will specifically target those who install power generation systems on their property and sell the excess energy back to the grid.
Misleading title. They want to tax people who want to sell the solar energy back into the grid , since joe six pack has to rely on other people's equipment to transmit the energy he captured on his roof. Also there is the issue of joe synchronising his output with whatever is coming down the line from the normal generators.
Maybe it shouldn't be a tax, maybe a fee paid to whoever owns the power infrastructure.
Joe Six Pack already pays a basic charge for his access to the grid.
The issue seems to be that PoCos have decided to mix all the infrastructure costs into the variable price of the energy you consume. When your solar power makes you a net producer of energy, that scheme no longer works. But I don't see why we have to institute a new tax to fix their broken pricing model.
The problem is the more accurate pricing model won't make people happy. Distribution costs are largely fixed. It matters more how far your house is from the substation, and what the population density is, than how thick the wire is or how many KWh are pushed through it. Including the distribution costs in the price per KWh is a form of price discrimination -- people who need more energy (which implies "need energy more" or "are price insensitive") pay more for distribution than others. It makes those people unhappy, but those people are a minority without the will or political influence necessary to change it.
Charging a fixed cost for distribution would reduce prices for high energy users and raise prices for low energy users. The low energy users are, in general, the most price sensitive. They would become very irate and try to exert political pressure on the power company.
Of course, that doesn't mean we should let them. But it isn't the power company who causes this; the power company is just responding to politics and the market.
Given you don't generate as much power as you consume, it is an inevitable outcome for most solar installs to be connected to the power grid. The cost of installing a solar array to meet all energy usage, especially in the Summer in Oklahoma, is significant. It gets crazy hot there.
I was just complaining to my wife not 30 minutes ago about how it's cold here in Moraga today. Sometimes I miss the Oklahoma heat, but that's about it.
Synchronising isn't really an issue. You need to do a dc-ac conversion in any case, so you take the incoming mains feed and make that the reference for the ac modulator.
I don't think it's the synchronizing that's an issue; it's the fact that power is now flowing from your house into the grid, instead of the other way around. Since there is no storage in the grid, power in has to balance power out at every point in the grid, which means the grid has to be able to manage its own power generation, in real time, to adjust it according to how much is being put back in by homeowners. The grid as it currently exists is not really designed to do that.
It's true that the grid has to balance its own generation, but that happens today - the frequency of the mains changes constantly, and it's the grid controllers' job to bring on supply as required. There are some storage options - pumped hydro for example - but I absolutely take your point that the grid is designed for a classically understood demand/supply environment.
Certainly there is a risk that all these intermittent renewables will end up causing the most dirty of generators to be spun up more often, in the least efficient usage pattern.
The dream has to be a proper demand response system, with electric cars being a key sink for excess generation.
the grid has to balance its own generation, but that happens today
Yes, but today (i.e., without individual homeowners putting power back into the grid) the grid's control system can assume that the load is always positive except at a finite and fairly small number of known points, the grid's generators, which are controlled by the grid itself.
When individual users can put power back into the grid, the load can become negative at any arbitrary location in the grid, without warning. That greatly complicates the control problem.
The dream has to be a proper demand response system, with electric cars being a key sink for excess generation.
Yes, and who's going to pay for that? (Not the electric cars, but the improvements in the grid that allow it to make use of them as storage.) An obvious solution is to charge the people who are creating the problem by making their connection with the grid two-way instead of one-way.
