The Gazette printed most of my letter to the editor. Here is the original version, with brackets around the part they deleted. The Value of Distributed Generation September 15, 2014 at 12:06pm The Oklahoma Corporation Commission is now holding committee meetings in accordance with SB1456, to determine the surcharge to impose on people who contribute clean energy to the grid using net metering. The claim is that by reducing their utility bills, they avoid the portion of those bills that go to the upkeep and maintaining the power lines, thus shifting that cost onto other rate payers. It ignores the benefits that people investing in their homes bring to the power grid. For one thing, most of the energy is used at generators home, so there are no transmission losses, and no fuel burned to produce that electricity. Only around 20% of the energy from the fossil fuel reaches the customer; the bulk of it is lost in generation, voltage conversions and transmission. So the fuel saved is significant. Also, any excess generation will go to neighbors houses, with only minimal transmission loss. These contributions reduce the utilitys need to build new plants, they help it to meet environmental regulations, and they increase the generation capacity by reducing apparent demand. They help meet peak load requirements and reduce the loads on the transmission and distribution subsystems. There have now been a number of studies done on the cost/benefit of solar and determining the best method to calculate them. [ Here are eleven such studies: maine.gov/legis/opla/NEBSolar%20valuestudies.pdf Value-of-Solar is an alternative to net metering, somewhat similar to the Feed-In-Tariff. The significance here is that they compute what distributed generation, i.e. solar, is actually worth to the utility company. And it is typically much more than the retail rate that they pay in net metering. (ilsr.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/MN-Value-of-Solar-from-ILSR.pdf) In Minnesota, the initial computation gave a value of 12.5 cents per kilowatt-hour; in Austin, Tx, a similar computation gave between 10.9 and 11.8 cents, depending on the direction ones roof faced. ] As OG&Es base charge is $18 per customer per month plus about 5.73 cents/kwh, ( oge/Documents/OK/3.00%20R-1.pdf ) we see that they are already charging for line maintenance, included among the administrative costs, and are benefiting greatly from distributed generation contributions. So we see that the initial assumptions of SB1456 are unwarranted, and that the actual effect of distributed generation is positive to . [ both the utility company and the environment. Any charge contemplated by the OCC should be a bonus to those investing in distributed generation.] {everyone} Joel Olson, NOAA, retired. okgazette/2014/10/21/letters-to-the-editor-oct-22-2014/
Posted on: Mon, 27 Oct 2014 05:34:28 +0000
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