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Oklahoma Moves To Discourage Solar and Wind Power
Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "Paul Monies reports at NewsOK that Oklahoma's legislature has passed a bill that allows regulated utilities to apply to the Oklahoma Corporation Commission to charge a higher base rate to customers who generate solar and wind energy and send their excess power back into the grid reversing a 1977 law that forbade utilities to charge extra to solar users. 'Renewable energy fed back into the grid is ultimately doing utility companies a service,' says John Aziz. 'Solar generates in the daytime, when demand for electricity is highest, thereby alleviating pressure during peak demand.'
The state's major electric utilities backed the bill but couldn't provide figures on how much customers already using distributed generation are getting subsidized by other customers. Oklahoma Gas and Electric Co. and Public Service Co. of Oklahoma have about 1.3 million electric customers in the state. They have about 500 customers using distributed generation. Kathleen O'Shea, OG&E spokeswoman, said few distributed generation customers want to sever their ties to the grid. 'If there's something wrong with their panel or it's really cloudy, they need our electricity, and it's going to be there for them,' O'Shea said. 'We just want to make sure they're paying their fair amount of that maintenance cost.' The prospect of widespread adoption of rooftop solar worries many utilities. A report last year by the industry's research group, the Edison Electric Institute, warns of the risks posed by rooftop solar (PDF). 'When customers have the opportunity to reduce their use of a product or find another provider of such service, utility earnings growth is threatened," the report said. "As this threat to growth becomes more evident, investors will become less attracted to investments in the utility sector.''"
The state's major electric utilities backed the bill but couldn't provide figures on how much customers already using distributed generation are getting subsidized by other customers. Oklahoma Gas and Electric Co. and Public Service Co. of Oklahoma have about 1.3 million electric customers in the state. They have about 500 customers using distributed generation. Kathleen O'Shea, OG&E spokeswoman, said few distributed generation customers want to sever their ties to the grid. 'If there's something wrong with their panel or it's really cloudy, they need our electricity, and it's going to be there for them,' O'Shea said. 'We just want to make sure they're paying their fair amount of that maintenance cost.' The prospect of widespread adoption of rooftop solar worries many utilities. A report last year by the industry's research group, the Edison Electric Institute, warns of the risks posed by rooftop solar (PDF). 'When customers have the opportunity to reduce their use of a product or find another provider of such service, utility earnings growth is threatened," the report said. "As this threat to growth becomes more evident, investors will become less attracted to investments in the utility sector.''"
Why do investors think they are entitled to growth?
There is a risk to returns. If the investors want no risk then they should get no gains.
Obviously this varies from region to region, but I was always led to understand that in hot locales, peak was late afternoon, when houses began to cool down, and businesses were still cooling. ...part of the reason why large solar plants are moving to molten salt -- to keep providing power in the early evening when the sun isn't directly overhead.
Assuming the maintenance costs are built into the cost of a kilowatt-hour and your budgeting process assumes a minimum usage to recoup each customer's share, customers that dip below the minimum would necessarily need to pay more.
The real question is why they feel the need to change the base rate (the most politically difficult route, as you have to convince the Public Utilities Commission of your state) instead of adding a "co-generation fee" or something similar to make up the difference.
It's too bad they couldn't store that energy in another way for long term usage in batteries. Are the windmills too efficient?
'When customers have the opportunity to reduce their use of a product or find another provider of such service, utility earnings growth is threatened," the report said. "As this threat to growth becomes more evident, investors will become less attracted to investments in the utility sector.''
Suck it up princess!
I know you're going to fight tooth and nail to get legislators to protect your business model but the writing is on the wall. Feel free to look up buggy whip manufacturers if you want to see how this story is going to end in the long run.
Oh, and if you think we, the public, are going to feel any sympathy for you as your business model gets replaced by newer and better technology, trust me when I say you're wrong. No sympathy. Adapt or die.
I know you think legislate or die are the options on the table but I assure you, it's adapt or die.
Because after they drive the utilities out of business, they might drive the lobbyists and the corrupt politicians and bureaucrats out of business next. These extremists must be stopped at all costs!!!
Who needs a free market anyway, let's just regulate profitability for industries so as to not risk disturbing the status quo.
Damned idiotic, cronyistic bull shit.
It seems now with every emerging industry, established corporations, by way of Government lobbying, don't want to what amounts as progress. Tesla is facing it right presently, and solar and wind will be facing it soon. Whatever the opposite of progress is in the US, it seems Corporate interest are determined to force us down that path.
Next up, if it hasn't already happened wholesale, is agriculture!
Battery backup to completely cut from the grid. When people learn how well it works the pace will accelerate until no residential power users exist. You can bet that long term.
I bet republicans are behind this.
Is there any industry that isn't run by manipulative money-grubbing dickholes?
Why the fuck are we trying to salvage shitty business models?
Just because the current technology isn't good enough doesn't mean "solar power" is going to be bad forever. That's like comparing a Ford Model T with an IBM Model M.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
If you take off your "Electric Companies are TEH EVIL" hat for a second, it's pretty interesting that they have the same issue that states do with paying for roads in relation to electric cars. That is, someone generating electricity or using an electric car is making use of a resource where the cost of access is subsidized by something you are no longer consuming.
I think the electric companies have a pretty good point that they still have to pay to maintain lines to your house even though you are now consuming a fraction of what you would have.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This seems like the sort of problem that could be much more logically and less painfully solved by breaking out the (more or less constant, at least within a given size class and geographic area) grid hookup cost and the per-KW/h price for electricity as separate items on the bill.
Infrastructure doesn't build and maintain itself, so if you want to maintain your connection, it's only logical that you'll pay something for that. If you try to bundle the distribution costs into the energy cost, though, you just get a bit of a mess since the amount a given person is paying for infrastructure can vary wildly and you end up having to field requests like this. Even here, they make a somewhat arbitrary distinction between users who do feed to the grid and those who don't (who presumably also use less power but just aren't easy to identify). Just break out the two items and call it a day.
They punish a technology out of idealogy rather than economics.
They say they want to start working out a solution BEFORE it becomes a big problem.
A solar customer could sell lots of power to them around noon, and use about the same amount at night. This customer would have an electric bill of $0, because they put as much energy into the grid as they took out. In 10 or 20 years, if a million customers are doing that, you have the power company trying to run on a budget of zero - no money to pay salaries, no money to fix equipment, etc. Obviously that doesn't work, the power company would go broke and noone would have power, except while it's sunny. They don't want to wait until that happens to address the problem, a problem which probably will occur if nothing is changed.
Perhaps this is all a part of the vast right-wing conspiracy against green energy. Can't let the hippies win!
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
Oklahoma has some fantastic wind & solar resources and adjoins the Texas Panhandle where there are many wind turbines and therefore a reasonable transmission infrastructure.
Even if they didn't need the wind & solar, Texas can make very good use of it. They should be investing in those resources and they could probably get Texas to pay for a big chunk of it.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
The last time I looked, the flip side to a regulated utility was a deregulated utility. Deregulated utilities end up as monopolies.
