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Utilities Fight Back Against Solar Energy
JoeyRox writes "The exponential growth of rooftop solar adoption has utilities concerned about their financial future. Efficiency gains and cost reductions has brought the price of solar energy to within parity of traditional power generation in states like California and Hawaii. HECO, an electric utility in Hawaii, has started notifying new solar adopters that they will not be allowed to connect to the utility's power grid, citing safety concerns of electric circuits becoming oversaturated from the rapid adoption of solar power on the island. Residents claim it's not about safety but about the utility fighting to protect its profits." We mentioned earlier the connection fee recently approved in Arizona. Do you have a solar system? If not (or if so, for that matter), does this make you think twice about it?
I don't understand why the utilities simply don't build out their grids to accept feed-in from customers' solar rigs, and then split their pricing structure into 1) grid access, and 2) net power supplied? Or is this too simple?
If you can't connect backfeed to the grid, you can't connect new load to the grid, either.
It shouldn't matter which way the watts are flowing for a particular customer.
Yes, I do own a solar panel, but it doesn't quite have enough mass for nuclear fusion to spawn my very own solar system.
I think at issue is that utilities are required to buy power back at the same rate they sell it. This does not take into account the cost of infrastructure construction and maintenance that the solar adopter does not have bear the burdon of. The average person NO COMPREHENSION of this and just gets mad at "the man", "big business" etc. Of companies want to protect their profit margins. They lose money on people selling back at the rate they sell that which takes into account infrastructure/overhead needs. They are a business after all. And if you think for one second the "state" would do it better they sure as heck wouldn't let their "reveneu source" (er... taxes) be nipped by solar adopters.
anything to protect corporate profits
drill, baby, drill
I live in Arizona, and I'm not quite ready to put solar on my roof. Getting my connection locked in and grandfathered before the new "tax" on selling solar back to the power company wasn't enough to sway me to jump. The technology keeps getting better, and the current break-even in initial outlay might recoup a lot faster in a few more years. That $30,000 worth of equipment might be $20,000 next year, and I'm a gambler. [This is the same reason I'm leasing a Leaf. Who knows how many miles the 2017 Leaf will get, or how many more purchase options I might have.]
As long as power companies are monopolies, the idea that they should have to buy back solar power to feed the grid makes sense -- but at some point, they'll have a bunch of off-peak power that nobody wants. Arizona's "connect fee" is mostly harmless. Hawaii just seems like they're being dicks.
Hawaiians can still put solar up, and still power their homes, and still fill batteries. They just won't be able to sell off-peak power back to their monopoly power company.
The utilities appear to be doing a one-sided analysis from what I have noticed. They complain about their lines being loaded by customers generating power and don't count the reduction in line use from the local power a home solar instatllation is helping to power the local neighborhood. Yes, we have a rooftop solar installation. Currently around 90,000 of them in California. Increasing fast. Local solar company is hiring 10-15 new installers *every day* according to local paper.
a fantastic story from a neighbor of mine in Watsonville, CA. He fought PG&E over some years and finally won: http://www.solarwarrior.com/pgebattle.html
Why yes indeed... I imagine there exists some real progress if the utilities have begun to fear it.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
It matters to the Utility, because of the watts are flowing OUT, then they have to PAY YOU for that power. They don't want to do this.
It all boils down to this simple axiom: "Follow the money."
Willie...
Yes, utilities can refuse to accept power from people's solar inverters, but what that will result in is people still remaining on solar... but going with off-grid setups. Instead of the panels going to the inverters, then to the grid tie, people will be going with panels, charge controllers, battery setups, then auxiliary power panels to provide emergency power, or even just move some low current use circuits permanently off the mains.
Computers and electronics are an ideal candidate for this. A good PSW inverter would provide pretty much all the capability a UPS has. To boot, if solar doesn't get enough energy to keep up with the batteries, smarter charge controllers can tap mains voltage to (literally) rectify that issue.
As for the utility companies, there isn't much they can do about solar electric circuits that are in no way connected to their grid, other than demand code that all internal house wiring is mains connected, and no wiring can be 12/24/48 volts DC inside the house.
Good old greenies are at it again. If you force taxpayers to subsidise solar power installations for people well off to afford them (e.g. most greenies) you are contributing to wealth inequality. At least if you want to do this it would make sense to use a more efficient means of power production. You have to wonder how we might be better off if instead research and development was not cut off from nuclear power technologies by these various rich greenie groups that often bring in 100 million a year in revenue or are endowed with large trust funds.
Anyway, point is, that the power company refuses to buy back your excess power is not sufficient reason to abandon solar.
But that said, isn't there some law that the power company *must* buy back your excess power if you generate and are synced to the grid? Or was that only in California?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Ideas? SUPPLY the means of your reinvention. You've captured a large portion of the US Congress and the Canadian Parliament. They bark your bullshit at your pay and command. Pay them to sing a different tune. You and the fucking vampire squids that are wrapped around the face of humanity jamming their blood funnels into whatever smells like money, also known as the Banking System, basically own these pathetic weasels and the good little chimps of the MSM will dance to you money song.
Face it, the war in Iraq that dumped trillions into the squid^H^H^H^H^H banking and military sectors didn't pan out with the cheap fuel as you had hoped - oil is still around $90 - $100bbl no matter how much you try to pump out of the ground. So, face it, game over. So you now need to transform yourselves into something else. Rebuilding the grid and switching to renewables will be cheap compared to the road you're going down now. So, get over it, and get with it. OWN your own destruction, or be OWNED and destroyed. Stupid fucks.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Excess energy on the grid is a real issue, especially if there has been a significant wave of people adopting these systems. If there isn't demand for all the electricity being pumped onto the grid, there has to be a place to dump the energy. This is an even bigger issue with wind and other intermittent sources.
If the grid is overwhelmed and there is no demand, should folks expect to get paid for that energy, which could actually cost the utility money to dump somewhere?
Something else to bear in mind- the utility has to operate base load plants no matter what.
Recent literature indicates that these issues can be overcome (one example from Utilities Policy ), but that the process will take time. Utilities are a very conservative industry and are often slow to adapt new systems because they have stringent boundary conditions.
Just playing the devils advocate here- I'm sure profit is a part of it.
