But critics insist the costs of those solar panels are beginning to outweigh the benefits.

Incentive payments to homes with solar, they say, have led to higher electricity rates for everyone else — including families that can’t afford rooftop panels. If so, that’s not only unfair, it’s damaging to the state’s climate progress. Higher electricity rates make it less likely that people will drive electric cars and install electric heat pumps in their homes — crucial climate solutions.

The solar industry disputes the argument that solar incentive payments are driving up rates, as do many environmental activists. But Newsom’s appointees to the Public Utilities Commission are convinced, as they made clear Thursday.

“We need to reach our [climate] goals as fast as we can,” said Alice Reynolds, the commission’s president. “But we also need to be extremely thoughtful about how we reach our climate change goals in the most cost-effective manner.”

When I am having a stroke, I don’t stop and calculate of the most cost effective treatment options. I go to the emergency room. We could have done this calculation in 1970 and acted, but that ship has sailed.

  • sbv@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    1 year ago

    According to the op-ed

    Those groups make the case that large solar farms produce electricity at a far lower cost than rooftop panels.

    Which is kind of short on details. Googling, I see:

    2019 non-partisan estimates put the midpoint unsubsidised levelised cost for residential rooftop solar at 20¢/kWh, for commercial/industrial rooftop solar at 11¢/kWh, and for grid-scale solar at 4¢/kWh. That’s a big gap.

    As the author says, that’s a big gap.