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Why Morgan Stanley Is Betting That Tesla Will Kill Your Power Company
Jason Koebler (3528235) writes One major investment giant has now released three separate reports arguing that Tesla Motors is going to help kill power companies off altogether. Earlier this year, Morgan Stanley stirred up controversy when it released a report that suggested that the increasing viability of consumer solar, paired with better battery technology—that allows people to generate, and store, their own electricity—could send the decades-old utility industry into a death spiral. Then, the firm released another one. Now, it's tripling down on the idea with yet another report that spells out how Tesla and home solar will "disrupt" utilities.
I'd believe in small-scale power systems in basements that run off natural gas, or all-in-one nuclear reactors being more likely to disrupt the power industry/grid complex than solar and stored charge. Wind power still has a chance in rural areas were people have larger backyards, though.
Apparently the over-priveledged and intellectually under-equipped "analysts" at Morgan Stanley are trying to give Gartner Group a run for their money... :p
We human have become to dependent on gadgets - it is not that using gadgets is bad, but our over-reliance on the use of gadgets on our daily lives mean we are wasting unnecessary power and those wasted power adds up
Until we can live with using much less than we do now, I do not think the power that we can generate using solar / wind / or whatever green-tech can come up with will give us enough juice to power up all those gadgets that we use
In other words, Morgan Stanley's report are mere fearmongering --- perhaps they do it with an agenda of their own, perhaps they want to short sell the utility stocks and make a killing that way, I dunno
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Translation: "A few of our VP's are long on Tesla stock, so please buy it. We double pinky swear it'll go up, trust us, we're Morgan Stanley".
Home generation through solar is good for everyone.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
.. how is this a bad thing?
Don Head
UNIX/Linux Administrator
Generally such theses are well founded in reason and logic but it's very difficult to make money from them, in this case by shorting the power companies, because not only does the basic premise need to be correct but so does the secondary and tertiary effects of that premise. In other words, these theses have to get multiple predictions correct, some of which are nearly impossible to do so considering all the permutations of possible outcomes.
The energy needed to power vehicles used to come from oil-derivatives (gasoline, diesel fuel). In a way, each car was its own little power plant.
With more and more cars becoming electric — for better or worse — the need for somebody to turn fuel into electricity will increase. That somebody can only be a power company, really... Solar panels remain joke — you need too many of them and making them is rather harmful to Earth. And disposing is a problem too.
So, even if they lose some business to the consumers' ability to generate some share of their own electricity, they'll gain from our increasing total demand for electricity.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
They topped even Citicorp ($99.5 Billion) for the dubious distinction of top dog in the bonus round at the Bailout Games.
They're crooks of the highest order, and anything they ever utter again will fall upon jaded ears.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
In order for solar+battery tech to become a viable solution, there needs to be ways to move the electricity generated by the solar panels to batteries you want to use. I.e. co-locate the two (e.g. panels & cars at home; panels & cars at work) or network them together (e.g. panels at home, cars at work.) The first scenario isn't very likely considering the sun generally shines when people are at work and the concentration of vehicles at work will overshadow the electricity generated by panels at an office building. The second scenario begs the question "who maintains the grid." In the US, this is the power companies, who could presumably adjust their business models and charge network access fees instead of production fees.
What about those, who repent — and denounce their (ex-)fellow RethugliKKKunts to the local people's commissars?
Are their days just as numbered, or will they be allowed to survive on rations of beets, potatoes, and vodka?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I could see something like this working in a place like phoenix AZ. abundant sunlight, *tons* of single family homes. more sunlight than you could ever want to shake a stick at (it would catch fire from the heat).. did i mention it's really sunny? But I'd think the PV cells would need to be a bit more efficient, and the batteries as well.
But, it would probably be feasible *now* if not for running AC during the day. Letting the system charge during the workday. (Yes, you'd want to run your AC from about 5pm until 5am)
But shoehorning sustainability/environmentally friendly living into "oh it would work in a huge metropolitan area in the middle of a fricking desert is completely missing the point of the exercise.
So an investment company has published reports.
Have they started pulling out of investments in power generation and transmission, then?
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Hello Friend,
I'm a Republican, and I'd like to help clear up some of your misconceptions about Republicans.
First of all, killing Americans is not our goal, and never has been. We love America. We love Americans. We love eagles, the most American of all of the birds.
And when I have to make a tough decision, I ask myself one question: What would Jesus do? The answer to that question is always the right answer.
When it comes to energy, I know that Jesus did not use solar panels, he did not use hydroelectric dams, and he did not use wind turbines. Jesus used coal, oil and wood as his primary sources of energy. When he needed to cook, he burned wood. When he needed light, he burned oil in a lamp. When he needed to warm his tent, he burned coal. If those energy sources were good enough for Jesus, then they are good enough for me.
When it comes to health care, I know that Jesus did not go to publically-funded hospitals! When he needed treatment, he acted like a responsible individual and treated himself, even after he had died. When others needed treatment, he acted like a responsible individual and healed them, and even gave them fish. That's why I think that prayer is the only method of medication one needs. If Jesus wants you to heal, he will heal you. If Jesus wants you to be with him, you will join him.
As you can see, we Republicans aren't the mean people that you have portrayed us as. We are loving people. We love America, and we love Jesus. We put the two of them together to form the ultimate kind of love: Republican Love.
Yours Truly,
Richard
From your link:
Solar Energy Comparison with Fossil Fuels
By comparison, solar power is still the clear winner, according to ecology.com, in terms of being more environmentally friendly. When solar power generation is matched against fossil fuel-based energy production, solar is less damaging to the earth. Even the dangers that are presented by solar power are found as often, or more so, in the by-products of fossil fuels, and there is no escaping the fact that a solar panel can provide as much as 20 years of power generation for a single carbon investment of manufacturing the system, which cannot be duplicated by any other commonly used type of energy production, other than wind system
Read more : http://www.ehow.com/list_63278...
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
sign up with a solar lease for my house, flatten my mains bill for 20 years and THEN go buy a volt / leaf / pip / tesla? Or is this subject to the dreaded fine print?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
The argument here is not about large solar power plants, it's about small-scale decentralized power generation.
Half of Americans rent. People who rent can't do anything to their property. Apartment buildings are stuck with whatever they were built with 40 or 50 or more years ago. They're built using the cheapest technology available at construction time and they're never upgraded. When they get old enough they become the bad part of town or in some cases the outright ghetto until they collapse or are torn down. Some people rent houses, but there is no way your landlord going to put solar panels and a charging system in your rental unit, at least not this decade and not bloody likely the next.
When I read here on Slashdot about intelligent devices in homes, or this thing people have called garages, or home chargers for vehicles, or fiber to the home, it kind of makes me laugh because these aren't most people. These are the things that less than half of Americans even have a chance of using.
People who rent aren't necessarily poor. Many renters in New York City, Boston, and San Francisco would be informally considered rich in most of the United States.
The electric company will continue to serve at least 50% of Americans indefinitely.
Yes it can, as long as battery technology improves. Did you happen to see the article on the new Panasonic/Tesla GigaFactory for batteries? Really the only thing holding us back is batteries. As long as the sun keeps on shining, we have a near infinite amount of FREE energy.
To reinforce your point, just ask the people in Toledo Ohio about a centralized water supply that is crippled due to an algae bloom in lake Erie.
Anything that reduces the average home owner's reliance on the grid is good in my book...especially as the infrastructure is so dated and fragile.
Dated and fragile? Where on earth do you get that impression?
The technology of power transmission hasn't fundamentally changed in 100 years. Yea, there is some OLD equipment out there, but it is not like running electricity though wires somehow wears them out, so why would you replace it if it's still working just fine? The same for transformers, if they have enough capacity and are not leaking or arcing over someplace, why replace it? It's not like there is anything better, more reliable or more efficient out there.
The power grid is only fragile at times because we do not keep enough excess capacity in the system for efficiency reasons. But even then, Major blackouts are extremely RARE events and usually are caused by multiple faults and human error. The grid is actually a very tough system, designed to keep operating in the face of lots of unforeseen faults and failures. It routinely takes lighting strikes, component failures, human error and sabotage attempts in stride while it delivers huge amounts of power to almost every location you will find yourself.
What has changed in power distribution of late is the control systems and the efficiency of the power plants, but you are talking about the "grid" which implies the distribution system. Most of these control systems are for efficiency, monitoring and metering and don't really matter to the operation of the actual distribution system, which in most cases would be just fine without the control system watching.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I still get a dam good price on my electric cooking from a private electric company, under $20/mo, mostly due to having a local public utility company to compete with, even if I'm not the public utility company's customer. From what I hear that's not the case in places like Carolina's, where monopolies run rampant and charge anything they feel like,. To them Tesla is a blessing, but I don't really give a crap right now. I do know however that almost any kind of energy independence starts through electric, as renewable energies like wind and solar are electric. Only biofuels are not electric, but the photosynthesis efficiency is like 0.25 compared to 15% for a silicon crystal solar panel, so you're talking a 60x difference in energy capturing area, and that's why they are not worried about natural gas prices, or wood pellets, but they are holding the line low on the electric front, at least in my area. Who likes to be shafted on the price by monopolies, throw yo hands in da aya, and say I!
