California Wrenches - Urgent [RE-wrenches]

[Joel Davidson]

Dear Mo,
For more than 20 years, surveys have shown that over 70% of Americans want
clean, renewable solar electricity and are willing to pay a premium for it, but
almost all utility companies refuse to serve their customers and build PV power
plants. Their unwillingness forced us to fight and win the battle to legalize
privately owned, net-metered PV systems, but the war against polluting utility
companies, their owners, their suppliers and their political lackeys is far from
over.
Best regards,
Joel Davidson
(This just in: The Bush Administration wants to fund public renewable energy
programs with money from Alaskan leases to oil companies.)

Mo Rousso wrote:

> 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
>
> --
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
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