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Got a solar panel? Time for a little energy arbitrage.
The new film Dumb Money gives home traders the Hollywood treatment. The movie, based on the GameStop saga of 2021, recounts how amateur stock enthusiasts and trolls united on online platforms like Reddit drove up the stock price of an over-the-hill video game store and caused huge losses for hedge funds that bet against the stock.
The bizarre episode shone a spotlight on just how many armchair stock jockeys are out there. Now, another type of trader is quietly growing in popularity: the garage energy baron.
Online, you can find solar enthusiasts not only celebrating how much energy their panels created but also how much money they made by selling energy back to the electric utility. As more homes can make and store their own energy, more homeowners are trying to get in on “energy arbitrage.” They are buying low and selling high, though this time the product in question is not a share of company stock, but a kilowatt-hour of energy.
Most people have minimal control of their home energy. It is a resource we consume, and the principal way to affect the monthly bill is by turning up the AC or turning off the lights. The roughly 5 percent of Americans with solar panels, along with those who have wind turbines or other ways to generate electricity, have been changing the equation by becoming energy providers rather than passive recipients.
Home solar lowers the amount of energy a home must buy from the grid. Sometimes, when the sun shines high and unobstructed, homeowners with a large solar setup can make more energy than the home requires. In most places, they can turn around and sell the excess energy back to the grid. Net metering, as it is called, helps to recoup the five-figure sum needed to pay for solar panels in the first place.
The revenue can be eye-popping. In the Tesla Solar subreddit, a hive of people with Elon Musk’s solar panels and integrated home energy systems, users recount the details of their system and their savings. A poster from Texas this week uploaded a screenshot showing they made $600 in a month by selling back energy as part of Tesla Electric, the company’s virtual power plant (VPP).
Tesla Electric works because of a new wrinkle in the energy game. With the advent of products such as Tesla’s Powerwall — basically a big, intelligent battery for the house — homeowners can now make their own energy and store it for later, which opens new possibilities. The first is a no-brainer: Stashing excess energy in the battery creates a backup power supply in case of a blackout. However, the ability to charge and discharge the battery at will gives rise to gamesmanship.
Suppose that instead of selling solar energy to the grid right away (in the afternoon when there’s lots of it), a homeowner stashes it and waits. In the evening, when energy demand rises as people get home from work and the price of energy rises, that’s when their system hits the “sell button.”
This is energy arbitrage. It earns the biggest windfalls when prices are volatile, with big gaps between high and low. That’s exactly what happened in Australia in 2022, where wild markets earned record profits for anyone who could use a big battery to buy and sell energy. In Texas, the Tesla Electric VPP automatically sells the energy stored in customers’ home Powerwalls when the price is the highest (and refills the battery when electricity is cheap), which leads to windfall profits during a major “sell event.” One Redditor claimed to be up more than $800 this summer, mostly by using his Powerwall to perform energy arbitrage.
Indeed, homeowners don’t need solar panels or wind turbines to do this, says Jeff Maguire, a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Lab.
“If you're in that scenario and you have a battery, you can charge the battery when energy is cheap and discharge it when energy is expensive,” he says. “You'll make a little bit of profit, and you can do that every day. It’s called energy arbitrage. It's one way to pay [yourself] back for the batteries. It's usually not enough to cover the cost of the battery itself, but it certainly helps, and then you'll have it for resilience when you need it.”
Of course, all this scheming and strategy is reliant upon one basic idea: that a person can sell electricity back to the grid at fair market price. There is no guarantee this will continue indefinitely.
Over the past couple of years, state lawmakers and electric utility operators around the country have proposed cutting off net metering, slashing the rates residents get paid for extra energy. One (disputed) argument from utilities is “cost-shift,” the idea that people with solar panels are subsidized by everybody else who pays for standard electricity, and who pays for the upkeep of the grid as part of every kWh they purchase. Another is technical: America’s aging infrastructure wasn’t built with this “backfeeding” in mind, and may not be able to deal with a very large number of homes sending juice back onto the grid.
The gambit is also about the big utilities’ bottom line. They don’t want to have to “curtail” some of their solar because there’s too much on the grid, thanks to net-metering residents. And they, too, are engaged in the energy arbitrage game.