The click bait title makes it look like the utility is purposefully stopping solar power from feeding back into the system in an effort to stay pertinent in the industry. This is not true at all. If they REALLY wanted to screw customers over, they would buy back the electricity at little-to-no cost. The article probably got it's conclusions from some pissed off customers.
Meeting electrical demand is a far more complicated issue then this article makes out.
Yes, I have got 6 solar panels on my roof for a total peak capacity of 1500 kW, and about 1300 kWh per year. Total investment (DIY package): 1950 Euro. BEP is around 8 years, and the NPV over 15 years with net-interest-rate-after-tax of 0.4% is about 1500-2100 Euro
http://econews.com.au/news-to-sustain-our-world/energy-ceos-urge-end-to-renewables-subsidies/ says "The CEOs of 10 European utilities companies, which together own half of Europe’s electricity generating capacity, are calling for an end to subsidies for wind and solar energy." They are united in the "Magritte group".
FWIW: I did not get subsidy for my solar panels.
I live in the Valley of the Sun, and most of the southern half of my roof is covered in solar panels. I generate about half again as much electricity as I consume. This is by design; the plan is to get an electric vehicle in the not-too-terribly-distant future, and my excess generation capacity is enough that I should be able to drive for basically free. And the whole thing will pay itself off in about seven years total; if you remember the Rule of 70, that works out to about a 10% annual rate of return on my investment.
My utility provider is SRP; it was APS who was taking Koch Brothers money to fuck over their customers.
I've got a really good thing going for myself, obviously, but SRP is also making a nice profit off of me. My peak generation coincides with peak demand here. At the same time as they sell my electricity to my neighbors at $0.14 / kWh, they're paying twice that to spool up diesel generators...and they're paying me about $0.02 / kWh for my surplus. And I've signed over all my green credits to them, as well. Sweet deal for both of us, and I'm glad for it to be that way -- that's how good business profits are supposed to work.
If, however, APS's original proposal went into effect and SRP adopted it or something similar for themselves...well, at that point, I'd tell them to fuck off, get a battery system, and drop off the grid entirely. Changing the equation like that would wipe out any financial advantage I get from my investment and hugely profit the utility -- and, remember, I'm already far and away the most profitable customer they have on the block. It would really suck to have to pay again for a battery system; I've got better things I could do with that money. But I'd much rather invest that money in real physical goods that provide me with actual benefits (including, in this case, having the lights stay on should the grid ever go down) than throw gobs of money for no good reason at greedy profiteering corporate CEOs.
I can assure you, if the utilities keep up this sort of thing...well, they'll "protect" their profits for a little while, but it won't be long before people start dropping off the grid in droves. And that will be a bad thing for everybody -- but, most of all, for the utilities.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
My electric bill has two lines, the connection fee ( a straight 41 cents per day) and the actual electrical usage fee.
Clearly the utilities can do it this way, but not all of them do.
If we had truly privatized power companies, I'd expect this behavior. After all, it would only make sense. You invested a bunch of money to build a whole infrastructure for power generation, doing all of your cost calculations based on people relying on it for 100% of their electricity needs. You have no provisions in place to store incoming electricity for future resale to users. What upside would you have if your customers start to generate their own power?
But we don't. We have government regulated monopolies. I'm not trying to argue the merits for or against the arrangement right now, except to say this means to me, they should be required to comply with whatever the government believes is the best way forward. If government is going to issue tax breaks and incentives for installing solar power? Then it's clear it thinks this type of energy generation on an individual basis should be encouraged. So how can it sit by and tolerate the power companies imposing rules that run counter to that goal?
Personally, I think as a homeowner, my ideal solar installation would be one where I don't need to be tied to the grid at all. Tesla is working on battery packs for homes that look a lot like refrigerators, which you'd couple to a solar panel installation to provide power at night or during bad weather conditions when the panels aren't capturing energy. I've heard that currently, they make the cost of the installation a bit prohibitive, but there's a good chance they'll become successful as part of a mainstream installation in the next 3 years or so. From what I've heard, reviewers of the setup said it was possible to run the entire home for as long as 48 hours or so on nothing but the battery pack, as long as power was used somewhat sensibly (not just leaving all the lights on in the house for no reason, etc.).
... the music, film and TV industries recognized that technology advances had rendered their business models moot, and so they faded away quietly and gracefully? Same will happen here.
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
This doesn't surprise me in the least. Look at what's been happening in Germany for a few years now in respect to their struggle with maintaining the power plants. The risk of course is people accuse the power company of being greedy but to be honest they can only operate so long they have a minimum number of customers buying power. Coal and nuclear plants cannot just be turned off and on like your light switch at home, they take weeks if not months to heat them up or turn them off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load_power_plant
http://www.ipautah.com/data/upfiles/newsletters/CyclingArticles.pdf
So when a ton of solar comes on the market, it drops the rates during peak times but doesn't supply power during darker days and night time. Baseload plants must always operate at a fixed level in order to be economical. If the baseload plants were not there most factories would not be able to operate, so we have a problem of how fast can we switch to solar and even if everyone put panels on their roofs what then? Where will the extra capacity come from? The average server farm needs a steady power supply that is reliable; the ones that do run on "green" power usually get their power from lager utility companies with diversified or steady power supplies, however those don't exist everywhere. I don't know of any large power generating dams in Hawaii.
It's great that so much solar power has come on-line but what does someone like myself do? I don't have solar panels on my roof, so when the local power company goes under will you supply me power from your solar panels?
So does the energy company have to buy energy at the same rate that they sell it?
Why can't they just buy it for 50% of their selling price? They should be able to make a good profit off of people with solar panels this way, and the solar panel people would be able to offload their energy during the morning. This would also mean that they wouldn't need to invest in generate new power facilities... right?
In the article the utility suggested that power surges and other grid problems could be traced back to the influx of new solar. Could it be a valid excuse that the grid isn't smart enough to take in a bunch of additional inputs and they need some time to upgrade?
I stole this Sig
I live in Hawaii. HELCO (not HECO) is very intent on maintaining their monopoly over power and dabbling with shutting down all alternative energy efforts, even though we have geothermal, wind, solar, and wave energy options.
You have to realize that many of the houses in Hawaii aren't tied to the power grid because HELCO won't run power lines out. A lot of people I know survive off generators, some small solar, water catchment, and sat-based internet and TV. It's not about profits for them, its about the basic tools to live.