The other last time I looked, business interests of all kinds turn to governments to maintain their profits, and raise barriers to competition. And spare me the "The problem is bad regulation." That's not the problem.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
You obviously are not familiar with Oklahoma.
Oklahoma is a firm Republic state, and past experience tells me this will be legislated.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
The utilities were already required by law to buy customers' solar power at full retail price. That eliminated any free market angle right then.
This just modifies the laws.
If you are a huge free market fan, would you agree that removing the regulatory requirements on these utilities and letting them determine what to pay for customer-generated solar power would restore the proper order?
We all know that wouldn't work. With only one way to sell their solar power (through the utility) the utility would just refuse to pay them anything.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
When you put power back on the grid, it is at wholesale. You *used* to wind the meter backwards and have a result of 0, but no longer with newer meters.
I don't see how the utilities can dislike that as they make a profit on energy returned to the system.
Exactly this. They shouldn't charge solar customers a higher base rate, they should make the pricing more transparent. Charge everybody a monthly connection fee. That goes to maintain the lines. Then you charge for electricity consumed by their plant. They have two businesses going, generation and distribution. Their pricing should reflect that.
I think the electric companies have a pretty good point that they still have to pay to maintain lines to your house even though you are now consuming a fraction of what you would have.
I don't know about Oklahoma, but my bill is split into two parts: a fixed per-day customer charge, plus a separate charge per kWh. Presumably, the charge per day covers the lines and administrative overhead. (The per-kWh charge is further divided into separate fuel and generation charges, and the fuel rate changes frequently.)
If Oklahoma uses this system, then the utility is being fairly compensated for the power lines no matter how little electricity the customer actually buys.
It's about time that power companies realize that their most important goal is not in providing customers with a quality source of electricity, but in making investors as much money as possible.
Except considering the fact that 98% (not an exaggeration) of damage to roadways from vehicle traffic is caused by large trucks, the electric car driver swho pay no gas taxes are actually paying much closer to their fair share than the automobile driver (particularly the low income one), who gets shafted. Just another example of big business (the trucking industires and htose who employ them) externalizing costs onto the taxpayer.
Then allow the companies to charge a per-kWh-generated fee. Don't increase their base per-kWh-used fee.
It isn't short-sighted. They watched the big Telcos charge Netflix a trumped up access fee for their video streaming business and thought they could use the same strategy--charge a specific group more than anyone else for the same product. Makes good sense in a Government-Regulated Industry.
It will fun to watch and see if they charge vacationers more for each KW use by their house when to usage rate is lower.
These customers currently (using OGE, one of the utilities for Oklahoma as an example) get to sell power during the day at $0.14/kWh and buy it back at night at $0.0027/kWh. They are using the grid as a 500% efficient battery.
If they go to using an actual battery, will have to increase the size of their array many times in order to reach the same level of monthly bill reduction they currnetly have. And they have to buy a battery.
The current plan is an enormous subsidy to solar customers. That's why they will stick with it. Even if a fee is tacked on top which reduces their financial advantage it will still be far more financially advantageous than going off-grid.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
"The state's major electric utilities backed the bill but couldn't provide figures on how much customers already using distributed generation are getting subsidized by other customers"
How does generating your own electricity subsidize other customers? Isn't this just a way of the utilities to gouge more revenue out of people who use less of their expencive electricity.
It's a no win situation.. in Florida that woman wanted to get off the grip and they sued her, saying she had to stay attached, and therefore had to pay..
It's all about their profit margins, plain and simple.
One of the big issues with paying customers that generate electricity is that it costs the utility company more per wattage to pay a customer generating solar power than if they were to generate the extra power themselves. I am not sure about OK law, but I know in NY it was a major issue because of some funky laws in regards to the reimbursement of customer generated power being put back into the grid.
User generated power shouldn't be a burden on the power company. They should be able to reimburse at cost.
>I think the electric companies have a pretty good point that they still have to pay to maintain lines to your house even though you are now consuming a fraction of what you would have.
Which is why I, as a solar customer, pay $12 a month to PG&E to maintain the grid.
It's interesting that OK thinks that it's OK to change solar customers higher *power rates* instead. This means that it will penalize people for having smaller solar installations, and still not recover any extra tariffs from large installations that break even (or come close to it).
I should also mention that PG&E has been lobbying furiously in the state to void the CA state senate's decision that they need to pay me 3c/kWh for any excess generation I produce. We're still freeloaders, somehow, even though they're technically the ones trying to freeload on us.
It's amazing how much bullshit they and their shills have spit over the issue, and how the local newspapers have lapped it up, uncritically.
Do Oklahoma power companies not charge separately for connectivity and power consumption?
I thought it was common sense to be charged a fixed daily rate and an additional rate per kWh.
The fixed rate is supposed to pay for transmission lines, maintenance, billing, customer support etc. The kWh rate pays for generation.
It's true that the vast majority of damage to roadways is from trucks, but there's also an opportunity cost of roads to which every road user contributes.
In other words, if you could magically remove a portion of users from the roads without affecting commerce, you could reclaim some of the lesser-used road lanes for taxpaying businesses and thereby improve that land's cost effectiveness to the city.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
"If fewer people are dying from cancer pharmaceutical companies will make less money, so fewer people will invest. Lets let more people die from cancer so big pharma can continue to profit."
If homes with the solar panels had electrical storage systems and disconnected from the utility, the utility would not have a case. It's hard for me to understand why people attack the utility when the money types get a free ride paid for by those who can't cash in. The crowd that can afford the solar panels can afford to chip in to help support the utility. I live in an apartment. Why should my bills have to help cover the extra capacity needed when the solar panel people have a bad day and want the power.
At its core, Solar is solar and it all suffers from one glaring problem, it's extremely difficult (i.e. impossible) to accurately project how much power you will get from an installation at any single instant. Power grids must always have excess capacity available or risk going down and most industrial sized power plants take hours to throttle up while usually providing very little storage capacity. So you have to schedule hours in advance how much fuel to burn which means you have to know how much power you will need to have. Solar power may or may not be available and may come and go on a partly cloudy day, meaning that providers have to schedule excess capacity to cover for this uncertainty. This means that a Kw/H from a solar plant is worth somewhat less than from a power source that is easier to predict because it wastes more fuel to keep enough capacity in the system when you use solar.
This issue with solar will *not* go away. What may happen is that we may be able to someday store electrical power and smooth out the uncertainly.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I don't know how or where this "grow or die" idea began, but it's just plain wrong.
It's not grow or die. It's grow or lose investors. If I own a company (I'm a shareholder) and want a return on my investment the only way for that to occur is for the company to grow. In fact it has to grow faster than the rate of inflation or I will be losing money. The company has to engage in profitable activities sufficient to generate a return for investors. If the future value of risk adjusted cash flows is lower than another potential investment then the company will lose investors because they will put their money into the other investment.
You can't have infinite growth within a finite market.
I've never seen a company experience infinite growth or anything close so that's kind of a meaningless statement. You can however have substantial growth rates for a long time both for a company and for a market. There are companies that have grown by 10%+ per year on average for decades.
Size? Potential size?
you mean in square feet?
No, no -- he's clearly talking in terms of coconuts to sparrows.
