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Energy Utilities Trying To Stifle Growth of Solar Power
An anonymous reader writes: Incremental improvements have been slowly but surely pushing solar power toward mainstream viability for a few decades now. It's getting to the point where the established utilities are worried about the financial hit they're likely to take — and they're working to prevent it. "These solar households are now buying less and less electricity, but the utilities still have to manage the costs of connecting them to the grid. Indeed, a new study from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory argues that this trend could put utilities in dire financial straits. If rooftop solar were to grab 10 percent of the market over the next decade, utility earnings could decline as much as 41 percent." The utilities are throwing their weight behind political groups seeking to end subsidies for solar and make "net metering" policies go away. Studies suggest that if solar adoption continues growing at its current rate, incumbents will be forced to raise their prices, which will only persuade more people to switch to solar (PDF).
This story was posted a couple of days ago: http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
Maybe some utilities are scared. Mine in Texas seems to encourage solar adoption since they offer thousands in rebates for a qualified solar installation.
There's a long tradition of regulating electrical utilities -- their new-plant construction, their service build-out, and most especially their rates. If connecting single-household solar installations and buying back power from them is imposing an undue burden, and they can prove this, adjust the tariffs accordingly.
But you shouldn't quash an entire emerging industry just to protect an old and established one. Unfortunately, that seems to be one of the main duties of legislatures.
If the amount of money made from the actual electricity falls too far then the cost will be transferred to a network connection costs.
This is already the case in Australia where the cost per kw/h is predominately made up but the cost of the distribution network rather than the generation costs.
You may see an increase in people disconnecting from the grid all together but I would suggest that will remain a fringe component for the foreseeable future. Battery costs are too high and most people's electricity consumption is very lumpy meaning they need a lot of storage. Finally people will pay for the security of mains power.
In Australia you tend to see a feed-in tariff - ie the electricity you put into the grid is priced. For a while this was heavily subsidised meaning the feed in rate could be more than double the buy rate. Which skewed the market terribly, basically the people who could afford solar systems were funded by renters and those that couldn't.
Now the feed in rates are a commercial competition between the various energy retailers.
In the end someone has to provide the wires, transformers and sub-stations. Those don't care where the power comes from. If it cannot be paid for by the generators it will be paid for by the consumer directly.
This strategy is untenable in the long term - as battery technology grows better and cheaper thanks to the likes of Tesla, they will eventually drive consumers off-grid entirely with these punishment tactics, losing any chance of making money from them.
Utility companies need to change their business model if they want to survive.
Pay solar at wholesale rates, or, make grid interconnect a separate fee, and charge them for that. Solar advocates, of course, can't stand the idea they should actually have to pay for the delivery of goods and services, even if it costs them a measely five bucks a month.
I would be willing to bet that the apportioned capital cost of power plants, maintenance, and distribution alone would amount to a third of a typical power bill.
Dog is my co-pilot.
A business model that would allow you to charge one fee for hookup and another for amount of product used sounds kinda fair.
I want solar power during the day but want grid power at night? Then it's fair that I pay a hookup fee.
I want to use a big box of batteries overnight? No hookup fee for me.
Externalities are a bill to which any amount may be assigned.
Dog is my co-pilot.
I fail to see a problem with local/green energy production. Power distribution infrastructure is terribly vulnerable, horribly inefficient, and more often than not attached to a chimney.
Too many industries have the philosophy of "if it's broke, don't fix it." It's time to develop and employ 21st century technology, join up or stand aside. There's no reason power companies can switch their business model up a bit and adapt. Perhaps add SolarCity style businesses to their portfolio.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Electric companies don't like being forced to pay far above their normal cost for something they have to throw away by shunting it to ground. That's net metering, when done on a large scale. The light outside might LOOK ten times brighter than the lighting inside Walmart, but it's actually 10,000 times brighter. Your eyes are very good at seeing in a wide range of light - from candlelight to full sun, a million times brighter. They do so by using a logarithmic, rather than linear, scale for brightness. For the same reason, although the noon sun may APPEAR to be only twice as bright as the sun at 9:00 AM, it's actually much, much brighter. Virtually all of the solar electric is generated when the sun is bright, from about 10:00-2:00.
What that means is that if most people had solar panels, from 10:00-2:00 they could generate as much power as they use the rest of the day. Their electric bill under net metering would be zero. However, the power company still has to provide power to them the other 20 hours per day - for free. See how that could be a problem for the utility, having to provide power for everyone, but nobody has to pay for it?
The utility can't give them back the power generated ten hours earlier, because there is no effective way to store power at utility scale. I know someone who heard a stock tip about some cool new company with magic storage will want to argue with me on that, but I've looked into all of the options and nome of them work at scale. You can try to argue with me, but I'll make you look very, very foolish when I apply some arithmetic to your idea.
Net metering is survivable if only 1% of people do it, because their neighbors can use their noon power. If everyone is doing net metering, you need a magic free energy source the other 20 hours per day. If you decide that solar electric implies net metering, you only end up proving solar electric to be impractical, because net metering absolutely, positively cannot ever possibly work for more than a small fraction of the population.
On a related note, if your argument for solar power assumes that solar means solar electric, you're probably shooting yourself in the foot too. There are several varieties of solar power that work well. Solar water heaters are a no-brainer. Solar electric is probably the silliest approach that anyone seriously suggests, as shown by the trillions of dollars we've wasted on utter fail so far.
because soon i am going to go completely off the grid, no electricity except for solar, water will either be bottled, or if i get dig a well i will put in a lever hand pump, and for heat a wood stove, no more air conditioning and no more refrigeration, i will build a composting toilet which is legal, research composting toilets if anyone plans on going off the grid, i will figure out a way to recharge a cellphone by solar power because i do want to remain in communication with family and friends
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Studies suggest that if solar adoption continues growing at its current rate, incumbents will be forced to raise their prices, which will only persuade more people to switch to solar.
Which means the subsidies are effective and successful, and we should have more of them.
Oh, wait. I thought I lived in a sane country for a second there.
"These solar households are now buying less and less electricity, but the utilities still have to manage the costs of connecting them to the grid."
The pro-solar folks think the utilities should pay this cost, instead of the people who actually incur that cost? Do tell.
If the power companies didn't have to worry about connecting all of that moderately-erratic power to the grid, they could easily "build down" over the next decade or two - and chop lots of unprofitable customers from their systems. They could dump pretty much all of the rural customers, and wouldn't have to worry about capacity expansion in the near future. They could even shut down a lot of older power plants that are low performers, profit-wise, instead of having to fight the government to build new plants while trying to keep the old ones running.
Perverting the market through solar panel adoption subsidies is not a good solution. They should instead allow the true cost of solar and other power sources be reflected in the price, by only taxing and subsidizing to account for positive and negative externalities. If the government wants to promote solar, it should be pumping money into green energy research to help make solar power (and other green technologies) cheaper faster. It should not be subsidizing the purchase of current expensive and inefficient technologies. It should be facilitating the development of future technologies that are actually cheap and efficient (without subsidies).
In fact, if the government owned the patents for these new technologies, it would have the power to lease them royalty free, further spreading their use. We want these technologies to be cheap, and we want people all over the world using them and improving them. Funneling profits to certain private corporations through subsidies is not the best way to achieve this goal.
I don't know if you've been following this story, but the efforts of the energy companies to thwart any development in renewables has gone a heck of a lot further than a $5 monthly surcharge.
In Oklahoma, Wisconsin and other states, they are requesting special taxes on solar panels. They don't even care if the money goes to them, they just want solar users penalized. Yes, this is about more than just the economics of energy. There is malicious intent.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Dear electric companies:
Your time on this planet as profitable private entities has come to an end. Rejoice! You had a good run. But it has ended.
If you succeed in eliminating net metering... Honestly, I bought a $20k solar installation; do you really think I'll put up with your bullshit instead of spending another $5k on batteries and going totally off-grid, costing you even your scammy $14/month "connection charge"?
Think about this long and hard, boys. Right now, you get peak-usage power from me at your totally fictional "residential standard rate", that you turn around and sell to time-of-day commercial customers for 10x what you pay me for it. Which of us do you really think will suffer more if I tell you to come get your meter and shove it up your CEO's ass?
Pay solar at wholesale rates, or, make grid interconnect a separate fee, and charge them for that.
Grid interconnects already appear as a separate fee in most places. Perhaps not at its fair market value, but go fuck a goat if you think I'll pay over a dollar per KW for my occasional nighttime use.
Solar advocates, of course, can't stand the idea they should actually have to pay for the delivery of goods and services, even if it costs them a measely five bucks a month
Try $14, for me. And yeah, I consider that fair. Ending net metering and charging me when they resell my peak-demand production for 10x what they pay me for it? Yeah, I can afford batteries, can they afford every other house going off-grid?