Most electricity in Hawaii is generated using petroleum and coal fired plants. These plants are notorious for their slow warm up and cool down. With enough solar feeding in during peak times they will produce excess heat before the rising demand when the sun goes down and to compensate for the diving demand when the sun comes up. Coal and oil plants are not light switches. So in effect enough solar panels could produce power than can't be used but still has to be purchased by the grid companies and the grid companies still have to sell power to the solar produces when they need it. The solar produces pay nothing for the power produced grid maintenance and the cost for people without solar goes up. By the way, many people live in apartments without enough roof area to power them.
I work for Maui Electric which is a subsidirary of HECO. I am posting AC for this reason. I am copying part of a news release that we gave to these customers to help them understand. "On Sept. 6, the Hawaiian Electric Companies announced they were enabling more small PV systems (10 kW and under) to be added without a potentially time-consuming interconnection study and possible safety upgrades. The new threshold for a possible study was set at the point at which the PV on the circuit reached 100% of that circuit’s daytime minimum load, increased from 75%. At the same time, with a growing number of circuits with high amounts of PV, Hawaiian Electric also announced that customers who want to add PV on circuits that have reached the more liberal 100% threshold would need to await the results of an interconnection study to ensure their PV system can be safely interconnected into the grid. Previously, when PV levels were lower, O‘ahu customers had been allowed to interconnect their systems while they were awaiting final Hawaiian Electric approval of their net energy metering contract. Some customers with loans and/or contractual obligations for a PV system at the time of the announcement were caught in the transition, facing the possibility of being unable to get the benefits of a PV system they had committed to buy or had already installed" We are not denying any customers Solar, Hawaii leads the nation in KW generated per customer. (Solar Electric Power association Rankings). Hope that clears up some questions people may have.
I forgot the most important part...due to environmentalist efforts, we haven't been able to upgrade/build a new power plant since the 80s. Brownouts are fairly common, but the power company would rather kneecap the economy than allow any profit to go to anyone else
considering solar is during the day. the peak usage is from 830am to 9pm, so basically the energy company is getting cheap solar from consumer, selling it at the highest peak rates and then complaining to get more of a handout.
http://www.pge.com/en/mybusiness/rates/tvp/toupricing.page?WT.mc_id=Adwords_peak%20electricity%20hours_b_c
The power grid generally runs on AC (many countries, like the U.S. use 60Hz, many others use 50Hz)
The power grid is supposed to provide a consistent, reliable source of power to all customers. Millions of consumers expect to be able to turn things on and off whenever they want without any problems
This means power companies must increase or decrease generation of power moment-by-moment to match demand (already a complex task). To make this work, large generation capacity that can be ramped up and down as needed must be available to fill-in the gaps of any unreliable sources (Nuclear, coal or gas backing up hydro, big wind farms, etc) When you add-in millions of small solar and wind sources on the properties of individual consumers (that are the types of sources that are in constant flux) the problem becomes FAR more complex. On top of all that, ALL those energy sources hooked into the grid need to be generating their power in the proper phase. If you have multiple generators hooked to a common grid and they are not in phase, things get very exciting in a hurry...... and NOT in a good way
You're completely ignoring how the billing works. During that peak time, they would be charging $x * high_peak_rate to those customers, and the solar customers. In comes the solar customers producing excess, giving energy to the energy company. The energy company has to pay $y * high_peak_rate to the solar customer. This means they collect total ($x-$y)*high_peak_rate. If $y > 0, then the company is losing money, not getting a handout. This was 3rd grade math when I was in school many moons ago...it's probably kindergarten math by now.
The early adopters that the utilities are fighting now are few and far between and only nibbling at the edges of utility profits in most areas. Quite simply a good solar/wind setup is a bit of a pain in the ass. So by eliminating these few people it might even slow down development of better home energy technology a tiny bit. But quite simply solar continues to not only fall but the various flaws and other related technologies are getting better and better. The key technological lynchpin will be battery technology. But with today's solar/wind, LED lighting, and energy efficient appliances basically everyone is waiting on battery technology; if it were to get good enough, people won't have to worry about feed in tariffs they will just go off grid.
So what will happen is people will look at a one time up-front cost and just jump in and leave the power company behind. This is something that the utilities won't be able to stop. So instead of a stead decline it will be a shocking quarter by quarter disaster where the power companies will have problems making payroll.
This last will be a huge problem for those buildings that for various reasons can't go off grid.
I'm just saying, I would buy dinner right after I've eaten.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
And in return for providing this service, they're protected by the government as a natural monopoly. They have no competitors and there is no free market for electricity. It's completely reasonable for tax payers to compel a utility to do some things for free in exchange. Having no competition is a tremendous boon, and it's not something that we should give away freely.
Oooh. Oooh. Wait a minute. Remember back in the old days of DSL, where the telephone company managed the infrastructure but multiple companies provided services? I think the alternate DSL providers had to pay some of it back to the phone company for managing the last mile.
So, before some laws changed and some technical issues were solved, only the owner of the last mile could provide internet services over the wires they owned, but eventually other companies could offer competing services over the same infrastructure.
You see where I'm going with this? What if, let's say, a homeowner's association that has made a heavy commitment to solar has decided to form a co-op or an LLC and sell their excess power -- not back to the power company, but directly to other homeowners?
I think part of the mechanism is already in place -- you can pay extra for power from "green" sources, for instance. (Although part of me thinks that what they're buying is coming out of the same bin as those of us who are paying regular prices for dirty power.) Why couldn't you buy power from some other power source, perhaps a co-op close to you, using the existing infrastructure?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck. This seems remarkably like a monopoly trying to sow FUD to prevent the destruction of their business model...
I don't have one. I do live in one.
FWIW, the peak demand in California typically occurs about 6PM, well after most PV installations fall off the grid (peak production from solar occurs at 12noon and solar output is largely gone after 3PM). This data is from the California ISO website. This implies that grid tied PV solar without some sort of power storage is NOT an effective source of peak shaving.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
Our utility has also put a ban on "Net Metering Connects" as they call it here. They fully admit it is all about money but still try and look green. It is all a sham and a scam.
The way net metering works here is during the summer months when you generate excess power you build up a credit on your account. Then come January 1st take all that extra credit that you have built up and donate it to themselves such that you start the new year with no credit during the darkest, cloudiest time of the year. Now you have to buy power from them until you get to late summer when you've finally got a net metered credit again. Very lucrative for the power company.