:-P
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Where I live a large number of summer homes are unoccupied the majority of the year, to get around zero charges for empty homes (which still require system maintenence to keep connected) the utility charges a daily connection fee, coupled with slightly lower per KWh charges.
This change in billing structure could easily solve the $0 solar customer problem.
However the proposed changes, raising the base rate, will also encourage energy conservation.
What the hell are you talking about. Any engineer will tell you that generating power at peak demand is much more expensive on the plant than at other times. So even though the customer is being billed zero, the utility still gains. Of course the utilities are greedy bastards so they go to the government for more money that they somehow feel they are entitled to. You see the utilities are the real welfare queens here.
Further, they should go to charge you based on "time of use" for that Kw/H.
Personally, I think the electric company should *pay* (at a discount) the Solar customer for each Kw/H the customer provides based on their current cost on the wholesale market and not pay at the customer's current retail price. Yes, customers may get more or less than they pay depending on when the power is supplied to the grid, but this would more closely reflect the utilities actual costs and benefits.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
If Oklahoma uses this system, then the utility is being fairly compensated for the power lines no matter how little electricity the customer actually buys.
OG&E certainly does not do this, but that would certainly be a fair way to do it. Of course, then you run the risk of pissing people off with your complicated and proliferous line item charges,
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Screw the power company then... instead of sending excess back to the grid, store it yourself. They have (albeit pricey) house-sized batteries for just this purpose. Then you can end up giving even less money to power company.
Obviously that doesn't work, the power company would go broke and no-one would have power, except while it's sunny.
So why don't they fix their broken model and charge a fixed fee for everyone that is connected to the grid. Oh wait, they already do that (albeit a nominal fee).
The "fair" solution is to set a fixed fee so that their grid-maintenance costs are covered. Then they can reduce their tariffs to reflect the true price of generating (not delivering) the electricity.
In the future we very well could have massive arrays of solar panels in space (think LEO) with ground stations receiving the incoming electricity. In the really far off future, we may even come up with a real world Dyson Sphere. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
All theoretical, but so was electricity before we understood its properties.
Lets see them budget the cost of not having to build peaking plants and extra full power plants as renewables slow the need for growth.
:)
Accounting works both ways
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
hat the hell are you talking about. Any engineer will tell you that generating power at peak demand is much more expensive on the plant than at other times.
What the hell are YOU talking about? The people with panels arent generating much power at peak usage times -- they are drawing power at peak because the sun isnt above their house. At peak the sub is approaching or already below the horizon.
Given this, nothing you said makes any sense at all. its like you dont even have the first clue about what you are talking about. Seems fishy to me that you would be so gung-ho to post on a topic you for certain know that you dont understand. Almost as if you are just repeating some shit someone else said, because you share some sort of bond, such as a god damned bleeding heart.
"His name was James Damore."
The problem is that they have a system with a single count that just runs backwards. They should charge retail for kwh used and reimburse at wholesale for what the solar or wind generation feeds back into the grid. That way the grid usage still results in a net charge.
Peak demand usually occurs between 11:00 and 2:00 pm. There is plenty of sunshine on rooftops at those times, so the panels are in fact generating power.
Under the "International Property Maintenance Code" people must be connected to the grid. They have been enforcing this in Florida using SWAT, just look up the news articles.
Did you click "reply" on the wrong post, because it doesn't sound like you read mine.
Let's pretend for a moment that solar can actually work on a large scale, maybe some new solar panel comes out that's 500% efficient. So most companies install solar panels. Therefore, the power company doesn't have to generate ANY power around noon. They save boatloads of money, right? They don't need to generate that peak power. (Not on sunny days, anyway, they still need to maintain the capacity.)
Okay, so the utility is now spending less. They are also billing most customers $0. They have zero revenue. Explain to me how you run a large utility without any money.
That WOULD be fair, for everyone to cover their share of the cost, what it actually costs to provide service to them. It's not politically possible, though, because residential bills would jump much higher. For years now, residential rates have been heavily subsidized by business customers. Outside of cities, it can cost hundreds of thousands to run lines several miles to serve a few households that have acreage. Suzy the barrel racer isn't going to pay $50,000 for the power to her house and barn.
Making it fair (everyone pays their own costs) would result in 500 happy companies for every 100,000 pisses off households (voters).
Because right now the utility has to put on peaker plants during peak power (which are run on natural gas or even diesel and pretty expensive compared to their base load plants) or build way overcapacity base load plants and shunt the excess into the earth. They're doing the former by the by. Peaker plants are expensive to operate, and buying solar for "market rates" solves a lot of this peak demand. Also, the utility in question already charges separate amounts for line charges (fixed costs charged as a per day charge) and usage (variable costs based on usage). So even if everyone did this (which they cannot because of a wide range reasons such as tall buildings and apartments without enough southern exposure for generating even close to what they use, to large scale industries who would have to buy acres of panels to offset their usage) the company would still make money on line charges, would end up ditching most their peaker plants and probably never have to upgrade the base load plants. So no, they cannot make money on zero revenue but there is no way they will get zero revenue under any rational system.
You are absolutely right. You should start sending me that $500 / month you're saving for retirement. In 20 years, I'll send the exact same amount back. There is no reason you should be getting that gain from your mutual fund.
Oh, I forgot. You're clueless, so you're probably not saving for retirement, but rather expecting the government to take the money I save and give it to you. Anyway, just loan me $1,000. I'll pay you back in 20 years. The interest rate? What do you mean interest rate? Why would you expect a return?
They can even break it down more by showing you the cost of generation, transmission, and distribution.
This change won't fix it. They're still doing billing based on net metering, which means a net zero consumer will still pay $0 (if I'm reading it right). They're just charging people with small solar systems a lot more.
PG&E does it with a monthly minimum for grid-tied solar systems, which is reasonable (or not, depending on the size of the minimum). But they're still lobbying hard to destroy rooftop solar in the state.
The utilities already charge a flat baseline connection fee. That should take care of all infrastructure and grid maintainance. If you want it your way then I say get rid of the flat connection fee.
you are named Raplh Wiggam right ?
Both thoroughly shitty examples of their respective product lines.
In Texas the State forced the Electric Utility to separate the delivery/distribution and generation portions of the business. Everyone pays the same fee for the distribution/delivery (infrastructure) and you are free to choose which provider generates the electricity you use. Of course there is a bit of a sham there in that many of the largest providers in Texas are all owned by the same holding company but it has helped bring a TINY bit of competition and downward pressure on electricity here. In this model a Solar/Wind customer would still be required to pay a monthly fee for the infrastructure and would pay or be paid based on their net usage or surplus generation of electricity. Of course I have no idea if that is actually what happens here in Texas and since it makes some sense, I actually doubt it. :)
The token connection fee, $2 or whatever, isn't significant. Get a cost quote to build power poles and run lines out to this guy's ranch and tell me $2 makes any difference whatsoever to the discussion.
If the connection fee were a) significant and b) based on the actual cost to run utilities to that particular customer, then you'd have a point. That, and if the utility were not forced to buy power they can't use. In some areas, utilities have to shunt power to ground, throwing it away, on sunny days - but they still have to buy the solar power they have no use for and have to pay to dispose of it.