I think its more correct to say that its difficult to make money from them because the biggest portfolios are already on it. Macroeconomics is too simple. Before anyone retorts about banks needing bailouts... banks arent holding companies. Look at what Warren Buffet is doing (ignore what he is saying, although what he says often jives with what he does) ...
Berkshire Hathaway (Buffets holding company) current has over one billion invested in each of these companies respectively:
Wells Fargo, Coca-Cola, American Express, International Business Machines, Wal-Mart, Procter & Gamble, Exxon Mobil, U.S. Bancorp, DIRECTV, DaVita HealthCare, Moody's, Goldman Sachs, USG, and General Motors
They are ordered from highest ($23 billion) to lowest ($1 billion)
The only energy company, Exxon, is primarily oil and doesnt do much in the generation business. Most of his money is riding on banks right now, and most of those that arent banks are putting out healthy dividends.
"His name was James Damore."
A company making an electric car, which has the potential to roughly double residential electrical demand, is going to put the utilities out of business? Using two of the biggest vaporware technologies around -- practical residential solar and really good batteries? The only thing they left out is nuclear fusion.
I think you're being too kind.
Adapt or Die.
Looks like Morgan Stanley and Tesla are adapting.
Looks like deadenders aren't.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
As opposed to individual contaminated ground water wells? Or a million homes' pipes somehow stuck out into the lake? WTF?
Or are you just bad at coming up with analogies? Because those are the water installations analogous to the situation described.
That is all.
Solar energy can't provide the demands of the average household let alone factories etc who use even more power. Good luck trying to run a washing machine, fridge, dishwasher or drier on solar.
Strange. My dad and his wife do perfectly fine in their three story house in Vermont running on solar.
Maybe you're stuck in the 70s?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
You would think, but the big issue with renewable energy is that when the power is flowing, you have to use it. Storage is not increasing at the rate of improvements in tech. But that's changing. With better batteries, electric cars plugged into the grid can act as a large storage system. The batteries can be both filled and drained by the grid, meaning that energy can be stored and pulled from the network of cars that are sitting idle. This (potentially) fixes the storage issue of renewables, and allows for a decentralized grid, which is far more resilient to damage. So, as Morgan Stanley suggests, the age of the centralized power source may soon be over.
That's a good example of FUD, because if solar systems ever get cheap enough for large numbers of people to go off the grid, then as the remaining customers' bills rise, it will make more and more sense for them to go off the grid as well. "So it'll just work itself out naturally," to quote one of the Bobs.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Most people in Seattle don't run AC. In fact, most cars here rarely turn on their air conditioning.
Not everyone lives in the South.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Solar panel production can only have environmental disadvantages in third world countries without environmental regulations.
I doubt you live in such a country so stop spreading FUD.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
HVDC is the biggest and most fundamental change but it's still rare. However substations are also full of plenty of things granddad would not recognise.
gosh where indeed. oh right, a power issue in Canada takes out electricity for millions of people not even in the country. It was due to 1(one) fault.
SCADA infrastructure is woefully out dated.
"The technology of power transmission hasn't fundamentally changed in 100 years. "
um, yes it has. sure you see wires and thing its the same, but the tech to make the wires, to step up and down the power has vastly improved. This is why we have so little power loss compared to even 50 years ago.
"so why would you replace it if it's still working just fine?"
it's not.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Sounds like you're just looking for an excuse to dis solar power.
I used to eat a noncooked diet, but I find that cooking rice/potatoes/eggs, plus raw veggies + electric is a cheaper and tastier way to go than the allergy prone bread(wheat,gluten)/mayo(soybeans)/cheese(nonlactose but very expensive protein)/milk(lactose protein)/veggies diet. Out of the above the 20lb bag of rice from the Asia Supermarket nearby by far outdoes everything else on food vs. price, and ease of storage. Which must be why half the world's population lives on rice, not bread. , Only ease of consumption is more difficult for rice than the other, but not worse than wheat that has to be turned into bread, or potatoes that also have to be cooked forever - both my hotplate and microwave must be near 1500-2000W, and potatoes take 15-20 minutes to bake in the microwave, whether you bake 1 or 6 at the same time, while I can fry rice in less time on the hotplate, and drain the oil save it for next time, as that's the really expensive part. Then dump water on top of it, bring it back to a boil, once it bubbles, pull the plug and walk away. 15 minutes later it swelled up and ready. As a vegetarian, I really can't live without eggs, for protein. Rice, potatoes and bread just does not have enough protein for omnivores like humans, cheese does, but that's even more expensive than meat, compared to eggs being really cheap. I'm a vegetarian mostly for cost reasons, if they sold meat at 5 cents a lb and eggs over $1/dozen, I'd definitely be eating meat, as long as it's kosherly killed, and learn to deal with any repulsion I'd have against it, in the name of good economy.
You could easily plug your washer into the car for the necessary short burst of juice, and then let the car charge back up from the sun.
But how do I get my car down my stairs? The stairwell to the basement is too small...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Batteries are already very efficient.
Perhaps you mean their limited lifetime/charging cycles, or limited capacity in relation to size and weight?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The utilities are sticking their heads in the sand and trying to pretend that technology won't move forward. In some places they are trying to add an interconnect fee for those with solar panels that's as large as my electricity bill. They also are requiring solar panel inverters to stop working entirely when the grid goes down, instead of just providing power for the house and still leaving the grid upstream unenergized. All this, and the price of electricity keeps going up. And they expect people won't move forward with batteries as technology improves?
Disconnecting from the grid entirely is large investment: people need a large solar array, several days worth of batteries, and probably smart appliances (mainly air conditioners and refrigerators). Or the utilities can make money helping to create a lower-investment intermediate option: staying connected to the grid with a smaller solar array and half a day worth of batteries which both help the utility with load balancing and can keep the house powered when the grid goes down. If they do this right, they will be able to remotely control when the system is storing energy or sending it to the grid, which probably means it's in their best interest if they write the software and maybe even make and sell (and install?) the hardware.
Plus, they can provide monitoring services and, if they want to really diversify, insurance services or financing options. Otherwise, as more people abandon the grid, it will become more expensive per person to maintain it, creating a downward spiral of grid usage.
Solar panels are no joke. They're already out-competing all other forms of electricity on price in some places in the USA.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
And all those great new Tesla batteries will cut the cost of producing steel in electric arc and induction furnaces. And then there's converting bauxite into aluminum.
Cars will be (almost) free. Bridges will be cheap. There will be an airplane in every garage. I can't wait.
That sites like "ecology.com" declare solar to be a winner is not surprising. That they even ask a question, however, is a sign, that things aren't as obvious and clear-cut, as some would like the rest of us to believe.
Just twenty years ago we were lead to believe, growing more corn for conversion to ethanol would save the Earth and otherwise make the world a better place. That turned out to be a lie, but you wouldn't find a mention of it on ecology.com. Or, maybe, you would nowadays, but it is hardly trumpeted the way "progressive" politicians were praised for pushing ethanol and the "kkkonservative" ones — lambasted for opposing it.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Did they repay it with interest or not? Public good.
In Australia ATM, a dodgy deal with the monopoly owners of the grid's "poles and wires" has enabled and encouraged a massive over investment. Causing prices to rise for just about everyone. At the same time, in response to recent economic woes, the government was offering large subsidies to residential investment in solar panels.
As I travel around our suburbs now, solar is everywhere. And there is actually talk about the grid going into a death spiral. Their customers are reacting to rising prices by installing more solar arrays, even though the government subsidies have ended. There's a good chance that some of the over investment in the grid will never be needed at all.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Trying to still keep Nikola Tesla down even from the grave!
More importantly - timing matters. Even if they are 100% correct, power companies will continue to make money for a decade. As for the "market disruptor", if you are just a few year wrong, you would have put your money in MySpace rather than Facebook. If you sold your investment in real estate in 2006 you hit gold, if you did it in 2004 or 2008, you lost.
We are a long way from when a portable battery can compete with a tank full of diesel fuel in power density. It is vaporware at best...
Sure. And the liquid fuel can be transfered from one gas-tank to another — and with less of it lost due to spillage.
I wish it were true, but I doubt it — and suspect, MS is either engaging in wishful thinking or simply trolling the rest of us, while keeping their stocks of power-producers (and buying more).