So, why don't they want more connections? Because they say the people who are net metering aren't having to pay the cost of power delivery and they are protesting this by demanding a new fee and higher rates.
Pure greed.
All this talk about storing excess PV power. In almost all cases the excess PV power generated by one house flows 100' to his non-PV neighbor who pays the utility exactly what the utility is crediting the PV provider. No power is stored, the "grid" is hardly used at all. Yes, if the number of houses generating excess PV power started hitting 50% or more there could be a "problem" but the real problem is utilities are guaranteed profits based on their capital investments. If their capital investment needs drop, their profits will drop. That's a good thing. No need in the future to drop off the grid entirely if the utilities get too uppity. Just have enough storage capacity for anticipated over production, more closely align peak PV capacity on your house with your peak power consumption and just use far, far less of the utility's expensive power. No doubt they'll be crying about that as well. Let 'em cry. Society doesn't owe utility companies ever increasing profits based on ever increasing capital investments. Or entire neighborhoods will cooperatively put up solar and basically turn the entire neighborhood into a single connection to the utility and sub-meter internally. Instead of the utility paying me a penny for power flowing to my neighbor, we work it out amongst ourselves and leave the utility out in the cold. So they turn to FUD and nonsense about storing excess power and how terrible it is they can't buy your power for a penny and sell it to your next door neighbor for a dime.
your statement is true if...
since i have eaten, so no one else is hungry.
Let's say your grid uses 10GWh baseload and 20GWh during the day (reasonable numbers) then the existing generators are capable of scaling to demand reasonably well.
Now add in solar and that's reducing the peak, in effect smoothing demand for the generators and providing a more reliable grid as the peak is reduced. I doubt there are many national grids in the world where carbon fueled baseload is throttled because of solar; Spain and Germany being exceptions and they're grids haven't collapsed, in fact Spain has managed to peak renewable electricity at 100% of national demand. If Spain can do it, why not USA?
Also solar is reducing the wholesale price of power during peak times; peak wholesale rates eat into your power company's profits cause them to jack up the prices (and it reduces the need for expensive peaking power stations), so solar is helping you with cheaper and more reliable power even though you don't have panels on your roof. Don't fall for the mantra. Solar power doesn't scare carbon power companies, lack of control does.
One huge difference between attaching something to the phone network and direct back-feed connections to the grid is that the back feed can be deadly if there's an issue with the local distribution network. This is usually taken care of by the anti-islanding circuitry in an inverter designed for grid tie use, and the utility has both the right and duty to make sure that circuitry is present and working in any grid tied installation.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
> Do you have a solar system? if not (or if so, for that matter), does this make you think twice about it?
Given the stupidity of these anticapitalistic measures -- the USA definitely must be one of the less capitalist countries in the so called First World. Heck, I'm looking towards China for a more progressist attitude -- such is how things came to be!!
Well, I'd like to inform all people concerned that my Lord (though I'm not really entitled to speak in his Name) effectively has a solar system.
Given the aforementioned stupidity, I'm praying He is not thinking about it. Or that He, I also pray, have mercy on us and correct our evil ways -- for receiving things for free and preventing fellowmen from getting what Nature provides -- isn't that evil?
Please do correct me if I am mistaken.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Mahatma Gandhi
---
Solar power continues to get cheaper. I'm interested in the implications for the broader energy market. Even a 5% drop in demand for coal, natural gas, and oil could have a tremendous impact on the boarder market.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Automatic transfer switches eliminate any danger of locally generated power being fed back into the grid if there's any sort of danger in connecting the two. The electric company would only have to tell home owners to employ transfer switches in order to stay connected to the grid (with the only side effect being that they can't contribute excess power back to the grid)
My local utility company actually employs smart meters that can monitor both grid-side and home-side circuits for dangerous conditions in cases where there's a grid-tie inverter in the home. The smart meter instantly disconnects the home from the grid if there's an excessive surge in current being fed back into the grid (by analyzing the voltages, transfer current, and phase angles of both sides). The same meters also communicate with the utility company over a combination RF and powerline-based data transmissions, eliminating the need for guys to be dispatched monthly to read everyones meters.
In other news, you can buy a good charge controller, a 50KWh bank of deep-cycle batteries, a 2KW inverter for lights and outlets, and a 12-KW inverter for air conditioning, all for about $12K. This setup can run A/C for 5 hours a day and your only reliance on the grid would be to top-off the batteries on dark days.
If you have the means to get off the grid, by all means, you should, because most electric companies don't care about anything but profits.
Parent post makes a great deal of sense. With PV generation reaching 100% of minimum circuit load for some circuits, HECO is justifiably concerned about how to safely handle the generation.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
Call me an old fart, or what you like. Or just ignore me.
I have seen this before, yes, it is the money. City of Tucson in the 1970-80's had a program to use water smartly, called "Beat the Peak". An education program to explain that you shouldn't water you lawn in the middle of the 100F day, do it in the evening, after dark or wee hours of the morning. You'll use less and have just as green a lawn (this was in the 1980's, please). And it worked, people used less water and had really green lawns.
It worked so well, the Water Department had to raise the rates because there was less usage, less money coming in. They were quoted as not having the funds for Capital Improvements, gee, you think?
Solves the problem. While the sun is shining just dump the excess current into a load resistor or even a storage array. Then tell said electric utility to go pound sand. Problem solved.
The problem is to backfeed into the network you need a higher voltage than the network, and if alot of people are generating they are each steping up the voltage. I don't know about hawaii but in australia we have parts of the country (places with lots of retirement homes) that have the volts up around 270v (you will start to blow 240v stuff up around there). It also isn't an easy problem for utilities to solve as you would need to dynamically step down the voltage for the whole block (depending on cloud coverage). Energy storage seems like the answer to me (we need better batteries first ofcourse) then you have no impact on the network and no power bill.
Rocket Surgeon.
so you are saying the power companies are like you... you want to make money at your job? Gee... why not volunteer?
And it's actually a sign that consumers are internalizing costs that were otherwise passed to the society as a whole. This kind of switch is not easy, but it has to be done.
Remember!
It's only capitalism if WE make the money!
Thank you for your time (and money!).
- Your friendly corporation.