The utilities already charge a flat baseline connection fee. That should take care of all infrastructure and grid maintainance. If you want it your way then I say get rid of the flat connection fee.
Do you know for certain that this is the case with this utility? I have a house in California that does not have a baseline connection fee. I have a house in Arizona that does have a baseline connection fee. I don't have a house served by this utility and don't know if they actually have a baseline connection fee.
Investors know there is risk. Sheesh. When deciding which stock to buy, they weigh risk against potential returns. If the potential returns drop for a stock, and/or the risk goes up, investors will make the perfectly rational decision of buying a different stock instead. That's all this is about.
Here in phoenix the plan I have with SRP charges me a $30 flat connection fee every month. $30 should be enough to cover line maintainance.
The Man wants us to pay for power.
Free power.
Power from the Sun.
An unlicensed, unregulated nuclear fusion reactor that gives us free power.
Power from the Wind.
An unlicensed, unregulated energy distribution device that consists of air that respects no international or state borders.
The Man wants you to be Serfs.
And this is why Solar and Wind are dangerous.
Because Freedom.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
I mean, really, "LEO"? Are you insane? You don't even understand the basics of space. It's always people like you with a childish Star Trek view of space that have the most insane ideas about space.
It makes sense in the long term, because the lines have to be taken care for, regardless of the direction of how the meters are spinning.
There will be blowback though. It is very easy to have several circuits in a house on battery power, and instead of using an inverter to backfeed the electric company, have a charge controller keep a battery bank charged and attach inverters to that for very clean, stable power. No, these won't run an A/C unless one has a disproportionately large solar array, but stuff like computers and other electronic items can be moved completely from mains power.
This might be a good thing though... less power that the utility company has to generate and route, although it would mean less power coming its way from people's houses.
People can certainly do that. Having priced such systems a couple of times, I don't know why anyone who has access to utility power would spend huge piles of money on batteries that only last a few years, though. Maybe if there was a law forcing their neighbours to PAY them to waste money on expensive, toxic batteries.
...people who grow vegetables in their gardens during the summer and sell the extras at farmers' markets should pay a higher price than everyone else for vegetables they buy at the grocery in winter.
We subsidise solar here in Australia. It had to be reined in when too many people were putting their small amounts if power back into the grid. It is does not help businesses. It gets stuck at the transformer at the end of the street, then earths. Then everyone gets home at night and starts using base power but get paid by the rest of us because they had the money to buy solar. Its another class thing.
This is a higher BASE rate. Not what they get charged for power. Since the customers are generating power and possibly even getting paid by the power company to do so, they are paying far less than most of us. But they still use the most expensive part of the utility, the lines. Green energy doesn't make power lines any cheaper.
When customers give power back, often the utility is required to pay them for that power. But wind and solar do not provide power to the grid continuously. When the wind picks up or the sun is out, suddenly all these people are providing power at the same time... and not when the power company needs it. The power companies methods of generating power do not ramp up or down easily. For example, coal burning plants operate very inefficiently when they are not running at full capacity. So every watt contributed by wind and solar actually make a coal plant even less efficient.
Shit like this is what will sink green energy. Turn it into a subsidy like Ethanol and it'll never get anywhere.
To paraphrase the last sentence, "People don't like making bad investments in dying industries. We want to require it."
Isn't that their problem? Wouldn't someone else eventually step in and resolve this problem?
Or does the Free Market only provide a solution when it's the masses, and assistance is required for business?
Shouldn't fair share of the maintenance cost go into the cost per kilowatt hour? Sorry, but this smells like energy providers can't take the heat and they're penalizing solar/wind power generators in an effort to make them go "the hell with it" and sell their equipment on eBay.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
That's the Koch's, again, buying legislators.
As usual, their lobbyists (bribe bagmen) provide plausible-sounding bafflegab that has nothing to do with the reality. It's just there because most people cannot even find the details, much less understand them.
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-solar-kochs-20140420,0,7412286.story
OG&E certainly does not do this, but that would certainly be a fair way to do it. Of course, then you run the risk of pissing people off with your complicated and proliferous line item charges,
Of course, when pissed off people have nowhere else to go for their electricity needs, it hardly matters. (Unless pissed-off people are more persuasive to lawmakers than OG&E). But then, my ConEd bill has 9 different line items for electricity (and several more for gas).
Look, these MBA's always chase the sure short-term dollar for a tactical idea, that leaves them with plenty of money, while disregarding long-term strategies.
AE is a utilities best friend. Instead, utilities should be pushing to have a clean separation of power vs. grid. In addition, they themselves should focus on storing the energy and selling it back.
Finally, if these utilities Executives had HALF a brain, they would realize that electric cars are about to come and they can make a killing on these since the majority will charge at night. As such, they can drop the expensive on-demand systems, and focus on lowering their costs to generation.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The problem is that while she doesn't use the city's water--she's collecting rainwater, after all--she does use the city's sewage/drainage system, which isn't free. Waste water goes through a treatment process which costs money, and the city assumes your fair share of this treatment is based on the amount of water you suck in.
Now you can say the problem is the city's and not hers but that only holds water (pardon the pun) if she stops dumping her water into the city's sewage, as she's not paying for it by any measure. And she hasn't done so.
Exactly. That is how I pay for my natural gas, a monthly service fee and charges for BTUs consumed. In the summer my service fee is typically more than my charges for the fuel but in the winter the fees are a fraction of the total bill.
I have no problem with having to pay for the utility to maintain the connection to the service separately to the services provided. If these people want to have the utility buy their power then someone has to pay for the connection. One might assume the utility should pay but it's not the utility that wins out in this arrangement, the homeowner does. Without the utility there the homeowner would have to invest in an expensive battery pack or have the power go out at night.
Without the connection to the utility the homeowner could not sell their power so the homeowner can pay for that connection. The utility might not mind buying the power but the hassle of having to deal with single provider that provides them so little power they might rather not deal with them at all if the utility had to pay for the line to their property too.
The change does not "discourage" wind and solar any more than any other homeowner provided power source. It just turns out that most people don't have a coal fired steam generator on their property.
I can hear it now, "But shouldn't we encourage wind and solar?" I'm not so sure. If wind and solar can't make a profit on its own merits then it's not a viable energy source. "But coal and oil gets subsidies too!" Yep, and they shouldn't get subsidies either. No more energy subsidies.
I like distributed power and we should have more of it. Problem is that the nature of wind and solar have tendencies to destabilize the electric grid. People with solar panels on their roof spreads out the energy generation sources but without utilities keeping the grid in order the rooftop solar panels don't help much. These homeowners need the utility more than the utility needs them. Let them bear the cost of the benefit of the grid connection.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
And here in KS your rates get raised if you use too much, so they need the funds to "build capacity". Use too little and your rates get raised because of "budget shortfalls". Water, electric...doesn't matter. Happens either way.
They are asking the government for a rate change, because the government sets the prices. Does that sound like free market to you?
If it WERE free market, customers would probably be charged based on the cost to serve them. If solar customers demand less from the utility, they pay less. It would certainly make you think twice about moving into the country, to some place where you have ten or twenty acres, though - installing and maintaining a mile of towers and lines for each customer would be expensive.
