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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."
Not all states offer subsidies as generous as the solar industry thinks they deserve.
This isn't news, it's politics by other means.
Dog is my co-pilot.
In no place is crony capitalism so entrenched as in the former states of the Old Confederacy, and Florida is one of the worst. (And, note, I say that as a native of the South.)
Not all states offer subsidies as generous as the solar industry thinks they deserve.
Its about long term thinking.
The fossil fuel industry has so many tax and environmental subsidies and costs that go ignored by most people. Duke power dumps a shit load of coal ash into a river and WE the taxpayer pays for it in more ways than money. And there''s the economic consequences - that cost Duke nothing.
Fossil fuels are old, polluting - MUCH more than the manufacture of solar cells and other green energy, and cause health problems that are paid down the line in increased healthcare costs and deaths.
When fossil fuels are drilled or mined is has environmental and health costs. When it transported and burned it has environmental and health costs.
When a solar cell is made, that's the end - all the environmental and health costs are over with. And nuclear? Pfft. The used fuel is nothing compared to the shit: mercury and other crop being spewed by fossil fuels.
Why we can't progress beyond 19th century energy sources?
...as long as their corporate/special interests "freedoms" take priority from the public's interests, everything will be peachy.
Also see: Tesla vs. State auto dealership associations.
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.
What troubles me is the fact that even while all this is going on, the US government preaches to the world about capitalism and free enterprise. What hypocrisy!
One definition of free enterprise that the US government conveniently chooses to ignore:
Business governed by the laws of supply and demand, not restrained by government interference, regulation or subsidy, also called free market.
" 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."
Frankly, as someone that worked in the PV industry, I don't blame them for being nervous.
Commercial PV is now cheaper than nuclear and highly competitive with both coal and NG turbines. Rooftop systems are nowhere near as competitive, but as they are on the retail side of the meter, they don't have to be. So that's one thing that's scary.
And then there's the fact that PV, especially west and south-west mounted, provides power on-peak, precisely when the companies charge the most for their power. That's where they make almost all of their profit, so this is doubly super-scary.
Those "attractive rates" mean that the power companies pay retail for the power that you feed back to them, which automatically tells you that they are overpaying, since it doesn't include all of the expenses that power companies have. You know who pays for those "attractive rates"? Not the power companies, that's for sure; they pass the losses on to the rest of their customers. It's non-solar power users who subsidize solar power users.
Doesn't sound so bad: people who waste fossil fuels should pay for their sins, and we should reward people who use pristine power! Isn't that what we want? Until you realize that people who put in solar power systems into their homes are primarily affluent, and the money comes primarily from the poor and lower middle class.
Solar power incentives end up being a massive handout to the affluent, paid for by the less well off.
So you have this confluence of powerful, "environmentally conscious" affluent folks railing against carbon emissions, and lobbying for their expensive lifestyle gimmicks (electric cars, solar power, etc., you name it), combined with lobbying from the solar and electric car industry, and you get these junk laws pushed through. Then people pat themselves on their back about how great they are, while at the same time complaining about growing "inequality", which this policy (among many other "progressive" policies) actually contributes to.
I've got 4 100 watt panels that send power to my desk. All my devices and this computer are powered by what is stored in the battery that is in a box nearby.
My next 1000 watts will go to run the pool and all my backyard lighting. The power company can cry all it wants, but eventually my entire house will be off the grid.
Corporations have "captured" the government. They have discovered that by "investing" a relatively small amount of money in politicians, they can gain a high return in getting laws and regulations passed with protect their monopolies, enabling them to charge high rent.
This takes place in most (?all) governments but the dollar amount of this return on investment in the US is probably the highest or any country in the world.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I've been shouting this from the mountaintops on /. for years. Few people understand the concept and benefit of limited government. If government didn't have the power to regulate this or that, corporations wouldn't be buying it off. People seem to assume that political motivations are somehow natively nobler than that of business, but fail to realize they are often one and the same. Sadly I fear, even this clear example would not cure liberals of their stubbornness.
Several posts, mostly by ACs, suggest that solar panels are putting "dirty" power back into the grid. Is there any truth to that?
They also suggest that net metering requires some extra infrastructure on the part of the utility, which I know to be completely false.