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Even without subsidies, this model has reasonable pay back period in places like Arizona or Hawaii. Of course storage technology is very bad at residential levels. Solar thermal has better storage using molten salt. But not viable at homes. But home storage does not have the size, weight and crashworthiness requirements of auto batteries. The flywheel storage mechanical batteries might become viable. But almost all the proposed storage have issues.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
shrug. I kinda doubt it, but if so, maybe utilities need to be disrupted.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Perhaps. Would not that explain, why China's share of the panels produced in the world has been steadily climbing and reached 45% in 2010? Making the devices in countries with effective regulations is cost-prohibitive.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
If that company provides good enough and cheap enough batteries for a lot of people to use nothing but rooftop solar all day and night - yes it's certainly going to deliver a shock to the worst run power companies that only survive due to a local monopoly. There's still plenty of little Enrons in the mix.
It's got to the point where price gouging in some places is enough to drive people to spend the large capital cost for solar panels plus storage and go mostly or completely offgrid, which then makes the utilities scream because they are being exposed to the cold winds of capitalism and making less monopoly profit! Poor babies!
Around here we have lots of windfarms and more going up every day, at least in rural parts of the state. I've never thought of my local electricity grid as all that bad actually, rarely goes down except in large ice storms, and it's pretty cheap. ($0.08/KWh).
Though when Solar or some combination of it and propane/natural gas can more cheaply run an A/C unit in a midwest summer--that will be the end of big utilities.
Little known fact electricity running through wires degrades the wires and the protective jacket on them.
Wires from a home built in the 1970's are often so brittle that they crumble. not just the jacket coatings but the copper itself. This is due to heat. Heat comes from resistance.
As you pass electricity through the wires they heat up and cool off. then you have summer heat, and wind storms, and eventually you get cables that snap. but before they snap they are discharging electricity into the air and anything around them.
Copper lasts longer than Aluminum. But in time both wear out. The bigger the cable and the lower the load the longer it lasts.
So yes the system is dated and fragile. Like bridges wires only get upgraded and replaced after they cause problems or fall down.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
If you had enough battery capacity - which is what a Tesla car is supposed to be - you could run a washing machine off solar, as long as you charge the batteries for 10 hrs, and run the washing machine for 20 minutes, depending on your battery and solar power capacity of course. Your calculator solar cell is never gonna run your washing machine, even if you wait 2 years to gather the charge. A rooftop solar might directly run it, or maybe a 20 minute run with continuous charging off of a 40 minute paused charging time. By the way a big problem with new batteries compared to lead acid is the discharge rate, the peak amps, though if you have a large enough battery, such as for a whole house, or a car, you can go completely lead free, and even the Edison nickel-iron battery might work, which loses charge very fast, within a month, but it's very robust and environmentally friendly, so hillbillies can't really mess things up with it, compared to lead acid, nickel-cadmium, or even the super expensive lithium-ion, which by the way is kind of hard to fix and rebuild. With lead, cadmium and nickel-iron you can almost DIY your batteries very simply, and rebuild them when necessary. Especially lead is simple, because you can melt it down very easily, and mold a new shape, new electrode, in a gypsum mold, compared to nickel iron, where iron requires a blacksmith forge. There was this book at my college library, that really struck me, titled "Lead, the Precious Metal." And I was like how can they say that, it's toxic, Beethoven died from it, but when it comes to batteries and possibility of rebuilding them in your own home after they are aged and don't hold a charge well, nothing really beats lead. Plus it can be used as bullets, and x-ray shielding(though plain earth is better), and fishing sinker, low melting glass additive (CRT TV screen glass), a lot of chemical equipments in the 1800's specifiy lead lined vessels. Just don't get it in you, and if you do, make sure the dose is ultra small, on the level of a medicine, plus you consume chelating therapy agents, like drink Mountain Dew or anything that has EDTA in it, or sulfur rich compounds like garlic, onions and egg yolks, By the way acetate of lead is called sugar of lead, it used to be used to adulterate the wine of Beethoven, who was a big wine lover and got really fucked up from it, to make it taste sweeter, and the acetic smell or taste was not that strange in a wine environment. But when someone is trying to poison you with lead, there are few soluble lead compounds, such as acetate, nitrate and silicofluoride, everything else is insoluble, and the most likely poison would be acetate of lead that's sweet like sugar. Also, minium, Pb3O4, is a bright red pigment, and sometimes red dust spices, like paprika, used to be adulterated with it. If you eat paprika, try not to have it in a dust form, but crumbled pieces. I'm really watching out for both lead (Pb) and mercury(Hg) toxicity, because both can create mental illness, and at the autopsy they can frame you into a source, or how it got into your body, so if you handle any Hg or Pb, even if you're careful you're at a danger of mental illness poisoning, by providing an alibi to how it got into you. Also don't get it into the environment, and keep things like carpenter ants away from it, because they really love drilling holes into lead, not knowing they are getting poisoned by it.
Maybe — with government subsidies, tax-credits, and cheap solar panels made in China...
"In some places" you hardly need a car too...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I can see running households on solar, but what about things like large-scale industry, aluminum refining, stuff like that?
It is not batteries that are holding back anything.
The idea that batteries will change much regarding solar energy is completely wrong or at least absurdly overrated.
When you can produce all your day peak energy needs with solar, then you can start thinking about batteries.
The daily peak is around 2PM / 14:00 depending on your country and your consumption habits (do you use AC heavily e.g.). There is a plateau around the peek from roughly 9:00 AM to roughly 8:00 PM (20:00). If you produce solar energy fitting that curve, then there is nothing left you can store. Unfortunately you obviously have no energy at night and not enough during dawn and dusk.
To be able to use stored solar energy at night and during dusk and dawn, you need to have a significant overproduction, nearly 200% during daytime (only 1/3rd of the day you are producing solar power, 1/3rd at night you only use and the other third it is ramped up or down during dusk/dawn, 200% overproduction means 300% of peak usage!)
How much solar power does you country produce over a year? 1% of its total power consumption? Really? So you have to increase the production by a factor of 100 to even meet your peak consumption! And after that, you can start thinking about batteries or other storage.
Oh, you meant as a house owner? Sure, you already can install a 20kW plant when you only use 10kW peak, and store perhaps something like 10kWh (exaggerated) of energy in your basement. And surprisingly: batteries are by far good enough for doing this. Prices are a problem ... perhaps even space and maintenance. Such prices would go down if solar would be more widely adopted. However I rather have no batteries and 'buy' wind power at night, or solar power from a solar thermal plant :)
So all please stop considering storage being the problem.
Storage is interesting for different reasons. E.g. wind plants which are placed perfectly operate most of the year around their 'optimum' or rated power. Unlike solar plants that produce power linear correlated to sun intensity (half the sun, half the power, double the sun, double the power), wind plants scale with the cube of wind speed. Double the wind speed, eight times the power. That means the difference between average and peak is HUGE! And that peak usually is when you don't need the power! Around dawn/dusk or at night. Storing that excess power is interesting ... storing solar power is only interesting if you have laws/legislation ... fees versus grid operators etc. that put you into a disadvantage, if you don't store the excess power (and plan to have excess power in the first place)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I can personally attest to this. Our house was built in the 1940's. When we were fixing it up, we asked our contractor's electrician how much it would cost to replace the kitchen light fixture on the side. He looked quickly and, figuring it would only take ten minutes, said $25 which we paid him up front. When he took off the old light, however, he found that the wires kept crumbling in his hands. He kept needing to pull new wiring until he could hook it up. The job wound up taking him quite a few hours. That's the best hourly electrician rate we're ever likely to get.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Tesla once tried to give free power to the masses. ... He quickly found himself destitute and without many friends.
...heavily regulated/subsidized/driven by municipalities?
LA DWP, for example, essentially has the backstop of ratepayers/taxpayers for whatever financial missteps or misfortunes they might suffer.
Hard to go out of business when you're not driven by market forces.
If we are talking about the blackout in 2003, it started in Ohio(USA) not in Ontario(Canada).
HVDC is one. Superconducting cable is another. Both can be pretty expensive so the number of installations so far is quite limited. There are also people working on so called ballistic conductors. If those work out they should be a lot cheaper and easier to maintain than the superconducting cables which require liquid nitrogen cooling.
Actually China has regulations regarding solar panel production :) How good they are enforced is another topic ... point is: correctly produced there is no toxic waste. Hint: they get produced the same way your microprocessors, ram, and flash memory is.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Yes. I was merely giving a couple of more mainstream examples to show that the "100 years no change" thing is utter bullshit - which it is even if you consider the transmission lines alone.
It's quite believable that technology will develop toward helping people reduce their energy costs. What's not quite so believable is that it will be enough to reduce demand.
