Each state in the U.S. has a different way of making it work. In Texas, we get the federal tax credit (basically, a 30% rebate on the cost of installing your solar system) and then? Not much. Up to recently, the best plan around charged $0.12/kWh with net-metering, so every joule you generated directly offset a joule you'd be consuming, but that's against normal retail prices more in the $0.08/kWh range, so I felt like I wasn't being treated very well.

More recently, I'm on a "beta" plan from a vendor who doesn't want their name in public yet until they work out the kinks. I'm paying roughly $0.07/kWh for downstream consumption and I'm reimbursed $0.03/kWh for my upstream production, with a $5.50/month service charge. I ran the numbers with my prior year's usage and came out $100 worse than my prior plan, so they gave me a $100 gift certificate. Umm, okay then. What I like about these numbers is that you're now incentivized to store your electricity rather than feeding it back, and you're also operating a bit closer to the bare metal of the way wholesale electricity is priced.

My complaint, such as it is, is that neither net metering nor my current asymmetric plan really capture the place where solar really, umm, shines, which is when you're in a very hot sunny day, the grid is at its limits, and they're trying to reduce consumption. Businesses who buy into cheaper tiers of electricity are then compelled to turn things off. If that's not enough, you get into rolling brownouts. This is precisely when you want to have the benefit of home solar systems. They produce peak electricity at exactly the time when the grid is most taxed. So here I am, selling joules back to the grid exactly when the grid most needs it. Am I getting a price premium? Nope. But maybe I should be. Of course, if that upstream number (currently $0.03/kWh) tracked the minute-by-minute wholesale electricity rate, it would often be below $0.01/kWh. At that point, the only way solar would ever be profitable is if you had a battery to store your excess production, and those aren't cheap right now.