The electricity providers in Australia already do this... they charge "line access" fees to everybody just for hooking in to the network then charge customers one amount for consumption (e.g.: 23.7c/kWh) and pay customers a different amount for injecting power back into the network (e.g.: 8c/kWh). The amount they pay customers back unfortunately varies from state to state and also depending upon when the customer started providing power to the network: early customers can be getting anywhere up to 46c/kWh back (mostly subsidised by the government) but pretty much everybody now is only getting 8c/kWh (or 8+8c/kWh if you're in Queensland).
At current rates you'd need a 7kW system pumping out full power every weekday so you can break even on your air conditioning costs for the weekend. But the electricity providers are still crying foul and demanding that the government revoke all subsidies and allow them to jack up the line access charges.
Obama his Majesty will order the Killing of All Human and Rat life within the boarders of Oklahoma.
Ha ha
We pay about .08 per kwh on my most recent bill. Power is cheap here. I've seen it as high as 0.13 per kwh (gasp!).
Paying for gas goes toward maintaining roads, so people who buy electric cars are using roads but do not help the cost of maintain them, so they should get charged somewhere to (how liberals like to say) "Pay their fair share"
If people are going to profit from putting their extra solar power on the grid, they should pay to maintain the grid.
The excuse "The company makes a lot of money" is not a valid excuse to be against it. If you have a IRA or 401k, you own some stock in the power company, your retirement (in a small part) depends on the power company making money. (along with oil companies).
Lets see them budget the cost of not having to build peaking plants and extra full power plants as renewables slow the need for growth. Accounting works both ways :)
In the long run, you're correct. In the short run, sadly, my local electricity company applies for a rate increase to cover the depreciation on an already-existing peaking plant that is not being used at full capacity. And it's not limited to electricity. When we conserved water due to a drought, the water utility applied for rate increases, because we were not using enough water. But when we use lots of water, do they offer us a rebate? No, I think not!
That's not what I was told. Peak power consumption typically happens shortly after sunset as people turn on lights, TVs, ovens, and so forth. Business and factory loads are winding down at that point but residential loads are winding up at the same time and overlap.
Solar power not only does not help in this case it hurts. There's all kinds of good information on this if you take off your solar powered blinders long enough to read some of it.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Germany has been talking about requiring storage along with residential solar. Solarcity is now advertising it (yes, they're using the Tesla tie-in): https://www.solarcity.com/residential/energy-storage.aspx. Systems with storage often are not eligible for net metering even if it's offered - why? But this kind of setup would simply reduce your demand so the meter would only run in the middle of the night. Or you could go nearly off-grid with a big enough battery (the building permits people make you keep the wire connected, and some utilities charge a connection fee even if you don't use any power). Makes it all more expensive but those with money care if the utility company gets stupid oink oink enough. Seems like it's just a ploy to get more money from those who don't have the cash, or have other people get more money from those who do. Corporate-owned America - don't you love it?
Whether they are successful is another matter. That they will be successful is only a foregone conclusion in a country where people steadfastly stick to the belief that political donations are speech and that corporations have rights in addition to the rights of the individuals it employs. Until that changes nothing else will change ... regulation or deregulation.
That silly invented problem was probably dreamed up by some intern assisting in the a political office because it is certainly divorced from the reality of it making things easier on the transmission side for many reasons. I suggest considering the situation in technical terms instead regurgitating political dogma designed to fool people who do not go to the trouble of considering it in technical terms.
If you are having trouble I suggest first thinking about how low voltage DC is changed into higher voltage AC any time since transistors could cope with enough current. It's not done with induction coils and valves so where are those spikes going to come from.
Either you have been conned or you are attempting to trick others. This site is definitely the wrong place for stating stupid lies about simple electrical concepts.
Not in this world sunshine. In this world we have a lot of wires running around the place so that other places can get that energy from photovoltaics at times of peak demand, which is in day time since few businesses operate at full capacity 24/7.
Please read what you've written, consider it, correct your mistake and resubmit. If that's not acceptable and makes you look disloyal to The Party and endangers your chance at getting promoted to Commissar then perhaps you would have better luck posting to another site where belief is considered far more important than reality.
Solar is even used at Dome A in Antarctica FFS - easy to install because it's on vertical poles! You sound like some guy complaining about how the horse will never be replaced by the motor car.
I believe such a comment after your misinformed comment about the peak happening after sunset is what is called an epic fail.
Even in the short term there's local transmission equipment that needs to be upgraded as peaks rise, or not if they do not rise so rapidly.
Electric Utilities are heavily regulated. I am not sure about Oklahoma, but in many states the rate that utilities can charge is tied back to the cost of electric production
Sure, and the battles over the rates that utilities pay for customer-generated electricity are raging right now.
Since electric production tends to be capital intensive
But in this case the utility customers are putting up the money!! I blew $19,000 on solar panels, my utility got a new source of electrons for no money down! I'm taking on the risk for them!
Feeding electricity back into the grid is not a free lunch for the utilities – there are costs involved.
Well the utilities say that, but it's mostly fear-mongering. The wires they built to send electricity to my house will happily carry electricity in the other direction. And again, compared to building a new fossil fuel plant buying my excess instead of fueling a plant is easy money for the utilities.
(and I am sure that electric utilities will whine loudly in an exaggerated fashion as they fight a rearguard action.)
That's what this is all about. Most states have net metering: if the utility sells to me at 15/kWh , I can sell my excess to them at the same rate. It's currently a win for the utilities because they're getting electrons in the hot summer with minimal capital cost, but they're throwing up roadblocks and raising rates now in fear of a future where a significant percentage of their customers are selling to them. In a fair system they would pay me what they would pay to run a plant at that moment, less a transmission fee and plus a bonus that my electrons are low CO2. this month's Sierra Magazine lists state-by-state efforts to fight net metering, refuse to hook up new solar installations, etc. South Carolina sounds worse than Oklahoma, there "initial determination that rooftop-solar leases should be banned as unfair competition to the utility industry."
In a sane approach to limiting global warming, there would be taxes on fossil-generated electricity or (less ideally) carbon emissions trading, and the utilities would be trying to figure out how to decrease those costs. Well hey look, our customers are putting up their own capital to solve the problem for us!
It's a similar situation with V2G (Vehicle 2 Grid) to cope with demand spikes and brown-outs. Electrical vehicle owners could be a huge instantaneous reserve of electrons to avoid, without the capital and operational costs of having dirty peaker plants on standby. There have been dozens of studies of this, but again the electric utilities are allergic to the idea of paying their customers. Most owners would be willing to let the utility drain 20% of their battery, but not if they get nothing in return.
I naively hoped that the electric utilities would be happy about distributed renewable power generation and would evolve to work with customers who are also suppliers to their mutual benefit. But it turns out they're wedded to the idea of burning fossil fuels to make electricity to sell to us, and many are in bed with the fucking Koch brothers. But soon they'll need electrons more than people with renewables need them: "SolarCity is partnering with electric car company Tesla ... to store solar energy in battery packs for use at night, with a connection to the grid solely for backup."
