Received an email last night from SunPower, the manufacturers of the solar panels on our roof, and a portion of the infrastructure that integrates it with our house and the grid. Tesla is a part of that infrastructure as well, and which part does what is largely transparent to me.

The email was brief and not very helpful. I did some searching and got the story.

It looks like a combination of California net-metering changes and the Fed's high interest rates combined to squeeze SunPower out of business.

Right now, I don't think we have a problem as long as we don't have a warranty issue. We're four years into the installation, and we haven't had any problems, so I don't anticipate any "manufacturing defect" issues that would normally be the basis of a warranty claim.

Our installer, A1A Solar, is a long-established business and I'm fairly confident that they'll be around to address any maintenance issues.

The utility industry is lobbying the state Public Service Commission and the state legislature to change net metering rules, which would significantly alter the value proposition for rooftop solar (minus batter storage) for many, if not most, homeowners. Without battery storage, you can still generate enough power through a rooftop array to offset your electric bill by 100%. Your house will run on solar while the sun shines, and you'd be powering your neighbors as well, but you'll draw power from the grid when the sun is down or it's cloudy out.

FPL was able to convince the PSC to charge rooftop solar homeowners a monthly $25 fee for the grid connection. I'm certain that number will rise as time goes on.

With battery storage, you can be completely self-sufficient. But you have to build in a lot of excess capacity to cover periods like this one, where we're generating less power due to cloud cover. Buying a system to that specification is a lot more expensive, and few people would do that. We're about 86% self-sufficient (14% of our annual power usage comes from the grid), and we make enough excess power to offset the cost of the power we get from FPL, so our utility bill is about $300 annually for the grid connection. (I'm sure there are some taxes and "fees" that get tacked onto that.)

JEA, the publicly owned utility in nearby Duval County, is governed by a different set of rules than commercial utilities. They're allowed to offer a reduced "fuel rate," for net metering. That is, the credit the homeowner receives is only equal to the value of the fuel JEA would have burned to generate that amount of electricity, a fraction of the "retail rate." This has been a drag on rooftop solar installations in Duval County, and the public utility hasn't been very keen on doing utility-scale solar either.

It's a dynamic landscape out there as we struggle to transition to a new renewable energy regime. There's a lot to be said for rooftop solar as a distributed and resilient source of generating capacity. But it doesn't fit well with existing power utility business models.

In our case, the value proposition was always about "doing our best," not "saving money."

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:37 Wednesday, 7 August 2024