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Texas has a lot of incentives for residential solar. I'm not sure where you live, but in my DFW suburb, my neighborhood _is_ peppered in rooftop solar.

https://www.gosolartexas.org/available-incentives

A lot of the incentives are from local power companies like Oncor, but one notable state-wide incentive is that solar installations are exempt from property tax by state law.

I dunno why people act like Texas is staunchly anti-renewable. TX state politicians have said some goofy stuff about "windmills freezing over", but overall Texans are extremely pro-wind and pro-solar. It's a huge economic driver for a large part of the state, and it's seen as an overall part of Texas's strong energy industry, complimentary to oil rather than as a competitor to it. George Bush and Rick Perry were both Republican governors but both were _very_ pro-renewable and oversaw massive booms in wind energy especially. In 2005 Texas (including Perry at the time) passed a law to invest billions of state dollars into building transmission lines specifically to make it feasible for renewable energy generation in west Texas to bring power to the populated areas in the east, which is attributed to the massive wind boom. Abbot, on the other hand, has sadly not been very pro-renewable, but much of the state still is.




Here just north of Austin, PEC implemented one of the most regressive solar programs in the country. Their argument in their study was that they make less money off solar since they can't sell as much power.


Regressive in what manner? Historically a lot of solar buy-back programs were incredibly inflated. Residential solar can be great for the resident but is usually not great for the grid. Paying resi. solar producers greater than market rates always felt foolish to me.


PEC never paid greater than market rates, they simply gave a net credit since solar was only reducing load at the service drop for a neighborhood. The cost to them was swapping the meter for a bidirectional one. Now at some point if enough people started using solar, they have the option of either curtailment (which would be automatically reflected in the existing meters), which at that point would justify an increase in fees, but their study was specific that they lowered solar compensation due to being able to sell less power to solar users (not for infrastructure reasons), which makes no sense why they are singling out solar since they offer incentives for other efficiency measures such as more efficient AC units to lower power consumption.


Regressive in that solar programs are not inflated, but do require distribution upgrades to realize their efficiency advantages over centralized power transmission. These distribution upgrades are costly to IOUs because they cut into their margins when the efficiency of distributed generation is considered.

Paying distributed generation export at retail rates or higher (DR, etc) makes plenty of sense because there are significant load, resiliency, and efficiency advantages to homeowners who are supposed to be the ones to benefit most from the grid.


The only change needed for solar users is a different meter swapped at the house that supports bidirectional metering. Solar power at the residential level only lowers overall demand in the neighborhood and on the grid, and in the very rare case where the net solar production exceeds the entire neighborhood's demand, PEC could choose to simply not use that excess (curtailment) and the meter at each person's house would accurately reflect that with no upgrades needed (Texan power utilities are not required to buy back excess solar). So the added cost to PEC is entirely optional. At its worst PEC was only crediting almost half of the power they were reselling from solar users (from originally a simple net credit), although they've thankfully been starting to backpeddle on that.

Honestly, I would prefer they simply charged the cost of swapping meters and adjusted the flat infrastructure fee for solar users (when necessary) for cases where upgrades are needed in neighborhoods with excess solar generation. Instead, PEC is able to resell solar power for a very significant profit with their current rates.




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