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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
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
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...
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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.
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 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! --
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! --
Yes, then when you get home you charge it from the batteries that were charging while you were at work.
Also, there is vast unused solar space.
How many large parking lots could be covered but aren't? all of those could be generating electricity. It would even have the side benefit in that there will be less impact on micro-climate then asphalt.
The cover could be 30 feet high, so trucks wouldn't have a problem. And it would be better for shoppers during 'bad' weather.
The sides of the freeways could have linked solar panels AND act as a carrier for cross counter electricity.
The sad thing? the engineering isn't that difficult and is doable. Climate change deniers are spending money like mad, lying, and impacting us all.
I speak without hyperbole when I say, run away green house means the extinction of our civilization, and quite possible the human species.
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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)
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.
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.
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
Economies of scale would probably drop that significantly.
But even if the $300 B price tag is accurate, you could cover 1/3 of California using the bailout that Morgan Stanley received.
This signature is false.
Who said anything a out roof tops? I just price solar for my roof, here in Oregon. 10,000 BEFORE tax breaks and incentives, BTW.
Anyway, we can build solar thermal farms and hook them into the existing grid.
The US has vast open mostly sunny areas. We can build several solar farms 25 miles to a side.
Nothing about that is hard from an engineering perspective.
Roof top would be bonus. But if you want to talk about panels then:
Mandate new houses have to have them.
Cover parking lots and put panels there.
Put panels along the side of the freeways. These panel would probably get less efficiency do to the cover getting dirty, but that is over come with just the shear volume you could do.
This is a doable solution.
.
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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!
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.
FYI, transmission losses over 4000 miles is 7%.
100% solar panels? we could trivially wipe out a day time use.
We can use gravity systems for storage.
Fuck, if this was 1930, we would be doing it all ready. Now everyone is a whiny ass afraid of big projects.
The bests roads, best education system, best space agency, tallest buildings, longest bridges all see to be in the US, but apparently everyone has given up and have no problems watching out civilization built into straw start to blow away. At least billionaires get to keep more billions and suck money out of the system; which is what kills the middle class..
A massive solar project would pretty much put everyone to work, increase the tax base.
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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.
Or about 14% of the cost of the Iraq War.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I'm not sure how solar panels would do on my roof. I live in upstate New York. During the summer, yes, we could generate electricity, but during the winter, they could be covered with snow.
Worse still, when it snows I need to rake my roof. For those who have never had the "pleasure" of having to do this, heat from the house melts roof snow which runs down to the colder overhang where it melts into ice. When enough ice forms, it dams up any additional water which can then get pushed under the roof shingles and inside the house. (It happened to us once. Dripping water in your bedroom is NOT a nice sound to wake up to!) To prevent this from happening, I use a long pole with a sort of shovel on the end to pull snow off the roof. This way, there is less to melt. The down side is you are standing in the freezing cold (sometimes deep in snow) reaching high above you to pull a ton of snow down off your roof.
Getting back to solar panels, if I had them on my roof and had to rake my roof, I'd be worried that my roof rake would damage the solar panels.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
only recently went "Power positive" (where over their useful life a cell can generate more power than it took to make it in the first place. ... and I'm approaching my first half century. ...
Solar panels are 'power positive' longer than I'm old
They still cost more per kilowatt hour than buying power from the power company Depends on how your grid/infrastructure/marketing works. Right now on europeans energy spot market during peak time solar power sells for a premium. Even without subsidies you have a payback period of your installation on roughly ten years. With an expected lifetime of 30 years and more you are are certainly in the plus side, but that is Europe
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
Fortunately, it works well on a local scale.
Got an anecdote for you.. :)
I live not altogether too distant from you. ( weather-wise). I have solar panels on my roof. Had 'em since like.. 2008.
Snow isn't that big of an issue. Sometimes they get covered, sure. But wierdly they *still* work, even when covered with snow. Not enough to generate anything much worthwhile, but *enough to heat the panels*. I find the snow melts from the underside up, causing a slick undermelt which then causes all the snow to slough off and fall off the panels. Bingo! Panels are working again.
Even in cloudy weather and winter weather - they still produce a significant amount. I was surprised.
And I've never had to clean them. In summer any bird crap on them simply 'burns off' and the rain keeps them clean enough that I've *never* had to go up with a brush, and I've certainly never had to go up with a rake.
Might wanna watch out on the snow days though, in case you get dumped on when the snow falls off - but that's no worse than standing by my front door and getting the ( other, non-solar covered) roof dump its contents onto you.
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.
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.
My old PC had a 400Watt power supply.
My old Halogen downlights were 50 Watts each
My laptop had a 90Watt power supply.
My new halogen downlights are 35 Watts each
My phone has a 1 watt charger. (also my tablet.)
My LED downlights use 7 Watts.
I'll stick with my gadgets and generate 1.5 KWh on average with the solar panels on the roof thanks.
A sig is placed here
To display how futile
English Haiku is
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.
Don't even start on the solar powered roadways thing. Driving on solar panels is just not a thing that is currently possible, no matter how much kickstarter wants to make everyone believe.
That being said, there is a ton of effectively useless (undriven-upon) land where solar panels could go. Just the strips of land where the electric lines are could do it.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
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/...
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.
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.
" heat from the house melts roof snow which runs down to the colder overhang where it melts into ice."
you need to spend some money on improving the insulation in your roof / loft if heat is escaping to melt the snow
" I'd be worried that my roof rake would damage the solar panels."
use something softer on the end, you don't need anything like metal to dislodge snow.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
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.
Why take the least efficient per land mass and one of the most expensive forms of generation and lump it on potentially usable land far enough away to require transmission equipment and include transmission losses?
Instead you could mount the panels on areas wasted by coloured roofs, co-located to the consumer, and as a bonus it actually keeps the house cool in the summer as well.
I will have to go for exactly the opposite recommendation you just made. I think large scale solar PV and thermal solar is a horrible idea, but I fully support a panel on every roof of the city.
No, cross country you just need HV. DC comes handy when there are too many suppliers with independent problems and synchronization issues between them cause trouble all over the grid. But DC isn't fundamentally necessary just because transmission is cross country.
And no one does 3000 miles at 110 V. Transmission (long distance) grade voltage starts at 110 kV and above.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Actually, thanks to the Volcker Rule (part of Dodd-Frank), they generally _can't_ put their money where their mouth is, since investment banks have been significantly restricted in their ability to invest for their own accounts (i.e. proprietary trading).
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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
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).