=S
It's hard to believe you've written that in 2014. I suggest you stop recycling drivel that was probably proven wrong before you were born.
This doesn't make any sense. Can you think of a single business that just hires people because they feel that "everyone has to work" just so they can give them a paycheck?
Of course now, and that's because you never hire people until you have to. If you could buy a robot to do that job (and robots cannot really do too many jobs right now) you would - if they cost less that paying someone to do it. Successful employers are in the business of making money, not just hiring people for no reason.
Power grids must always have excess capacity available or risk going down and most industrial sized power plants take hours to throttle up while usually providing very little storage capacity. ... we may be able to someday store electrical power and smooth out the uncertainly.
There's a fix for that: all the electrical energy stored in electric vehicle batteries. Hence the dozens of studies and pilot programs of Vehicle 2 Grid systems where the utility can work with its customers to meet peak demand. And just like rooftop solar, the customer is spending the $1000s per kWh capital costs, not the utility!
But just like rooftop solar, when it comes to a utility actually paying its customers instead of billing them... Does. Not. Compute. <Utility looks around wildly for government people to influence so it can raise rates>
=S
That they will be successful is only a foregone conclusion in a country where people steadfastly stick to the belief that political donations are speech and that corporations have rights in addition to the rights of the individuals it employs.
Because there's only one interest possible in the corporate world - make some quick bucks for these particular electricity companies? No. You don't get it. This is not the only corporate interest out there. Even in a world dominated by corporate interests, which isn't the case in Oklahoma or the US, there would still be conflicts between the corporations.
Also, we see once again that certain people are willing to take rights away from business owners and employees. You still have that little problem that it is unconstitutional. The Constitution doesn't make an exception for agents of corporations from its lists of rights, enumerated or not. The whole point of corporate personhood is to honor those rights.
Screw their greed
While driving around Honolulu back in February I couldn't help but notice something crazy like 1 out of every 6 homes had solar panels and/or solar hot water panels on their roof. I was in shock at the sheer number of solar panels strewn about on every single size and type of house I saw. I don't know what the power company there does but they seem to have it figured out since they seem to still be in business and everyone has power. I don't think the distribution lines are in any sort of disrepair as I didn't go through inspecting all the lines but it looked to all be in order. What do you think Hawaii has figured out that Oklahoma doesn't?
--- Nothing is secure.
OG&E certainly does not do this, but that would certainly be a fair way to do it. Of course, then you run the risk of pissing people off with your complicated and proliferous line item charges,
Of course, when pissed off people have nowhere else to go for their electricity needs, it hardly matters. (Unless pissed-off people are more persuasive to lawmakers than OG&E). But then, my ConEd bill has 9 different line items for electricity (and several more for gas).
OG&E always points out that they don't make a profit on generating electricity, they pass on the fuel charge to the customer. OG&E makes it's profit on distribution. Of course, what they DON'T tell you is that the company they buy the fuel from is OneOK, which is the parent company of OG&E. That's how you do an end run around the Citizens Utility Board. The CUB can't regulate OneOK because it is not a utility, so OneOK can charge whatever they want for fuel, so long as OG&E doesn't actually charge us more than OneOK charges them.
Oklahoma is the largest producer of Natural Gas per square mile of any state, but we don't have the lowest rates on Natural Gas of any state. OneOK, Chesapeake, Devon and Sandridge sell most of it out of state and charge us a premium for whatever is left.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Because FUCK YOU , that's why.
Hey, where are you going? Come back!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I amazed that the really big problem here wasn't even addressed. Specifically related to Wind and Solar are change rates in production of the sources. When it's just a few people here and there (i.e. no large farms), then the benefits of solar and wind are not a major problem to utilities. However, when these resources are grouped in mass, the actual slope of the change can be much steeper than any type of conventional type of generator can respond to. It doesn't matter if the large generator is natural gas, coal or hydro. I won't even mention nuclear, because those units' output needs to be as steady as possible. Equipment on the grid is expecting 60HZ (at least in North America), so if a major cloud covers a city that is saturated with solar, then the rest of the grid has to respond quickly -- nearly instantaneously -- and then when the cloud goes away, the generation has to back off again. The same can happen with a wind farm if a large wind front moves through. You don't hear proponents of solar or wind talking about this issue. And you don't hear utilities speaking on the issue of reliability. If their equipment doesn't respond quick enough, then you are at risk of a blackout -- at least on a regional or sub-regional scale.
A solution to this problem would be with storage of the energy, yet very few large scale storage solutions exist. Does this issue really impact the small residential customer? Not so much, because most of those systems have banks of batteries, which tend to absorb the impact described here -- however, most business users and nearly all renewable farms are exposed to this.
I don't really care about the financial issue -- I want to know when someone is going to look at the reliability impact due to these sources. It's a MUCH larger issue -- and much more severe.
This makes sense, which is why it won't apply to the OK situation.
The OK situation has to do with right-wing anti-liberal-hippy-green-power branding. They're out to hurt alternative energy because it offends them. Well, it offends the people that write their bribery checks to be more accurate.
Because FUCK YOU , that's why.
Excellent! The new policy is taking hold
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The answer is adopting solar and wind and putting utility companies out of business completely for being jerks! It would serve the greedy so and sos right!
Fuck the rich assholes who have bought our state and federal lawmakers. And Fuck those lawmakers too. Be sure to wear a condom. Better yet, two.
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Most people seem to be focused on new battery technologies, which are designed to be small and light-weight - which is not important for solar. These newer batteries also tend to last no more than 3-5 years, and they are made of toxic materials. The lack of reasonable battery storage is one major reason I think solar isn't going anywhere.
These old-tech iron-nickel batteries sound very interesting. That information is more convincing than 99% of the pro-solar propaganda I've read on Slashdot.
there would be no problem because excess energy goes back into the grid no more dependence on prehistoric power like coal and foreign oil, no more pollutants to destroy the eco system, no reason to have another Iraq or Iran, defunding those who fund terrorists and you seem to be worried that some millionaires will make a few million less? Whose priorities are askew here? When these same legislators in the pockets of corporate power warmongers and robber barons outsource your job to china and you can't afford any electricity then what?
At some point you have to stop pretending that the guy spitting in your face is there to make polite conversation.
Of course you were surprised, it's not what happens. Who showed you this thing and can the rest of the world see it too or do we just have to take it on trust? You've been bullshitted. Please stop spreading it.
Please tell me you are joking about that being the source that has convinced you of this bullshit.
While loads do vary around the world I certainly saw nothing like that when I was working in power stations.
> If everyone was on solar as you say there would be no problem because excess energy goes back into the grid
There would be no grid! If everyone (or many people) are producing a lot of energy for six hours per day, and therefore paying nothing, there's no money, and therefore no power grid.
> no more dependence on prehistoric power like coal and foreign oil, no more pollutants
For several hours, on sunny days. Except that there is no power, because there is no grid.
"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."
-- one of Robert A. Heinlein's characters in the short story Life-Line, 1939
#Fracking Natural gas is bridge to the ultimate energy hydrogen! And you need nuclear energy to produce massive amounts of Hydrogen with renewable green nuclear energy!
