doubling since 2012, the United States is now on track to add another 4,400 megawatts of photovoltaic power in 2013.
All of which has been noted with considerable alarm by some electric utilities. A recent report distributed by the Edison Electric Ins ute, the industry's main trade group, for instance, calls the growth of small-scale solar systems the "largest near-term threat" to the industry and warns of a disruption to the industry similar to the one wrought by cell phones on the landline telephone industry.
Next up: Arizona
In a number of states recently, utilities have sought to fight back by charging extra fees to customers with rooftop solar panels. Moves to change so-called net metering arrangements were notably beaten back this spring in both Louisiana and Idaho -- hardly states known for liberal politics or environmental activism.
The latest battleground is Arizona, where the state's largest electric utility -- Arizona Public Service Company -- has similarly asked regulators to raise electric rates for residential customers who install solar photovoltaic systems at their homes.
Jacobs notes that the populist nature of rooftop solar power seems to be causing a paradigm shift in many people's political perspective. "Instead of being forced to buy power from a monopoly, people now have a real option to go buy rooftop solar panels as they would a television or a refrigerator. There's no question," he says, "that this aspect is particularly appealing to a segment of the population that prefers the free market and doesn't want utilities or government to mandate what they do."
While Koch-funded groups like AFP are unlikely to heed the message anytime soon, there is every indication in the solar energy field that the political terrain is starting to shift dramatically.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/seth-s...b_3726459.html
Utility Companies Launch Attack Against Rising Rooftop Solar Market
An internet web video attacks the California start-up companies that sell rooftop solar systems as the “new Solyndras,” which are spending “hard-earned tax dollars to subsidize their wealthy customers.” Meantime,solar companies accuse Arizona Public Service, the state’s biggest utility, of wanting to “extinguish the independent rooftop solar market in Arizona to protect its monopoly.”
Similar battles about how rooftop solar should be regulated have flared in California, Colorado, Idaho and Louisiana. And the outcome of these power struggles could have a major impact on the future of solar in the U.S.
Today’s solar industry is puny—it supplies less than one percent of the electricity in the U.S.—but its advocates say that solar is, at long last, ready to move from the fringe of the energy economy to the mainstream. Photovoltaic panel prices are falling. Low-cost financing for installing rooftop solar is available. Federal and state government incentives remain generous.
Yet opposition from regulated utilities, which burn fossil fuels to produce most of their electricity, could stop a solar boom before it gets started.
Several utilities, including Arizona Public Service and Denver-based Xcel Energy, have asked their state regulators to reduce incentives or impose charges on customers who install rooftop solar; so far, at least, they aren’t making much headway. A bill in the California legislature, backed by the utility interests would add $120 a year in fees to rooftop solar customers.
But other utility companies are adopting a different strategy—they are joining forces with solar interests. NRG Energy, based in Princeton, NJ, has created a rooftop solar unit to sell systems to businesses and, eventually, homeowners. New Jersey’s PSE&G is making loans to solar customers, and Duke Energy and Edison International have invested in Clean Power Finance, a San Francisco-based firm that has raised half a billion dollars to finance solar projects.
“The industry is divided on how to deal with the opportunity—or threat,” says Nat Kraemer, Clean Power Finance’s founder and CEO. “Some utilities are saying, how do I make money off distributed solar, as opposed to, how do I fight distributed solar.”
Distributed solar—which produces electricity outside the grid—“has become one of the more polarizing topics in the power industry, with some utilities joining the party, some doing just what is legislatively mandated and others remaining reluctant and not being true believers,” according to a new report from Citi Research, Rising Sun: Implications for U.S. Utilities. The report warns the utilities that “solar is here to stay, and very early in the growth cycle in the U.S.”
http://ecowatch.com/2013/utilities-a...-solar-market/
Another area where unregulated "wealth extractive capitalism" is ing over America, with for-profit electricity companies, often monopoly or near-monopoly, have the priority of enriching and protecting their investors and top mgmt rather than serving their customers.
Amidst Major Solar Battle, Arizona’s Largest Utility Quietly Renews ALEC Membership
As hearings begin to determine the fate of Arizona’s booming solar industry, Arizona Public Service, the state’s largest utility, quietly renewed its membership in the corporate anti-clean energy group the American Legislative Exchange Council after publicly leaving it in 2012.
APS spokesman Jim McDonald told the Arizona Capitol Times the utility pays $7,000 in membership fees and an additional $3,000 to have a seat on ALEC’s Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force. “ALEC is a pro-business organization. We support lots of pro-business organizations,” McDonald said. “We’re a proud member of ALEC.”
ALEC’s ‘pro-business’ backers feature a host of corporations and individuals opposed to clean energy, including numerous fossil fuel interests and the billionaire ultra-conservative Koch brothers. In 2012, the organization set its sights on clean energy and tried to repeal states’ renewable energy laws and despite failing in every instance, shows no intention of relenting.
