I hope you're not too upset about that - there's a pretty good justification for it: It's both expensive and valuable for the utility to be there for your burst needs beyond whatever your panels generate at any particular time. But with net-metering by itself, there's no way to charge you for that expensive value if your net pull from the utility is zero, even though you might pull a lot at certain times.
You could go off-grid to avoid this, or install your own batteries, but both of those are obviously expensive and inconvenient in their own ways.
I'm not saying they got the price right ($10/kWh) or the model (more for larger arrays), but the overall principal is fine.
If they are providing "green energy" into the grid, are they doing it for free or is there some kind of financial consideration for them? If so.. are they actually being charged _more_ than others who simply use power from the grid, or are they receiving an entirely different class of service all together?
Everyone (including non-solar customers) is getting moved to time-of-use billing with some sort of phase in schedule and I believe it's already required for new solar hookups. Part of CPUC's proposed replacement for NEM 2.0 combined fairly agressive TOU billing with moving credits for grid exports to an "avoided cost" model so that you get very little for exporting in mid-day when there's currently an excess of solar generation and much more in the late afternoon when there's a big mismatch between demand and renewable generation.
I think you can definitely argue about the specific values they chose, but the broad strokes make sense.
You could go off-grid to avoid this, or install your own batteries, but both of those are obviously expensive and inconvenient in their own ways.
I'm not saying they got the price right ($10/kWh) or the model (more for larger arrays), but the overall principal is fine.