Shell hopes to attract customers by offering incentives. Homeowners with solar panels will be credited the retail electricity rate for the excess power they send to the grid that residents pay utilities for power. In Texas, compensation for power that consumers send to the grid varies. Some utilities offer consumers lower, wholesale prices while others provide the higher, retail rate that Shell is promising.
“This is a huge growth opportunity, and there is going to be competition between oil companies like Shell that are pivoting and the tech companies like Tesla, Google and Apple,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, managing director at the Climate Policy Lab at the Tufts Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
“The irony is it should be coming from existing utilities, but generally speaking they have been very resistant.”