I don't think that's the case. Depending on where you are, you either get paid retail or wholesale rates, and still have to pay some monthly service fee regardless of surplus or deficit. I've never heard of any utility in the US buying solar production at more than retail rates.
So above market rates. Sorry, your 10kw of intermittent unreliable power provided at your whim into a random neighborhood grid is not worth the same amount per kwh as reliable base/load following generation. And that's wholesale.
Retail priced net zero metering is even worse - that's simply poor people subsidizing rich folks with solar panels.
Maybe the subsidization is ok overall due to the system changes it (might) bring about - but man it's bothered me for decades that rich folks who can afford to blow $25k+ on solar installs act so smug about net-metering - when it's them simply stealing from other ratepayers for their free battery.
> I've never heard of any utility in the US buying solar production at more than retail rates.
That doesn't refute the parent's claim of it being greater than the market rate. The residential retail rate [1] usually doesn't change, except on a long time scale, after regulatory approval, while the market rate changes intra-day, based on supply and demand.
If peak sun doesn't correspond to peak demand (and, from what I've read, it doesn't), those periods are where the utility could be taking a huge loss. For example, if PG&E has a customer in the top marginal usage tier is "selling" power at 25c/kWh when the wholesale market is selling it at 4c, that's a pretty tremendous loss.
[1] Often not even a single rate but a tiered one, so a heavy residential user could be "selling back" power at a particularly high retail rate, much higher than average.