Many electric utilities are installing their own large energy storage facilities, which is crucial as the country uses more and more renewable energy: If people can’t move their electricity consumption to the times of peak energy supply — say, by charging their EV in the middle of the day when the sun shines — then we need to save lots of our renewable energy for later. When the utility stashes solar energy made from the noontime sun and sells it at 7 p.m. when residential electricity is costlier, it makes a little profit in the process to help pay for the cost of those storage systems.
What all this means for the home energy trader could vary wildly state by state. New Hampshire, in a surprise, just decided against slashing net metering rates. Sunny California, the country’s biggest residential solar market, cut energy payments for new PV installations by 75 percent – in theory because there’s already too much solar – while grandfathering in all the people who already have panels.
It may turn out that if you want to be a solar trader, you should have started yesterday.
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The rapid increase in demand for artificial intelligence is creating a seemingly vexing national dilemma: How can we meet the vast energy demands of a breakthrough industry without compromising our energy goals?
If that challenge sounds familiar, that’s because it is. The U.S. has a long history of rising to the electricity demands of innovative new industries. Our energy needs grew far more quickly in the four decades following World War II than what we are facing today. More recently, we have squared off against the energy requirements of new clean technologies that require significant energy to produce — most notably hydrogen.
Courtesy of Rhodium Group
The lesson we have learned time and again is that it is possible to scale technological innovation in a way that also scales energy innovation. Rather than accepting a zero-sum trade-off between innovation and our clean energy goals, we should focus on policies that leverage the growth of AI to scale the growth of clean energy.
At the core of this approach is the concept of additionality: Companies operating massive data centers — often referred to as “hyperscalers” — as well as utilities should have incentives to bring online new, additional clean energy to power new computing needs. That way, we leverage demand in one sector to scale up another. We drive innovation in key sectors that are critical to our nation’s competitiveness, we reward market leaders who are already moving in this direction with a stable, long-term regulatory framework for growth, and we stay on track to meet our nation’s climate commitments.
All of this is possible, but only if we take bold action now.
AI technologies have the potential to significantly boost America’s economic productivity and enhance our national security. AI also has the potential to accelerate the energy transition itself, from optimizing the electricity grid, to improving weather forecasting, to accelerating the discovery of chemicals and material breakthroughs that reduce reliance on fossil fuels. Powering AI, however, is itself incredibly energy intensive. Projections suggest that data centers could consume 9% of U.S. electricity generation by 2030, up from 4% today. Without a national policy response, this surge in energy demand risks increasing our long-term reliance on fossil fuels. By some estimates, around 20 gigawatts of additional natural gas generating capacity will come online by 2030, and coal plant retirements are already being delayed.
Avoiding this outcome will require creative focus on additionality. Hydrogen represents a particularly relevant case study here. It, too, is energy-intensive to produce — a single kilogram of hydrogen requires double the average household’s electricity consumption. And while hydrogen holds great promise to decarbonize parts of our economy, hydrogen is not per se good for our clean energy goals. Indeed, today’s fossil fuel-driven methods of hydrogen production generate more emissions than the entire aviation sector. While we can make zero-emissions hydrogen by using clean electricity to split hydrogen from water, the source of that electricity matters a lot. Similar to data centers, if the power for hydrogen production comes from the existing electricity grid, then ramping up electrolytic production of hydrogen could significantly increase emissions by growing overall energy demand without cleaning the energy mix.
This challenge led to the development of an “additionality” framework for hydrogen. The Inflation Reduction Act offers generous subsidies to hydrogen producers, but to qualify, they must match their electricity consumption with additional (read: newly built) clean energy generation close enough to them that they can actually use it.
This approach, which is being refined in proposed guidance from the U.S. Treasury Department, is designed to make sure that hydrogen’s energy demand becomes a catalyst for investment in new clean electricity generation and decarbonization technologies. Industry leaders are already responding, stating their readiness to build over 50 gigawatts of clean electrolyzer projects because of the long term certainty this framework provides.
While the scale and technology requirements are different, meeting AI’s energy needs presents a similar challenge. Powering data centers from the existing electricity grid mix means that more demand will create more emissions; even when data centers are drawing on clean electricity, if that energy is being diverted from existing sources rather than coming from new, additional clean electricity supply, the result is the same. Amazon’s recent $650 million investment in a data center campus next to an existing nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania illustrates the challenge: While diverting those clean electrons from Pennsylvania homes and businesses to the data center reduces Amazon’s reported emissions, by increasing demand on the grid without building additional clean capacity, it creates a need for new capacity in the region that will likely be met by fossil fuels (while also shifting up to $140 million of additional costs per year onto local customers).