In Arizona, Arizona Public Service is currently embroiled in a major fight over solar energy and on Wednesday the state’s energy regulator, Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC), will begin hearings into how much customers should be compensated for the energy produced by solar panels installed on their homes and businesses. Solar advocates argue that if the policy, known as net metering, is altered to charge consumers more, it could deal a death-blow to their rapidly growing industry.
In addition to their ALEC membership, APS has come under fire recently after admitting that it had been secretly contributing to outside nonprofits running negative ads against solar power, namely the Koch-backed group “60 Plus.”
And the ACC has its own connections to the conservative, anti-clean energy group. A Think Progress analysis found four of the five commissioners have ties to ALEC, including Commissioner Robert Burns who recently announced a probe into the APS funding of 60 Plus.
Currently 43 states and the District of Columbia have net metering policies in place to encourage the growth of technologies like rooftop solar. According to The Washington Post, the implications of Arizona’s fight extend far beyond the state’s borders: “For the solar industry, if rates consumers can charge drop to a point at which solar panels aren’t economically viable in Arizona, sales could plummet. For the utility companies, a victory in Arizona would set the ball rolling in other states where net metering rules are up for debate.”
A look at ALEC’s agenda for the December convening of its Energy, Environment and Agriculture task force shows they are well aware of the opportunity to attack net metering nationwide. The task force will consider a resolution “calling on states to update net metering policies so that anyone who uses the grid in any way — even adding energy to it — would have to pay a fixed charge or some other rate mechanism,” EcoWatch reported.
Jason Rose, a veteran Republican consultant working for the solar industry, told The Washington Post, “If the utilities are able to upend rooftop solar in Arizona, the sunniest state, then imagine what they can do everywhere else.”
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/201...ec-membership/
Anybody doubt that Repug TX will follow ALEC dictations of solar distrubuted solar policy in order to protect BigCoal's profits?
Last edited by boutons_deux; 11-14-2013 at 04:56 AM.
politicians just protecting its big business partners, but wont embrace cleane alternative energy for the consumer, while ppl are struggling with to pay bills and cause of rising costs...
they hold consumers to ransom with price increases each year, yet you never hear them improve their network/infrastructure...all you hear is they are struggling or paying dividends to shareholders...fck them...
those with solar panels on their roof, should monitor their inverters recordings, the chinese ones lmao dodgy numbers
Cool.
As an investments go, it is a good one.
the capitalists who own Arizona ulitilty gonna screw their customers and their their money
Arizona Approves Grid-Connection Fees for Solar Rooftops
Arizona will permit the state’s largest utility to charge a monthly fee to customers who install photovoltaic panels on their roofs, in a closely watched hearing that drew about 1,000 protesters and may threaten the surging residential solar market.
The Arizona Corporation Commission, which regulates utilities in the state, agreed in a 3-to-2 vote at a meeting yesterday in Phoenix that Arizona Public Service Co. may collect about $4.90 a month from customers with solar systems.
Arizona Public is required to buy solar power from customers with rooftop panels, and the commission agreed with its argument that the policy unfairly shifts some of the utility’s costs to people without panels. Imposing a fee designed to address this issue may prompt power companies in other states to follow suit, and will discourage some people from installing new systems, according to the Sierra Club.
The “decision to add new charges to Arizona’s main rooftop solar program will stifle the growth of our clean-energy economy,” Will Greene, the organizing representative for the Sierra Club in Phoenix, said in a statement yesterday.
The fee will apply to solar systems installed or contracted after Dec. 31 and works out to 70 cents a kilowatt. A home with a typical 70-kilowatt solar system will pay $4.90 a month, and people with more panels will pay more.
Arizona Public has about 18,000 solar customers now who won’t be affected. It’s adding about 500 more a month and expects to have about 20,000 customers that won’t pay the fee for sending excess solar energy to its system.
"Falls Short’
Arizona Public had requested a fee of $50 a month or more, and the commission’s decision “falls well short of protecting the interests of the 1 million residential customers who do not have solar panels,” Chief Executive Officer Don Brandt said in a statement.
The company was pleased the commission “determined that net metering creates a cost shift,” Brandt said. Arizona Public is a unit of Phoenix-based Pinnacle West Capital Corp. (PNW)
Arizona is one of 43 states that require utilities to buy solar power from customers under a policy called net metering. This lowers the monthly power bills for people with solar systems and reduces revenue for the power companies. Arizona Public argued that the policy forces it to raise rates on all customers to cover the fixed costs of maintaining the grid.
The utility spent $3.7 million to promote its argument, compared with about $330,000 spent by the solar industry, according to do ents filed with the commission.