Think of the pattern that will become obvious. The very last customer to stay on the grid would have to pay for the entire grid. It's the reverse of the usual situation such as the first Bic lighter costing 40 million bucks but every one after the first only cost fifty cents. One huge change in the way we live might be easy to adapt to. But we are going to see huge changes coming at us almost daily soon. The electric car will be the only game in town and that will be rapidly followed by requirements that machines drive our cars rather than allow mortals, with all our flaws, to operate cars. And then the housing shock as conventional construction almost vanishes from society. There is a machine that lays down a nice brick road already in use. How long before a machine can tile a home floor or install vynil planking or roofing?
In LA, with a southern-facing, steeply pitched roof, my power generation today peaked at 3PM and ran within 95% of peak from 1PM to 5PM, falling off sharply at 5PM. This is just slightly ahead of the air-conditioning peak demand, which creates the peak for the utility. LA could probably withstand a lot more than 10% on net-metering, simply because solar and air-conditioning demand are so closely aligned. (They would be even more aligned if air conditioners were set to over-cool houses during peak solar generation.) Of course, the main problem with California utilities is that they have a lot of legacy power that no one would build today, all built into the rate base, so that they charge 30 cents per KWh. Solar generation looks quite good at that rate.
Troll or not, maybe these utility companies should start investing in solar and other alternatives. Why not cut your own slice of the pie instead of giving it away?
Cheap electrical storage exists... You cast a large concrete cylinder and spin it up, storing energy as momentum. There was a 55 gallon drum (barrel) version of this based on carbon fiber that folks would bury in the ground a few years back that could store an amazing amount of power. Or go with water. Pump it uphill when the power is cheap, run it down through a generator when power is expensive. Haven't the Swiss been doing that for decades now?
Shouldn't we be making a quote about now about how the tighter the utilities squeeze their fist, the more star systems will slip through there fingers...
For a while now in Illinois, we pay separately for distribution and supply. Using the grid as pseudo-storage where you supply by day and draw by night would lower or eliminate your generation costs but not the distribution cost.
Why would the power companies care as long as they have a viable business model?
Greed is the root of all evil.
Blacksmiths try to stop the horseless carriage. See how that turned out for them.
The infrastructure costs can be itemized in the bill, or amortized in the rate.
The major power company has to pay for the wires and cables of the grid in your community: why should the minor ones get to use the grid for free? The small-time (homeowner) power suppliers are making money; their connection to the grid should be charged to them. That the big power companies are asking for a fair apportionment of costs is not surprising.
I don't have any sympathy to small power producers who want a free ride....
Multi-national corporations forget that America is a FREE country tis of thee, and the Government should step up and remind them. Its should be and probably is a crime to prevent anyone from using and persuing alternative energy sources as long as its safe and clean.
The same way many people pay for a sewer where there is a minimum charge to be connected.
So you could have net metering plus a connection fee, everybody wins.
You may not be *ABLE* to go off-grid. I talked to some people a while back who had waited on installing Solar until they moved out of the county because the local ordinances required them to have a grid tie system since one of the city ordinances required all houses to have electrical, gas and plumbing services to them, regardless of if they had an alternative and closed loop system to provide the same services locally.
As such they had to move 30-50 miles out of town to get to an area which didn't have such an ordinance and allowed them to buy solar panels for a completely independent and off-grid solution.
Additionally, one of the features I find annoying locally is that the energy companies are allowed to purchase power from you at the LOWEST POSSIBLE ENERGY RATE, but are in turn allowed to sell power back to you at any current rate. As such, unlike states with 'equal energy credits', you could in fact have a bill each month despite providing almost double your own demand in energy back to the grid. The result of this is that unless you have a smaller solar array or some way to 'store' your excess energy before it would ever go back on the grid, you're getting fucked on the ROI of your nice shiny new solar array.
It's not just solar. It's everything that doesn't conform to their production methods. If they're primarlity coal fired, they're against everything that isn't coal. If thei're oil fired, they're against everything that isn't oil. Etc etc etc. They should be going with Liquid-fluoride thorium reactors. They're adverse to anything that isn't what they're already doing. But China and India are going with thorium reactors.
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
So ending subsidies and charging them for services they are using is "preventing" them from using and pursuing alternative energy?
Interesting definition of preventing you have there.
That's [the electric power distribution companies'] future business, moving power around and storing it for use when the sun isn't shining.
"Are you generating more solar power than you can use? We'll give you somewhere to stick it when the sun don't shine." That'll go over nicely. :p
Many places *DO* require grid ties even if you have solar and it is mandatory that it be connected subject to fines if not worse punitive measures.
here in NY we already pay separately for usage and service, usage pays for the power and service pays for lines/trucks/tree trimming/ etc
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Just to let you know, this was probably submitted by the fanatical Solyndra-supporting troll, mdsolar [slashdot.org]. He's been around these parts for a while.
Interesting to see a baseless ad hominem accusation being moderated informative. Is this a reflection of how low Slashdot has sunk, or an example of energy utilities trying to control and frame an online discussion?
Whatever the case, utilities have a right to be scared. The falling cost and sheer reliability of distributed energy sources are set to send many utilities into a death spiral. I have no doubt they'll thrash around, grasp at straws and do as much damage as they can on their way out, but there's no doubt they'll be the buggy whip makers of our generation (pun intended).
http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welc...
... scuttle the ship.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Have an Amish family live in your house for a year. Then that family can plead freedom of religion, as Amishism forbids connection to public utilities.
That's a heck of an idea. Many places already have smart meters, or will soon.
It could certainly work like you said- noontime power would be very inexpensive if a lot of people had solar. Of course, that means the economics of buying solar panels would change significantly since the buyback would reflect actual costs. You'd choose between buying your noon electricity cheaply from the power company (from your neighbors, indirectly) or selling noon power at a low rate. Solar electric systems would probably have to get a lot less expensive before it would make sense for many people to buy them.
Using a piece of black pipe to heat most of your water for free - that already makes sense for many people.
It annoys me that most of the talk about solar energy ignores the inexpensive, effective type (solar heating) and focuses on the expensive, impractical type (solar electric) .
I said most of the power is in a four-hour period. Your numbers match that, you just pointed your panels into the afternoon sun. You'd get more power, earlier in the day, by pointing them more upward. You might prefer less power later. Of course what time that is also shifts by an hour based on daylight savings time.
You can (and probably do) also buy a system that is incapable of converting all of the peak power. In that case, your power generation will flatline not because the amount of sunlight remained steady, but because your system was incapable of converting. all of the brightest sun - you get only got 3PM power out of 1:00PM light, even though the 1:00PM light was much brighter.
This is simply a failure of imagination.
Utilities are in the business of sinking money into power generating and distribution capability, amortized over decades against customers' utility payments.
Nothing is preventing the utility company from building solar thermal or solar pv facilities for the purpose of selling the power. Nothing is preventing the utility company from purchasing rooftop pv systems and reselling them to homeowners, along with skilled installation.
Instead, they want to coast on coal plants and grid they built out, much of it long ago - and keep slamming your checks.
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
With 3D printing being the biggest game changer in the history of all Big Bangs ever, we'll all soon 3D print whatever energy we want at home. Hippies can 3D print solar panels, hipsters can 3D print 19th century steam turbines, techies can 3D print everything from 21st century steam turbine nukes all the way to aneutronic He3 fusion reactors with direct conversion to electricity.
I mean really, these "sky is falling" articles from Luddites that fail to see the utter game-changigness of 3D printing are hilarious. Is it warm back there in the cave?
"the company scaling up to build ... they claim"
For fifty years people have been claiming their company is just about to start making some magical new energy stuff. My uncle claims he's Napoleon. Call me when it happens. Fyi, if it costs $20,000 to make something, and the government (taxpayers) pays $15,000 of that through subsidies, that's still a cost of $20,000. We all can't subsidize ourselves for thousands of dollars per month.
I can understand some limits, home/business owners back feeding power onto the power grid could under limited circumstances cause some issues and where they are allowed to back feed forcing utilities to pay more than they would for wholesale electricity sounds a bit much. But complaining that people aren't using enough electricity is ludicrous, the strain on utilities during the mid-day was one of the pushes for peak metering. One of the biggest causes of those higher loads are AC systems, which are used most heavily at the same time where solar is at its peak. Now utilities are arguing the opposite, that they need to up rates because people are drawing less power during those peak hours? Hopefully the technology/economics will develop to a point where completely off grid systems are feasible, at that point we can just let the market figure figure things out
They are gonna continue to drive the companies into the ground while running up huge debt and get bailed out.
Yuppers! Our local "coop" electric utility is just like this. They tried hard to kill of net metering in the legislature. When they lost they announced it as a victory - fantastic spin. They keep raising our electric rates although we already pay some of the highest rates in the country. They have a monopoly and they abuse it. The times are a changing though... Soon we'll all be able to generate our own power and we need far less power because machinery is becoming more efficient. On our farm I've been designing things to use less and less power. My goal is to get it down to the point where I won't need the electric utility. Then we will have to deal with the phone company, another monopoly that abuses its power.
This story was posted a couple of days ago:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
Yes, which is rediscussion of even older topic [26-Dec-2013] Utilities Fight Back Against Solar Energy Well... if stories can be redished then I can recup hiccup my own muckraking comment from it [evil laugh] Where will it end??
---cut here---
SO to summarize every /. solar energy thread...