If energy was cheap enough, maybe you would use your excess electricity to get free water instead, extracting it and/or producing it from air and hydrocarbons, or otherwise recycle your waste. Maybe you will have some of the latest computer modules chugging away simulating your entire antatomy to anticipate future medical problems. If I had free electricity right now I would be using as much of it as possible to mine bitcoins. Who would have anticipated that 20 years ago?
I don't see the end to domestic energy demand until we see the end of people wanting wealth, because technology is increasingly a way of translating energy into things of value.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
My roof is the floor of the people upstairs. I can't install solar!
This is increasingly the situation many people find themselves in, having bought into the urban, high density, live close to everything and take your bicycle to work lifestyle. We will forever be the slaves of the big power utility.
Where's that hipster urban planner with the pony-tail that sold me this line of crap? I want to strangle him.
Have gnu, will travel.
My house has wires from '52, not quite as old, but close enough. The sheathing around the wires is extremely brittle and will crack and fall apart if moved. If left in place in the wall it is fine. What absolutely does not crack and crumble is the copper wire itself. The plastics and polymers used as sheathing around wires has improved dramatically over the years and would most likely last a lot longer now. The conductors themselves are about the same and last a very very long time.
Economies of scale have mostly kicked in already.
As of right now, the panels are no longer the biggest part of the cost of a full-scale installation - it's the "putting it on your roof correctly so it doesn't fall off or catch fire" part that costs.
Prices will drop - some - but for anything like the near future, they're going to stay in the $15,000-$20,000 range - without storage.
You can get lower quotes, but for some reason, those quotes always leave things out... the folks who brag about "I got it for half that" haven't dealt with contractors before, for the most part.
Fortunately, it works well on a local scale.
I know. We can fix this by connecting the grid to the internet.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
The fact that some people in some places could go off the grid doesn't make this horse crap Morgan Stanley is spewing any more true. If Morgan Stanley is saying it publicly it is to manipulate share prices and that's about it. Even if this does come to be true, there will surely be another couple up and down business cycles beforehand so there's no need to even act immediately on this information.
A lot of power usage isn't residential, either. Some light commercial users may be able to get away with off-the-grid solar solutions, but I don't think it's going to be practical for industry, which is a huge user of electricity.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Buffet is a well known value investor. He doesn't buy things for future growth, but because the current prices are too good to pass up. Most of those banks were screaming deals over the past 5 years. As their share prices come back up from the banking crisis and valuations aren't as good, I expect he will unwind some of those positions.
First you are confusing distribution with transmission. The distribution systems are in a sorry state, mostly because they are being squeezed to lower costs, so maintenance is cut.
Second, it would take about 6 coincident trippings of nuclear unit size MW to black out the eastern interconnection. Fortunately, the sorry ass FirstEnergy Ohio that caused the 2003 blackout got their balancing area functions taken away, so we are safe for a while.
Haven't you heard that the next Tesla model will fold and only weigh 40 lbs, to solve problems exactly like this.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Ballistic conductors are not super-conducting in the usual sense. They only occur in tiny 1-dimensional conductors, and are a result of the free-path length of electrons in the material being longer then the distance to the materials edges. They also only work if the electrons entering them have allowed energy levels for the free path which any electrical current does not - hence they present resistance at the ingress points.
They're an interesting phenomenon, but definitely not a large scale energy distribution solution.
could send the decades-old utility industry into a death spiral
Is it too much to ask to get the time line right?
The first hydro-electric plant generating AC power for regional distribution went into service at Niagara Falls in 1895.
Edison had much smaller scale DC plants online in New York and London in 1882. On-site generation is a decade older still.
There is always something of a disconnect between where people want to live - where the jobs are - and where alterative power sources are most easily and economically exploited on a commercial scale.
If you are looking for wind, Tornado Alley is a good place to start, and for sun the Hades hot and dry desert southwest.
Solar energy provides all the electricity for my house, and has done so since 2003. Not a single electricity bill since that time.
I installed 48 panels on my roof and I run the air conditioning, washing machine, electric dryer, dishwasher, and everything else electric from the roof panels. We do have gas heating and a gas range. I have a modern thermostat and I set the low point to 72 degrees and the high point to 76 degrees and let the system figure out how to keep the house in that range. I leave it set that way all through the year.
In the the year before installing the panels I spent $2800 on electricity, and prices have gone up considerably since then. The costs of the installation (after California state subsidy and tax incentives) was $31,000 so I've fully recovered the installations costs. I expect the panels to continue producing all the electricity I need for the next 20 to 30 years.
Anything that reduces the average home owner's reliance on the grid is good in my book...especially as the infrastructure is so dated and fragile.
Dated and fragile? Where on earth do you get that impression?... The technology of power transmission hasn't fundamentally changed in 100 years...
You said it yourself - the technology hasn't changed in 100 years. It was never designed with terrorism and climate change in mind. To continue relying on a grid that is vulnerable to cascade failures and can be taken down by an ice storm, (or a few well-placed bombs), thereby rendering a large part of the continent powerless, is silly and irresponsible.
Sure, continuous improvements are being made to the grid, and tech advances are making it more reliable and less vulnerable. But the complexity of the newer control systems constitue their own Achilles heel - see 'requisite variety' to understand why. The grid will never be as resilient and fault tolerant as widespread local power generating capacity will be.
Add in the fact that distributing solar capacity is more efficient than centralizing it, then consider the carbon footprint of coal-fired plants, and solar plus batteries starts to look damned good.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Power companies in cali rape us...
We had to use tax dollars to upgrade their plants that are spos to be budgeted already. and they still pull the we had put money in so expect power bill increases lol
The only part of your post I agreed with was the bit about free energy crap on YouTube.
There is no great conspiracy; there never has been. If small fusion power was feasible, the company that put it on the market would clean up overnight, have an instant monopoly and would put everything else out of business instantly. This hasn't happened, ergo, the technology doesn't exist. Same for super-energy-efficient cars and so on.
Super capacitors can't replace batteries, they just don't have anywhere near the energy density of even current battery technology, which in itself is very poor compared with chemical fuel. What they do have is the ability to take charge quickly, so they could be useful for harvesting waste power in an electric car, e.g. regenerative braking. To hold enough charge to power the car continually long enough for a typical commute would require a semi-trailer's worth of capacitor space.
Yes, the sun does produce all the power we'll ever need - on average >200W/m^2 over the entire earth's surface. That's a lot of power, vastly more than we consume today. The problem is harvesting it - we can't cover the entire earth with solar panels, and if we did, they wouldn't be efficient enough with today's technology. So, since there's no grand conspiracy that we can close down, we'll just have to go back to slow but sure, scientifically tested research in labs. In other words, exactly what we are doing.
Pretty ironic that Tesla might instigate a switch from AC to DC, given that Nikola Tesla fought Thomas Edison over AC vs. DC, with Tesla favoring AC. Especially ironic when you realize that a major (AC) power company is called Con Edison.
That quote is nonsensical.
"Solar power is the winner!"....at being environmentally friendly, not cheap or efficient.
"Solar power provides up to 20 years of power for a single carbon investment" what an absurd metric? So if I built a power plant, and "in one investment" dumped 50 years worth of coal piles around it, it would be better than solar, by this measure?
"(a feat which) cannot be duplicated by any other commonly used type of energy production"....other than wind. You might want to check what the phrase 'cannot be duplicated by any other' means.
-Styopa
Everyone's going to have $50,000 installations to recover all that solar power. It'll be free! Better than free! Cars will run on happiness.
I am sorely disappointed that clicking that link did not take me to a diatribe about how we are all educated stupid.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
The power industry can't just die, no matter how hard we try, but....
This is where it is going to get interesting. At some point (probably quite easy to graph) the combination of cheaper solar, cheaper durable deep cycle power storage, and braindead easy inverter and other power management technologies will make it feasible to switch to fully off grid with very little pain. I suspect that there will be some adjustment such as not being able to run the washer, dryer, vacuum, dishwasher, and a bunch of 55" TVs all at the same time but that the average household will be happy at some point to go off grid. But the key is that some people will go off grid as this equation approaches balance for a variety of reasons ranging from green thinking, a more consistent power bill (simply amortized payments for the capital cost), it came with the newly built house, and my favourite: a big FU to the power company.
So as this equality approaches a small number of fairly well moneyed houses will make the switch. While technically the load on the power company will marginally drop, their equipment service costs will remain steady. Thus as these customers leave the remaining customers will have to pick up the slack through rate increases. This of course will drive another handful of customers away; which is now driving a vicious cycle of rate increases. All this while the cost of the installed system will drop while the cons of having such a system will vanish. Also somewhere in this process that critical point will be crossed where it is cheaper to buy an off grid system than to stay on grid.
But there are a number of customers who can't leave. Some are simply the poor who can't obtain the credit for the capital costs, others are people in poor solar/wind locations; and then there are the high density customers who simply can't obtain a sufficient amount of renewables from their property such as tall buildings and factories.
