[tannedNerd]

I didn’t think I’d see corporate utilities propaganda on hacker news but here are.

The main rebuttal to this is why are non of the public utilities (Sacramento, Santa Clara, and La power) in California trying to get on nem 3.0 if it’s such a profit loss and causing so much “unfairness”? The answer is because it’s made up and the investor utilities want to be able to sell you all the power. They would love to get rid of rooftop solar.

[conradev]

Both can be true!

IOUs like Dominion and especially the ones in California are corrupt. They do want to discourage rooftop solar and NEM 3.0 is a battle between the solar industry and IOUs.

But the economics still stand, and your local power co-op is still going to have to end net metering at some point, too. Its a matter of when, and you could absolutely argue it’s too early.

My ideal model is what the city of Cambridge, MA did:

They built their own solar farm, started their own retail electricity provider (only found in MA and TX), and automatically opted everyone into cheaper, cleaner power by default.

We need the flexibility of REPs to de-emphasize the role of IOUs in building generation. Because then they don’t compete as directly with distributed generation.