What happens when great ideas meet profit margins?

[John motz]

A cool discussion about energy and greed.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRE1nPeUVOE

[Joe Blake]

Seems like an incentive to upgrade from a basic system to going entirely off-grid and then see what the legislators do about that.

"Please Big Br'er, don't disconnect me from the grid - - hahaha - born and bred in an off-grid household."

[John motz]

Well look what happened in Arizona, Florida and probably many other places. In Florida you are not allowed to go off grid. Greedy assholes want to take the money they usually make from you and when more people go solar or wind they will lose money so they tax you to make up for it. This is simply greed.

[Joe Blake]

In Florida you are not allowed to go off grid

Hmm, sounds pretty daft to me. In Western Australia one utility buys excess power from me at $0.07 per kWh. Since most of this power throughout the year is generated during "peak" period, the utility then immediately sells this power at $0.52 per unit (we have a system of variable tariffs depending upon time of consumption). Apparently for the utility to purchase a non-renewably generated unit of power costs roughly $0.14. According to my spreadsheet, in summer I can usually export about 10 kWh per day, sometimes up to 16. So it seems that the utility would be losing money if it couldn't purchase my excess and instead purchased fossil fueled power.

Further, the utility in charge of the poles and wires (as opposed to retailing electricity - yes, it gets complicated - there are four different utilities in the state) has a daily charge of about $0.40 per day for maintenance of said poles and wires, as well as delivering power to the consumer. This charge applies regardless of whether I export energy or not - I just have to be connected to the grid. For someone to go off-grid means that utility would have to justify charging the non-complying "consumer" for a service which is not being delivered.

So disconnecting a house from the grid might be a saving by one utility, but at the cost to another.

Further than that, if for example I decided not to pay any putative "tax" on my renewable energy and it was decided that I should be disconnected from the grid (without my consent) then that would incur a cost which could not be collected. (From memory the cost of voluntarily disconnecting from the grid amounts to about $500.)

I'm not sure how I could see a tax being levied on an individual who decided to be "off-grid" without such a tax being imposed on an individual who is so poor they can't afford to be connected to the grid, which doesn't sound particularly fair. And I can't see a court upholding a tax imposed for not using a service.

An interesting analogy is the charge for water supply and sewerage in this city. Whilst I have rainwater harvesting into standing tanks, I still consume water from the local "scheme", albeit very little. But whereas in some suburbs there is "reticulated" sewerage for each house, in my suburb, due to the very rocky nature of the ground, this is not possible and we survive with leach drains and thus are not charged for the sewerage component of the water bill. (This has an unexpected benefit as there are several underground streams which the local flora take advantage of, and the streams can be tracked from the air by the growth of the trees.) So here at least there is a precedent for a government entity not charging for a service which is not supplied.