Hello,
What is the situation in US/Canada when you use yourself your photovoltaïc electricity ? In Luxembourg, you have to pay network costs on the electricity that you don't sale to the network, around 4,5 cents per kWh, but usually you can't find a utility company that agrees to buy less than 100%, so you have to choose between buying back your electricity and loosing overproduction. The argument is that the network is available for all the kWh that you use, not only the ones you buy.
I heard that in some parts of Belgium, if you have an overflow of electricity going in the network without a sales contract, there are penalities around 100 EUR per kWh production capacity.
This makes the batteries business not so interesting, but I also found an article arguing that it isn't so interesting from an efficiency point of view.
https://biophyseco.org/2017/05/19/storage-is-the-holy-grail-of-the-energy-transition-or-is-it/
Best regards,
Etienne
Just like in Europe, it depends by jurisdiction. Typically by state or province, sometimes it varies even within a jurisdiction. So there's about a hundred sets of rules.
Nunavut currently a fairly simple policy: you pay a flat rate per kWh you draw from the grid, that's all. I'm not sure whether they care about pushing power into the grid, but they certainly don't pay you for it. The price is heavily subsidized, but despite the subsidy it's three times more expensive than the national average. It's also slightly unreliable: losing power for a couple hours happens a couple times a year in Iqaluit, which is the most reliable community (the legislators are there). And it's very dirty: diesel gen-sets. Iqaluit at least has a district heating system, but most communities don't (oh yeah: there's a local grid per community, but they don't interconnect).
Quebec has limited net metering. You can put up to something like 20 kWh per day onto the grid and get your bill reduced accordingly. But you're competing with the cheapest electricity rates in North America. It's also almost all hydro power, so very low carbon intensity. If we generated more from solar power, we'd be able to export more hydro power, displacing coal and gas in the US. But the carbon impact is muted compared to somewhere that has coal and gas on its grid. Exception: northern communities. They're on diesel like in Nunavut, but with Québec policies. Hydro-Québec is excited about efficiency and renewables because finally they can cut their losses in the north. The price they're allowed to bill is the same everywhere in the province, so every kWh they sell is at a big loss.
Ontario has a feed-in tariff that was *much higher* than the retail cost, and poorly thought out. It helped get a huge amount of solar on the grid, but it would have been cheaper if the government simply had handed out free panels. They seem to be getting things under control now, maybe?
New Hampshire, or at least part of it, has net metering with a limit that your monthly bill can't go below zero, if I understand my friends. But I don't have much details: I get the impression they got an unexpected bonus and just sank it into their passive-house without thinking too hard about it (unlike the degree of thinking that went into the initial construction).
Friends in Pennsylvania and California are mostly putting up panels with lease agreements: they pay zero to install -- a company finances it, then they buy their electricity from that company. That company in turn manages the policy situation.