“If you were going to save 15 bucks, now all things being equal, you’d save 10 bucks,” he said in an interview today. “Is ten bucks enough still to entice customers? If the answer is no, then it eats into SolarCity’s business.”
Other States
The utility industry has been closely watching the Arizona case, which may lay the groundwork for similar fees in other states. California, the biggest solar state, approved legislation in September that would let regulators approve fees of as much as $10 a month for customers with solar power.
“There are a number of state commissions currently reviewing outdated and unsustainable net metering policies,” Tom Kuhn, president of the utility trade group Edison Electric Ins ute, said in a statement. “The commission recognized that current net metering policies unfairly shift costs from solar homes to non-solar homes.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/print/...lar-roofs.html
protecting their non-solar customres?
BIG LIE
it's all about denying if not killing distributed solar so it doesn't hurt their business model. Very sinister when the centralize electric utility is a for-profit private operation feeding profits to capitalists.
This will spur the installation of local energy storage so people will disconnect from the rip-off grid completely. HUGE boost for battery or other storage technologies.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/print/...lar-roofs.html
China Withdraws Support For 75% Of Solar Equipment Manufacturers
A recent order by the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has sounded the death knell for about 75% of the country’s solar panel and related component manufacturers. The ministry has released a list of 134 companies which will be eligible to receive credit support from financial ins utions.
The companies which failed to be recognised by the ministry as being eligible for state support will not be able to request refunds of export tariffs and neither will these companies be able to participate in local deals to supply components to set-up power plants.
This ‘cleaning up’ of the Chinese solar equipment manufacturing sector may trigger massive consolidation as the unsupported companies could look to larger companies for absorption. Consolidation may actually bring good results for the Chinese solar components manufacturing sector.
?http://cleantechnica.com/2014/01/06/...eanTechnica%29
Last edited by boutons_deux; 01-07-2014 at 01:37 PM.
Wall Street Suddenly Loves Solar, Just In Time For New Solar Cell Efficiency Breakthrough
Over the weekend, the New York Times noted that the solar power “craze” is partly responsible for Wall Street’s recent good times. The Times used the example of solar giant SolarCity, which has seen a sevenfold increase in its share price to $59.27 since it went public, but this could just be starters for the US solar industry. An international research team based at North Carolina State University has come up with a simple way to increase the efficiency of organic solar cells by more than 30 percent, leading to lower costs and a much bigger market.
That’s great news for companies like SolarCity. The company – another brainchild of Tesla creator Elon Musk – packages and installs solar systems, so it’s not subject to the kind of downward global pricing pressures that doomed US manufacturers like Solyndra.
In fact, down works good for SolarCity’s business model. Solar cells account for about half the cost of a fully installed and connected solar system, so a major drop in the cost of solar cells will have a significant impact on overall costs. That gives SolarCity and other solar packagers another opportunity to offer their systems at more compe ive prices, and nudge conventional fuels out of the market.
http://cleantechnica.com/2014/01/06/wall-street-suddenly-loves-solar-just-time-new-solar-cell-efficiency-breakthrough/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaig n=Feed%3A+IM-cleantechnica+%28CleanTechnica%29
A New Solar Cell Efficiency Breakthrough
http://cleantechnica.com/2014/01/06/wall-street-suddenly-loves-solar-just-time-new-solar-cell-efficiency-breakthrough/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaig n=Feed%3A+IM-cleantechnica+%28CleanTechnica%29
u k now whats funny today
solar vs green coal energy
i dont believe in greener coal energy cause at the end of the day its still fkn coal going through the same process, no such thing as clean energy from coal, no matter what bull they want to spin, you they charge you extra for green coal energy when clearly the benefits is not much....fooling the customer...
solar is much cheaper if they can decrease capital start up costs...
the panels have declined so much that the "soft costs" (labor, etc) are much bigger and more resistant to cost reduction.
and of course the big obstacle is the centralized electric utilities fighting distributed generation, and buying politicians to block distributed solar.
Once you have a final product, solar is clean.
However...
Do you know what it takes to make them?
not this again.
At least my doesn't sting like yours does...
Hmmmm. How exactly do you know his stings?
Ouch...
I walked into that one...
sorry...couldn't resist that slow pitch.
Don't blame you. I often do the same. And for the record, I meant the normal phrase with "stink" instead of "sting."
For some reason I often flip my k's and g's. Probably from when I was learning Korean.
CosmicCowboy
how much u getting per kw back from the power companies into the grid?
fkn clowns down here have decreased it to 6cents, dont want fkn consumers to be power generators cutting their gold goose...
What if it's because of your learning disability?
It's dollar for dollar. Whatever the going charge per KW is = the credit. It averages about $100 a month off my utility bill.
So...
$1/watt net
8KW
$8000 final cost to you? and average $100/month return?
If I may ask. The numbers interest me, as I have been mulling over doing green consulting for a while.
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