Test 1 2 3 4
I have lived in Florida for 59 years and can tell you that at times the state is pretty much like an insane, psychopath who is loaded up on meth. So yes there is always corruption in play here. But when it comes to what seems to be over regulation keep in mind that most of Florida will have violent storms rather frequently. We build against a very real wind hazard. Some serious design challenges exist if one needs to safely mount solar collectors. Windmills would really have to be special as winds that gust at 200 mph will rip most things right out of the ground and your windmill may well become a missile that hits other homes. Our roofs have very little pitch to avoid being crushed by wind. They also tend to have very little overhang for the same reasons and our rafters must be far stronger than in other states. People in most states would be shocked if they understood the design differences require in our homes. Despite all of this we do have people going solar. It is just a bit more difficult here.
A more correct interpretation is that some states have a strong Public Utilities Commission that narrowly interprets public utility laws in a way that negatively impacts *some* solar business models.
In particular the solar business model that installs panels for free or at some low lease cost, and then sells the electricity created to the homeowner (and excess to the grid). In this case, the PUC sees the situation that someone has chosen to build a small electric power plant and sell electricity to a other parties. The notion that the primary customer is a single homeowner or business is immaterial. A company that builds electric power plants for the purpose of selling electricity to other parties is to be regulated under the same laws as any other electric utility company.
If you want solar power for your house, you are free to buy panels and have them installed at your own expense and you can reap the benefits of your self-generated electricity. There may still be issues involving whether and how you can sell excess power back into the grid.
If they had purchased equipment, then that would be the case as you put it.
But these instances focus on a particular business model where "customers" do not buy or install the panels. Instead, they allow another party to install panels at their expense (the installing company remains the owner of the panels throughout) while agreeing to buy electricity generated from the panels.
In other words, they allow someone to build a solar electric plant on their property and further agree to purchase electricity from that plant. Kinda like Verizon and Sprint giving you "free" phones so long as you agree to a two year contract for cellular service. You might not buy the $800 phone otherwise.
This keeps the property-owners initial costs low while locking them into a long term electricity contract. And it makes the provider a public utility--they build plants and sell electricity to customers--and therefore are unhappy to find themselves categorized and regulated as such under the laws governing public utilities.
If government didn't have the power to regulate this or that, corporations wouldn't be buying it off.
Or as P. J. O'Rourke put it When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
Solar PV for base load energy will not work
Solar Thermal, coupled with PV, Wind, Hydro, and energy storage will work. There is no requirement that only one kind of energy source be used to satisfy the demand curve. A current example is the Ivanpah solar thermal plant, just west of Las Vegas. They didn't bother putting in any storage because Boulder Dam, just east of Las Vegas, is on the same main power line. So whatever power Ivanpah puts out, just means more water behind the dam can be saved for other times.
Ivanpah also has natural gas backup. Once you already built the field of mirrors, boilers, and generators, adding natural gas burners is a small expense. The turbines don't care if it was the Sun or natural gas that generated the steam.
As far as storage, every electric car comes with a battery. If your car was fully charged up at work from a solar-panel covered parking lot and building roof, you can use part of that charge to feed your house at night. Buying a storage system by itself is expensive. But if you already bought a big battery for your car, not so much. There is a reason Elon Musk runs both Tesla and Solar City. They are complementary technology.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/green...
"15 November 2012—Glass panels on rooftops and hurricane force winds don’t sound like the greatest of combinations, but solar power companies say their customers’ rooftop installations stood up very well to Hurricane Sandy’s onslaught."
Suniva panels are rated for 200 MPH winds ( http://www.suniva.com/document... ). The rest of the house would likely blow away first.
I wonder if it's possible at all to just retrofit in a modular way. for example, take 1 power line that goes down a few city blocks and touches 10 stepdown transformers. Could that entire line be taken down along with the transformers and replaced???
IF the area was literally paved with solar and wind, such that its output could not only provide for it completely but with surplus for export, then these resonance effects might be measurable and some adjustment to the original design might improve efficiency.
But the effects that Dodson refers to in the video linked above occur over a much larger region, when large wind turbines create an ebb and flow of hundreds of megawatts at a time, fast ripples in a pond. It's not that the transmission lines cannot handle these variations in flow -- the whole system was designed to remain in near perfect phase except when large, slow and regularly scheduled events 'push' or 'pull' it -- slowly. Only the trip of stations or the gradual rise and fall of loads would affect it. Grid operators and their physical machinery do take kindly to extraordinary, unplanned events and wind power has made every day a cacophony of them.