Neither hyperscalers nor utilities should be expected to resolve this complex tension on their own. As with hydrogen, it is in our national interest to find a path forward.
What we need, then, is a national solution to make sure that as we expand our AI capabilities, we bring online new clean energy, as well, strengthening our competitive position in both industries and forestalling the economic and ecological consequences of higher electricity prices and higher carbon emissions.
In short, we should adopt a National AI Additionality Framework.
Under this framework, for any significant data center project, companies would need to show how they are securing new, additional clean power from a zero-emissions generation source. They could do this either by building new “behind-the-meter” clean energy to power their operations directly, or by partnering with a utility to pay a specified rate to secure new grid-connected clean energy coming online.
If companies are unwilling or unable to secure dedicated additional clean energy capacity, they would pay a fee into a clean deployment fund at the Department of Energy that would go toward high-value investments to expand clean electricity capacity. These could range from research and deployment incentives for so-called “clean firm electricity generation technologies like nuclear and geothermal, to investments in transmission capacity in highly congested areas, to expanding manufacturing capacity for supply-constrained electrical grid equipment like transformers, to cleaning up rural electric cooperatives that serve areas attractive to data centers. Given the variance in grid and transmission issues, the fund would explicitly approach its investment with a regional lens.
Several states operate similar systems: Under Massachusetts’ Renewable Portfolio Standard, utilities are required to provide a certain percentage of electricity they serve from clean energy facilities or pay an “alternative compliance payment” for every megawatt-hour they are short of their obligation. Dollars collected from these payments go toward the development and expansion of clean energy projects and infrastructure in the state. Facing increasing capacity constraints on the PJM grid, Pennsylvania legislators are now exploring a state Baseload Energy Development Fund to provide low-interest grants and loans for new electricity generation facilities.
A national additionality framework should not only challenge the industry to scale innovation in a way that scales clean technology, it must also clear pathways to build clean energy at scale. We should establish a dedicated fast-track approval process to move these clean energy projects through federal, state, and local permitting and siting on an accelerated basis. This will help companies already investing in additional clean energy to move faster and more effectively – and make it more difficult for anyone to hide behind the excuse that building new clean energy capacity is too hard or too slow. Likewise, under this framework, utilities that stand in the way of progress should be held accountable and incentivized to adopt innovative new technologies and business models that enable them to move at historic speed.
For hyperscalers committed to net-zero goals, this national approach provides both an opportunity and a level playing field — an opportunity to deliver on those commitments in a genuine way, and a reliable long-term framework that will reward their investments to make that happen. This approach would also build public trust in corporate climate accountability and diminish the risk that those building data centers in the U.S. stand accused of greenwashing or shifting the cost of development onto ratepayers and communities. The policy clarity of an additionality requirement can also encourage cutting edge artificial intelligence technology to be built here in the United States. Moreover, it is a model that can be extended to address other sectors facing growing energy demand.
The good news is that many industry players are already moving in this direction. A new agreement between Google and a Nevada utility, for example, would allow Google to pay a higher rate for 24/7 clean electricity from a new geothermal project. In the Carolinas, Duke Energy announced its intent to explore a new clean tariff to support carbon-free energy generation for large customers like Google and Microsoft.
A national framework that builds on this progress is critical, though it will not be easy; it will require quick Congressional action, executive leadership, and new models of state and local partnership. But we have a unique opportunity to build a strange bedfellow coalition to get it done – across big tech, climate tech, environmentalists, permitting reform advocates, and those invested in America’s national security and technology leadership. Together, this framework can turn a vexing trade-off into an opportunity. We can ensure that the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in building an industry of the future actually accelerates the energy transition, all while strengthening the U.S.’s position in innovating cutting- edge AI and clean energy technology.
Almost half of developers believe it is “somewhat or significantly harder to do” projects on farmland, despite the clear advantages that kind of property has for harnessing solar power.
The solar energy industry has a big farm problem cropping up. And if it isn’t careful, it’ll be dealing with it for years to come.
Researchers at SI2, an independent research arm of the Solar Energy Industries Association, released a study of farm workers and solar developers this morning that said almost half of all developers believe it is “somewhat or significantly harder to do” projects on farmland, despite the clear advantages that kind of property has for harnessing solar power.
