California's Rooftop Solar "Reverse Robinhood"

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California’s utility bills are thrice the national average. That will only get worse. A recent analysis by Severin Borenstein at the University of California estimates that rooftop solar is jacking up California’s utility bills and upwardly transferring $4 billion from those who don’t have panels on their roofs to those who do.

The state’s subsidies for residential solar (called “net metering”) started off as an incentive to get a struggling energy source on its feet 25 years ago. But now some 1.3 million Californian households have plated their roofs with panels. You can check out Borenstein’s piece (linked above) for the exact breakdown of how this became, as Matthew Freedman, a staff attorney at the Utilities Reform Network, described it, “a reverse Robin Hood scenario.” But in brief, California rooftop solar owners get paid above wholesale for their power, which means mostly people who don’t own homes pay for that residential solar power on their bills. It’s a cost shift. A few years ago, the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab reported that rooftop solar adopters make $113,000 per year on average (the national average is a few grand north of $60k/yr).

Borenstein closes his piece with this: “In 2018, Lucas Davis wrote a blog post titled ‘Why Am I Paying $65/year for Your Solar Panels?’ The question is still with us today, except now it’s more like ‘Why Am I Paying $300/year for Your Solar Panels?’” Here’s why: net metering isn’t about solving climate change, reducing emissions, or what have you. At least not anymore. That’s what’s so credulous about Jesse Jenkins’ take on this:

Link.

If you fixed the rates to better reflect the actual price of their power, less rooftop solar would get built, fewer homeowners would get rewarded, and the whole scheme would fall apart (especially because rooftop produces at the same time utility scale solar gluts the market, making it superfluous for both power generation and emissions reduction). In fact, because California succeeded in mildly adjusting its net metering policy a couple years ago, the residential solar industry has already taken a hit. (And to be clear, Borenstein has argued elsewhere that California’s solution isn’t a solution.)

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So, if rooftop solar isn’t about the environment or climate or keeping the lights on, then what’s it about? Patronage. The dynamics around rooftop solar exhibit all the hallmarks of a patron-client relationship between billionaire-funded NGOs and the upper middle class.

Green NGOs push for policies that will benefit upper class Californians, supplying them, in this case, with moral license (they’re helping save the world, how could they be bad?) and money. When these policies face challenges, the patron protects their client’s interest.

If you doubt me, consider the hundreds of organizations that threw in to defend net metering two years ago when California was working to pass legislation that curbed benefits for residential solar. That’s also why the Bloomberg-funded Sierra Club claimed that California’s reform would “eviscerate the industry in California” and that “the cost shift argument is a fiction created by the utilities to pit Californians against one another,” [emphasis added]. Spoken like someone who’d steal your wallet and then help you look for it. But more to the point, these organizations are simply defending two of their most important clients: rich Californians and the renewable energy industry.

This is why Joel Kotkin has described NGOs as the “First Estate” of the white collar “clerisy.” Most Americans don’t rate climate as a major issue. In Pew’s January polling, climate sat third-to-last in the top twenty issues respondents thought ought to be top priorities for Congress and the president. According to Gallup’s recent polling, only 2% of respondents said “environment/pollution/climate change” is the number one issue facing the country. Climate change is a boutique issue bolstered by well-heeled organizations and a motivated cadre of white collar voters who see their pet cause as necessary for the planet’s survival. The environmental movement’s politics and policies reflect those interests above all else.

The truth is, patronage networks are a constituent element of all politics. What matters is whether or not the dynamics of those networks produce beneficial results. That’s what makes for both the messiness of democratic politics and the challenge of managing our grid, because the grid is, in part, a political achievement. And it always will be, because it always has been. It is, after all, a major part of our industrial commons.

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