THE MANY: why don't [greedy, evil] utilities just build smart grids and [benevolent] governments just enforce buy-back at retail? Or [to make up for perceived greediness] more than retail? Plus [free money] incentives for home owners in Pleasantville [no multifamily unit or slum dwellings need apply] to buy the stuff. And [one in a hundred thousand, owns own house free and clear, grossing $70+k/yr] solar home owner says, but it works for me.
THE FEW: Grid already running near peak capacity because it was never built out for surplus, it was built as needed. Energy costs for base load generation plants is volatile and variable. Capital spent on new base load generation NOT re-designing and re-building infrastructure in Your Little Neighborhood.
THE MANY: but solar and wind generate during [daytime not night, never mind Winter] peak hours and so will we once the government gives us free money to buy all this great solar stuff so it's all good and when this [unlikely miracle] happens those base load plants can just bug off. While we're operational that is. We'll stay connected to the grid for old time's sake and to sell our power to the [evil] power company. Storage batteries will come along and will solve everything. For a day at least.
THE FEW: Who's willing to run some the odds that a geographically dispersed network of solar/wind hipsters each feeding a little bit into the grid is sure to keep it stable and keep this 24x7 factory running? What are the odds of a cascading domino failure triggered by the first untoward event, where the hipsters and tiny federally-subsidized hipster companies will drop off the grid quickly, like flies, to satisfy their own local needs?
THE MANY: Fuck the factory, and fuck those other grid people who do not embrace small scale or personal power solutions. They're probably wasting loads of energy anyway.
THE FEW: Okay, imagine trying to light a sports stadium with ten million tiny Christmas tree bulbs. The kind wired in series where whole sections go dark when one bulb fails. Now imagine that on the supply side, with a truly incomprehensible number of possible points of failure in place, instead of the historically reliable method of a few, professionally maintained gigawatt plants that generate baseload energy 24x7...
THE MANY: Sounds great! It would probably be good for the planet too.
THE FEW: [double facepalm] Troll us into oblivion why don't you.
___
Obligatory bump to the Thorium Alliance and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
This is essentially correct:
If they take away net metering they should give wholesale peak prices. This can be more than $10 per KWh.http://eex.gov.au/energy-management/energy-procurement/energy-pricing/the-wholesale-price-of-energy/
If they don't give this wholesale price to homeowners, then the dropping price of PV will mean that large companies will set up large installations, selling into the wholesale spot market at peak prices. Same effect: drop in profits for electricity generators, and an increase in the price of stanby power at night or on cloudy days.
Part time power is something a 21st century economy does not need.
If energy is cheaper from another source, your energy company is going to have competition and not rake in crazy profits.
Things will absolutely go crazy the moment some company makes a cheap hybrid plugin electric car. Up until now you can get like 100,000 free miles of gasoline for what you'll save by not buying one. Once there is an economical reason to get one, everyone will want one. They'll use grid electricity at first, but then realize the benefit of having solar panels at their homes, and people will be buying solar arrays. This boom will all be triggered when one of these hybrid plugin cars or maybe even Tesla makes a chap electric car.
Think about the craziness of how even stores being unable to do their promotional deals. All the poor people with more time than money will simply drive from store to store and shop instead of telling themselves,"There's no point in shopping around because I'll lose more in gas money than I'll save."
God spoke to me
I wouldn't mind paying the net metering fee, IF the subsidies for fossil fuels were removed as well.
An article at Forbes reports that coal increases health care costs by 19 to 45 cents a kwh. Oil increases the costs by 8 to 19 c/kwh, and natural gas by 1 to 2 c/kwh. Then there's the estimated cost of climate change, assuming we beat it. (Yes, I trust a near-unanimous group of subject matter experts. Heck, I bet those 97% would really like to be wrong, so we wouldn't need to do something about the issue.)
Summing up, I'd rather pay $168 a year for a connection, as opposed to paying an extra $1000/year for fossil fuel electricity. (5000 kwh * 20 cents/kwh). Actually, aren't we already paying that extra $1000/year in extra health care costs, property insurance, and natural disaster relief?
He has gone to far this time.
Re: "If rooftop solar were to grab 10 percent of the market over the next decade, utility earnings could decline as much as 41 percent."
This sounds like the breathless pronouncements of the television networks when VHS recorders were introduced. "What will we do, people won't watch the ads! The sky is falling! People will record shows and show them to their friends for free!"
Sounds like a panicky utility exec (or a hired consultant) with a bad case of the vapours.
Nice try, MDSOLAR!!!
Sadly, I have to concur, this place has sunk pathetically low over years. I'm on my third UID now but have been here since the beginning. It hasn't been pretty to watch.
Good point. Correct it to "stick it for when the sun don't shine".
If sales and buyback rates were based on time of day , noontime power would be priced low going both directions. Agreed, that alleviates a lot of the problem I described. By more accurately representing actual costs, it also makes solar much less attractive- you'd no longer be able to sell the company 1Kwh of cheap noon power and use that money to buy 1Kwh of more expensive evening power. You'd need 15Kw of noon solar to pay for 1Kw of evening power, because that's the actual production cost. That could work, we'd just need solar systems 80% less expensive in order for it to do a lot of good.
I don't actually assume that the peak solar is greater than the demand at that time, though I am talking about a scenario where solar produces significant power. "Enough to meet 100% of noon demand " is just the simplest, most obvious point on the graph. The problem exists for any amount of net metering. It's at the point if zero net cost to consumers that it becomes OBVIOUS that the power company would definitely go out of business immediately.
The power company spends quite a bit of it's revenue on customer service and on infrastructure. Someone has to handle the billing, collect late payments, hook up new connections, etc. They have to maintain lines, transformers, generators, etc. IT staff buils and maintain all of the big systems for billing, dispatch, etc as well as desktops. People are paid to handle payroll, HR, legal and regulatory, etc. So let's guess that 50% of the cost is actually generating the electricity itself and 50% is running the organization. That number might be wrong, but we're just talking about the concept. At the generating station, you have a set of $XX million generators that need to be paid for and maintained, whether they are in use that hour or not. Even if the generator is turned off for an hour, the people who loaned the $XX million still want the power company to make their payments on time. The staff at the power station still needs to be paid, inspections still need to be done and certifications renewed. So figure at least 30% of the costs at the power station itself continue even if no power is sold from one of the generators for a couple of hours. In total, we can say that maybe 40% of the cost is fuel, and 60% is everything else. The exact numbers don't matter.
So let's say solar covers 50% of the power needs at noon. That reduces the company's FUEL cost by 50%, but most of their costs are unaffected- they still have to pay their IT guy the same amount. Actually, they have to hire another IT gal to build and manage the net metering system. Their total costs for the hour drop by 20% due to reduced fuel usage, while their revenue drops by half.
That bears repeating - if solar provides 50% of the power, their revenue drops by 50% while their costs drop by only 20%. Where do you think that 30% is going to be made up? They could fire all of the customer service staff (and go,outbof business when the phones go unanswered) or increase rates by 30%. Something major would have to change.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
i wouldn't mind a service fee if i wanted to keep my grid power as a backup. but they tend to kick scream and fight until you just tell em to fuck off and go full offgrid.
Walmart is putting panels on some stores that they say will provide 5%-10% of their power. So as you say, they aren't saving that,much money- skylights might well save more money. However, the money paying for the solar panels is mostly YOUR money, not theirs. They don't care so much about saving YOU money. The taxpayers pay most of the cost od building the solar panel factory, pay the company tax credits for running the factory, and pay Walmart credits for buying the panels. When you put $1 trillion of taxpayer money in to be spent based on politics rather than arithmetic, you end up with silly decisions.
Solar electric is also good PR, of course. The hot water in the Walmart bathroom sink could be 100% solar heated with $30 worth of black ABS pipe, but that wouldn't get them PR headlines.
The electric companies (other utilities as well, but electric in particular) have been getting it both ways for some time. They have a lock on providing most - if not all - of their services for their market, and government is generally unwilling to investigate their actions when they use their power to abuse customers. I recall in a previous home of mine, one winter the temperature wasn't as cold as predicted, which led to less need for heating energy. The power companies hence made less money, which they made up for by forcing a subsidy on the customers. Customers who tried to contest the subsidy (which raised their monthly bill) were threatened with disconnect and collections.
Now that solar is becoming a viable option - even if just to reduce the electric bill - the power companies are seeking ways to prevent it from hitting them. Eventually they will follow the same path that the insurance industry took with "health care reform" and dictate to the government a giant handout for themselves.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Now, why on earth would the next big Monopoly ever think of stifling their next wave of competition before it can get any traction?
Oh, wait. They're TERRIFIED of people getting Free Energy that comes from the Sun (or wind, or water, or geothermal sources) and them not getting even Fatter than they are!
Sooner or later, Hybrid/Electric cars will be "skinned" with solar collection "stuff" so that, while sitting in the sun during your typical work day, it can at least trickle charge its own batteries. Maybe even have employee parking spots with charging stations connected to larger solar arrays for the same purpose: charge while working.
I'm already disappointed by the lack of solar proliferation, let alone there not being more windmills popping up like urban dandelions. Kind of like the proliferation of satellite dishes that dot rooftops like urban mushrooms.
Eventually, such solar and wind collection will become required in any and all new structures.
If Big Energy wants a piece of the pie, all they really need to do is start manufacturing the components, and continue to maintain a power grid for sharing the ebb and flow of it all. Besides, they sit on the Dark Net anyway. If they fear anything else, it will be the lack of a window into peoples appliances (and TV/Entertainment Centers) to sell the data to the highest bidder (or Big Brother)...
Just Sayin'
Solar advocates, of course, can't stand the idea they should actually have to pay for the delivery of goods and services, even if it costs them a measely five bucks a month [energyandpolicy.org].
I think we should extend this model to all businesses. We should have a flat fee that every person with a television pays to HBO to maintain the infrastructure required to deliver programming to your home in the event that you want to purchase HBO in the future. We should have a flat fee that every adult pays to the airline industry to maintain their planes and baggage equipment so it's ready when you want to fly some day. We should all pay a flat monthly fee to rental car agencies to maintain their fleet of vehicles on the ready for that day when you need an extra vehicle. The possibilities are endless.
It wasn't mandatory. Or if it was at least charged at 'real' cost, rather than a potentially profit inflated value.
You've been around forever. I remember Anonymous Coward from many many years ago. Was always surprised that they let you get that username.
The electrical companies are going to have a great time when the electric car becomes viable. All the energy that was being supplied by gasoline will now have to come from electrical companies. I am pretty sure that the electrical transmission system is not capable of carrying the load of large amounts of car energy that will be needed.
It was not so many years ago that there was power outages, brown outs, etc on hot days because there wasn't enough power transmission lines to carry the load.
The homeowner that has local generation will have some advantage, but most people don't charge their cars at home during the best solar power supply times.
do it then and stop complaining.
Don't expect the companies to eat all the cost and inconveniences of taking the energy they don't want when it's convenient to you only to give it back when it's again convenient to you. How are they supposed to make money if they can't have the price arbitrage? Renewables demand a smart, gear and maintenance intensive grid but the money for all that investment to the tune of tens if not hundreds of billions apparently is supposed to fall out of the sky.
Instead, [power companies] want to coast on coal plants and grid they built out, much of it long ago - and keep slamming your checks.
Well, sure -- those coal plants cost a fair amount of money to build, and the longer they can keep them running, the more they can amortize that cost.
Of course, while that's a rational policy for the power companies, it's not rational for society as a whole, since it's the rest of us who end up paying the costs of the carbon pollution (in the form of flood damage, crop losses, war, etc). A carbon-emissions tax would go a long way towards re-aligning the power companies' economic incentives to better reflect those of society at large.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
do you really think I'll put up with your bullshit instead of spending another $5k on batteries and going totally off-grid, costing you even your scammy $14/month "connection charge"?
Hmm. $5,000 up-front in order save $14/month? Those batteries will pay for themselves in only 29 years, yay! Or rather, they would pay for themselves if they lasted that long, which they definitely won't.
So yes, the power company really does think you'll put up with their bullshit -- or at least, that most people will.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Trying to end unneeded subsidies is seen as stifling from the solar energy people. I call it fair competition and I'm not even libertarian. Solar and wind are subsidized heavily all over the world which is very much behind their current rise. I would like to see a fair competition of the energy market or barring that at least move towards actually useful short term solutions i.e. nuclear reactors.
You mean to tell me that companies are upset because an alternative form of electricity generation that is guaranteed to be a fact of life due to legislation and despite the fact that the electricity costs for solar are non-viable for cost reasons in part due to the government subsidies (and therefore not able to compete fairly) and they shouldn't be upset? Say it ain't so!
What if Walmart suddenly had a new competitor in the market, and no matter what this competitor was buying goods at a cost that was below manufacturing costs for the goods, marking them up slightly while simultaneously keeping prices slightly below what Walmart could ever hope to achieve, and then be guaranteed to turn a profit no matter what because of government subsidies?
I bet every company would be upset to have that kind of competitor.
Posting anonymously because I work in the energy sector...
If there is a cost for power companies to keep someone with solar panels connected, the person should have to pay for that cost or be disconnected from the grid.
It is kinda like electric cars and maintaining roads. As more people drive electric cars, less gas is bought that means less money to repair roads so governments have to find a way to charge electric car owners a tax to pay for road repairs. Even if someone with solar power, they still need to pay to help maintain the power grid because they are stilling using the power grid.
Don't let the internet's blind hatred for companies to think with reason.
Watch the Invisible Hand, tirelessly toiling away for the benefit of us all!
The government has been perverting the market for generations. If nuclear or fossil fuel plants had to have liability insurance for the damage they cause, they would go out of business. Similarly here in Australia a massive amount of subsidies are provided to the fossil fuel industries by way of infrastructure grants (roads, ports, railways etc) and exemption from taxes such as the diesel excise levy.
By all means make it a level playing field. But on both sides of the fence.
I chose not to accept any subsidies for my solar installation for two reasons. One, I wanted to do it all myself, but more importantly the subsidy is in the form of a renewable energy credit which is bought by a polluting company so they can pretend to be generating green energy, which they then recover by charging more for this 'green energy' that is nothing of the sort.
Why so suprised? The point of renewable energy is using less fossil fuels.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
This post needs to be shared with anyone in-charge of energy policy anywhere. Look at Germany, the whole sale price is going below zero, aka, they need to pay people to burn off the excess electricity. This is not a good thing if no one can store this power to sell it at a profit when it's needed it. It also leads to higher prices for non-renewables because they still have to idle and burn fuel because it's cheaper then shutting and restarting them. Also people expect as uninterrupted grid service as possible.
We need to at least stop subsidizing solar and renewables. Possible start subsidizing store....
Where I live, one pays a hefty deposit when your are connected to the grid in a residential property (refunded when you sell, paid when you buy). In addition, one is charged a flat monthly connection fee plus a usage based fee. It sound like the utilities just need to (a) start charging a monthly connection fee to cover their fixed costs, and (b) if they are already charging this, increase that fee accordingly as renewable power generation increases. If someone doesn't want to pay the connection fee, and feels they can get by on power generated by themselves alone, they can disconnect from the grid.
Hmm. $5,000 up-front in order save $14/month?
Not "just" $14/month - Did you miss the part about the utilities wanting to do away with net metering, an arrangement that lets the power companies resell my nice cheap standard-rate excess capacity at peak-usage rates? Yet still selling a similar load of nice cheap off-peak hours back to me? "I'll pay you to roll this boulder up that hill; but then I'll take a turn, and you can pay me the same to roll it back down!"
That would effectively make solar financially pointless for most middle class people (the ones who can both afford solar yet still have an incentive to save on their electric bill; the ones who work and therefore don't use much electricity in the middle of the day). So try more like $140 (though that obviously depends where you live), your normal electric bill minus 10-15%. That works out to more like a 2.9-year payback, rather than 29.
How are they supposed to make money if they can't have the price arbitrage?
Net metering already gives them price arbitrage, as I've said over and over. During the day they buy from me at standard offer, and sell at peak usage rates; then at night they buy from the ultra-cheap baseline capacity generators and sell to me at standard offer rates. The KWH may "net" under that scenario, but make no mistake, the dollars do not and the utilities make a fortune off it. They just want even more.
Renewables demand a smart, gear and maintenance intensive grid
National security - The real kind, not the political theatre kind - Demands a smart gear and maintenance intensive grid. That we don't already have one that can easily handle distributed generation speaks volumes about what the utilities have spent the past century doing with all those profits.
but the money for all that investment to the tune of tens if not hundreds of billions apparently is supposed to fall out of the sky.
You missed the part where their biggest fear involves millions of private citizens paying tens of thousands of dollars each to upgrade one tiny section of the grid at a time. That works out to half a trillion dollars. How much more do you want?
My batteries are part of my EV though...
Anyways, I wouldn't mind seeing the local power company fail or at least have to change their ways. Lets see them pay for the pollution they spew out. And I sure as hell don't care that their trust fund kids who didn't have to worry about money now get to work with the rest of us...
This is a solved issue. In some states, natural gas deregulation means that you now can choose from competing "providers" (actually, billers) for your service. The per-therm price has dropped dramatically, but there is now a fixed charge added to the bill to cover the cost of maintaining the connection to the pipeline - that is, you always pay to have the connection, whether you use gas or not. The cost of the gas you actually use drops.
> He's been around these parts for a while.
submitting mostly interesting and informative articles, without hiding where's he's coming from. (just look at his nick)
just because you don't agree with him does not make him fanatical.
Also consider the opportunity cost related to hassle with getting the batteries and installing them and the risk of them failing.
Meanwhile, companies that are selling and installing solar are getting to utility-scale production. SolarCity should pass 1GW of installed capacity this year, and is accelerating.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
and I am pedantic-- so I would point out the bird killer Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System
http://www.outsideonline.com/n...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
And this time he uses a link to Vox a.k.a Daily Kos, so you know without reading it that the article is BS.
I don't understand why energy utilities don't adopt solar rather than compete with it. They could install solar panels on houses, and then charge people a flat monthly rate with cost of living increases or even just charge them what they are currently charging them per kilowatt hour, while at the same time being subsidized by the gov't for adopting solar. They aren't stupid people, I'm sure they could find a way to make more money off of that system than the lesser amounts of money they are going to be making in the future.
Six months ago, I lost my job, then I have the privilege of a great website, literally saved me stumble. After I started, I had started working for a month on average 15K online and in a very short time, they ...... best thing is that I do not computer savvy, because I need is some basic typing skills and Internet access started. This is where to start ...... http://www.wikiwages.com/
I keep hearing people talk about "Freedom" like it's something special. What is the difference between dictators and boardrooms when these companies can pawn (pwn) the serfs they hold in their kingdoms. It's fair to charge a small connect fee to cover infrastructure but not charging you for your systems use. Also consider a single land line phone costs over 40 bucks that is no small fee. It's already hitting other services and it's only a mater of time before the rest do the same.
Off-grid sounds great and will become the norm but sun taxes to offset corporate welfare is coming.
If solar were viable the power companies would be all over it. Right now the only reason we have gobs of wind power is because it's government subsidized. If it weren't for the subsidies it'd be DOA. I suspect there's something similar going on here. The real cost of so called "green energy" is hidden. Consider the cost of manufacturing in materials and energy. With a life expectancy of 10 years multiplied by every household. That's a lot of waste. All those batteries? Gee that sure sounds good for the environment. About as good as these hybrid cars. None of this stuff is really green when you look at the big picture.
IBID
They always go straight to the political powers that be in the area.
They know that as more and more people use solar, economy of scale takes hold. If solar supplied 10% of the electricity in an area for a particular price, the price of solar will go down. Then more people will go to solar and solar electricity supply will increase to 15-20%. Perhaps it will continue to 25-35% or more. Eventually the need to pay the utilities' high price is no longer a need since the utility is no longer able to twist their arm. Result: the price the Utility has been forcing on the customers collapses. That's the real reason their profit goes down so much more.
Solution: From the utilities' point of view, go to the Political Powers that be. Tell them that they will loose huge tax revenues if they let these pesky people supply their own electricity! They must limit the solar, regulate the solar, and tax the solar to protect the industry and their tax revenues. Problem (for the utilities) solved.
Maaaaaybe they themselves should switch to renewable energy sources, which after 7-10 years turns into a magic free money generator, and then individuals wouldn't all have to switch themselves.
So you'd like to store energy in the form of water in a reservoir. Okay, there's precedent for that. Hoover Dam, located in Black Canyon, produces 4.2 billion kWh annually.
I told you I'd throw some arithmetic at your proposal. Let's start getting a rough idea of how that would work, then we can refine the numbers. The US uses 1,4000 billion kWh, so Hoover Dam provides 0.03% of our energy needs. 3,333 reservoirs the size of Lake Meade would do the trick, if we had huge 3,333 canyons to put them in, so they could all have dams 700 feet tall. Lake Meade covers 247 square miles and is 590 feet deep. That means 3,333 of Lake Meade would cover 823,251 square miles. The land area of the continental US is 2,959,064 square miles. So we'd need to cover 28% of the country, to a depth of 590 feet, in order to have all our energy come from hydro.
PUMPED hydro is different from traditional hydro in that we only need to store enough water to last a week, until the cloudy period is over. So we don't need the water to be 590 feet deep - 50 feet deep would do the trick. Of course, 28% of the country isn't canyons. Most of the country (everything between the Appalachians and the Rockies) is flat plains. When you try to flood the middle of the country to 50 deep, it spills out all over the rest of country, and you end up with the entire country under 12 feet of water in order to have enough water to provide a week of energy storage.
Sorry, I _told_ you that a little bit of arithmetic would make you look silly. And that's without even getting into the millions of giant pumps you'd need in order to pump billions of gallons of water every day.
Surely the widespread switch to CFLs or LED bulbs is a hit to their business too. Are they trying to stifle growth there too?
i cant up-vote, but i will say this is spot on.
utilities want solar-panel peak-load energy---and give you a bunk pricing rate for it. then want to charge a line-connection fee so solar-people can sip juice to power a refrigerator at night? I'd buy batteries purely out of spite so i could avoid a line-fee.
unreasonable monopoly
Or Iranians? Or Iraqis?
No?
Then nuclear isn't an option for power generation. I don't trust YOU with it any more than I trust them.
If 10% of your customers install solar panels you will lose 41% of your revenue?
If we are talking regular homes, 10% of home with solar panels should mean a loss of roughly 10% revenue not 41%. It is like they are cherry picking the numbers. Oh wait.
Which, as we all know, is a tropical paradise that never sees hardly any clouds!
SCORCHIO!
Oh, hang on, that's right: what you said was a load of shit. My bad.
whats wrong with the power companies charging two costs: One for the amount of next electricity drawn per month and a second as a line cost that everyone must pay in order to keep service? The line cost should cover updates to service to the house and stuff like that.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
I've myself tried some solar panels in the 1980's for a summer cottage, and the end result wasnt exactly amazing. It managed to produce power, but never enough to even watch tv with it. The power output was not constant, meaning that you saw only about 30% of the tv program you were watching, the rest of the time was flickering screen, when the panel just couldnt produce enough juice to power _ONE_ television. There is NO WAY for solar to power the thousands of televisions, if even one tv is a stretch. This was summertime in finland, a place where sun's output isnt exactly hottest, but even with improvements to the solar panels, and more sun's output is other side of the globe, I still cannot believe solar is ever going to produce enough electricity for anything significant. After this experience, I don't believe anything other than E=mc^2 is going to power significant portition of the world. And it would be nice if that E=mc^2 was near your location, and not millions of miles away like the sun.
An offer proposed for the State of California For a 600 kW parking lot canopy system the best price we were offered was .19 per kWh hour fixed or .165 with a 2% per year escalator. Not competitive when pay a seasonal average of .093. Yes we use a lot of power and our allocation is up to 4.6 mW
I just received a pamphlet with my last electric bill from Potomac Edison in Maryland that broke down where the electricity they provide comes from. I don't have it in front of me, but I recall the percentage of solar power stated as 0.02%, vs. numbers in the 30-40% range or so for nuclear, oil and coal.
Even with the rapid adoption of solar panels on roofs of residences and businesses, I find it hard to believe it will really break their business model any time soon?
For example, one of the largest solar installations I know of in the area is at American Public University in West Virginia. They have a several hundred kilowatt installation (I think someone said around 430 Kwatt but don't quote me on that), but they also have at least a dozen office buildings to power -- so all of that STILL produces well under half of their power needs.
I'm trying to get solar panels installed on my house right now, and even the most optimistic engineering model their computer software could come up with for my property wouldn't generate over 67% or so of my average power needs. The problem is, you're limited by how much roof space you have that faces the right direction -- and the more efficient panels cost a big premium price too. (If you do those no money down or low money down solar loan/lease arrangements, they often only agree to supply the cheaper Asian-made panels that don't have the especially high outputs. In my case, we were looking at no more than about 40% to 42% of my needs supplied with those panels.)
If the power companies would invest in the long-term, instead of trying to fight all changes with legislation -- they could use all of this to great advantage. It looks to me like your typical solar user is still going to need to be supplied 30-50% of their power from the power company. (Battery storage tech. is still just not really cost effective on a large scale, so solar panels mean you're not able to use your own electricity after dark or during storms where skies are dark.) So they need to simply scale back how much they spend on things like coal, oil and natural gas for generating power as more solar panels come online. Share around the power they generate during the day, and use the traditional power plants after dark. They're going to be able to collect fees for the power distribution, regardless.
> truth in here, but, since realtime peak solar output is still not within TWO ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE of demand,
I explicitly said I was talking about why we can't get a significant portion of power from solar under net metering. I also explicitly said "net metering is survivable if only 1% of people do it". So we agree, solar electric works fine as long as almost nobody is doing it, and we're not trying to get any significant amount of power from it.
> the construction basically demands building mountains in the plains
Hoover dam is one of our nation's largest engineering projects. It's a few hundred FEET across, just filling a pre-existing canyon. Those hundreds of feet took years, and loss of lives, to build. You're proposing to build thousands of MILES. Thousands of FEET would be a huge undertaking, thousands of miles is beyond what you see in fantasy movies. You're in talking about quadrillions of dollars, maybe a billion dollars per person. Can YOU pay $12 million/ month for your electric bill?
Actually capitalism is the only thing that is encouraging Americans to install solar power systems in any significant numbers. And within my city's limits, nobody has solar because the government-owned utility forbids residents from doing business with that capitalistic company (or its competitors).
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Allowing utilities to pass along 100% of "the fixed cost for just being hooked up" will -- in the long run, and not-so-ironically, if you think about it -- actually be good for adoption of solar power.
Because the alternative -- bankruptcy for the entities that add value to solar power installations, by maintaining the grid that ties them together and delivering power when the sun's not shining -- is not sustainable.
