Net Metering - South Carolina

Why would Santee Cooper want to build a coal fired plant when solar panels sell for less than $1 a watt?

Consider this concept that the future could bring to South Carolina.
Let’s imagine that Santee Cooper allowed net metering and everyone started buying all-electric cars powering South Carolina’s commuters to work every day, petroleum free, and more people started putting solar-electric panels on their roofs.  If you spend $20-30 thousand for a 5,000 kW solar electric system at your home with net-metering (the utility has to zero out your electric bill if you produce as much or more than you use on a monthly or other time basis) it will eventually pay for itself through conventional electricity use (dishwashers, lights, refrigerators). However, if you are using an all-electric car to drive 30-50 miles per day, and every night you are fueling it by plugging it into your net-metered home, the pay-off comes even faster. In essence, with enough solar panels, your home becomes a private power plant for home use AND to power most transport needs. The panels don’t generate at night, but with net metering, it doesn’t matter. The juice the car uses plugged in at night is likely more than made up for by the net metered electricity pumped out during the day when commuters are at work and using little at home. If this vision really took hold it would be a “disruptive” technological advance in the extreme.

Why? Well, let’s say just 10% of homes went this route. And they did it to the extent that with net-metering their net electric use from the outside grid is zero. Where does that leave Santee Cooper? They have a vested interest in big power plants cranking out juice they get paid to dole out. If individual users reduced demand by 10% and their neighbors started seeing happy people paying no gasoline or electricity bills after their up-front solar investment (which technology is making cheaper every day and may be cut in half in two years), it just might catch on. However, de-centralized energy production does not make the utility empire expand. Big new power plants do. Who has more lobbyists at the state and federal level, Santee Cooper or individual homeowners trying to generate political favor for these concepts? Pretty easy answer to that question.

Do you get the picture of why Santee Cooper won’t allow net metering? These ideas are going to have to be fought for to become reality. A lot of home owners will have to make their voices heard, it won’t be easy. It is for sure that our world is rapidly changing, photovoltaic cells keep getting cheaper every day and more electric vehicles are coming onto the market every year. It sure doesn’t look like to far a stretch to see people driving to work on photons!

Santee Cooper may not like it because their demand may go down someday because of the masses taking to this concept, but no one should care, after all it is a state owned utility that should be concerned about supporting a better way of life to the people of South Carolina! I believe this is a look at the future when Santee Cooper allows net metering!!!

Don’t forget the best part, We’d be giving Hugo Chavez and the Iranian Mullahs the finger!!!