Unveiled in conjunction with RE+, the largest renewable energy conference in the U.S., the federally-funded research includes a warning sign that permitting is far and away the single largest impediment for solar developers trying to build projects on farmland. If this trend continues or metastasizes into a national movement, it could indefinitely lock developers out from some of the nation’s best land for generating carbon-free electricity.
“If a significant minority opposes and perhaps leads to additional moratoria, [developers] will lose a foot in the door for any future projects,” Shawn Rumery, SI2’s senior program director and the survey lead, told me. “They may not have access to that community any more because that moratoria is in place.”
SI2’s research comes on the heels of similar findings from Heatmap Pro. A poll conducted for the platform last month found 70% of respondents who had more than 50 acres of property — i.e. the kinds of large landowners sought after by energy developers — are concerned that renewable energy “takes up farmland,” by far the greatest objection among that cohort.
Good farmland is theoretically perfect for building solar farms. What could be better for powering homes than the same strong sunlight that helps grow fields of yummy corn, beans and vegetables? And there’s a clear financial incentive for farmers to get in on the solar industry, not just because of the potential cash in letting developers use their acres but also the longer-term risks climate change and extreme weather can pose to agriculture writ large.
But not all farmers are warming up to solar power, leading towns and counties across the country to enact moratoria restricting or banning solar and wind development on and near “prime farmland.” Meanwhile at the federal level, Republicans and Democrats alike are voicing concern about taking farmland for crop production to generate renewable energy.
Seeking to best understand this phenomena, SI2 put out a call out for ag industry representatives and solar developers to tell them how they feel about these two industries co-mingling. They received 355 responses of varying detail over roughly three months earlier this year, including 163 responses from agriculture workers, 170 from solar developers as well as almost two dozen individuals in the utility sector.
A key hurdle to development, per the survey, is local opposition in farm communities. SI2’s publicity announcement for the research focuses on a hopeful statistic: up to 70% of farmers surveyed said they were “open to large-scale solar.” But for many, that was only under certain conditions that allow for dual usage of the land or agrivoltaics. In other words, they’d want to be able to keep raising livestock, a practice known as solar grazing, or planting crops unimpeded by the solar panels.
The remaining percentage of farmers surveyed “consistently opposed large-scale solar under any condition,” the survey found.
“Some of the messages we got were over my dead body,” Rumery said.
Meanwhile a “non-trivial” number of solar developers reported being unwilling or disinterested in adopting the solar-ag overlap that farmers want due to the increased cost, Rumery said. While some companies expect large portions of their business to be on farmland in the future, and many who responded to the survey expect to use agrivoltaic designs, Rumery voiced concern at the percentage of companies unwilling to integrate simultaneous agrarian activities into their planning.
In fact, Rumery said some developers’ reticence is part of what drove him and his colleagues to release the survey while at RE+.
As we discussed last week, failing to address the concerns of local communities can lead to unintended consequences with industry-wide ramifications. Rumery said developers trying to build on farmland should consider adopting dual-use strategies and focus on community engagement and education to avoid triggering future moratoria.
“One of the open-ended responses that best encapsulated the problem was a developer who said until the cost of permitting is so high that it forces us to do this, we’re going to continue to develop projects as they are,” he said. “That’s a cold way to look at it.”
Meanwhile, who is driving opposition to solar and other projects on farmland? Are many small farm owners in rural communities really against renewables? Is the fossil fuel lobby colluding with Big Ag? Could building these projects on fertile soil really impede future prospects at crop yields?
These are big questions we’ll be tackling in far more depth in next week’s edition of The Fight. Trust me, the answers will surprise you.
Here are the most notable renewable energy conflicts over the past week.
1. Worcester County, Maryland –Ocean City is preparing to go to court “if necessary” to undo the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s approval last week of U.S. Wind’s Maryland Offshore Wind Project, town mayor Rick Meehan told me in a statement this week.
2. Magic Valley, Idaho – The Lava Ridge Wind Project would be Idaho’s biggest wind farm. But it’s facing public outcry over the impacts it could have on a historic site for remembering the impact of World War II on Japanese residents in the United States.
3. Kossuth County, Iowa – Iowa’s largest county – Kossuth – is in the process of approving a nine-month moratorium on large-scale solar development.
Here’s a few more hotspots I’m watching…