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Nick Hodge: Right. Well, there you go. But it’s because the solar that you sell into the grid is at a fixed price of 25 cents a kilowatt hour, that's the net metering law. What it sounds like California lawmakers are trying to do is say, "Hey, if you've got solar, we're going to change this law. We're going to kind of pull the rug out from under your feet."
And especially if you're wealthy, they're basically saying that solar is exacerbating wealth inequality, and that's just a little too much jumping the shark for me. Because basically the state is saying, "We offered you this program to put solar on your roof, and now we want to take it away." But they want to keep it going for lower income brackets, who would get the same $0.25 cents, but wealthier people would get the market rate, which is just $0.03.
But really they want all that already-installed electricity at $0.03 because they need it to stabilize the grid. You’ll remember the California blackouts recently because of wildfires and winds.
So it sounds like California is making a literal power grab. And so it caught my eye. But for me it just seems glaringly obvious that a free market solution is the best solution. Why not let the market bear what the market will bear for the price of solar electricity, and everybody gets paid the same?
And then if you want to incent a lower income brackets, give them a tax break or a credit or something to subsidize their cost of installation.
Why not just let the market bear the true price discovery, right?
Soon, I think you’ll see that via what's called a virtual power plant. When you can just sell into the market at the then market rate, which by the way the article I was reading about California didn't mention. This is something the FERC is trying to do.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has an order — Order no. 841 — that essentially does that. It says anybody can be a utility. You don't have to meet a threshold to be a utility, like is currently in place. Anybody that wants to sell power into the grid can be a utility and do so at the market rate.
And so hopefully California gets superseded here in some way, and we can just create a true free market system for power transactions, electricity sales. And I would bet that blockchain has something to do with that as well. Like storing the transactions because we have the capacity and the technology to do that now.
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