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/02/renewable_green_nuclear_energy_here_now.html #frackoff
Power lines are shared. If I go off the grid that powerline is still going to run down my street. They don't have any justification for the fees they are imposing at this point when only a few people are putting power back into the lines. When areas progress to the point there the line costs are greater than the usage then they can raise prices to make it worth maintaining but before that point it's just an excuse to attack the competition they've never had to deal with before.
Furthermore, base rates are itemized on the bill to cover grid costs already and it has been this way for a long long time. Unless more powerlines are going down or they need expensive regulation gear or upgrades, then the connection fee to cover the grid costs should remain the same for everybody (unless your state lets them charge you by your actual location's cost - which I doubt because rural areas rarely pay the actual cost for their lines.)
Power Utilities are heavily (often poorly) regulated services which should have been publicly owned in the first place. The private ones get all kinds of welfare and free money gaming and corrupting the system. There is no reason they have to remain profitable; they can be regulated to bankruptcy and at that point the public can take them over while we all transition to clean energy. We should not hold back progress just so one corrupt old industry can stay profitable forever. The horse and buggy and iceman went out of business and coal can too. Besides, it's not like they invest in modern infrastructure; they just keep the lines going cheaply as possible and wait for disasters to get gov bailouts to do half ass upgrades.
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Thanks.
Though I wonder where he got 'defending coal mining company jobs' from. Reviewing what I wrote, I think I kept it from really looking at utility generation methods at all.
I don't read AC A human right
This sort of thinking has the cost of the line be $0 every customer but the last one, who's charged millions. Not all that practical. It's much easier to look at the cost of the line* and divide by the number of customers. I'd say it's more fair as well.
You've presented two extremes, and neither represents the most fair and accurate way to allocate maintenence costs.
The most fair and accurate way is to look at who is served by each segment of the line. It makes no sense to make the last customer bear the entire cost of maintaining the entire line; but it does make sense to make him bear the entire cost of maintaining the last segment of the line, which serves only him. The next-to-last segment serves two customers, and its maintenance should be borne by those two customers; the next segment after that serves three, etc.
There are scenarios where simply dividing by the total number of customers can lead to severe misallocation of resources. If the line serves 999 customers who live in a relatively tight cluster, but the 1000th customer wants to build a home 100 miles from that cluster, the utility will never recover the cost of that extremely long line extension if the single customer it serves is permitted to pay "average" rates. The other 999 customers should not be forced to subsidize the new customer's unrealistic desire to live in such a remote location while enjoying all the comforts of civilization.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Distribution utilities pay a wholesale price for each kilowatt-hour purchased from a generating facility. Individuals who want to sell excess power generated by their rooftop unit should have the same status as the big guys -- receiving wholesale, not retail rates for the power they put into the grid. (This encourages right-sizing of an individual's solar installation. Effectively, those individuals do get retail price for the non-excess solar power that they consume themselves.)
Once that level playing field is understood and established, distribution utilities should heartily welcome little guys selling power. The more places you can go to obtain the commodity you're redistributing, the better off you are. Each additional seller makes the market more competitive and makes the network more robust.
Perhaps what is needed here is breaking apart the distribution side of the business and the generation side, so each side can pursue their conflicting interests.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
If Oklahoma uses this system, then the utility is being fairly compensated for the power lines no matter how little electricity the customer actually buys.
That's true if the pricing scheme accurately reflects the costs. If the pricing scheme is a kludge that merely gives the illusion of providing an accurate cost breakdown, it is now coming back to bite them.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
I suggest looking at that right hand graph for at least a full second - and if that is not enough USE A RULER.
It looks like we've hit the depths of a bluff and a link to something that does depict what you say in the hope that it will be followed.
For those that didn't follow the link or didn't look at it properly it is a graph of typical seasonal loads of electric utilities in Eastern New England Division in 1919. That's certainly extraordinary evidence, and while it can be argued that it's probably irrelevant to today's usage it still doesn't have that 6pm peak the above poster says it shows.
I really hate it when comments that are really just politically motivated no holds barred green bashing turn up to try to encourage people to turn away from what is now mainstream technology. You should be ashamed of yourself blindseer.
Ah yes, talking about a 10% loss in transmitting electricity to what is effectively next door in transmission scales even if it takes an hour to get there in traffic - are you SURE you looked up actual figures?
To me it just looks like no holds barred Red on Green political action with a few technical sounding guesses (which you are probably very much aware are not correct) to try to make it look like it's not just an outright lie.
I'd rather this place remained a technical discussion site of a sort instead of a political rant site. You may hate the concept of people not buying power from a Party approved supplier, but the technology works, is mainstream, and I wish it had been on the grid when I was working in power generation and transmission in the 1990s because it would have made dealing with peaks a hell of a lot easier.
Solar panels are not really a "green" thing any more - they are used by people who do not care about politics, so please use a different target for your rants.
Other readers who don't already have an engineering background and time working in the electricity industry should feel free to follow the links and make up their own minds - but I'm sick of arguing against what I see here as either invincible ignorance or active disinformation. I suspect it's the second case and it turns my stomach - you are effectively grooming the kiddies to join up with the politics you are pushing.
Yes, but not very well since you mixed up a 3 and a 6.
The first link does not support your point - total household demand is typically far less than industry demand.
The second is cherry picking by choosing a place with almost no industry.
More utterly disgusting bait and switch. However your strong loyalty to your Party over and above the constraints of morality are noted Comrade.
I don't know how or where this "grow or die" idea began, but it's just plain wrong.
It's not grow or die. It's grow or lose investors. If I own a company (I'm a shareholder) and want a return on my investment the only way for that to occur is for the company to grow. In fact it has to grow faster than the rate of inflation or I will be losing money. The company has to engage in profitable activities sufficient to generate a return for investors. If the future value of risk adjusted cash flows is lower than another potential investment then the company will lose investors because they will put their money into the other investment.
You can't have infinite growth within a finite market.
I've never seen a company experience infinite growth or anything close so that's kind of a meaningless statement. You can however have substantial growth rates for a long time both for a company and for a market. There are companies that have grown by 10%+ per year on average for decades.
Name one. All too often growth is on paper without any substantive change to the day-to-day operation.
No, they don't. My bill only has usage, fuel surcharge and sales tax.
As more affluent people go off the grid people who can not afford home generated power will pay much higher bills as the utilities must hop scotch to get power lines to those forced to buy power. In effect the people who purchase power will be as if they are rural customers, few and far between. Conflict will follow. The same issue will strike with home education over computers. Stable homes with one parent at home can gain from a child being educated at home. Single parent and low income families will require brick and mortar school buildings. Obviously those educating at home will not want to pay taxes for those who are not in a position to educate at home. Colleges will also suffer severe change as the campus may become irrelevant for many college degrees. Technology may act as an amplifier for the friction between the haves and the have nots. The big question is how we get progress to work for all of us without placing burdens on those less fortunate.
-1 for presentation, +3 for accuracy
It shows that you have fabricated a line of bullshit to push a political agenda.
US Energy Information Administration good enough for you?
On average demand peaks at ~1900. Overall power demand starts ramping up at 0500, reaches a relatively stable level at 0800 which lasts to 1700, peaks at 1900 and drops rapidly thereafter.