So the rates for these remaining folks will be prohibitive if they have to carry the entirety of the power system capital costs alone. So even these folks will begin to look elsewhere for electrical power. I suspect a popular source will be natural gas generation, either through traditional generators or through some sort of fuel cell systems. This will push up the price of natural gas but will probably be much cheaper than grid power.
So my prediction is that the power companies and large power consumers will try to bend reality, they will attempt to make it illegal to go off grid, or they will charge regular fees to any house that does go off grid. I can see other tactics such as charging a tax for every KWh generated with your own power system. This will be in defence of not only the power companies but of the landlords and factory owners who don't want to pay for their own problems.
But this reality bending will simply be dealt with by the free market. Factories will move closer to power generation sites or will move the power generation sites closer to the factories. The same with high density buildings. I suspect that they will figure out some way to buy power. An interesting one would be to have containers with massive batteries that are charged at a power generation site and then trucked to the building. This might sound bonkers but it could end up being cheaper than paying for the unwieldy infrastructure of a power grid.
On top of all that this will certainly drive a massive quest for efficiency. Right now it is stupid to have any incandescent bulbs in your house. Yet most people still do. But if these bulbs meant the difference between needing a $10,000 power system and a $20,000 power system; people would throw them out with their next trash. The same will go for nearly every appliance. People will look at the 150W 55" TV and instead and opt for the 120W 55" TV; this being something that the TV companies don't focus on much.
On top of all that this will be another opportunity for third world countries to leapfrog over another technology as they did with landlines.
Comment of the year right here.
To add to what you said.
Australians now pay about 25c/kwh compared with 12c/kwh 10 years ago.
The overinvestment in wires and poles was due to stupid legislation that GAURUNTEED a 10% return on any capital investment. (Gee lets spend a billion so we gaurunteed to make $100M)
We put 40kwh of solar in at our business that with the current subsidies nets us 18% return on capital (vs 2% cash in the back)
46137
Ever tried running a large industrial complex on photo volaics?
Hmmm... 40 pounds? Perhaps I need that South Korean exo-skeleton to use...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
http://www.sunwindenergy.com/s...
The next Tesla model will be a big metal box full of batteries that you park next to your house, and permanently connect.
Will home insurance cover these panels in the event of hail and wind damage?
Life is not for the lazy.
I mean really, come on. When a broker tells you to buy, it is time to sell (and vice versa).
I totally agree. Now the big difference is the cost differential between selling excess power back to the grid (feed-in price 8 cents) compared to purchasing from the grid at 25 cents per KWHr. The Tesla batteries are projected to cost $200 per KWHr of storage so for $2000 your average punter can get 10 KWHr of storage and likely never need to purchase electricty from the grid. So a $5000 5KW system plus $2000 for 10 KWHr of storage means no more $2500 bills per year. The system pays for itself in less than 4 years.
There is a truely massive market if Tesla can hit their production targets at the advertised price point. Which seems possible given the extreme amount of vertical integration in the plant. Even the energy costs are provided via renewable energy buffered by their own batteries. Feed in raw lithium, aluminum, human labor, out comes batteries.
the outer oxide layer helps protect the rest of the copper in the statue, but it is in salty air and does degrade
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Will home insurance cover these panels in the event of hail and wind damage?
I don't know. I didn't think to ask as I haven't ever seen a hail storm here and we don't get very high winds. However, chemically strengthened glass is used for the panels so they are less likely to be damaged compared to float glass. The panels are solidly anchored to the rafters and the roof is metal tiles so they aren't likely to blow away.
I did check that everything is covered for theft or fire damage as the inverters were quite expensive back then.
The power grid is fairly faulty around here, we have power blips and brown-outs (black out lasting seconds) all the time. to the point of my boss installing 20 UPS all over his gas station. 1 each register, the satellite link(lottery and CC transactions), each pc in the office, and miscellaneous items that really don't like being ungracefully shut off.
at least once a year the woodland creatures stage a revolt and quick-fry themselves on tower transformers and relay stations. this year alone, 3 squirrels have taken out the county's grid. (not to mention the guy with the backhoe who ripped the wires off the pole, idiot's lucky to be alive) In previous years, we had a raccoon who decided the local power relay station would be a cool place to nest, started to renovate his new den, and took us offline for 3 days.
Now in winter, we are blessed with many feet of snowfall, and the branches push on the lines. the power companies hire tree cutting services to clear problem trees from the right of way, but sometimes a tree sags just right from the weight, and oops, there go the lights. most homes have a gas generator just for this, (I have 2 in my garage, no fun finding out one won't start when you need it)
And this is just northern WI, i imagine some areas a bit further north with a sparse population density could have it worse.
then one way or the other, the company is aptly named
considering there are states where it is illegal to capture the rain that falls on your roof, I'm sure capturing photons won't be far behind...
Vegetarians who eat eggs are hypocrites
Not if they are doing it for health reasons rather than ethical reasons. But as an Omnivore I think It just means more steak for me.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
The problem is that with low power LCD TVs, battery powered mobile devices, and LED lighting it's getting entirely possible to run a house with Solar power for all but Heating/cooking purposes.
We've almost flipped on efficiency where 30 years ago Manufacturing energy bills subsidized residential costs... Residential usage has gone down by 20% in REAL numbers over the last decades (energy star, laptops, mobile phones replace giant entertainment centers) while their share of the bill has gone up.
To "save business" most states have rebalanced the costs of producing electricity and Residences are picking up more than their share... Which is the easiest share to replace.. Leaving heavy industry struggling because nobody will build new heavy duty power generation for the next 50 years. Homes simply won't need that kind of power as population has leveled off and homes become an order of magnitude more efficient in another decade.
you could have posted the links you found......
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Back then the insulation around the copper was cotton. PVC didn't exist yet.
Cotton crumbles to the extent that any vibration can cause it to simply fall off. Couple that with the steel tubing from that era (again replaced by PVC) and you see a house with those wires could have a continuous ground fault below the trip level of a ground fault interrupter. We had it and we saved a lot by replacing the mess with modern cables. Didn't even have to replace the tubing (although that would have been better)
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
that's not really because the tech is bad though.
it's just that you have a crappy power company which doesn't care...
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Even the great Tesla couldn't break the laws of physics - though if any man could, it would have to be him.
Also: Name the battery technology and I'll name the resource you'll run out of if you're trying to build capacity in the TWh range. (possible exception: sodium-sulfur cells).
I have a modern thermostat and I set the low point to 72 degrees and the high point to 76 degrees and let the system figure out how to keep the house in that range.
Is that Fahrenheit or do you live an a sauna?
-- Make America hate again!
So, they are not planning to run any industry at night? Or during the monsoon season?
It is a little known fact because it's actually quite wrong. Electricity does not degrade protective jackets, and reasonable forms of heating which is to be expected in a house also does not degrade the protective jacket or "insulation" as we like to call it.
The problem you're describing has nothing at all to do with electricity and everything to do with the choice of insulation. Older installations in many houses had wires insulated with rubber. You don't need heat or changes in temperature for rubber to become brittle and crack. Age alone will do that. Other methods used were some kind of cotton tape, fibreglass, and general nasties. Modern installations are PVC. They age quite well and don't have a problem with being brittle. They do get eaten up by UV though which is why they are usually kept out of sunlight. XLPE is another modern conductor which is quite resilient. My house built in the 40s used lead mineral sheathing as the insulator. The cable is still as good now as it was back then, unfortunately also just as toxic if you are a literal wire-licker and not just a figurative one.
Copper also does not degrade. In the presence of oxygen it will oxidise and that the layer of copper oxide then protects the copper from further degradation.
All of this ignores one big glaring mistake you made, the grid does not have a protective jacket, and the wires are not copper which all leads into the fact that there's absolutely nothing wrong with running a 100 year old electricity grid.
Now associated equipment, power poles, spacers, downcommers, fuses, transformers, protection systems, etc they all do need maintenance and periodic replacement.
Meanwhile, you can easily power your electric car with the solar panels on the roof of your HOUSE, where there's much more surface area.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
No they aren't, unless the eggs are wrapped up in some meat-like substance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotch_egg/
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
Feasible electric cars and their battery technology could be exactly the thing the world needs to decentralise electric power. Let's hope for it. The energy companies are way to powerful for their own and societies good. I'm sure it would help the environment to - not just the electric car thing but the decentralisation.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
... go north and south of that and guess what? Solar isn't viable in any meaningful sense.
And you know what? That's as it should be. So:
Dear Utilities,
Send your power to where people need it.
Thanks,
Person from a Dark Cold Country
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Has anyone considered a global, rather than national, power network? I would imagine something like that would allow solar energy generated during the day to be used elsewhere, without the problems of peak demand that can currently happen.