The utilities' current opposition to solar implies that they're being forced to provide money-losing subsidies for grid connections. Eliminate those, and everyone will benefit from the new transparency in the cost structure.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Pss - the "subsidy" the ranting bloggers talk about is this:
Oil and gas companies, like every other company in the country, don't pay taxes on money they don't make.
If you spend $100 million buying crude oil, and sell it for $110 million- you made $10 million. That's called arithmetic. The wacko blog scene, the "tinfoil hat" crazy wing of green blogosphere is suggesting that oil companies should be the only companies taxed on their revenue, rather than on profit. They call treating all companies the same a "subsidy" .
There is of course ONE industry who has paid negative $3 billion in taxes in the last six years. That'd be solar, who receives tax money rather than paying taxes. Of course, the exact numbers depend on what you count as a solar company. For example, Solyndra received half a billion dollars of your money and mine through the federal solar subsidy program. They never produced anything related to solar power though, so are they part of the solar energy, or just another scam taking advantage of the solar slush fund? The editor in chief of Nature called Nanosolar "the poster child of silicon valley solar", but they too took a half billion dollars and never produced a panel, so is that part of the solar industry, or is "the poster child" pf solar just yet another half-billion scam to send taxpayer money to Obama's friends and campaign manager?
If everyone is doing net metering, you need a magic free energy source the other 20 hours per day.
Why, when we already have a non-magic, non-free network of generating plants? Some of them burn fossil fuels, some of them don't, but that network as a whole becomes more robust when supplemented by distributed solar power installations that produce during hours of peak demand. Brownouts become less likely, etc.
I'm not in favor of going solar when other sources are more cost-effective -- and I'm not in favor of subsidies that merely give solar the illusion of being more cost-effective. Having said that, you've built a strawman: I haven't heard anyone asking to be provided with "free" energy from the grid during hours when the sun's not shining.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
a flywheel that has a distressing tendency to self-disassemble. Catastrophically.
GP did specify a buried flywheel. If pieces of flywheel become embedded in the soil four or five feet under my lawn, I fail to see the catastrophe. A one- or two-percent annual failure rate for a device like that would be quite acceptable.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Where I live: the bill is in two or three parts as it depends on if you generate power yourself. The bill always has a connection fee and consumption fee, the other part is if you sell power back to the power company. The price you sell it to the electric company is far lower than what you have to pay for it from the electric company. Friends who have installed solar have added extra capacity with sale/buy price difference and come out neutral on the power bill... except the connection fee part.
In our area as we get more energy efficient the power company increases the connection fee. Even though I have switched every light bulb in the house to save energy my monthly bill remains the same. Yes I consume less power but my connection fee has increased. It is just a shell game to keep the money coming in. I suspect if I was 100% off the grid I would be hit with a special tax that would help subsidize the poor failing power company. The city did this to one business that decide to generate their own power - they passed a by-law that taxed any private business that generated its own power with in the city limits. The tax worked out to be exactly the same as their power bill (the city generated the power).
I pay about $8 a month to the utility for the connection to the grid. I can't imagine their cost is much more than that to maintain the connection, especially if everyone is paying that fee.
Have you heard of utility "decoupling?"
It's all the rage, and you can expect to have it implemented in your area if you live the USA (well, maybe not in New Hampshire).
It works like this: the buggy whip maker (an electric utility) is having trouble keeping baby (legislators) in fresh minks (campaign contributions) due to the lack of need for buggy whips (coal and frack-gas power) so the law is changed to allow them to "decouple" use from billing.
Decoupling allows the utility to charge you completely independently of your actual consumption of power, and in turn this allows the utility to reward those customers who show their patriotism by leaving floodlights on their flagpoles 24x7, and harshly punish filthy communists who put up solar panels or use LED lights. And decoupling isn't just the future - it's already here today, in forward thinking communities!
I tell you, it's great to live in America today. Land of the Free, Home of the Brave!
> I haven't heard anyone asking to be provided with "free" energy from the grid during hours when the sun's not shining.
That's what net metering IS - everyone puts X kWh into the grid at noon, when the sun is bright. They then use X kWh in the evening, when they are st home cooking, watching TV etc. Since their net use is zero, their electric bill is zero - free power 20 hours per day. You can see why the utilities are saying that could cause problems.
Though I am worried about Anonymous Coward's mental health, as he's always publicly fighting with himself (or herself, that part seems seems to change over time as well).
Big Oil interests have always done everything possible to suppress technology that could in any way reduce their profits even slightly.
Since their net use is zero, their electric bill is zero
Wrong for several reasons.
Some households that participate in net metering are net producers of power, "exporting" more than they "import." Other households have remained net consumers of power. But no household has perfectly balanced exports with imports, resulting in zero net usage.
And even if a household did happen, one month, to export exactly the same number of kilowatt-hours as it imports, the fact of net metering does not guarantee that the utility will pay retail price for the exported power. The term "net metering" also applies when a utility pays wholesale price:
Net metering policies can vary significantly by country and by state or province: if net metering is available, if and how long you can keep your banked credits, and how much the credits are worth (retail/wholesale).
It doesn't make sense that a utility should be forced to pay retail price for each tiny trickle of power generated by amateur mom-and-pop producers, when bulk power generated by professionally-managed plants can be purchased at wholesale price.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Yes, some months they may produce more noon power than they use evening some months they may produce a bit less.
That only affects HOW MUCH magic free power is required for the scheme to scale. If it's perfectly balanced, resulting in a zero bill, ALL electricity must be magical free electricity, because nobody is paying anything.
On the other hand, if everyone's excess at noon is equal to half of their usage in other parts of the day, they're only getting half of their energy for free, so only half of it needs to be magic. The instant that the total produced at noon exceeds the amount used at noon, you're throwing noon energy away giving them evening energy in exchange for trash energy that's being thrown away. That's already happening sometimes in California. If you're trading something of value that has a production cost in exchange for trash, that's only sustainable through magic.
The "cloud" is an extremely centralized way of doing computing. There's no other way of looking at it. Basically, people/corporations give their data to (a few) other corporations to store in their enormous server halls. That's pretty much the definition of centralization.
It's also a movement to decouple function from what had been mostly single location single point of failure 'hosting'. A proper cloud may not offer provider diversity but it should offer a greater resilience to localized disaster. Consider it to be a step away from one (physical) point of failure towards 'zero'.
Our points of failure today are oil, coal and natural gas, not the corporations that serve them.
Too many people tend to think that intermittent energy sources are the solution to the 'big' problem, and they go on to spend all their thinking (and activist) time there. In fact, these sources have been a diversion from the real problem which is, can we come up with a path that could take every one of the world's 7 billion people to a level of technical affluence of, say, the United States, with diminished or no fossil fuels It's a mix of personal and heavily industrial energy draw. It's water treatment and distribution, sewage collection and treatment. Africa wants a grid.
The answer with just solar and wind and as-yet undeveloped storage technology and an incredible amount of manufacturing and capital is -- eventually at best. But probably never at worst because we will not be given enough time to do it before fossil fuel declines into the 'global war for resources' stage. Which will make today look like happy fun day.
Dismissing Thorium at this point in time is dangerous because there is barely enough time left to develop and scale it. If you're one of the few as I who also consider it vital that the United States take the lead -- rather than go further into debt to buy reactors from another country that is faster on the ball yet not necessarily as capable as we must become -- then time is really short. Fission is easy to do right because there are no 'surprises', only well defined problems to solve and challenges to be met.
Anyone who wants to go with a solution that could achieve this for a few billion people at best might wonder, what then will the remaining billions do? They would not go gentle into the good night if there is a light burning in the distance. Hope you're ready for company.
Only with a grand surplus of available energy in hand do we all stand a chance. Affordable, cheap energy is the only 'sustainable' form of wealth creation because only by increasing wealth by lowering the cost of living (personal and corporate) -- not by borrowing and taxation -- do things become possible tomorrow that are not possible today.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
If solar generation plus any form of utility-based storage were cheaper than fossil fuel-based generation, power companies would already be deploying solar widely.
Solar panels are nothing but an attempt by wealthy home owners to get cheap electricity, at the cost of tax payers and renters. And to add insult to injury, those homeowners justify their greed by pretending they are doing it for the poor and for the planet.
Back around 2003, I was arguing on the SSI list against space-based solar power satellites, pointing out that with trend towards ever cheaper ground-based solar power, solar power satellites were making less and less economic sense, even if they might have made more sense in the 1970s if built from lunar materials. I also pointed out the with decentralized roof-based solar power, and with likely predictable improvements in power storage (compressed air, hydrogen and fuel cells, better batteries), fairly soon it would no longer make sense for many people to connect to the grid even if the production cost of the electricity was nearly free (like from SPSS), because roughly half the then-current cost of electricity was for "distribution" via a grid of wires, not for "production". The grid is costly to maintain with falling trees, hurricanes, and so on. So, at some point, it is cheaper to have local solar panels than to get even free electricity from space if you need to use a grid to distribute it. (Solar power from SPSS beamed directly to airplanes in flight or to big industrial plants or laser launching rocket systems might be a different economic story.)
