Hello from Michigan! Where you can’t legally remove your house from the electrical, water, or sanitary sewer “grid” if such public services are available to your property.
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Here in Denver, CO, you must be connected to the grid. And you pay to be connected to the grid even when you don’t use energy - it isn’t some free-for-all that the utilities pretend.
And as an added bonus, your solar system must be configured so that if there is a grid outage, your array shuts off and doesn’t send power into the grid - which makes sense, bc you don’t want to accidentally kill the lineman coming to fix something down the block… but also means that your array is not allowed to power your own house when the grid goes down.
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Another way is to have a global electricity grid, so places with a lot of renewable energy supply power to places with less energy. We’ve got a cable to Tasmania. It doesn’t seem impossible to run a cable to New Zealand.
Is the rule just that you can’t send power back into the grid, or really that you can’t power your house? Seems like the second one would impact all kinds of backup generator installations too. As you mentioned, the first is a safety factor, plus you would be trying to power the entire grid poorly.
Having said that, the last time I checked this had more to do with the equipment used in most solar installations, and the cost. Something about the way the inverter works along with the equipment that combines the grid and solar and the normal circuit design. For instance, if you combined a backup generator with a solar installation, the solar power would be on the same side of the transfer switch as the grid and not the backup generator.
I remember reading about equipment that would let you hook it up so there are 2 distinct feeds from the solar. One for normal use and one that’s for backup power, with a transfer switch to move loads from one to the other. This way, when switched to the backup configuration, there’s no way for power to flow back into the grid. I don’t remember if it was just extra equipment or if the panels themselves needed to be designed to work with it. But, I do remember it adding significantly to the installation cost.
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The theory is that public services are maintained by everyone paying a share, even if they don’t use them. In practice, I’d want audits to make sure that those fees only go towards maintenance and not jacking utility profits.
(It would be an argument to raise against school voucher systems that let people take their kids off-grid to private schools without paying to maintain the public school system.)
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The solar-panel-owners are vendors to the utility company, providing energy for the utility company’s customers. So, making them pay for the infrastructure that takes their product to those customers (who pay the utility company for said product) is not quite kosher.
If, however, they are also customers, sometimes sending the product (energy) to the utility company and sometimes paying for it to be sent to them, then aren’t they already paying for the infrastructure?
Improved on-site storage is definitely a goal, but so too is having the electrical grid being a public utility, not a for-profit company. Then we would all pay for its upkeep through our taxes, and all be able to access it, for less than what it takes to support corporate profits.
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Same in Illinois.
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Yes and no. Under the current (ha!) model, if my house contributes excess power to the grid during the daylight hours and draws power from the grid during nighttime hours then I’m only paying a small amount toward grid infrastructure compared to my neighbors. Which might seem fair at first glance until you consider that it costs just as much to run power lines to a house that only depends on them a few hours a day as it costs to run them to a house that depends on them exclusively.
So I’m not saying the utility company has right solution but sooner or later we are still going to have to rethink how energy infrastructure is funded in a world where distributed solar power is a major part of production. As you say, we need to approach it as a truly public utility.
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