Turn the sun off!!!
 

Hawaiian power company, HECO, simply can't make money from those darn solar panels and smart meters, so we'll shut down the program! And by the way if you install one of your own, you can't sell power back and you're OFF our grid!

Private PV market, we have seen the future.



A Solar Boom So Successful, It's Been Halted: Scientific American

Wow, that one has enough interesting points to fill a book.

I've been considering an investment in solar panels, basing my cost rationale at least partly on the expectation that electricity costs will continue to climb. If the utility can change the rules this radically, my whole cost/benefit calculation goes out the window.

That's strange. 4.6% is way below the share of solar enery in Germany. It works there, what is Hawaii doing wrong?
Maybe it is causing a problem because they want to keep running their oil generators at some minimum rate?

Apart from that, the wisdom of taking a loan for a seriously oversized PV installation when the monthly payment is higher than the energy bill without it defies me. Unlike they really gone ecomental.

I want PV panels too, but I expect some improvements and lower cost in the coming years, don't want to throw money yet.

German power is federal, Hawaii's is commercial, ie: "...GREED IS GOOD, charity is NOT."

I'm sure that all of the other corporation-bashing electrical engineers in this thread will be more than willing to go fly over to Oahu to tell HECO how they can connect residential power generation equipment onto a grid that the article mentioned was not ready to accept residential power generation. After all, it must be simple to do! Just connect up two wires, and you're good to go! Don't have to bother with A/C phase matching, or load balancing, or overvoltaging the supply transformers, right?

Oh, that's right! Them ******* HECO corporate types should have just jacked up the rates on their customers to invest in residential power generation capability, back when their grid was first being built. Why didn't I think of that? After all, it would have made perfect sense to jack up electricity rates and make residents pay even more for electricity, to support being able to have residents pump power back into the grid, when said residents would have already have had to pay out the nose just to have said expensive power generation equipment shipped out thousands of miles by ocean, let alone installed. I mean, that's what people do all the time, right? I sure can't wait for my $20K PV cell installation to arrive, just so I can save $40 / month on my electric bill!

The "grid" across all of USA is HUGE, the "grid" across that one, single, Hawaiian island is "miniscule"...sounds to me like HECO just wants to 'protect' it's income.

True, there can be problems with stupid customers doing stupid things, but MOST power companies (our local Tucson Electric Company, for example) will not allow ANY person or installer to simply "...connect & dump..." power onto the grid without THEIR inspection/test/checkoff. Simple philosophy: No connection until system is PROVEN safe/OK for addition onto the grid.

A smaller grid is less resilient than a larger one, especially one that was designed decades prior to the invention of relatively cheap residential power generation that is capable of supplying a grid. Factor in the "out-in-the-middle-of-the-ocean-which-makes-everything-cost-more-because-it-has-to-be-shipped-in" factor, and I can see that HECO also wants to do the right thing by all of its customers, not just the small minority that wants PV and utility electricity.

It's a sensible philosophy.

These companies knew this day was coming should have been better prepared. In some areas the electric company job may be to supply nighttime and high demand usage only. They should look at this as someone else making a capital investment in equipment they won't need to maintain but can still make a profit from.
I do think that the Hodgepodge of private installations will be a challenge. But as they surely tell their workers change or become obsolete.

$36,000 and still not off the grid? I think we have found the couple that grow the legendary maui wowie. :D

35 grand for 18 panels?!?!?!?!? :eek: