Predictably, the electricity company's response has been "We're going to lobby strongly against it".
For which you can hardly blame them: They're being ordered to pay more to buy electricity than they can charge to sell it.
That's the sort of thing that took down PG&E: The so-called "deregulation" was a set of new regulations that required them to:
- Divest themselves of their own generating capacity and become a transport company.
- Sell electricity at a fixed flat rate.
- Not enter long-term fixed-rate contracts, but
- Buy it at whatever the spot-market price is.
Needless to say they went broke selling low and buying at price spikes, while suppliers had an incentive to produce shortages in order to spike the prices.
Not to mention the incentive to fraud: If you can sell power for more than seven times what you can buy it for (and power storage doesn't lose anywhere NEAR 85% of the power) it makes sense to alternate between charging your batteries from the line and discharging them into it.
Thus you can do your own version of what brought down Enron when they got caught: "Exporting" power from CA at a low price, while "importing" the same amount of power at a high price.
= = = =
I'd be happy for a net-metering scheme that just paid for any excess at the wholesale price:
- Good deal for the power companies: Renewable sources tend to have a surplus at peak load times and deficits at low load times, so paying a flat rate average wholesale price for biased-toward-peak-times power is a bargain. Meanwhile they don't have to put in fancy separate metering equipment than separates power direction and understands peak/offpeak load periods, but can just use existing, cheap, bi-directional meters.
- Good deal for the grid-connected RE-enabled customer: He gets to use the grid as an infinite battery pack that only costs him the monthly connect "nuisance fee", rather than shell out the amortized purchase plus ongoing maintenance and replacement charges for a giant battery pack. He only needs to buy enough batteries to handle outages and gets paid for his (necessary) surpluses (as reduced connect fee "maintenance costs" or money in his pocket when his surpluses exceed that fee, rather than burning his surplus power away in a dump load.