> more reliable or more efficient out there.
Transformer efficiency has increased dramatically since the 1970s.
Moreover, we need to replace a lot of them to get true bidirectional flows, and it would be really nice to have cap banks at all the distribution centres to fix the problems with reclosers. My power goes out for about 1/2 of a second about once a week, and that's really not something that should be happening.
> The power grid is only fragile at times because we do not keep enough excess capacity
No, the power "grid" is fragile because it's not a grid. If you trace the wire from your home backwards I think you'll find there is exactly one route for that power to reach the regional distribution center, probably one route from there to the 230kVA backbone, and maybe even one route from there to the actual network. Consider the mess that occurred in Montreal, in spite of one of the best developed actual *grids* in existence.
Carbon-fibre HT wiring appears to be going widespread over the next 20 years. That's a 3x increase in energy density.
> Wires from a home built in the 1970's are often so brittle that they crumble
My home was built in 1917 or earlier. The wiring is knob-n-tube. The insulation is quite brittle and will break. It won't if you don't move it. The wire is fine in either case.
You're wrong.
MS, like GS, has ample capital to deploy in areas they see as real opportunities. I would discount their vehement jawboning (which is trying to convince others to buy.. what they're selling! what a coincidence!) and instead look to where they are themselves deploying capital.
Ah yes, found those in my house (1926) when I was renovating, they were in steel pipes and in reasonable condition. No crumbling. I also found thick steel gaspipes leading to the center of every ceiling. They were still pressurized. Needless to say I removed all those. I kept the bakelite switches.
Are you sure it wasn't aluminum wiring? That stuff is horrible, and happened around then briefly.
My 100 year old knob and tube copper is completely workable.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Scrub the word 'betting' from the headline, as there is no indication they are putting any money where their mouth is,,
:
Why Morgan Stanley Is Continually Trying to Convince Investors That Tesla Will Kill Your Power Company
but of course, that's not accurate either, because the article and reports merely report THAT morgan stanley is making the pitch, not WHY.. so maybe it should be
Morgan Stanley Continues to Try and Sell Investors On A Company That Has Paid Them Many Millions in Underwriting Fees and Stands to Pay Them Many More Millions More If They Can The Public Buying It
FIFY
Not sure if troll, but you have heard of storing energy?
For instance, and to name but a few of the most recent innovations
http://www.popularmechanics.co...
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Just like to mention that the transformers are oil cooled and require regular maintenance (ie, change their oil). The oil is slightly hydroscopic and absorbs water over time, if left for too long it causes a short and a high voltage arc in several thousand litres of oil makes a very big boom.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
reread the post. He specifically said the "sheathing" not the copper wire,
Why don't they have panels on the roof/hood? I am sure there are plenty of reasons, but I am not familiar with solar panel technology myself.
In Florida, we get the privilege of paying in advance for DECADES for nuclear projects that never get built.
We'd see more benefit from that spending if we literally burned the money.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
"Vegetarian" often refers to ovo-lacto-vegetarians, ie. people who will eat eggs and milk products but not the flesh of animals. Compare with 'vegan' which refers to people who eat no animal products at all.
I'm ovo-lacto-vegetarian and I eat a lot of eggs, they're one of my main sources of protein and when fried they're delicious.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
It could be. Enough other things in my house have wound up to be horrible and needing repair. As much as I like not having a landlord to answer to, there are days when I miss being able to say "X is broken. I'll call the landlord so he can get it fixed."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
If you ever saw 1970s cabling that had the insulation breaking down, much less the copper itself, then it was overloaded far past its design limit. Normal usage does not cause breakdowns. There is one exception, in that the insulation used before the 1980s did have a temp limit of 60 degrees C, which could be exceeded readily when used inside an enclosed light fixture. Since then, the standard is 90 C and you will see a warning on any new enclosed fixtures to make sure your cabling is rated properly.
Copper breaking down? No way. It couldn't even get corroded except where the insulation is stripped away-- and I haven't seen that unless there was a water intrusion problem. If you have water getting on your wiring, your structure won't be around long enough for the copper to "break down".
Think about it: do you think everyone with wiring over 40 years old is about to have their house burn down? I've replaced wiring older than that and it wasn't broken down. I replaced it because it doesn't meet our current heat standard or was damaged by pests.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
No, it's a grid nearly all the way to my home. Now, my neighborhood gets power from a power pole right next to the city's Police, Fire and Emergency Management Center, and is just down the road from the main phone switch center so I'm sure we benefit from a really strict SLAs and redundancy required for that.
There is a lot of redundancy engineered into the system on purpose and although having loops is a difficult engineering problem to manage, they can and do have them well into the local distribution system, especially in cities and metropolitan areas. You get out past the suburbs and it gets a bit less redundant, but that's because they don't have customers who are willing to pay enough for SLA's that require redundancy.
But my point is that the grid is far from fragile and far from being "outdated".
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
If you're talking about the old pushbuttons, they're neat but I hear the issue with them is that they arc a lot more than modern switches. I imagine if the switch is not overly worn, it's OK, but I wonder if any of those oldies are enough to trip the arc fault protectors we use in the modern code.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
If you live in a rural location, you may have issues, but the whole grid remains stable, even if your little branch of it isn't.
I live in a major metropolitan area and in 10 years I have had my power go out twice. Once when lighting hit the feed line, shorting one phase to ground for the neighborhood out in front of the city's main Fire, Police and emergency station which houses our 911 service center, and once when they replaced the transformer in front of my home because it was leaking. I also monitor the voltages (though my UPS) and we've not had any sagging noted over the past year's worth of logs.
My point is, the grid in general is stable. That your electric delivery service provider chooses not to properly maintain their equipment does not negate that.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Again, that has nothing to do "wear" caused by electricity, but by environmental factors.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
If it is, you should know, because that can be dangerous when attached to normal wiring stuff (it oxidizes with standard equipment), and just in general (it oxidizes in general too).
I can't bend my copper wiring, but I can definitely work with it if I leave it be. Also, maybe some wires were strands like a lamp wire, I don't know, the copper anywhere I've lived has been a single thick wire, but I could see how if it was like lamp wire it could crumble with age.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
That JP Morgan's company is backing Tesla?
Surely I cant be the only one that finds that humorous. After all JP Morgan was the first person in the world to have a private home lit by Edison's Direct Current electricity. When Telsa joined the company a bit later and tried to convince Morgan and Edison that Alternating Current (Today's Standard) was the future they told him he was wrong and AC was dangerous. Frustrated by their inability to see his invention for what it was he quit and went to work for Westinghouse as a competitor.
Morgan and Edison went so far as to create the electric chair out of AC just to try and ruin the career of Telsa. It backfired of course and everyone blamed Edison for creating the chair and paid zero attention to the fact that he used Tesla's alternating current.
Fast forward a hundred years and Morgan's legacy company is out in the public saying Telsa is the future. I love it.
You need to finish reading the article you posted. Some gems include that solar is now the cheapest electricity source in some sunny areas, that it's price continues to drop rapidly, and that if coal burning paid the real costs (including paying $50/ tonne for the carbon they put into our collective atmosphere) then photovoltaics would already be on par or cheaper throughout Germany (the source of the prices the article is quoting).
Little known fact electricity running through wires degrades the wires and the protective jacket on them.
This is not about the wiring in your house or the insulation on it. This was about the power grid, which uses very few insulated wires. Most of the power grid consists of aluminum and steel bare wires hanging from poles which is extremely durable and not degraded by the current passing though it.
Corrosion is not generally a big issue either, except in coastal areas or places where there is a lot of moisture. But like all things, the grid requires maintenance. You need to replace wooden poles, insulators, and transformers repair broken wires and such regularly. This should come as no surprise.
Just as a reference point.. My family used to own a farm which was serviced by a rural electric company. We where the last house on the branch that ran about 3 miles from the main highway. We moved into that house nearly 40 years ago and the wires which are there now, are EXACTLY the same ones that where there when we moved in. I'm told that the house had electric power prior to the previous owner's buying it and that was 10 years before we owned it, so it's pretty much certain that the wires are 50 years or more old and still going strong today (as are most of the poles that hold them up), which tells me they are very likely to be the original wires placed there way back with the rural electric push was on in the 50's.
I think you are making a mountain out of a mole hill here.. Wires don't really wear out... The insulation might, but the wires don't.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Out of curiosity, what was the pre-subsidy and tax incentive cost, or alternatively what were those subsidies/taxes?
The installation is rated at 8.9 kW DC (7.5 kW AC) and the total cost was $65,000. I received a check from the state of California for $29,000 and a tax credit of $5,000. So my out-of-pocket cost was $31,000 . All numbers rounded and in 2003 dollars.
