It would be just terrible if people were able to produce their own clean, renewable energy in sufficient quantities that it drove the power companies out of business. Just terrible!

I’m sorry, is my sarcasm showing again?

Who needs conventional infrastructure then?

Imagine a city with 100% solar panel usage. No one buys power from the electric company except for the occasional cloudy day. Who pays for the infrastructure then?

What worries me is the new digital meters they’re pushing.  I figure that they’d have them configured to log how much you generate back into their system. That way they pay you a wholesale rate for it, but you still pay full retail for everything you’ve used, as opposed to the current meters, which would just reduce the total kW usage and lower your bill by the retail rate, not a wholesale rate.  Yeah, I know that it is logical from the power co’s perspective, but it doesn’t encourage solar use, since your payback time would take longer. 

Seems to me that encouraging supplemental solar here in Texas would help them in the peak periods where they have to bring up the offline plants to meet demand.  The peak days are all sunny and hot – it’s the a/c usage that drives the demand. 

I guess TXU down here solves the fee issue by charging everyone some kind of base fee (usually ~$5), depending on the plan.

Well, as much as I thought our power companies were assholes, I guess they’re not so bad…they fully encourage residential and commercial solar installations. They go so far as to explain the different types and to contribute to the federal and state rebates for installing them on your home.
Just browsing one of the companies’ sites and they even talk about being “on-grid” or “off-grid”, saying when it makes more sense to go off-grid.
I can’t find anything specific on the site that would back this up, but I seem to recall hearing that it is possible to generate more power than you consume and then the electric company actually pays you because you are feeding power back into the grid.

I heard years ago that this was the law. This is the closest I’ve come to getting confirmation of that. Along with that, I also heard that once you are connected, you can’t disconnect. Your only hope of not paying the power company is to avoid getting physically connected to them in the first place.

As for confirming that, there are so many laws and each state is different, I’m not sure where to start. I’ve also never cared enough to look.

Doing my best.

Pathetic. Charging people for saving money. To hell with all of them.
Though they suck, looks like you’re still doing awesome hanging in there. Keep on truckin’.

Assholes.  Yeah, they’re my power company, and they’re assholes.