"over-saturated from the rapid adoption of solar power"
Ok, even if that is true it should be possible to rig a solar installation so that it could fill the power requirements of the house during the day but not back-feed any power into the grid. It wouldn't be as advantageous for the solar installations as they would end up with a bill for the power they used during the night but it would drastically decrease their grid costs, especially if AC is the primary power cost. However it seems obvious that power grid issues are not the primary "issue" for utilities, as evidenced by this excerpt from a report quoted in the article “Not only does solar steal share of new electricity demand, it parasitically steals demand from previously installed generation, and does at the most valuable ‘peak’ part of the demand curve.”. 'Peak' power is supposed to be more expensive for utilities, necessitating higher rates and special metering. If its so difficult and costly why aren't they welcoming a decrease in the strain? The only way this would make sense is that it has been used simply as an excuse for increasing profits.
Batteries will finish the Utilities business model!
Consumers may just go fully off grid rather then supplement their electrical system. Now instead of getting some business from these consumers, the utility company will get nothing. This could actually speed up adoption.
I would give Solar Industry and Corporations who go solar, a Tax Cut...
This isn't entirely a bad thing. Higher energy costs spur investment in alternative energy sources and efficiency gains.
Which wouldn't be needed if you simply used nuclear power. Solar would improve anyway for other reasons. But in the meantime you wouldn't be wasting a lot of money better spent on forcing alternative energy on people before it's ready (or in the case of wind power, propping up a zombie until it dies once more as it does every few decades).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Look at the economics a little closer. You are spending $2-300 per month to avoid paying the utility company a connection charge.
The best way to use solar is by deep-cooling the freezer, heating your hot water tank, and pre-cooling your home, in that order. Charging batteries doesn't work well because they want to charge at a slower rate than discharge to maximize life. So, if you charge over 6 hours and discharge over 18 the battery bank really should be 3x the size minimum.
The best solution is mixed generation sources-- solar, wind, diesel, fuel cell, battery, etc. Look at what is cheapest and lowest risk.
First, I don't have a solar installation, but I'm seriously considering it for 2014.
As to a "connnection fee", we don't have one here, but if we were to put a $5 connection fee in place here (about the size of the AZ one), I'd have no real problem with it. Probably wouldn't notice it, really, what with all the other trivial little fees attached to my electric bill.
Of course, my plans will change if the relevant governments decide to stop making my neighbors pay for the solar installation. But as long as I can get 80% of the cost paid by other people, it's looking like a good investment....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Well it's not a good thing when taxpayer money is being misspent...like paying wind farms to NOT produce electricity when it's not needed. That's just farking STUPID.
How about telling the wind farms we will pay for the electricity we need on the grid when we need it. If we don't need it we won't pay for it. Tax payers subsidized wind farms to begin with, now we're paying them not to produce what they were built to produce.
The utility in Hawaii is breaking federal law and will be absorbed by the Obamapower Company Ltd...
Then on the cold / dark days when the wind is howling and your neighbors are cold and dark, you'll have power galore and you'll be able to tell your neighbors that they'd have power too if not for the illegal antics of the power companies...
We should kill off the subsidies for the solar, and instead, focus it on storage, along with clean safe thorium nukes. The storage can be of many different types, but one that is going to make a huge splash is EOS energy storage.
In addition, we should require that all buildings below 5 stories to have on-site AE energy generated equal to 95-100% of the HVAC energy. In doing that, it will discourage new daytime increases, esp. during the summer. And it does not require a subsidy.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Yeah, we've just seen the story recently (or was that somewhere else?) where a woman who had moved her home off the grid and had her story told on the local news received a visit by the local government declaring her home unfit for human habitation without so much as an inspection.
But there is a way. It is, as one would expect, the responsibility of the homeowner to buy all the stuff needed to move off the grid. So why not perform the act through a weening process? I've pointed it out before that as home lighting is trying to become more efficient, LED lighting wants to work on lower power but efficiency is actually harmed with each AC-DC conversion for each LED lamp. So why not start by going DC in the home? Starting with lighting and moving on to appliances and other fixtures until eventually all AC is either derived from your own from your own inverter or all your devices are converted until you are weened. I think it should be perfectly okay with the utilities that your local power does not interface with the grid.
I haven't even really considered acquiring/investing in my own solar system. I do, however, participate in the use of one in a community of a few billion other people. It isn't the most efficient system--only the third planet is really habitable, and even if there was life on the fourth at any point, now it is only speculated to be in subterranean water pockets. All in all I'm happy with my current situation and wouldn't really go for my own.
This is a world wide problem, utilities are running scared and the politicians in their pocket are following their pied piper. Keep pressing on for being able to create your own power. If the utilities won't let you plug in. Screw em and invest in battery back up, companies are already scrambling to make affordable, benign battery power http://www.ted.com/talks/donald_sadoway_the_missing_link_to_renewable_energy.html the sooner you let the power utilities depending on power drawn from old fermented dinosaurs or power created with other environmental deadly pollutants as a result like nuclear die the better. Keep adapting alternate power generation technology, not only will you be free from the utilities and save a lot of money freeing up your personal resources. Unfortunately governments all over the world are in cahoots with the utilities so do not expect any help from them. This is a battle you as an individual will have to take upon yourself to win. Educate yourself in how you can save, personally I have been able to cut my electricity consumption 22% by doing simple things like cutting off vampire loads, remembering to turn off lights when not around etc. without in any way having less comfort at home or making "sacrifice" and I have not even yet started investing in energy harvesting nor A+ or better household things like dishwasher, fridge/freezer, washing machine etc. stopped using the dryer in the previous billing cycle, that saved a bundle as well but is not counted in this round, but energy harvesting and buying less power consuming equipment is next on the list. I wish all of you the best of luck in the search for cheaper and cleaner energy free from the power monopolies of the utilities. Don't buy into the lie that you are using the utilities as a backup battery, they are benefiting from your production, they are actually able to use less energy to produce load for the grid etc. and actually able to earn money from your production to anyone claiming something else I will in the holiday spirit offer a "bah humbug", and if they won't let you plug in, find alternate ways to store and utilize your energy. Don't let the utilities win. Let them go the way of the dinosaurs, you do not need them. Learn and live free!
MS, ALS, Aphasia ? http://globability.org - Me http://einarpetersen.com
... does this make you think twice about it?
It sure does. Here's the relevant sentence:
Efficiency gains and cost reductions has brought the price of solar energy to within parity of traditional power generation in states like California and Hawaii.