What you can do at the community level is take advantage of all this great stuff and become more self-sufficient -- help one another to install power sources that begin to take you off the grid for certain things or some of the time. As 'preppers' or 'conservationists' or maybe just for the hellacious fun of it.
In short, leave the government and the grid out of it. We will continue to need reliable power, and the grid is fragile. Paying by the kilowatt-hour to some well-designed, stable entity miles away is not an abomination, it is the best way we've come up with to solve the problem.
The net metering 'fad' with its Federal mandates and subsidies reminds me of the The Bank That Was Sent Through the Post Office back in 1913. 80,000 bricks needed to be moved 120 miles and freight was prohibitive, so this young entrepreneur 'pwned' the Post Office which had recently introduced its Parcel Post service with reasonable rates for packages under 50 pounds. No one believed for a minute that the Post Office should shrug off this large scale abuse and re-tool their organization to subvert the whole idea of bulk freight. But (for a time at least) they were powerless to do anything about it, and the Bank was built. Two hundred tons of bricks by Parcel Post.
Similarly -- it is my belief that given the purpose for which it was designed, and the way it was constructed, the North American Power grid is being abused dangerously by variable energy sources. And we cannot afford, nor should we strive to 'fix' it until we address the more pressing problem -- a lack of sustainable, reliable energy sources.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Voters. The elected official are put there by voters, every time.(Not it some rare, and temporary situations)
Educate the voters. Let them know what's going on.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
> 2) The electricity companies are not under any obligation that I know of to take your electricity.
They are in locations where the utility regulators require "net metering". In a fair situation, the homeowner still pays a line charge, to cover line maintenance and provisions for current flowing backwards through transformers, and not overloading the lines in times of high output. Then they pay and earn fair per kWh rates (which may be different and vary by time of day) for power used and generated.
> 4) The cost of taking your crappy, varying pittance of power
Is nothing like the way you describe it. Unless surplus solar is a majority of the power on a distribution line (the line that goes from the substation to houses), it will simply go from your house to some other house on the line. The utility then pushes the difference through their substation to meet the remainder of the demand. They already have to handle varying demand on the distribution line, since demand varies all the time in normal use. Only if solar were more than what is needed to power the solar houses *and* everyone else on the distribution line, would the utility need to make provisions at the substation for running power to other substations.
Educate the voters. Let them know what's going on.
The problem would be separating education from propaganda. Who decides what the education content is? The current incumbents? The media? Unions? Corporations? You?
And then of course we have the subtle slant that can go into the education: ... ... ...
Sources said
The opposition claimed today
The opposition complained today
And of course for time -- just for time really -- we need to cut stories that are less relevant. You say it's censorship, I say good editing (or vice-versa, I don't care). We'll educate more on the possibility of impeachment (or more on Lois Lerner and the IRS scandal) depending on our point of view.
I suppose we could establish a bi-partisan commission -- one to designed to exclude third-parties from participation. After all, they aren't likely to win anyway.
No. Some politicians. not all. There are plenty of states that are citizen friendly regarding solar, and that's because the politician did what there voters, BaL, wanted.
Are you sure the friendliness is towards the voters and not the solar companies? Just curious?
Note: I'm just playing devil's advocate on perceptions. While normally I'm against government subsides, I personally think solar/alternative energy is a great thing for the governments to subsidize; especially when you consider that the "loser" (if there truly is one) is another government sponsored monopoly.
The business models that have made solar systems financially viable for millions of homeowners in California, New England and elsewhere around the country are largely illegal in Florida, Virginia, South Carolina and some other Southern states. Companies that pioneered the industry, such as SolarCity Corp. and Sunrun Inc., do not even attempt to do business there.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
What about those business models is illegal? Is it perhaps something that might reflect badly on the companies that practice it?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
The business models that have made solar systems financially viable for millions of homeowners in California, New England and elsewhere around the country are largely illegal in Florida, Virginia, South Carolina and some other Southern states. Companies that pioneered the industry, such as SolarCity Corp. and Sunrun Inc., do not even attempt to do business there.
What that appears to mean is that without the subsidies and questionable business practices, no one in their right mind would buy solar panels for their home. That may not be the case, but the fact that the article fails to spell it out, suggests that it is.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison