To continue reading

Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Economy

California’s New Solar Rules Aren’t a Disaster. They’re Going According to Plan.

Earnings calls by rooftop solar companies reveal that the battery business is booming.

A battery as a solar panel.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The solar industry has been sounding the alarm about California’s new rooftop solar billing rules basically since the day they were first proposed in late 2021. The market for residential solar panels in the state — the country’s largest — could contract by 40 percent in 2024, the industry warned, if rules governing the price of energy generated by those panels were changed. A coalition of environmental groups even sued the state earlier this month to stop the changes.

But now that the new billing rules are in effect, it’s becoming clear they may actually open up new opportunities for the solar industry, shifting its business away from trying to throw up as many panels on as many rooftops as possible to selling more complex and dynamic solar-and-storage systems that fluidly work with the state’s whole grid. While the industry at times has marketed residential solar as a way to escape the grid, the new rules recognize that every panel affects everyone else who uses electricity in California, and that for decarbonization to work, more than solar panels are needed.

That being said, the logic of the industry and the environmental groups is pretty straightforward. The old rules, which still apply to existing solar systems as well as those that applied for interconnection before the April 15 deadline, were deliberately generous to encourage mass adoption. The new system has changed how utilities pay for electricity that rooftop solar users sell back to the grid. Instead of paying (California’s quite high) retail price of electricity, the payments are now based on a formula that’s supposed to reflect how much electricity generation the utilities can avoid by buying up rooftop solar supply. While overall payments would be cut by around three quarters for many of those who install rooftop solar after the deadline, the value of energy that could be sold back to the grid when it’s most needed — like on a hot summer evening — could go up.

These rules are then naturally meant to encourage the installation of batteries along with solar panels. If Californians can store the energy they generate, they can functionally shift some of the sunshine from the middle of the day, when demand is low, to the end of it, when demand spikes.

“Battery storage is now a required component for rooftop solar economics in [California],” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in note to clients.

The industry is putting a brave face on the changes, noting in some cases that they were able to sell a bunch of systems before the April 15 changes as customers presumably raced to lock in the old rules. But now that the new rules are in effect, companies are more than happy to include a battery with a residential solar system. And Californians at least seem to be taking them up on the offer.

“While still early, we are seeing signs of a meaningful acceleration in battery storage adoption in California. This is not too surprising, in our view, given the need for battery storage to arbitrage the varying power prices and export rate differentials under NEM 3.0,” the Morgan Stanley analysts wrote.

Peter Faricy, the chief executive of SunPower, one of the country's largest residential solar companies, told analysts on a May 3 earnings call that business notably picked up in anticipation of the April 15 changes. He also noted how the rules have changed the game for batteries: “For customers in California, I think [batteries will] almost be a standard part of the package now. It just makes a lot of sense to include a battery in the system." Faricy also said about half of SunPower’s direct California customers have bought batteries in recent weeks, up from about 20 percent earlier this year.

For another solar giant, Sunrun, California sales jumped 80 percent in the first quarter in anticipation of the new rules going into effect in April. The company also said it launched a new program called Shift, which allows its customers to store solar power generated in the middle of the day for use during peak cost hours when utility rates are higher. “We are seeing over 85 percent of customers select Shift or battery backup since launch,” the company’s chief revenue officer Paul Dickson said in its May earnings call.

William Berger, chief executive of Sunnova, another big solar company, told analysts in late April there was “a fairly steep drop” following the changes on April 15, but that the portion of new customers getting batteries was “something like north of 60, 70 percent.”

Get the best of Heatmap in your inbox:

* indicates required
  • “So I know some others have talked about, hey, as NEM 3.0 goes, it's going to be great for storage, equipment sales, and, obviously, our service,” Berger said. “I wouldn't extrapolate too much on this, but very early days shows that that's proving itself out very quickly. So we do expect to see a very high attachment rate in California.”

    In other words, despite the grousing of the industry, NEM 3.0 may very well be working as it’s intended to.

    It’s all part of California’s overall shift in how it thinks about its electricity generation, moving beyond simply deploying as much renewable energy as possible to crafting a renewable-heavy system that actually keeps the lights on 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and serves everyone who needs electricity, not just those who have the financial wherewithal or hobbyist interest to install solar panels. (The old net metering system, the California Public Utilities Commission said, led to $67 to $128 in higher utility costs for low-income households.)

    While California is by no means decarbonized — about a third of its electricity comes from renewables, less than what it gets from natural gas — it is the state that has most aggressively attempted to transform how it powers itself, and could thus be a model for what a more mature energy transition looks like in the United States.

    Precisely because California has so much solar already installed, the solution’s predictable intermittency issues are an increasing challenge for the grid as a whole. With almost 25 gigawatts of solar installed, the so-called “duck curve” — the graphical representation of the mismatch between solar generation’s daytime peak with demand later in the early evening — has become a “canyon curve,” with net demand crashing quickly sometimes to zero and then rising again at the end of the day.

    This means that California needs to figure out how to make its non-carbon generation more flexible, through some combination of storage, demand management, and flexible non-carbon generation like hydrogen.

    The California Public Utilities Commission was very explicit about this when they laid out the rationale for the rule changes. “By modernizing NEM, California can incentivize distributed storage and promote electrification, which will provide more value to the electric grid and help California meet its ambitious climate goals even faster,” the Commission said.

    And while that may not help solar companies sell as many panels as they like, it sure will help their battery business.

    Green

    Matthew Zeitlin

    Matthew is a correspondent at Heatmap. Previously he was an economics reporter at Grid, where he covered macroeconomics and energy, and a business reporter at BuzzFeed News, where he covered finance. He has written for The New York Times, the Guardian, Barron's, and New York Magazine. Read More

    Read More

    To continue reading

    Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.

    By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

    Project Cypress and money.
    Heatmap Illustration/Project Cypress, Getty Images, Library of Congress

    The Department of Energy is giving the green light to Project Cypress, a cluster of facilities in southwest Louisiana that will filter carbon dioxide directly from the air and store it underground. The agency announced Wednesday that it will award the project $50 million for the next phase of its development, which will be matched by $51 million in private investment.

    Before receiving any money, the Project Cypress team had to reach an agreement with the DOE regarding how they would engage with community and labor stakeholders. The result, also released Wednesday, was a series of commitments — for example, to assemble a community advisory board, to partner with local workforce development organizations, and to create a public website with project information.

    Keep reading...Show less
    Green
    Electric Vehicles

    The Fisker Ocean EV Is Dirt Cheap. Don’t Buy One.

    It will be the most expensive $25,000 you ever spend.

    A Fisker going off a cliff.
    Heatmap Illustration/Fisker, Getty Images

    I’ve been saying lately that a tipping point for EVs will be the electric family crossover that can compete on price with the emperors of suburbia, the ubiquitous Honda CR-V and Toyota RAV4, which both start around $30,000. Suddenly, there is one. Although I cannot in good faith recommend it.

    The troubled electric startup Fisker has slashed the price of its basic Ocean EV to just $24,999 in a desperate bid to sell enough vehicles to stave off bankruptcy. The Ocean is now the cheapest EV on the American market. The high-end Ocean Extreme, with a dual motor setup and zero-to-60 time under four seconds, has been discounted from $61,499 to just $37,499.

    Keep reading...Show less
    Blue
    Climate

    Climate Change Is Breaking Time

    A new Nature paper outlines the relationship between rising temperatures and the literal rotation of the Earth.

    A broken clock.
    Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

    Thinking too hard about time is a little like thinking too hard about blinking; it seems natural and intuitive until suddenly you’re sweating and it makes no sense at all. At least, that’s how I felt when I came across an incredible new study published in Nature this afternoon by Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, suggesting that climate change might be affecting global timekeeping.

    Our internationally agreed-upon clock, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), consists of two components: the one you’re familiar with, which is the complete rotation of the Earth around its axis, as well as the average taken from 400 atomic clocks around the world. Since the 1970s, UTC has added 27 leap seconds at irregular intervals to keep pace with atomic clocks as the Earth’s rotation has gradually slowed. Then that rotation started to speed up in 2016; June 29, 2022, set a record for the planet’s shortest day, with the Earth completing a full rotation 1.59 milliseconds short of 24 hours. Timekeepers anticipated at that point that we’d need our first-ever negative leap second around 2026 to account for the acceleration.

    Keep reading...Show less
    HMN Banner
    Get today’s top climate story delivered right to your inbox.

    Sign up for our free Heatmap Daily newsletter.