this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

There's a very good reason you don't want the entire country to go off-grid, and that net-metering is a plague that only serves as a wealth transfer from the poor to the rich.

A large chunk of electric costs are fixed costs. Wiring, power station upkeep, more wiring, transformers, storm damage, etc. Whether you personally use twice or half as much power as the median household does not matter for this. So every net-metered kWh you send on the grid, everybody ELSE ends up ponying up the infrastructure costs for (nevermind the enormous production-side costs of fighting against the duck curve).
A partial solution to make this fairer is therefore to either tax solar installations, use non-net-metering (with digital meters), or make grid connectivity a fixed cost in the electric bill.

For people who are completely off-grid (meaning not only do they not pull any electricity from the grid ever, they are not connected AT ALL and therefore do not incur infrastructure cost on everyone else), it's not as bad but sill not great because the grid operates on economies of scale. So in (semi-)urban areas it's still a net loss for society when someone goes off-grid.