The Solar-Panel Backlash Is Here

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In Los Angeles, where I live, the rites of autumn can feel alien. Endless
blue skies and afternoon highs near 90 degrees linger long after Griffith
Park opens its Haunted Hayride. When the highs dip toward more seasonably
appropriate numbers, they’ll be accompanied by one of California’s
unfortunate traditions: wasted clean energy.

During the fall and spring, cloudless afternoons produce a spike in solar
power at a time when milder temperatures necessitate less air-
conditioning. When that happens, the state’s solar farms make more energy
than the state can use, and some panels are simply turned off. This
maddening problem—a result of what energy wonks call the “duck curve”—has
been getting worse as the amount of available solar power outpaces the
state’s ability to move that power around. In early 2017, just more than 3
percent of the state’s solar was wasted this way. The total reached 6
percent by 2022, according to California’s grid operator, and 15 percent
in the early afternoons of March 2021. Wind power also can be wasted if
the weather is especially breezy, and California’s combined curtailment of
wind and solar set a new record this April.

Now the state has punted this dilemma to its residents. In December, the
California Public Utilities Commission voted to slash the amount of money
homeowners with new solar panels can make from “net metering,” the
practice of selling your own extra solar back to the power company.
Because the math for buying new panels is less favorable, fewer
Californians are installing them, according to the Los Angeles Times. Many
sunny rooftops that could generate clean energy simply won’t.
California is outpacing the rest of the country in the energy transition,
but its misadventures in solar are going national. Moving away from fossil
fuels requires a huge expansion of renewable energy in America. One
government report estimated that meeting Joe Biden’s goal of supplying
half of the country’s energy with solar would mean doubling America’s
capacity annually until 2025—and then quadrupling it annually through
2030. But without better ways to transport that solar power or store it
for later, California and several other states are already turning off
perfectly good solar panels and clawing back incentives that entice
Americans to install their own. Far more of America’s sunny potential is
about to go to waste.

A little clean-energy wastage is inevitable, Carey King, the assistant
director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Energy Institute, told me.
Such is the very imperfect nature of integrating unpredictable renewables
onto a power grid built for the predictability of fossil fuels. Compared
with an inflexible coal or gas plant, solar panels are easier to turn off
and on, so they are first to be cut during times of energy surplus.
Ideally, we could stash away sun power and use it to light up the skyline
at night, but that would require a build-out of big batteries that is
still in early stages. Excess solar can be moved to less sun-soaked places
to help them burn fewer fossil fuels, but electricity doesn’t just
teleport from sunny Palm Springs to drizzly Portland. Moving it across
long distances requires heavy-duty power lines and navigating the
bureaucracies of various agencies that operate them.

Take Texas: The state’s famously independent power grid has relatively few
interconnections with neighboring systems to send spare renewable energy
elsewhere. When Texas started making a big push toward renewables in the
2000s, King said, the state began turning off solar panels and wind
turbines, and slowing the construction of new ones because it lacked
enough so-called transmission lines capable of zipping renewable energy
from windy West Texas to the big cities in the east. A state-mandated
power-line expansion solved the problem then. Now, as Texas’s total wind-
energy capacity leapt from 10 gigawatts in 2010 to 40 gigawatts by 2022,
those new wires have reached their limit. In 2022, Texas wasted 5 percent
of the wind and 9 percent of the solar energy it could have created.
Without another big fix to the grid, those numbers could jump to 13
percent of wind and 19 percent of solar by 2035.

Across the country, clean energy is similarly hemmed in by the limits of
transmission lines. Existing plants can’t get all their electricity where
it needs to go, because there aren’t enough power lines for them to
thrive, says Timothy Hade, the co-founder of Scale Microgrid Solutions,
which builds clean-energy systems for homes and businesses. The Biden
administration has pledged billions to modernize the grid and expand high-
voltage transmission lines, but actually building them is very, very, very
hard. As Robinson Meyer wrote in The Atlantic last year, “If you want to
build new transmission, then you need to win the approval of every state,
county, city, and in some cases, landowner along the proposed route.”

The Herculean task of building new transmission lines wasn’t such a
pressing issue before the rise of renewable energy. But now solar power is
so pervasive that parts of the country have no choice but to turn down the
supply. Although that could take the form of fewer industrial-size wind
and solar plants coming to fruition, the other option is giving a cold
shoulder to people who have their own solar panels and sell it back to the
power company through net metering. After all, net metering can create
lots of power: California gets more than 15 percent of its energy from big
solar farms and roughly 10 percent from residential rooftop panels,
according to the EIA.

Like California, other states are choosing the second option. Indiana
phased out net metering, and in North Carolina, solar advocates are now
suing the state for allowing its giant utility, Duke Energy, to force a
minimum monthly bill upon its customers and adjust net metering in a way
the advocates say will reduce payouts. Arizona is considering cutting
payments for homemade solar, as is Madison Gas and Electric in Wisconsin,
according to Energy News Network. A few other close calls show the
perilous state of net metering: This year, it has so far survived in New
Hampshire, barely, when utilities backed the practice at the last moment.
Last year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis vetoed a bill that would have
ended the practice and hit home-solar users with extra fees.

That isn’t to say that the clampdown has happened everywhere. Texas, for
example, has allowed Tesla to set up a “virtual power plant” so that
people with Elon Musk’s solar panels and batteries can make gobs of money
selling back energy whenever they have extra. And there are legitimate
fears about using this method as a way to grow the country’s solar supply.
Hade calls net metering a “blunt instrument”—too crude an approach for the
complex energy system of the future. One major problem is that solar-panel
owners tend to be far richer than the average American but don’t pay their
fair share for the upkeep of the electrical grid, which is built into the
price the power company charges everybody else. The more houses that have
rooftop solar, the argument goes, the more that people without solar must
pay to maintain all the infrastructure that everyone needs. “Net metering
can’t be the end-all solution as we go forward,” King said. “It’s just
going to create a little bit too much disparity.”

The growing backlash against net metering isn’t just a response to wasted
solar power—it’s also about for-profit power companies wary of rooftop
solar panels that don’t make them money. The idea of turning homes,
apartment buildings, and businesses with solar panels into mini power
plants is a potentially transformative one—and net metering is a big part
of how people can afford solar panels in the first place. Solar panels can
cost upwards of $10,000, and in California, the extra cash from net
metering has helped residents recoup the expensive cost of panels in five
to six years. Now it will take up to 15 years, according to one analysis.

In that way, America will end up squandering more potential clean energy
down the line. Fewer than 10 percent of U.S. homes have installed solar
panels so far. The rest constitutes an enormous swath of untapped real
estate—billions of square meters of sun-drenched rectangles that could be
making clean energy. Incentives for solar energy still exist from states
and the federal government, but the result of slowing down net metering is
that residents will put on smaller solar panels that make only enough
energy for their own use, Hade told me, because they can’t make much money
selling their bonus juice. Or they won’t get solar at all.

The squeeze on homemade solar is a missed opportunity in the making. A
retreat from net metering makes solar-panel owners less like mini power
plants and more like doomsday preppers, perhaps filling the backup battery
in the basement with electricity to get through a blackout but adding
nothing to the country’s clean-energy supply. With a more nuanced form of
net metering to allow people to sell their surplus, or with the advent of
“microgrids” that tie together communities and allow them to share energy,
American rooftops could contribute gigawatts toward running the country on
clean energy. Such a DIY approach would be a way around our inability to
build new power lines, but it is deeply at odds with the way America has
operated for a century, and will seemingly operate for many more years to
come: The power company sends you the power, and you use it.

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