One idea I suggested back then is that if you looked at these trends, and factored in a future decommissioning cost for the grid to remove poles and power lines and such, and also sunk costs of debt being repaid for previously built coal and nuclear plants, some utilities might already be effectively bankrupt? Of course, you need to weigh the value of the copper in the wires as well as the value of the power line right-of-way for communications, so that idea is a stretch -- but it shows what these cheap solar PV trends could mean to the utility industry.
But even in the 1980s, just as Reagan took office and took the solar panels off the White House, people were talking about these solar trends. Amory Lovins is another person good at general big predictions on energy (including oil prices in the 1970s, when you factor in risks like wars and supply disruption).
Anyway, all this issue with solar PV reaching grid parity something utility company planners should have seen coming a long way off. Instead, it seems most people (including on Slashdot) have been completely ignoring these cost trends towards grid parity, and are only now acting on the fact that it has finally been (or is about to be) reached for solar PV. That is kind of like ignoring the fact that a car engine is leaking oil until it actually seizes up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
Or in other words:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/U...
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
Of course, I'm not sure what you could tell most utilities to do even if they had seen this trend. If their only response is to try to disrupt cheap solar, then maybe it is for the best that they ignored this trend? An alternative might have been for utility companies to get into a Sears-like appliance relationship with homeowners and their solar panels and batteries, or to do something like Solar City did with funding such systems?
The only thing I can see that would affect this trend towards dirt-cheap solar is even cheaper power from hot or cold fusion or something similar. It's true that people can fall off roofs installing solar panels, and that ground-based solar not on roofs can look cluttery and cover up ground otherwise usable for growing plants, and that batteries in the home need to be maintained and can be a hazard, and that some solar panels could in theory have run-off with some heavy metals (like lead or cadmium). So, nothing is perfect, and utilities might have been able to supply something better if they had thought hard about it and invested in R&D.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Reading articles like this really makes me ambivalent about getting solar. I've been tossing around the idea for a few months. My main concerns are the following: 1. Am I truly helping the environment with solar panels? Being that I'm only producing a few hours a day and storage isn't really a part of the grid, does it really truly help? I highly doubt they (who I assume is some 18th century irish immigrant) shovel 10 less scoops of coal into the plant because I have panels. If my objective is altruistic, would signing up for a green energy provider like Veridian help more in the long run? 2. Am I going to get screwed over by future regulations and price changes that will make the projections the very nice saleswoman gave me for RIO change? I already know my energy provider is going to increase their base rate by over 100% in the next year (to about $20). Thoughts?
since the utilities are often selling the panels, control the regulations connecting them, the "free power" means simply increasing rates to match, while not having to invest so much in source energy in the first place.
Utilities get everyone to install solar, then use those solar sets to generate power to offset parts of the grid where more juice is needed.
And like water conservation, no matter how much waste you remove, eventually you get to bare minimums so no more "rate improvements" as your consumption stays the same. And the rate STILL climbs. Like California with increased fuel mileage and less driving for summer - with less tax revenue from less sales, the taxes are raised to make up the shortfall, and everyone still pays as much (or more) for their monthly fuel cost even though they use so much less.
Only utilities losing money on solar installation are ones that are buying their power from someone else who controls the lines. Everyone else, is playing the Modern Enterpreneur - offer the same service as before but make the public and/or your employees bear the operating costs.
I bet any "on the books" losses are being made solely to game the system. In reality they're making more.
I agree with you about solar power, though it may well make sense for smaller countries like Japan who want energy independence and simply don't have the surface area for domestic solar. Plus, with a few (maybe-not-so-) minor modifications to the transmission system an orbital solar power array makes for a peachy-keen orbital death ray, and who wouldn't want one of those?
The problem with eliminating the grid is that you then need to have *all* power generation and storage locally - which dramatically increases the size of the buffer you need to maintain steady power during, say, a multi-week storm. Batteries allow you to average production over time, while the grid allows you to average production over space. They're complementary technologies. With localized power generation *most* of the time you won't be transmitting power very far, reducing wastage dramatically - it's more of an insurance policy against extended interruptions in local generation capacity, in which context it's likely to be considerably cheaper than a dramatic increase in local power storage or alternative generating capacity. Moreover in cities, where most of the human population now lives, you're going to be hard pressed to install enough rooftop generating capacity to provide for the extremely high power consumption density - apartments and office buildings typically just don't have the surface-to-occupancy ratio to go self-sustained solar, Meanwhile trees and tall buildings dramatically reduce the generating capacity of nearby small buildings, and I can't endorse any course of action which promotes even fewer trees in the city.
The situation is admittedly different in rural settings where space is plentiful and the incremental cost of grid connection is significantly higher, but any solution which ignores the situational realities of the majority of humanity is a non-starter.
So, if you have the grid anyway, then it make sense to use it to take advantage of economies of scale in power storage as well. Neighborhood-level power storage facilities still offer most the benefit of individual home storage, while reducing the per-battery maintenance cost and opening the door to things like flow- and liquid metal batteries which are unlikely to be cost-effective at small scale. And as someone pointed out to me yesterday - even with current lithium, lead-acid, and manganese (Aquion) battery technologies combined, we likely don't have enough global reserves of the limiting materials to provide storage for a single day worth of US power consumption, much less for the rest of the world.
A grid also allows you to supplement solar generation with hydro, wind, tidal, nuclear (including hopefully pB fusion before too long), and yes, even fossil power, though hopefully we can reach the point where that's only used as emergency backup generating capacity. None of which is likely to be cost-effective on a small scale.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I suspect this is more about justifying additional energy costs.
In order for any of what they describe to happen an awful lot of ducks would have to fall in a row, many of them at least historically unlikely.
1) Cost of solar equipment and install needs to go WAY down. Sure someone can go out an install a 20,000$ system, that will eventually pay for itself in 20 years, however only a nut is going to do it. This isn't even considering maintenance or the fact the panel efficiency decreases over time requiring replacement, or the fact that not all installs are viable, from direction, cover, weather, structure, etc...
2) Solar efficiency. I have been reading several stories a year on Slashdot about the next BIG technology that will dramatically increase solar panel efficiency, over say the last 10 years. Actual occurrences of such can be measured in the ZERO range. There has been some slight improvements to both that and cost, but that is largely about larger and better manufacturing techniques than any sort of scientific revelation of design.
3) Economy needs to improve, interest rates need to not go up, loans need to be easily accessible, housing prices need to not go through the roof (no pun intended!). None of these things are a sure thing, and many of them are likely to go in the other direction entirely.
4) Really the only thing this has to do with energy companies at all, are A) the hook up to the grid (which they set the cost of and install), and B) the amount they pay for solar generation (which they also set likely, though may have some policy implications). So really in the end they can simply recoup lost profits that way. Actually if you think about it, they can use it to make even more profits, so they should be all for it! Most power generation requires large up front capitol costs, which usually requires a secured load, along with dealing with policy makers for contracts and subsidies, etc... along with a lot of risk. In this situation, the home owner is taking all the risk, capitol costs, loan interest, etc... all the power company has to do is buy the power for 10 cents and sell it for 20 cents, and maintain the system with whatever they make in between. It is pretty much the "Money for nothing and the chicks for free" scenario!
Great points about the nuances in the details!
I agree that the dynamics of dense cities based on space available are going to be different for grid connection than for rural areas or suburbs or even some more sprawling cities. Dense cities are either going to want dense power locally (some form of safe nuclear fusion) or they are going to pull energy from diffuse sources at a distance like big solar or wind farms via direct lines or from a broader grid.
I think the "global reserve" issue is not significant in the long term, both because we do have storage technologies like compressed air or hydrogen that don't require too many exotic things (even if they have other issues). And also because a good aspect of markets (amidst many bad aspects) is they tend to lower costs when there is a demand either by putting in play new resources (like from new mines) or by finding cheaper substitutes.
A ready backup to solar also for those on a gas grid or who have their own propane storage is gas-fired generators to smooth out interruptions in solar power. Some sort of major advance in hydrogen storage, like via converting it to a liquid fuel or in metal hydrides, could also solve the local storage issue -- and we are seeing innovation in that space.
It is hard to tell what technologies hold in the future. Other possibilities might include centralized production of materials requiring lots of electricity like refined metals such as aluminum or via hydrogen saturated in some metal-hydride complex and then trucking those materials onsite to use for local power by oxidation or some other process, where they are then shipped back when consumed. Then we are using the highways as a "grid". :-) A wired grid may well be much better, but that is an example of how you can change the time constants of buffering in systems by different sorts of engineering.
Neighborhood-scale power with a local grid might make a lot of sense -- perhaps even with trucking of materials of some sort instead of wires? Or, the USA could perhaps do like in Europe and just start burying much of its electrical glid cable to make the grid more reliable (but currently at a greater cost -- but maybe we will see innovation in tunneling robots?)
In any case, your insightful comment points to how the "devil is in the details" and how most real power system (absent "Mr. Fusion" from "Back to the Future") are going to be some mix of options (including energy efficiency and other alternative choices).
