New_Sun6390 t1_j3y9jct wrote on January 11, 2023 at 10:02 PM

Adding wind and solar does indeed cost the average electricity price to go up. This is partly because there are many tax credits for wind and solar Additionally, when some customers who are wealthy enough to install their own generation save on their electric bill, the price for other customers who are not so fortunate goes up. This is because the price of delivery of electricity does not change with the addition of wind and solar. So some customers are getting free power, which is awesome for them, but the cost to maintain the grid has to come from somewhere and it comes from the less fortunate people who don't have the resources to install their own wind and solar.

salvelinustrout t1_j3z4gj8 wrote on January 12, 2023 at 1:28 AM

Little more nuance to this. Tax credits aren’t funded by electricity ratepayers, so that has nothing to do with electricity prices going up and a lot to do with renewables helping push them down (or keeping them from rising faster).

Net metering is complicated. For a while — ballpark the first 30% of households adopting solar, for example, which Maine is nowhere near — the benefits of having that distributed generation taking strain off the transmission system during peak hours, which saves everyone money, outweigh the reduction in bills those customers get. It’s true that eventually in theory if everybody net metered we wouldn’t be able to cover the cost of the grid with per-kWh rates, but many of the costs that have historically been recovered with per-kWh rates are probably better recovered with fixed customer charges anyway, so if the PUC keeps up with net metering by raising the fixed charge appropriately everyone will still pay a fair share, and we’ll all be paying less that we would’ve otherwise.