I.e. places with enough sun (5ish or so solar hours) to make it worthwhile. (It's not just the subsidies.)
What's new is that the breakeven point is finally being crossed. So it's finally time to look into actually getting off the grid.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
... as home lighting is trying to become more efficient, LED lighting wants to work on lower power but efficiency is actually harmed with each AC-DC conversion for each LED lamp. So why not start by going DC in the home?
Because you have to include the (square law!) resistive losses of the wiring, too. For every factor of two you drop the voltage you must multiply the amount of metal in your wriing by by a factor of four to get the same percentage loss for a given amount of powe4r transferred., Going low-voltage DC means putting in a LOT of new VERY HEAVY copper wire, and copper is currently so expensive that thieves are actually breaking into empty houses and ripping open the walls to steal it.
Meanwhile, semiconductor-based switching-type voltage converters have become very cheap and very efficient - to the point that modern commercial computer and networking equipment puts individual voltage converters next to the major chips, to save a substantial amount of power (mainly to reduce cooling requirements) from transporting the power across a few inches of power-plane printed circuit layer.
By substantial, I mean that, by feeding the boards 48V and regulating it beside the chips, rather than using a single regulator where the power enters the board, they more that cut their heat losses IN HALF. The resistive losses at low voltage were bigger than the load AND its regulator. It's the same story as using high voltage transmission lines cross-country. But now switching regulators are substantially more efficient than line-frequency transformers.
So you want the regulators at the load, to keep your efficiency up and your house wiring costs and losses down. The last step: Switch to DC at high voltage for the house wiring? Why bother? You don't lose enough extra power or add enough extra cost by including a couple diodes and a filter capacitor to make up for the trouble of retooling ALL THE APPLIANCES for AC/DC capability, and failing to do that means you still need both AC and DC wiring in the home (doubling the wiring again) or to only be able to use DC-capable devices. How many gadgets do you have powered by transformer-based "wall warts"?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
An interesting surprise!
Hawaii has basically hit the saturation point of renewable energy until a decent storage system is developed.
A fine, industrial scale, storage system has already been developed and deployed. It's the "vanadium redox" battery.
Think of it as a battery built something like a liquid-fueled fuel cell, with chemical solutions pumped across the two sides of a membrane going through oxidation-state changes, and the electrons going the long way around via conductors on the surfaces of the membrane to cross the potential difference. In this case the solutions on BOTH sides are the same soluble vanadium compounds (except for the different oxidation state of the vanadium), so minor leakage doesn't contaminate the solutions.
Pumping the liquid "electrodes" of this battery decouples power and energy storage rating. Size the cells for the power requirement, size the tanks for the energy storage requirement.
This has already been developed and deployed for utility energy storage. As I understand it: It's quite cost effective and the limited deployment is mainly because it's still under patent protection and the one manufacturer isn't big enough (yet) to make a dent in the power grid's potential market. (Of course it's also new, so it's not yet time-proven.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Why not use the "excess" power for hydrogen production or desalination or both?
I can't imagine that Hawaii has "too much" fresh water or too much natural gas. As long as the energy is available, it seems like it makes sense to make it do useful work, regardless of whether the useful work is turning on the lights in my house, producing a useful product like fresh water or storing the energy in another form (methane derived from hydrogen).
It always seems strange to me that the only accepted place renewables can go is direct end-user consumption.
I'm glad you posted this, as I've wondered why the electric company should be forced to buy-back power everywhere, when it's feasible, and should be required, for customers to install their own automatic transfer switch and energy storage (likely batteries, but there are other options) with the requisite DC-to-AC equipment on their own.
I have a 6.88Kw array (https://enlighten.enphaseenergy.com/pv/public_systems/MRhM160938) that has taken off nearly 70% of my bill. AmerenUE charges $0.17/Kwh peak, $0.08/Kwh off peak. if I generate electricity I make $0.02/Kwh (wholesale price). Besides panels we have now adjusted our lifestyle to the rates. We do laundry and dishes before or after rates change. We stay away from the middle of the day. Oh, and we bought a Nissan LEAF. I have it configured so it just charges during off peak. AmerenUE doesn't like solar anymore and since they technically met MO government requirement for renewable resource use they are taking all the carrots away.
So with the carrot gone they are now even trying to get a law passed where you are only allowed 1/2 of your max capacity for install (ie I would be only allowed 3.4KwH system). The company would come out with solar installers and make sure nothing extra would be allowed. They are doing all they can to stop Solar.
Glad I got in when I did...
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
Remember, these industries are monopolies and their opponents are individuals. We will have a period of adjustment where the dying titans make themselves look even worse and fail to justify their own purpose by lashing out against things which are a benefit to mankind.
The basic problem here is the basic problem of our government anymore. We really do not have individual representation against corporate interests.
"No good deed goes unpunished"
you state:
"Nuclear power as we know it -- uranium and plutonium fission"
Now, this is quite incorrect. what you refer to is the OLD method of nuclear power generation--think 50's tech. it was specifically chosen to help make atomic weapons with byproducts.
so long as we can drop the mantra of nuclear power for weapons--there's a whole world of much more efficient and safe nuclear power methods.
but if you have sun on the panels there will be a potential some where
Technically true. But the voltage coming out of solar pannels is rather low (and is DC).
I can imagine that there are way to keep it safe until it reaches the convertor (which converts it to AC and ramps up voltage to 110 or 220 depending on your region).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I know my heat pump will run on these cold and windless nights.
Well, if they are windless, they aren't that cold. And if they are windless there's less convection to which you could lose heat to, so perhaps you would be better off buying better insulation on your house to begin with.
Solar must be the most subsidized electricity source out there today. {...} The level of subsidies on wind and solar is mind blowing. These people will basically get the state and federal government to pay for all the equipment but they still can't build up wind and solar power because they would not be able to make enough money to pay the rent on the land. Think about that, they get the sun and wind for free, and the solar panels and windmills paid for by my tax dollars, and they still can't make any money.
Perhaps in the US. Here in Europe, the solar panels aren't that much subsidized (maybe you could get a small rebate in the form of state susides). But it's trivially easy to connect your solar powered house in such a way to the grid that it inject excess power back into the grid (in exchange of monetary compensation). Again, not free but some utilities companies will give a rebate for the procedure.
In the end, putting solar pannels on your house or building lowers you cost on the long term. The initial investment (pannel, connections, etc.) ends up paying off somewhere between 5 and 10 years laters.