BTW, I DID go looking for actual household measurements, haven't found them yet.
I don't read AC A human right
Also known as rent seeking behaviour.
I'd better provide a simple thought experiment as to why the line you have been fed is bullshit, and as to why you should not have accepted it unquestioningly.
Let's consider an extreme.
Consider a well off area that has also got an insanely generous government handout for installing solar panels, a place with more houses with solar panels than anywhere else. Let's say it is a very sunny day, as sunny as it gets, but a nice breeze is blowing so it's not hot enough to run airconditioners. Let's say it's also a public holiday so a lot of people have turned a lot of things off and gone to the beach plus a lot of businesses are closed for the day. Let's say an incident kicks the local substation off the grid - what do you think happens?
What will happen is that even at the extreme end of the solar ownership graph there are enough people, small businesses etc without their own generating capacity but plenty of fridges, pool pumps etc that the total consumed in that area is still much less than the total generated. It means that some people will have electricity in that situation and some won't, and it will fall a long way short of the total demand.
Following me so far?
Let's consider things now at the substation while things are running normally. The area will demand a certain amount of power - it will be asking for less than anywhere else but will still be getting quite a bit off the grid and won't be sending anything back. Thus all locally generated power is used locally which means nearly zero line losses and no conversion up from 110/240V to 11kV or whatever so no losses there either.
Do you see it yet? Household solar is still a tiny proportion of generating capacity and even if it reaches saturation the electricity consumption of local retail, light industry etc is going to take all excess and ask for many times more in just about every situation.
Do you see now why I get so annoyed at people pulling such a blatant con as the one that was pulled on you and you innocently passed on? The "losses" confidence trick is of the scale of a manufacturer of dentures saying that brushing teeth is bad because it causes tooth decay.
In reality when an area demands less power that reduces network and generation costs. It doesn't "cause problems". It reduces them.
I think you need to re-read what 'strawman' means:
"The so-called typical "attacking a straw man" implies an adversarial, polemic, or combative debate, and creates the illusion of having completely refuted or defeated an opponent's proposition by covertly replacing it with a different proposition (i.e., "stand up a straw man") and then to refute or defeat that false argument, ("knock down a straw man,") instead of the original proposition."
I'll admit that I changed your proposition a bit - but I did so with the intent of firming it up enough to actually analyze it. While doing so I used public data that was available for basically the exact situation you described. I even cited it.
Second, While it might be a while if HECO has it's way, the fact that HECO was stopping connections because areas were hitting 100%(check the links!) tends to indicate that without those brakes 'not likely to happen any time soon' could be next year.
Though I should probably ask what you mean by 'substation level'. How many homes do you expect to see served by a substation? Do substations typically service mixed user groups, IE residential, commercial and industrial?
I don't read AC A human right
On 120% being a strawman:
Hawaii solar boom so successful, it's been halted, Dec 20, 2013:
On Oahu, 10 percent of utility customers will have rooftop solar by year-end, Rosegg said. That compares with California, where it is 2 to 3 percent, he said. And demand for new connections for PV has been heavy.
The new edict for Oahu mostly focuses on grid circuits where power available from rooftop solar reaches or exceeds 100 percent of the minimum daytime load, the low point of the total power that customers on a circuit are using.
About one-fourth of circuits on Oahu are at 100 percent, Rosegg said. At the current rate of adoption, Harris said, all electrical circuits controlled by the utility could be closed to small-scale solar within six months.
Changes could include adding grounding transformers or increasing the capacity of a substation, Rosegg said.
Combine the above statements with the power company allowing 120% Daytime Minimum Load(DML) that I found earlier, how long will it be before substations are seeing that 120%? Don't forget that commercial companies can install solar panels as well. I drive by that building fairly frequently, and it's not the only one with solar panels.
Another NREL study on Hawaii's issues, detailing technical information on WHY they're concerned.
I don't read AC A human right
One hundred fucking percent of residences. Did that make the point clearly enough so you can't pretend to not get it this time? Stop pretending to be too stupid to breath and take this seriously.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that a solar generating unit can't just be taken off the grid like any other unit when the desired capacity is reached. What did you think those very expensive controllers that come with mains connected solar panels do?
If it was a taxpayer owned utility in those islands they would be cheering on the situation since they could save a lot of expensive fuel costs. It's only a compliant because it's a commercial enterprise seeing a reduction in profits. People still want power at night so the company is not doomed but they do not want to lose the profits they currently have - it's harder to gouge on low volume than high.
All of that should be very obvious once you know that there is zero threat of "overload" or whatever you have been imagining.
If we ever do get to the point where an area can supply your mythical 120% then that is actually very good news. Then instead of not accepting excess from panels beyond the 100% in the substation area it becomes financially viable to put in some gear to move the excess across to the next substation,. So once again, instead of creating problems it's reducing others. I can't see it happening soon at full peak load anywhere even if it may be able to work at 6am in Oahu in a few years. If it can happen there, good luck, I think they burn oil there so taking units off line means you can stop feeding them expensive fuel and get them up pretty quick when you need them later.
As an aside that may help with understanding, windmill farms and in some cases large arrays of photovolatics are made up of lots of little electricity generating units that are connected to the grid as required and disconnected when not needed. That's the only reason why windmills are in the mainstream of electricity generation at all - you need another 1.5MW so you connect another expensive and tiny windmill but the alternative is spending hours warming up 250MW of cheap coal capacity that devours fuel at a tremendous rate so at low demand costs a hell of a lot more per MW than a few little windmills. Rooftop solar is designed to be operated the same way with the excess generation capacity. Too much power? Stop it sending excess to the grid. The people living under it won't even notice unless they are getting paid for whatever they feed back into the local power network.
No, the only way for you to get a meaningful return on your investment is for the company to show a profit. Companies grow without profit all the time; they buy, merge,and create new business units that show up as huge growth but no profit and no dividends. Profits = dividends to shareholders. Growth = executive bonuses.
1. 953,207. Not a 'few thousand'.
2. As a small monopoly, HECO can't really have a world-wide impact. But it serves as a useful case study.
3. You have failed to address the technical problems listed in the links, ergo I still consider them a real-world problem, not 'invented'. Remember, equivalents to 'Nu-huh' don't count.
4. If you're an engineer who's worked with electrical systems, you should realize that powering up said generation capacity takes time, often an OOM slower than supply&demand can change at. A power supply that takes an hour to stand up isn't very useful when you need the power in 60 seconds.
5. The NREL study covers specific ways HECO wants any solar system installs to be set up, concerns about rolling standby power to cover fluxuations*, etc... If you don't think it points out concerns that I have, you're still making silly assumptions about my position(which is the definition of strawman): To restate yet again: I think there's nothing wrong with using solar power. However, as the deployment grows significant the power company/electrical grid MUST change the way they do business in order to cope. This includes altering their generation mix($$$), updating the grid to properly handle bidirectional power flow($$$), and changing their charging system to maintain cash flow in order to pay to maintain electrical infrastructure in areas that are now net neutral for electricity consumption.
*Some of which still needs to be built as solar installs expand.
I don't read AC A human right