its already here in Australia, we pay on average 25 cents a kwh ( varies place to place) and only get on average 6c kwh feed in... it sucks big time
I think it pertinent to point out why this is the case though as the way electricity is billed varies around the world.
In Australia our grid home electrical energy bills have two main components:
- a daily fee for service connection and
- a per kWh tariff.
Some have flat rate tariffs, others time of use tariffs. There are occasionally peak demand charges as well but we can leave them aside for the time being as they are less common and are pretty much just another form of time of use billing.
The market is serviced by three distinct levels of service:
- generators supplying the energy to the national grid via contract and the wholesale electricity market
- distribution companies (heavily regulated regional monopolies) who own the poles and wires and are responsible for the network
- retailers who bill the end customer and who purchase energy from the generators and pay the distributors for their customer's access to the network
Generators may retail energy but distributors are prohibited from generating or retailing.
The costs included in the retailer per kWh tariffs comprise several components, but by far the largest component is made up of the charges the retailer incurs and passes on levied by the poles and wires distribution companies. The actual wholesale generation cost of electricity is a minor component of that tariff. It is the network and distribution costs which are the biggest component of our retail electricity cost - about 2/3rds of the retail tariff is made up of distribution/network costs.
Now in Australia the the distribution and network charges only are levied by distributors on the flow of energy from the grid to your home, but they are not levied on energy flowing from your home to the grid. Hence the value of energy exported to the grid is really only its wholesale value, plus any carbon offset value.
This is the primary reason why our retail import tariffs and export tariffs have such a large difference. It was distorted somewhat in the past decade or so as various state governments offered additional incentives for export by the way of premium FITs (feed-in-tariffs), which have all but disappeared now. And in the last few years the strong rise in grid scale and rooftop renewable energy supply has meant the wholesale cost of daytime energy has plummeted.
Fact is the value of energy supply in the middle of the day is pretty low and as a result the amount retailers are going to pay for taking excess rooftop solar is relatively low.
Despite that, average FITs are actually still a bit higher than wholesale value of the energy, so while they seem low, they are still better than wholesale.