So if your plans are to put a few mills or pannels and immediately start making fucktons of monney right away... sorry it doesn't work that way.
If your plans are to lower your energy cost, help the environment, and invest into something that will pay off over the life time of the house: solar is a good solution in Europe.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Solar producers should pay for the grid? Only if nuclear, coal, gas, oil, and wind producers do. At present, they do not.
The solution us safe, local batteries, so that the grid is not overwhelmed, and so that excess power can be stored for times when it is not collected.
In Kansas the utilities will credit you for electricity you generate against your usage, but at the end of the year if you generate more than you use they DO NOT give you a credit.The consumer losses. Another example of utility's winning....
It's crystal claro that we have to reduce greenhouse gas emissions rapidly and getting the coal plants off the grid is one of the most efficient ways to do that. Technologies have been designed for large-scale grid storage to balance intermittent renewables. There is underground hydroelectric, underground compressed air, underwater compressed air bags, molten salt heat storage, electric trains on slopes, sodium-sulfur batteries.
Oh, and much more use could be made of high-voltage DC long distance transmission (e.g. of what's possible now: 2300km at 800kV) to shunt power from where it's being produced to where it is needed, and to, for example, time-shift PV across longitudes, and flatten out wind intermittency (it's always windy somewhere).
And that doesn't even scratch the surface (pun intended) of new superconducting transmission lines technologies that could boost long distance transmission efficiency even further.
We are at the baby steps (no, the crawling) phase of this transition now. Governments should simply across the board legislate that utilities MUST accommodate ALL new zero-carbon electricity generation with no additional fees. Period. Full stop. Any other policy is suicidally backwards.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
(Note, this is more of a stream of consciousness than an actual comment, so I apologize in advance if this sounds ADD-ish)
Get rid of the bulky, loud transformers and phase shifting coils and cap banks. Run -12KVDC to -20KVDC over the residential feeder lines down to neighborhood-located equipment with switchmode buck converters to give -240VDC and -120VDC to homes via their usual 3 mains wires, and a fourth wire for homes who wish to feed power back into the local grid via switchmode boost converters. The power transformer boxes on the corner of every block will contain high-frequency switching equipment and a few batteries (for keeping the block lit during upstream switching events and outages) instead of 2000-pounds of copper and laminated steel. The neighborhood substations will have their giant transformers and oil-filled breakers and phase compensating equipment replaced with IGBT-based switch stacks and intelligent converters that quickly compensate for changing load and back-feed conditions completely silently. Managing connections between substations and the high voltage grid will be an order of magnitude simpler and safer when all you have to worry about is matching the voltages within a few percent and measuring static currents after connections are made, rather than comparing frequency, phase angles, and power factors. With today's "modern" AC grids, you're liable to blow fuses/breakers/transformers if you connect two independently-fed parts of the grid together without first matching phases and frequency.
I know it's just too late for the change from AC to DC in the home to be practical. The biggest, most power-hungry devices just don't have an "upgrade path" to DC: Air conditioning and refrigeration compressors, fan/blower motors, fluorescent lights would all need complete replacement with DC-compatible equivalents. It would have been better if appliance manufacturers had designed their devices to be run off either types of mains from the start... Large, high-torque brushless DC motors are quite cheap now, and switchmode power supplies are now smaller and cheaper than 60HZ AC power transformers, and many of them will actually work equally well being fed by 120-240VDC.
Power prices are set to double in the UK over the next few years and at least half of that is down to "green" energy.
Actually, it'll more than double - because that's the guaranteed sale price of electricity produced by the (yet to be built) newest nuke power plant when it comes onstream in 10 years time.
Utilities are paying wind turbine owners NOT to hookup to the grid and to disconnect in high winds. It seems there's more money to be made not shipping out electricity than in actually doing so.
Rebuilding grids to handle multiple small inputs is a massive undertaking and the backing capacity cost is insane. The only way forward "correctly" is to mandate that "green" sources play nice with the grid or not connect at all - whilst the current setup is just turning the entire system into a blackout waiting to happen.
" Imagine building a power plant and running it seven hours a year. Welcome to peaker plants."
A lot of smaller utilities (city size) use them - and in a lot of cases those peaker plants may be 80 years old.
It doesn't matter if they cost $1/kWh to run, as long as their running cost saves running into the next peak charging band from the supplier (wholesale power is priced as baseload, plus substantial premiums for peaks, so squashing the peak is worthwhile even if that means rolling blackouts in some cases)
I was really interested in solar back at the turn of the century. At the time, I was living in an area where it was feasible to use solar. You have to realize that solar has a very geographically limited output; desert and tropical areas. In tropical areas the frequent cleaning is a bit labor intensive. Unless there has been a huge change in manufacturing technique; my findings from 2005 should still be good.
1> Without battery buffering solar is variable with light sourcing.
2> To generate the amount.current it takes to make a solar panel it would take 15 years. The mean lifetime of a panel in service before output degrades is around 5 years.
After running numbers I concluded that from a system standpoint the supposed "green" power of solar was a bunch of hooey. Now, using a solar hot water heater actually works well just requiring a bit of plumbing, a home made box full of black gravel, and a thermal sensor to turn the heating pump on when the sun put the temperature of the box above 150 degrees F.
What so many never consider is the maintenance of an alternative energy source. A co-worker put in a wind generation facility along with a battery system to buffer the power generation. Works well. But, there is weekly maintenance on the moving parts of the generator and on the batteries. The initial cost was a bit high but manageable using Navy surplus submarine batteries. But, where to put a bank of five foot tall lead acid batteries? From the numbers I saw, the installation cost should be amortized by the power savings in less than a decade.
I do ask how many of those clamoring for "green power" are willing to do the upkeep on household systems?
NRRPT/RCT
Didn't you forget something in your cost basis, like a power source - solar, diesel generator, or whatnot? Also you have to look at the amortised cost for this equipment, which has a finite lifetime with a non-trivial probability of sudden failure.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Well, if they are windless, they aren't that cold. And if they are windless there's less convection to which you could lose heat to, so perhaps you would be better off buying better insulation on your house to begin with.
Easy enough to say to a relatively young and healthy single adult male. What about someone with children? The baby is going to want warm milk. No power means no refrigeration. No power mean no microwave oven. What about the elderly? Sorry Grandpa, the power went out again. We can't run your oxygen generator for the next eight hours so you are just going to have to hold your breath.
