Thread by @kingslyj

I was under the assumption that one of the few things govts were getting right was rooftop solar power and net metering.

Boy was I wrong.

Parents want to install an AC for the summer and I suggested exploring rooftop solar to go with it so that they don't have to worry about electricity bills and the upfront expense will be recouped in electricity bill savings in a few years.

Only to discover it's a rigged system designed to exploit customers rather than meet renewable energy goals/climate change commitments.

They offer 90% discount on your electricity bills, which sounds great at first glace but...

1. They don't allow you to install a higher capacity of solar panels than what your current average consumption is.

2. They don't adjust power generated/shared against power consumed... instead they are adjusting in Rupee value and they charge you many times more for the power you consume than the power you generate/share with the grid.

Effectively ensuring you'll never be able to save 90%.

Then there's License Raj alive and kicking in the 21st century, so you cannot get the rooftop solar installed by yourself but have to go through a limited set of "approved" vendors.

So effectively you cannot just go with the lowest bidder.

Apparently when the program launched they used to calculate the adjustments/discounts on an annual basis, but now they've reduced the adjustment window to the bi-monthly billing cycle.

So if you generate a ton of suprlus electricity in the summer, you get no benefits at all.

Of course you can "negotiate" with the right people to get a higher capacity installation "approved".

After all it would be anti-national to not bribe govt employees to get things done in India.

#TrueStory from someone who has an rooftop installation...

They got a huge bill once and were told, there was some failure at the EB side and EB didn't receive any of the electricity generated. So all the power generated went to waste and they had no choice but to pay the bill.

This is in Rural Tamil Nadu / TNEB.

https://twitter.com/sinc100pc/status/1359060473350508544

There's official order moving away from "net metering" to "net feed-in"

I didn't note the exact rates while talking to my dad, but they are buying electricity from consumers at around Rs 1.xx and supplying it to them at around Rs 5.xx

tnerc.gov.in/orders/Tariff%…

They are not even paying the full sanctioned purchase rate.

"The price of purchase of energy exported to the grid by the SPGs commissioned under the Solar net feed-in during a financial year shall be at 75% of the pooled cost of power purchase notified by the Commission"

Oh I forgot the killer feature to the scheme.

When there's a power outage, you can't supply power to the grid either.

So in rural areas where there's frequent/extended power outages, you can't even supply all the generated energy to be paid their ridiculous low rates.