Floridian (and Southern) Governmental Regulations Are Unfriendly To Solar Power

An anonymous reader writes with a link to a story in the LA Times: "Few places in the country are so warm and bright as Mary Wilkerson's property on the beach near St. Petersburg, Fla., a city once noted in the Guinness Book of World Records for a 768-day stretch of sunny days. But while Florida advertises itself as the Sunshine State, power company executives and regulators have worked successfully to keep most Floridians from using that sunshine to generate their own power. Wilkerson discovered the paradox when she set out to harness sunlight into electricity for the vintage cottages she rents out at Indian Rocks Beach. She would have had an easier time installing solar panels, she found, if she had put the homes on a flatbed and transported them to chilly Massachusetts. While the precise rules vary from state to state, one explanation is the same: opposition from utilities grown nervous by the rapid encroachment of solar firms on their business."

Comments

Re:Translated into English

[dhanson865]

Some people think they should have free Solar Panels paid for by the utilities and government. The cost for 3 cottages was quoted as 106,000 dollars but I keep seeing where in California people are installing panels for a tiny fraction of that. I guess that shows just how much of the cost is being subsidized. Solar advocates keep touting how inexpensive it is but here we see the true cost. I wonder how long it'll take to recoup over 30 grand per installation?

No the cost isn't just being subsidized. Florida gets half to one quarter the solar energy at the rooftop that California gets to for the same power usage you have to install twice to four times as many panels.

Another factor is hurricanes. In California you can use cheaper panels because they don't have to be rated to withstand hurricane force winds. Even if you use the same number of panels in an Florida installation you'll have to pay for more expensive panels and more expensive mounting brackets/rail systems. Everything has to be stronger in a state that is likely to see a hurricane every few years when the panels would otherwise last >30 years.

With no subsidy in either state you'd still spend more for solar PV to get the same power in Florida.

Try a TRILLION DOLLARS, for starters.

[TheRealHocusLocus]

Aw C'mon, everybody's whining about the subsidies and 'net metering hardware' that needs to be installed and maintained at each point of presence -- aside from the purchase of the solar and wind units themselves... at the core of it are a few folks discovering that power utilities are not as eager as they like them to be.

For solar It's just a politics-entitlement issue because, frankly, the power these solar installations push back onto the grid is too tiny for the 'trouble' they cause. I am SO GLAD that my small midwest city has none of this DAMNED FOOLISHNESS going on. We can see what our electrical co-ops pay by the kilowatt for reliable grid power and we see the salaries of the fine people who maintain it, and it's pretty much in parity.

The power grid is a massive tuned circuit which uses frequency to regulate power flow. Several regions such as Oklahoma, Florida and the Northeast already contain enough intermittent energy sources to create real problems with distribution, today. Electrical Engineer Andrew Dodson lays out a few of these problems at this fascinating presentation at the recent Thorium Energy Conference in Chicago, showing plots of dissonant waves hundreds of miles across caused by the onset and outset of wind surges. He describes the "single machine infinite bus" model that grid engineers design for and how it is being compromised in this followup interview.

Here is someone who has devoted his career to grid stability, understands it completely -- and what is his own take?

A TRILLION DOLLARS to retrofit the grid to accommodate so-called renewables. That's without putting a single additional megawatt on the grid. He even advocates the build out of a parallel grid for variable sources to protect the essential 24/7 machinery of power generation, which can incur physical damage from these effects -- allowing us to concentrate new infrastructure for tuning reactive load to a few buffer points.

Sounds great down the road. We need reliable baseload power cheaper than coal first.

___
Please see Thorium Remix and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
Also of interest, Faulkner [2005]: Electric Pipelines for North American Power Grid Efficiency Security