I'm not speaking *against* power at all.
I'm arguing that, in the specific case of "cold windless night", the house is only slowly loosing heat through conduction.
If you upgrade the house to better thermal insulation, you're going to lose a lot less heat on "cold windless nights" and thus you will need less energy.
So instead of spending money on a big pile of fossil fuel to run your heating on, you could invest in better insulation, that will make lose less heat in the first place that you would need replacing by heating.
Less heating: less energy spending.
So you can either:
- buy less fossil fuels for your heating needs on cold windless nights.
- redirect the same energy to where it is needed. Spend energy on cooking warm milk for Junior and on keeping the lifesupport[*] of Granpa, instead of wasting said energy on making up heat to replace the lost heat due to bad insulation.
European countries which have success with eco green electricity (like the often cited Germany, or like Switzerland), among other reasons, are also successful due to non-electricty related reasons, like upgrading building code to mandate better insulation, which in turn helps lower power requirement by lowering the need to make up for lost heat from bad insulation.
You'll need less energy if you don't need it to warm up the house, and thus the "cold windless nights" are less problematic.
---
[*]: which you cited for illustration purpose, but accidentally happens to be a bad example. Medical devices don't work this way. Critical medical device are built to be autonomous. Not only in your though experiment of a region were power is in short supply when there's no wind nor sun, and choices have to bee made. But it has to survive other catastrophic situation as black-outs, power outage due to broken power lines, or as mundane as the power box blowing up due to thunderstrike or the fuse blowing-up, of the old-school type where there's an actual filament burning, instead of electronic reset.
To be able face this, most critical medical devices have a battery, on purpose so that Grampi doesn die just because the power broke.
Also oxygen is provided from a pressurized bottle/tank rather than a generator that continuously extracts it from the air. (the bottle themselves could be locally filled that way instead of shipped from the factory) but still, oxygen consumption is not power dependant, its mechanical (pressure based) and completely oblivious to the current state of the power distributions grid.
But still, your observations are valid (some uses do require power during the night) hence are mine too (before anything else, try not to waste power through stupid reasons like bad insulation, thus you have more power free for the critical uses).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The public WANTS FREE ENERGY!
The utilities do not. Greedy bastards. They just want to protect their cash cow. They have no concern for the enfvironment. They do not care about their customers needs.
We need to continue to pursue renewable CLEAN energy sources.
If the utilities go out of fucking business....too fucking bad!
Just share with neighbors. Hire an electrician, share with people on your block or just next door.
Start thinking like a community again, USA! If I had extra energy I'd share it with the neighbors so their bill is lower. Could it be a little complex and cost money? Yeah.
But the goodwill and sense of community it develops would be awesome.
This is the solution. Separate we are defeated. In unison, as a community, we fail.
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while you did de-villify the utilities, you have shown us with logical discourse that the utilities are, indeed, trying to protect their financial arses.
Just a few years back a large wid farm was built in Wisconsib or MN. The state agreed to purchase any excess power. Turned out, there wasn't enough grid capacity to handle it. The state was stuck with some huge bills for electricity that no one could use.. We were lucky as some major users of electricity in the area closed up shop, leaving ready made grid capacitu for new installations.
THE MANY: why don't [greedy, evil] utilities just build smart grids and [benevolent] governments just enforce buy-back at retail? Or [to make up for perceived greediness] more than retail? Plus [free money] incentives for home owners in Pleasantville [no multifamily unit or slum dwellings need apply] to buy the stuff. And [one in a hundred thousand, owns own house free and clear, grossing $70+k/yr] solar home owner says, but it works for me.
THE FEW: Grid already running near peak capacity because it was never built out for surplus, it was built as needed. Energy costs for base load generation plants is volatile and variable. Capital spent on new base load generation NOT re-designing and re-building infrastructure in Your Little Neighborhood.
THE MANY: but solar and wind generate during [daytime not night, never mind Winter] peak hours and so will we once the government gives us free money to buy all this great solar stuff so it's all good and when this [unlikely miracle] happens those base load plants can just bug off. While we're operational that is. We'll stay connected to the grid for old time's sake and to sell our power to the [evil] power company. Storage batteries will come along and will solve everything. For a day at least.
THE FEW: Who's willing to run some the odds that a geographically dispersed network of solar/wind hipsters each feeding a little bit into the grid is sure to keep it stable and keep this 24x7 factory running? What are the odds of a cascading domino failure triggered by the first untoward event, where the hipsters and tiny federally-subsidized hipster companies will drop off the grid quickly, like flies, to satisfy their own local needs?
THE MANY: Fuck the factory, and fuck those other grid people who do not embrace small scale or personal power solutions. They're probably wasting loads of energy anyway.
THE FEW: Okay, imagine trying to light a sports stadium with ten million tiny Christmas tree bulbs. The kind wired in series where whole sections go dark when one bulb fails. Now imagine that on the supply side, with a truly incomprehensible number of possible points of failure in place, instead of the historically reliable method of a few, professionally maintained gigawatt plants that generate baseload energy 24x7...
THE MANY: Sounds great! It would probably be good for the planet too.
THE FEW: [double facepalm] Troll us into oblivion why don't you.
___
THE ONE: Obligatory bump to the Thorium Alliance and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
The aim is to have cheap renewable electricity for everyone (socialism). .. thus the cost is infinitely expensive. ...
Every electricity generating facility needs a certain amount of materials
and energy input to be created.
That said, doing a honest calculation, then anything non-renewable
has a close to infinitely expensive cost, because every piece of atom split,
goal burned or natural gas oxidized cannot be replaced
Of course over time, the green bio-machines will absorb the carbon-dioxide and over time
they themselves will again turn into the coal, gas and oil. this is still cheaper then having
to wait for our sun to explode, reform, thus absorbing our planet and its radioactive waste and hopefully
rebinding the split atoms into heavier ones in the second supernova...etc.
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One solution would be to have TWO feed-in tarifs. an expensive one and a cheap on-par one.
if you consume 100 kwh from the grid and feed-in 100 kwh solar then you get the expensive price.
if you produce more then what you consume, you get paid the cheap on-par price.
thus you need two meters: one that counts what you consume and one that counts what you produce.
one gets deducted from the other
But non-renewables are infinity expensive ... somehow : )