But who knows, if LENR pans out, we may indeed have "Mr. Fusion" of a sort even within the decade? Or that may be a scam or self-delusion by dozens (hundreds?) of researchers...
http://coldfusionnow.org/comme...
"The recent 2014 Cold Fusion/LENR/LANR conference from March 21st to March 23rd at Massachusetts Institute of Technology happened to overlap with the 25th anniversary of the announcement of the discovery of cold fusion at the university of Utah. Against all odds, huge strides in understanding the phenomenon were made in the last 25 years. Recently, groups have shown that this is more than a lab curiosity, it can be engineered and harnessed to safely solve the worlds energy problems. This is an overview of some commercial groups which presented at the 2014 MIT conference."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"the established utilities are worried about the financial hit they're likely to take"
According to the established utility Hawaiian Electric, which by the way has the highest solar penetration in the USA, solar has no impact on it's profits.
http://www.hawaiianelectric.com/heco/_hidden_Hidden/CorpComm/Questions-and-Answers-for-Hawaii's-Energy-Future-Plan?cpsextcurrchannel=1#bk8
"No. The way our rates are currently set - using a model called "decoupling" -- there is no connection between electricity usage and utility profit. "
Electricity is only about 33% of energy "delivered" to end-users. The remainder is fossil fuels burned in point-of-use applications; primarily transportation and heating. If we are to dramatically reduce point-of-use burning of fossil fuels, we'll need to dramatically increase the amount of electricity that is generated. Electric utilities should realize that the future is electricity and they should see new business opportunities in every fossil fueled vehicle and every furnace or water heater. The future market for "electricity" is double or triple the size of today's market.
Even if distributed generation with solar panels, wind, or whatever is able to serve 20% to 30% of today's electric demand tomorrow, that will be only 7% to 9% of the total energy market. Rather than worrying about losing a small part of their future market, the electric utilities should be working on figuring out how to crush the oil and gas companies and drive them out of the point-of-use energy business.
We need to "re-electrify" this country... That's what the utilities should be focused on.
We need a national grid that does load shifting across time zones, so that peak usage is just a matter of shifting power where it's not needed, to where it is.
Those who participate in net metering are selling surplus power when they have a surplus to sell, and buying power when they don't. It's rather absurd to say the power they purchase at night is "free," when in fact every single kilowatt-hour they purchase eats into the proceeds from their daytime power sales. If they are selling power at, say, a wholesale rate of $0.02 per kilowatt-hour, and buying power at a retail rate of $0.12 per kilowatt-hour, it massively eats into the proceeds from their daytime power sales.
If you were correct that every kilowatt-hour sold by a solar facility has to be "thrown away," or discharged into the ground, then you would also be correct that that's not a sustainable business model. But you present no evidence for this. Here I present evidence to the contrary:
A utility can look at the forecast for how sunny it will be, and then conservatively scale back production at its peaking plants and at its load-following plants, to minimize the amount of solar power that needs to be "thrown away."
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
> If you were correct that every kilowatt-hour sold by a solar facility has to be "thrown away," or discharged into the ground, then you would also be correct that that's not a sustainable business model
Very good, let's start from the point where we agree. I think you'd also agree that if they are forced to give something that has a cost of production (evening energy) in exchange for any significant amount of worthless trash, that's not sustainable. In other words, it doesn't matter if it's ALL of the solar energy being thrown away, or some significant percentage. Any energy in excess of what's being sold is worthless, and being forced to pay for something that is worthless is stupid. Agreed? Please let me know if we're on the same point up until this point.
We can also probably agree that at noon, a solar installation can make a significant amount of power, say around 4kW.
We can also agree that most people aren't using 4kW at home from 11AM-2PM, when they aren't even at home, they're at work.
So the solar will be capturing significantly more energy than they are using during those hours. Agreed so far? Please let me know.
In fact, I'd say that at noon, with nobody home, they are probably using less than 1kW, while producing 4kW, so they are producing four times as much as they use. Sound about right?
So if most people's solar electric systems were capturing more energy than they are using at the time, that means the same is true in aggregate, correct?
Most people generating more than they use at noon means that the neighborhood is generating more than it uses at noon. That means that in total, solar would be generating more at noon than is being used at noon. Therefore, some of it needs to be thrown away at noon. Since the system generates 4kW while usage is less than 1 kW, that means that if one 25% of houses have solar, we'd being throwing away electricity, agreed? And the utilities would be forced to pay for electricity that they then have to pay to throw away.
on GoSolarCalifornia.ca.gov, the California Public Utilities Commission says: ...
Most smaller electric customers have simple bidirectional meters-capable of spinning backwards to record energy flowing from their system
the customer has to pay only for the net amount of electricity used from the utility over-and-above the amount of electricity generated by their solar system
That's a very important point. It's net METERING, not net billing. It's based on the net amount of electricity from a meter that spins backwards, NOT the net amount of dollars. If they produce 40 kWh (at noon) and use 40 kWh (at night), they are billed zero. You might want to re-read those two sentences explaining how the California system works, because that's important.
You said:
> If they are selling power at, say, a wholesale rate of $0.02 per kilowatt-hour, and buying power at a retail rate of $0.12 per kilowatt-hour
That would make sense, so that's why the utilities are asking for it to be done that way. That's not how it's done in California, though. As quoted from the California regulators, if your solar system produces 1 kW at noon and you use 1 kW at 6:00 PM, you pay zero.
If we've gotten to this point, we've agreed that if 25% of houses have solar, they will produce more energy than is being used, so some will be thrown away. The value of noon energy will be close to zero, or even negative since it costs money to run the heavier infrastructure to carry more power to a place that it can be safely burned off without running afoul of California's environmental controls. (Huge electrical arcs produce ozone, noise, and all kinds of other things that scare hippies).
So once 25% of people participate, the noon energy is practically worthless, but per Ca PUC, utilities have to trade it 1 for 1 for evening electricity, and it costs them money to generate and distribute electricity in the evening. Agreed?
Of course, RIGHT NOW, 25% of houses don't have solar. I've said repeatedly that it's not a significant problem right now, but would become a real problem if most houses were doing net metering.
It's never a good idea to presume you know the motivation of a poster. GGP is very unlikely to have been paid for by special interests. Much better to judge a post on its merits. In regards to your question on what astroturfing job posts look like though: http://heartland.org/internships
Are you a conservative or libertarian considering a career in the free-market movement? Do you want to spend 10 weeks working side-by-side with others who share your interests, learning new skills and making contacts that can launch your career? Then being an intern at The Heartland Institute is the right choice for you.
Internships typically run for 10 weeks. Interns typically work 20 hours each week and are paid $150 per week. These terms are flexible – ask if a different term or number of hours would work best for you.
The internship will involve a wide variety of Public Relations responsibilities, including print and broadcast media relations; event marketing and promotion; “new media” and social networking; and speaking engagement scheduling. Among the specific tasks that will be assigned to the intern during this period:
prepare and submit news releases, op-eds, letters to the editor, and feature articles to mainstream media outlets
use Heartland’s Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and email accounts to promote new research and commentary, monitor reactions and ongoing debates, and participate in online discussions
In Wisconsin We energies is the dominant electric company. If you are on their grid and have solar they charge you higher rates. This is totally fucked up.
Welcome to last month's conversation. Yes, if solar electric could be efficiently stored, it would become much more economical. I've looked into it, and a lot of startups will be glad to sell you stock in their company which is just about to come out with a method of storage which makes sense. If you do the arithmetic on any of these ideas, they just don't come close to working.
One of the MOST reasonable ideas is pumped storage. If you take a look at current hydroelectric dams, how much power they produce, how much head they have and the area they cover, you can do some arithmetic to find out roughly what kind of hydroelectric dams we'd need to store a two days worth of energy, and how big the reservoirs need to be. I've posted the math here on Slashdot before, so I won't repeat it again, but it comes down to a reservoir 56 feet deep that covers the area from the Rockies to the Appalachians. That's one of the more reasonable approaches.
One thing that trips people up is that they want to get off of fossil fuels and replace them with things like electric vehicles, with the electricity provided by solar. They then do some math and figure out that solar only has to 10 ten times more efficient (and have magic storage) in order to provide all of our electricity. What they forget is that they're looking at electricity usage from 2012. If you replace all of the gas and diesel vehicles with electric, that triples the amount of electricity you need. Want to do all your smelting and other industry by electricity? You're going to need a lot more electricity. So you actually need solar to be 50 times more efficient (and have magic storage).
I forgot to say this. When I talked about "If you replace all of the gas and diesel vehicles with electric, that triples the amount of electricity you need", and "you actually need solar to be 50 times more efficient" those are extremely rough guestimates based on numbers I looked at a year ago. When I said "triples" it might actually be five times as much electricity needed or twice as much, I don't recall offhand. You get the point though - a very common error made (and sometimes exploited) when talking about solar is to mismatch electricity usage and energy usage. If you're aiming to have mostly electric vehicles, you'll need a heck of a lot more electricity than we have now, so even if solar could meet 4% of our current electricity needs, that's only about 1% of our energy needs, and therefore the amount of electricity that would be needed to support electric vehicles, etc.