We need something that will incent home solar + storage because:
1) it increases resilience in disaster scenarios and a lot of high usage scenarios. I especially think back to Puerto Rico getting hit by the Hurricane, or the Texas icestorms or things like that. Having a lot of homes semi-independent of the grid would help people mitigate impacts, because you can rely on neighbors for certain things while the grid is down.
2) BEVs are going to introduce a huge additional burden on the grid. But if we couple it with a lot of home solar installations, it will reduce the impact to the grid and the grid can focus on more industrial tasks like highway supercharging for semis and those big challenges.
3) aside from the solar panels, home solar means a distributed storage for the grid too.
Net metering is flawed, but there's the baby with the bathwater argument. Let's introduce better incentives before chucking the flawed ones that are working, and I don't see that happening.
And it's hard to price the incentives. Home solar panels are going to change a lot with forthcoming perovskites, and home storage is going to drastically change with production Sodium Ion, high density LFP/LFMP in the next few years, and Sulfur beyond that.
What I think is ridiculous is the pricing of home solar+storage versus what the grid buyers get. If home solar programs could have their panels bulk-purchased along with grid solar purchases and then the grid providers have to get them installed to homes, it would swap the grid providers from opposing home solar to being incented to finding people to allow the installation.
1) it increases resilience in disaster scenarios and a lot of high usage scenarios. I especially think back to Puerto Rico getting hit by the Hurricane, or the Texas icestorms or things like that. Having a lot of homes semi-independent of the grid would help people mitigate impacts, because you can rely on neighbors for certain things while the grid is down.
2) BEVs are going to introduce a huge additional burden on the grid. But if we couple it with a lot of home solar installations, it will reduce the impact to the grid and the grid can focus on more industrial tasks like highway supercharging for semis and those big challenges.
3) aside from the solar panels, home solar means a distributed storage for the grid too.
Net metering is flawed, but there's the baby with the bathwater argument. Let's introduce better incentives before chucking the flawed ones that are working, and I don't see that happening.
And it's hard to price the incentives. Home solar panels are going to change a lot with forthcoming perovskites, and home storage is going to drastically change with production Sodium Ion, high density LFP/LFMP in the next few years, and Sulfur beyond that.
What I think is ridiculous is the pricing of home solar+storage versus what the grid buyers get. If home solar programs could have their panels bulk-purchased along with grid solar purchases and then the grid providers have to get them installed to homes, it would swap the grid providers from opposing home solar to being incented to finding people to allow the installation.