Residential solar panels can raise electricity rates
A modeling study shows how under some conditions, increasing numbers of households with rooftop solar panels can lead to higher rates for those without their own solar system. When utility customers cancel their accounts after switching to residential solar panels, the utility must spread their fixed costs around to a smaller number of remaining customers, which can lead to rate increases. Charles Sims and colleagues studied how this pecuniary externality affects different income groups using agent-based computational economic modeling of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), an area with some of the highest poverty rates in the United States. The authors asked 2,307 TVA residential customers ...