California Wrenches - Urgent [RE-wrenches]

[Mo Rousso]

All,

I have been rallying the troops to write Governor Davis and The
Commissioners.  My letters are already out.  I have contacted 30 customers
and friends, the Friends of Solar, and asked them to write to the politicos
and recruit 30 of their contacts to do the same.  Hopefully, we will neutron
bomb the politicos into submission!

Anyway, I¹m writing this to forward a response I got from one of my friends.
Here it is:
*********************************************************************
Hi Mo

I've been thinking about the proposed exit fee.  I found this definition in
the Energy Dictionary:

"When a retail or wholesale energy customer switches from one supplier to
another a fee is often levied to compensate the supplier for costs the
supplier may have incurred to make sufficient energy available for that
customer. This is referred to as a competitive transition charge or exit
fee. These fees are often necessary when generating facilities used by an
exiting customer might otherwise be operated at a loss or shut down
completely. This charge is not the same as a transition charge, which refers
to transition from a regulated to a deregulated market. Competitive
transition charges refer only to transition from one competing supplier to
another."

Apparently the utilities consider a solar generating system to "exit" their
service on a daily basis.

>From the time I first started thinking about a grid-tied PV system I had
some reservations about the true conservation value of something that still
depended on the grid for stabilization and storage.  If you think about it,
the utility must periodically deliver energy to me, incurring all the
transmissions losses, for which they will be repaid in kind when the sun
shines.  But they will again incurring some transmission losses in receiving
the repayment.  They must also maintain spinning reserve to cover the
minute-to-minute variations in PV generation over their entire service area.

On the other hand, it can be stated that the utility gains some advantage in
that PV energy tends to reduce the electrical load during the peak
consumption hours.  Perhaps this benefit has been overlooked, although it
must certainly be wothwhile.  To cite a related example, I'm aware of a
ludicrous practice of pumping water from a lowland lake to a mountaintop
lake during off-peak hours, and subsequently running it back down through a
hydro plant to generate on-peak power.  To someone's thinking, the money
returned by this procedure justifies the consumption of  NON-RENEWABLE
energy lost to the inefficiencies of the process.  I wonder if the operators
of this scam are assessed a daily exit fee.

I can somewhat understand why the utility is asking for some compensation.
I had hoped the minimum billing I pay, equivalent to about 3 kWh per day,
was fair and adequate.  But maybe it is not.

What I don't understand is how this proposed fee has any connection to the
Gray-out Davis energy debt.  Are the utilities planning to donate these fees
to that charity?

Regards

Pete

-- 
Mo Rousso
President
HelioPower
Renewable Energy Systems
Remote Power Solutions
mrousso at heliopower.com
www.heliopower.com
760.451.9374


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