Duck Curve: California Learns Terrible Solar Secret

California mandates and subsidizes solar power, but the money doesn’t come from all taxpayers. It’s taxes and fees that are added to the bills of people who use conventional energy—apartment owners, renters and anyone who can’t afford to install solar panels.

Worse, solar owners, already privileged, are “selling electricity back at the same price they bought it,” which everyone knows is impossible. Utilities have workers, infrastructure, and repairs, so without a margin to cover those costs, they would go out of business. Thanks to an intransigent majority in state politics, science is sidelined, and conventional energy users pay even more so the state can engage in fiscal wizardry.

The worst thing, however, is not that it is an economic loss, nor that it does not contribute much to clean energy production, when the dominant role is played by imported electricity from other states, which is another reason why California has the highest electricity rates in the country. The worst thing is that it does not help the planet at all.

Unbiased experts were pushed into the conspiracy theorist fringes when they noticed solar power’s “duck curve”—that the time it is most widely used is the time it is least needed. Now, with the government’s illegal deficit at least $42 billion, and possibly more than $70 billion when final bills for the past year are tallied, critics are beginning to wonder where the money went.(1)

Like the belly of a duck, solar power will be available in the spring and during the day, when fewer people need it because they are using much less heat or air conditioning, or are not at home. That means conventional energy users forced to “buy” electricity from solar customers at full retail price have lost money. 2.6 million megawatt-hours of power last year went unused and unsold because no other states needed it either.

To try to stem the financial losses caused by “net metering” of solar, the state changed the program for new installations. New solar owners can no longer sell electricity at full retail price.

Anyone who understands economics knows what happened then: installations fell by almost 70%. If poor people aren’t going to pay for it, rich people aren’t going to bother.

This was never about saving the planet, and it’s time for the state to stop penalizing people who can least afford basic needs like electricity by forcing them to pay extra fees just because they’re not as wealthy as residents of Malibu and Marin County.

But the government is not doing anything smart now, or then. Instead, poor people will be forced to pay even more for electricity, so utilities can add expensive batteries to store energy at high cost because no one will have to buy it.

NOTE:

(1) $24 billion wasted on the homeless problem that Governor Newsom created when he told all the homeless in the country to come to the state. $14 billion in subsidized health care for illegal immigrants, $5 billion on a mandatory government “green composting” program that actually involves sending trash to centralized facilities where composting is accelerated using massive amounts of energy. And so on.