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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (857141)	5/15/2015 12:39:00 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575856

A driving factor in the proliferation of low-cost solar has been a policy known as net metering, in which customers are credited for the electricity they put back on the grid, through, for instance, rooftop solar. In other words the driving factor is subsidies, in this case not from the government (although they get those to, at least tax breaks if not direct subsidies), but from forcing the utility companies to subsidize the solar production. Its not just that the small solar producers aren't paying their share of the grid costs, they also produce neither peaking nor base-load power, so there electricity is worth less to the utilities even if there was no grid cost. The electricity is sometimes actually worthless, but the utilities have to pay anyway.