Slashdot Mirror
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).
Posting to myself for additional information.
In Queensland the breakdown in a typical bill is
21% Generation
24% Retail
3% Green Schemes
8% Solar costs
48% Network
Source - http://www.dews.qld.gov.au/ene...
Actually Tesla is really the wrong kind of battery - they are designed for high wattage (dis)charge, low mass, and low volume. None of which is relevant to your average home solar power system, and all of which come at the cost of considerable design compromises. Lithium batteries have short lifespans unless you're only using a fraction of their capacity, high environmental toxicity, and are extremely expensive. A more interesting contender is Aquion who are building a factory to build power-grid oriented saltwater batteries that are fairly nontoxic, don't mind being deep cycled, and are currently about the same price as lead acid (the cheapest rechargeable batteries available) while having 10x the projected working life (so effectively 1/10 the annual cost of lead acid). Sure they're every bit as heavy as lead-acid batteries while being even larger, but that's not really relevant to a stationary application.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
My solution is to take some things of the grid. My outdoor lighting has been the first to go, soon to be followed by the swimming pool, finally followed by the workshop. Things considered "temporary" can be easily disconnected from the grid without violating code or running afoul of the banks.
When I move here in a few years I'll try for 100% disconnected. If I don't move I'll be paid off in 10 more years and can pull the plug.
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.
Sure, I'll argue the point. Perhaps your friend was referring to Aquion, the company scaling up to mass-produce saltwater batteries that they claim will be as cheap as lead-acid while lasting 10x as long and not minding being deep-cycled. So let's run the numbers, shall we? /kWh/cycle. And since power cycling presumably happens daily with solar we can replace "cycle" with "day" /kWh/day
A quick search gave me the following base numbers:
an average deep-cycle lead-acid battery price as $120/kWh and will last about 600 cycles, so about $0.20
Aquion claims 10x the battery life at the same price point, so that makes it $0.02
The average US home uses ~11,000kWh/year, or about 30kWh per day. We could argue whether the actual number should be lower (there is some power consumption during the day after all, especially during the summer when air conditioning runs rampant) or higher (you need buffering for extended overcast periods, assuming your grid isn't efficiently cross-connected between regions), but that's a good first estimate.
So: 30kWh * $0.02 /kWh/day = $0.60 per day just for the power buffering, or $18 per month. Not nothing, but an eminently survivable expense.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Take away the government subsidies on solar purchase & installation and this problem doesn't even exist. Our government has backed an expensive and inefficient renewable energy tech - that's the only reason we're even having this conversation.
And while we're on the subject, and since /. seems to have become the new Tesla marketing platform, when is the free lunch going to end for EV owners w.r.t. road maintenance being funded by taxes on gasoline? It'll be interesting once we hit that balancing point of there being enough EV cars on the road today that gov't wakes up and restructures road funding so that every pays their fair share. And we'll see what that does to the EV ROI calcs.
It'll be interesting once we hit that balancing point of there being enough EV cars on the road today that gov't wakes up and restructures road funding so that every pays their fair share
If we do end up with a system involving paying a fair share, it would need to involve the weight of the vehicle, in which case the share of the cost by cars, electric or not, would be quite small considering the nonlinear effects on a road by heavier vehicles. Alternatively, one could just realize that many government fees are not about proportionately recovering costs, but influencing certain behaviors that have a variety of costs and benefits elsewhere.
Did you expect that factories and ships all ran on pixie dust?! China is putting their money where their mouth is, but conversions take time.
China is building out there solar very rapidly, more than doubling their capacity each year for the last 5 years (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China). Oil and coal should be conserved for the things that solar and wind suck at, such as cargo ships. Predictable commutes of 30 miles are a travesty to waste gasoline on.
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.
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
A million homes in Australia have solar panels on their roofs as of right now. That's about one home in ten. Workers, pensioners, the unemployed, everyone - rich or poor, all benefiting from free energy. The installation pays for itself in five years, and comes with a twenty five year warranty. You Americans need to crawl out from under the dead hand of capitalism and join the free world.
The U.S. has the world's biggest three distributed, decentralized power grids. That's why it's called a grid.
What do you call "9,023 individual generators at about 6,997 operational power plants in the United States with a nameplate generation capacity of at least one megawatt." Do you have any earthly idea how difficult it is to get all this going at 60Hz at once within the three interconnects without any large fraction of microinversion messing it up?
source: http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=65&t=2
Because there isn't really a good pie yet, they take far too long to pay off and can be dangerous to air traffic and wild life if they are A. in the wrong place, or B. installed incorrectly.
Oh, and if they don't have overspec'd components, they can cause a phenonom called "flicker" which is destructive of delicate electronics like your fridge, washing machine, A/C, and computer.
- Pilots have sunglasses.
- Wildlife have no problems with a flat piece of silicon that doesn't move. (Cars kill them by the millions though).
- And your electric circuit should have a fuse and other safety features that prevent fluctuations in the power.
How many of you trolls are volunteers, and how many are paid to troll by the coal/oil/gas lobbyists? This is just another scare tactic, just like everybody is now convinced that wind turbines kill birds, when in fact it is cats that kill birds.
Now move along, there is really nothing to see here.