Brilliant! what could POSSIBLY go wrong?
I for one can't see anything. Engineers could fix problems from anywhere in the world... from their smart phone.
Not sure how to get into this conversation (and I haven't RTFA), it reminds me of Smart Grids presentation. Speaker showed a diagram of how things were back in the days. One big power plant sending only power out, goes through transmission lines and distribution systems (only one way), and then to the users (only "feedback" is the electric meter with its disk going round and round, ticking the little numbers for the meter reader to note how much to bill you). Then he showed a diagram where the distribution system has all kinds of switches, loads measurement, and fault detection. And now you have users squirting power back into the system. On top of that there is digital information of system status in those lines. Actually quite fascinating, most of us don't even think about those light green boxes here and there occupying a small space along the highway. I've not studied it much but it's interesting. http://www.sandc.com/blogs/ind...
I do remember back in the days when PG&E did everything (north Calif). Generate the power, owned and serviced the transmission lines and distribution system, did the billing, etc. It also seemed there were more service trucks back then (I used to ask the PG&E guys if they had anything to spare, I got few hardware items that fun to have). PG&E does the billing and servicing of local lines but someone else owns the power plants and the big transmission lines.
mfwright@batnet.com
How many gallons of fuel does it take to charge a Tesla car? I know its off topic kinda but is there real value to elect cars. Seems to me we need a solar charging system to make any real dent in our insatiable oil diet. The oil WILL run out I think much sooner then later but that's just IMO
Jack of all trades,master of none
The technology of power transmission hasn't fundamentally changed in 100 years. Yea, there is some OLD equipment out there, but it is not like running electricity though wires somehow wears them out, so why would you replace it if it's still working just fine?
Do you mean to say you haven't experienced Digital Electricity? Though, to get the best out of it, you should only use the best Monster cables. I can't even imagine using my toaster with the old fashioned analog electricity I had to put up with growing up.
I'm a fan of solar and wind. I buy into the optional wind-source program offered by our local utility even though it raises my electricity bill by about 5%.
But when I recently looked into installing solar, got a quote from a local installer, it was going to cost $13k (after federal tax credit/subsidy) to buy and install a grid-tied system. That would replace about 1/2 the 700 kwH / month that we use at our house (gas heat, gas hot water, gas cooktop). Our utility charges $0.135 / kwH. The payback for the installation without counting on any alternative return on investment for the $13k was 16 years. The other assumption is that the solar system requires no maintenance.
Here is some of the information I got from the installer during the bid process:
1. In northern states in the USA, you can figure on about 1,250 kwH per year from 1,000 watts (manufacturer peak rating?) of panels. So if you use 625 Kwh / month, you need 6,000 watts of rated power to replace your usage 100%. That's only 24 250 watt panels, or a panel price of 6,000-$7,500.
2. If your panels do not get 100% equal sunlight, the array will produce at the rate of the most shaded panel. UNLESS you buy the panels with the inverter/converter built into it. Then each panel produces whatever it can, independent of the production of the other panels.
3. Batteries are expensive and they wear out in 10 years. So if you buy a big battery system for $6,000, you're effectively spending $600 / year on the batteries unless you make unicorn-rainbow assumptions about advances in battery technology. For this reason, a grid-tied system is probably going to be about $50 / month more cost effective.
4. Mounting systems for attaching the panels to your roof can cost around $100 per panel.
So, install it if it makes you feel good, or if you live in a place where power costs far more than the $0.135 / kwh it costs where I live. But until the costs drop by 50% or the price of power doubles, I'm not going to buy.
I think Morgan Stanley is probably going to turn out to be wrong. I don't think we'll see solar panel prices continue to drop 20% / year and right now, panel prices are only about 1/3d the cost of a system, the other pieces and the labor are 2/3rds, so even if solar panels dropped 20%, the cost of an installation would drop at best 10%, and more likely something like 6.7%.
Large-scale wind farms look more likely to me.
potatoes take 15-20 minutes to bake in the microwave
We're straying off-topic here but, that's ridiculous. Even a large potato doesn't take more than about five minutes in the microwave, then an equal amount of time to finish cooking and cooling down. Just wrap it in a damp paper towel and put it directly on the turntable. It's easier than making popcorn.
I didn't notice. Need to be more careful with online shopping.
-- 29A the number of the Beast
There hedging - either way they will profit.
Get up!
What I'd like to do eventually is have parallel wiring in the house, one string coming from the inverter, and one coming straight from the batteries, (through a fuse box of course) so that things like lights and electronic devices that don't mind working on 12 volts can use the native voltage, and things that need 110 will have 110. (Did you know that you could get CFLs that run on 12 volts?)
If you have 12 volts DC, you can set up some cheap, efficient, and long-lasting LEDs. Most of the cost and inefficiency of "lightbulb replacement" LEDs are because they need a transformer and rectifier to reduce the household current to low voltage DC; if you already have that you are probably better off using LEDs, and they will be (much!) cheaper, more efficient, and longer lasting than the "screw into a regular lightbulb socket LEDs", and also than compact fluorescent.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Give him credit for pointing something that actually does exist, even if it is only in a lab. I'm surprised we haven't had people talking about all the space-based solar arrays with microwave downlink as part of the grid.
What will happen is that Utilities WILL change, but they will not die. They are expected to deliver not just electricity, but nat gas in most of them.
Instead, what will happen is that they will simply move away from peaking plants, and use batteries instead. These will be charged by wind, nukes, and nat gas power plants through the night. Then in the daytime, they will be able to provide solid electricity quickly.
In addition, this will allow utilities to move away from a large multiple utility grid (America has 3 grids), and instead use a number of small grids in which excess local solar is sold to the utility for their batteries, while a faster, larger grid will allow for large base-load plants to provide electricity.
For those of you who say that batteries are not coming, then ignore Tesla and focus on multiple companies that are doing flow batteries.
In particular, my favorite remains EOS energy.
These are now being built and tested by multiple utilities. For example, on the east coast, which has high prices for electricity, they are now testing these.
Then we have California that requires that utilities will have more than 1 GWH of storage.
So, when MS is claiming that Utlities are dead, they could not be more wrong. They will just transform and very likely will make a decent profit upon their grid and energy storage.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Not tesla.
Solar City is going to transform from a simple solar company, to an energy company.
They are currently working towards geo-thermal and wind energy.
There is some evidence that they are also working on nukes.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
All these gloom-and-doom reports from an investment company? I wonder if they're shorting the utility companies.
1) Short the stock of the utility companies ...
2) Release predictions of doom
3) Wait for stock to drop
4)
5) Profit
But naw, that would be unethical, our banks and investment companies would never do something like that. Obviously.
EXACTLY.
It is the same BS when ppl claim that electricity can now replace 100% of oil. Yet, they ignore the fact that batteries are NOT ready for semi trucks or that Oil is used for more than just energy. Basically, ppl do not think this through. Electric cars can and should help smooth the electric curve, but then they will need to be charged in the middle of the night. As such, the question becomes what do you use? Wind can NOT be counted on. Solar is gone. And coal is too expensive. In light of climate change, then nat gas will also be a mistake long term.
As such, the only real base-load power plants should be things like hyrdo, nukes, geo-thermal. These should be combined with wind to lower the costs and keep from taking all of the energy. For example, if geo-thermal is ran at 100% all of the time, each well will lower their temp over time. Instead, you want to use it only part of the time and allow earth energy to continue to flow to it. Therefore wind and nukes are great back-ups to it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Most home owners would take your caution about carpenter ants as a how to on getting rid of harmful pests.
Did you thank your neighbors for subsidizing your ability to do this or do you simply laugh at them for being so gullible?
Because the water table in that area is maintained by that lake and some toxins can transfer.
As I understand, back in world war II, Einstein presented Truman with the atom bomb; Tesla presented him the "death ray". Had the US Gov't gone with Tesla, our world energy grid might be a very different configuration now.
There's a significant amount of money being made by the energy industry, who essentially has us enslaved. They will do anything they can to lobby against free energy, but it's the wave of the future -- personally, I'd love to see this not just for the reduced expenditure, but for the environment /and/ some relish in watching the present power industry model crumble. It probably won't all go one way or the other -- adopting newer technology is almost always expensive, unless Tesla can find a way around that, with reduced costs (that will be key). The Sun (and other forms) provides for it, why shouldn't we benefit from it? Yes, I realize that's very idealistic, but I think we're getting closer to it becoming a reality.
Use electricity to synthesize hydrocarbons, run trucks (and planes, and ships) with those.
or that Oil is used for more than just energy.
Oil (and natural gas) is also used as a source of hydrogen. Which can also be produced using electricity.
Oil is also used for making lubricants ... see "synthesizing hydrocarbons" above.
Wind can NOT be counted on.
Wind availability can be determined statistically. And the more turbines you install and the large the area covered, the less likely you are to run into a "no wind at all" situation.
There is nothing to stop my neighbors from doing installing solar also - and several have.
Do householders thank their neighbors for the break they get on their mortgage interest that allows them to afford their houses?
Do the various fossil fuel industries thank every tax payer for the huge subsidies that they receive?
Do farmers thank everyone for their subsidies that permits them to grow crops like tobacco that kill tax payers?
Governments have always promoted certain types of behavior with subsidies and tax breaks. There's nothing wrong in going along with their wishes if it benefits you also.
Right now it is stupid to have any incandescent bulbs in your house
I can think of a number of reasons to have incandescent bulbs in a house, though most aren't related to power. The foremost is that if I break an incandescent bulb, I just scoop up the shards and toss them in the bin. Here's what they say to do if you break a CFL bulb. I'm sorry, but a broken bulb shouldn't require me to turn off my AC and essentially evacuate the room of vulnerable persons. LED bulbs are somewhat safer in that regard, but the light quality/quantity isn't realy as good and if I break one of those then I cry at the replacement cost.
Usually this means that I have the higher-efficiency bulbs in places where they're less likely to break, and I keep incandescent bulbs in places where there's a higher possibility of breakage (the shop, trouble-light, some lamps, etc). Generally the latter are areas that aren't on as often anyhow. As a bonus in the shop, the heat leakage actually warms things up a bit in the winter.
Also, one of my peeves against the new "efficient" bulbs is that - though they cost more - they were supposed to last much longer. This was much more of a cost-saver than the actual energy. I'm still up-in-the-air about LED bulbs, but I've found that CFL's burn out just as frequently as incandescents, possibly more-so in some situations (low-wattage incandescent tend to last a fairly long time).
The solution is not poisoning wildlife living next to you, but building houses not from wood, or other edible materials, like gingerbread, but stone, or clay. Ytong is pretty good stuff for instance.
I'm catholic, or some variation on that topic, going off on a tangent, but by kosher in the judeo-christian abrahamic religions we mean causing least amount of pain possible, the original quoted text being: do not eat a limb ripped off of a live animal - meaning kill it first please, as fast and efficient as possible, don't make it suffer for a long time, don't torture it - and in the old days that did mean killing an animal with a knife stuck in their throat. These days we can shock them unconscious first, and then you don't even have to go for the neck. Also, that's how most wild animals like lions do it, at the neck, the most efficient and kosher way. If you have a bulldog or other large dog attack, protect your throat with your hands, let them bite onto that, as they go for your neck instinctively, and you can survive most other bites, to legs, arms, body, head.
Works fine. There are places where that's happened, but if the industrial complex knows PV is involved, they complain.
Learn to love Alaska
I don't usually wrap it, but I hear it simmering in about 4 minutes, but it does not cook through in 10, it's like it needs time to sit at the cooking temperature. I could try bringing it up to temp, cutting the power, bringing it up again, cutting the power. I don't usually wrap them, but now you're giving me an idea about some polypropylene insulation, like a microwaveable plastic dish, with a small hole on it to vent steam, or just the lid loose, to keep the heat contained, while you generate that sawtooth temperature profile of 100C slow to 90 back to hundred slow to 90. Up on the mountainside you can only get 90C temp when cooking with water because of low air pressure therefore low boiling point temperature, and stuff takes even longer to cook, but it does cook eventually even at 90C. I just haven't bothered that much. My microwave is touchy, it likes to blow fuses as it shuts down automatically when the timer is up, and it won't start again, so I have to cut the power at the extension cord socket switch before the timer is up and, and this way there is no outrush current from the transformers, it has nowhere to go, it can't go back into the power grid, the amps stay low, and it saves the fuse.
They aren't pushbuttons, you have to turn the knob. They make a fairly loud sound but seem to work fine so far. Haven't had any problems.
I have worked on plenty of continuously powered instrumentation and test gear older than that which never displayed the problem you describe with the copper itself disintegrating although insulation often becomes brittle or fails in other ways. What I would believe though is that the decaying insulation outgassed something which attacked the copper and I have seen that happen even on insulated wire newer than World War 2. With insulation which does this, higher temperature operation accelerates the process.
Yes.
Learn to love Alaska
Yeah, 5% cashflow profit and 10-20% principle growth just sucks. What stocks grow like real estate? And real estate pays dividends too, called "rent". Look it up.
Learn to love Alaska
cheap solar panels made in China.
Why would you buy the most expensive solar panels, then complain about the price?
Learn to love Alaska
But most people who sell back get paid at the higher 25 cent price, not the 8 cent price. If you went nuts and put a 100 kW setup at your house and had no other agreements, you'd get paid at 8 cents. But the general user pays 25 cents for power used or is paid 8 cents for power generated, on a monthly basis. So if you use 10 kWh over night, and generate 20 kWh the next day, then use 10 kWh that night, you are net 0, so you'd pay 0, and get 0. Do your ROI is from the 25 cent number. Only if, at the end of the month, you fed back in more than you used, would you get paid the 8 cent number. That'd only happen if you went out of town for a month in the middle of summer or other unusual case.
Learn to love Alaska
Using EV car batteries to act as storage for the grid -is a silly idea with one fatal little flaw - the daily time cycle at least for the average commuter car just doesn't fit. -
You generate solar electricity during the day - when your car isn't at home. You discharge the car battery during the night to provide power, but you also need to charge the same battery during the night so that the car will be ready in the morning.
The solution is obviously a separate battery to provide house level grid storage. If you also have an electric car - then a third battery to allow overnight charging, or more efficiently to swap the two car batteries over.
My solution - solar generation near the equator used to create synthetic ethanol on a large scale. - Then ship it out the countries that need it. So why does the equator get more sunlight? mainly because the light has a smaller incidence angel and so less atmosphere to get through..
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
Your comparison doesn't make sense. Sure, a tank of petrol is denser than a battery, but a machine to turn the output of a solar cell into petrol isn't, and the machine to take that power and turn it back into something your house's electrical system can use (with little loss) is also big. Connecting your car's fuel tank up to both machines every time you park is not feasible. In contrast, connecting a power cable to your battery is pretty easy.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The conversion losses in that would be absolutely astronomical, and wouldn't hope to compare with local solar/wind power charging batteries, pumped-hydro storage, or just regular grid balancing between different power sources.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Its all about scale - we would be talking about arrays of 100's of square km.. and I am only talking about ethanol for use in vehicles.. Once made Ethanol can store a lot of energy in a relatively compact space in a fairly stable form- that can be stored and shipped in the way that standard gas /petrol is.
Anyway I said its my solution but only one of several - I actually favour the development of more advanced nuclear technology, and nuclear fusion. Fusion is currently slated as taking up to 50 years to come on stream, but if it was given proper funding and higher priority that could be reduced to ~ 20 years. (the biggest delays are caused by lack of scale in the specialist steel fabrication required.)
Grid level storage is still a big problem that is still not completely solved...
Batteries on a large enough scale could do it but there are still huge technical and logistical problems in simply making and maintaining so many batteries. - Plus on this scale high energy batteries create substantial fire/explosion risks. - Plus with the kind of heavy usage needed for grid storage lifespan would probably be limited to 1 or 2 years at most so recycling and reuse would be very important.
Hydro storage on the scales needed also has enormous problems - very high build costs, the need for mountains to sacrifice, large areas of land, the need for vast amounts of water- which should be fresh water not salt. Plus with this kind of system the stored energy in the water creates a major potential flooding danger to surrounding areas. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (it was only pure luck that Taum soak didn't kill anyone)
All forms of energy production or usage have problems - nuclear kills 50 to maybe a 1000 people per year and releases radiation into the environment, coal kills something like 0.5 to 1.5 million a year, fracking is toxic and environmentally damaging, even wind turbines can kill.
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
It can, but we can only convert a fraction of it into usable energy.
Methanol is better, just because we have working methanol fuel cells (often in forklifts) right now.
1) Nope. We've got many megawatts of pumped-hydro storage installed. Existing dams can be retrofitted with pumps pretty easily, IF it was needed.
2) Solar panels are extremely predictable, and track pretty close to peak electrical demand.
3) Solar thermal offers free thermal storage with molten sodium.
4) Solar/wind does NOT need storage to work on the grid:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Time for capitalism to return to the people who do the work. Enough moneyed Lords and their manipulations.
Are you selling back to the grid to balance out to a zero cost bill, or storing electricity for later peak use in your house (batteries, etc..)?
I've seen that some people who generate their own power, by it hydro-electric or solar, can actually generate so much power that they can then sell it back to the electric company and by paid by the electric company for it. In the video from Solar City, as Tesla endorses them, they show the power meter moving in the other direction and then getting a credit from the power company.