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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).
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.
First there will need to be a minor revolt against codes requiring electrical service as a condition of human occupancy.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
Why batteries? Spin up a buried flywheel in a vacuum.
Because flywheels aren't actually all that energy dense, even after quite a few years of development. To store more energy, you want bigger radius, more mass, or higher speed. There are material limits to all of those things. Push any of those criteria too far and you end up with a flywheel that has a distressing tendency to self-disassemble. Catastrophically.
Oddly enough, as difficult as it is, the materials science of figuring out more efficient ways to store electrical energy by moving ions around is still easier than the materials science of keeping spinning-very-fast things in one piece.
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
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.
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.
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>
Take away the government subsidies on solar purchase & installation and this problem doesn't even exist.
Take away the USA's $70 billion + fossil fuel subsidies at the same time. And drop a few of the wars they're fighting to ensure supply while you're at it.
Let me know if they'll save enough to put some cheap rooftop solar in.
The missing revenue is small, under $100 per year (12k miles per year for a 30 mpg car is 400 gallons of gas at $0.18/gal of tax for a total of $72). As an EV owner I would be happy to pay my fare share. I do not want a GPS tracker in my car, and would prefer either a flat fee per year or to have my odometer checked every couple years. Hell I want my taxes raised to properly fund schools too, there is an excess of dumbasses in this country.
EV's that charge at work combined with solar is a great combo, but it would be nice to see some of the Smart Grid fantasies come to reality so that I could just set my car to be charged by 7 AM and 5 PM and it would smartly play nice with the grid to charge when the sun is shining, the wind was blowing, or the dams are full. We are still a ways from the point where solar will fill in the afternoon peak daytime hours and EV's more than plug the night time trough in base usage, but those days are likely closer than we think.
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.
My friend who works in solar is taking the claims seriously - they're selling the things now at very competitive prices, but the current micro-factory has low volume and (I think) a bit higher cost - as is to be expected without economies of scale. Meanwhile the new large factory is not yet operational. And my other numbers were all conservative.
First off, what crazy tangent are you going off on? Who said anything about subsidies? Let the power companies take out loans to buy the suckers and amortize the costs - they do it every time they build out any infrastructure. It's business as usual, and they may as well be investing in long-term solutions rather than building more coal-fired power plants.
As for not all being able to finance $20,000 - isn't that part of the point of having "the grid" provide the storage? That is Aquions primary target market. You don't seem to be considering the incredible benefits power buffering brings to the power companies themselves, even without net metering. Currently they need to maintain a whole fleet of generators to be able to handle peak load, which sit wastefully idle the vast majority of the time - and they're having to build out ever more generating capacity as demand steadily increases, with new construction generally needing all sorts of expensive emissions control system, etc. Or they could buy batteries and run the existing generating capacity on a more regular basis leaving the batteries to handle the peak. Then as carbon-power gets phased out (which is looking inevitable in the long term) they'll already have the infrastructure and experience in place to handle the shift to a more variable power source. This is stuff that a smart power company should be paying attention to - it's likely to be far far less disruptive to the existing players if they start implementing incremental upgrades now than if they wait until some new company with a proven track record come in offering the local governments to build all new infrastructure from the ground up for half the price it would cost to upgrade your equipment. Start bringing the retrofit costs down now in the course of normal business.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
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.
> 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.
Note the conflation of a single location on the planet with every system everywhere.
> Oh, and if they don't have over spec'd components, they can cause a phenonom called "flicker"
> which is destructive of delicate electronics like your fridge, washing machine, A/C, and computer
Offgrid PV systems are far *less* susceptible to flicker than the grid. Which shouldn't be surprising given that off grid PV systems are essentially a very large UPS.
Expect more AC posts like this, the power companies are paying green washers to come up with moronic arguments so people in the same tribe can re-post them thinking they actually make sense and won't look like a tool in the process:
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2014/04/30/wont-anyone-think-of-the-seniors/
I want my taxes raised to properly fund schools too, there is an excess of dumbasses in this country.
I'm all for paying for good education. But, I'm also against government waste. If you can show areas where the monies spent would provide an educational ROI, I'd jump on that bandwagon.
Data published by the U.S. Department of Education in its annual Digest of Education Statistics shows that per student expenditures are high across the country and they have continued to rise.
$553 billion was spent on public education in 2006-2007. This figure represents 4.2 percent of GDP.
An average of $9,266/pupil is spent in American public schools.
Of the $71.7 billion spent by the Federal government on elementary and secondary education programs in 2007, $39.2 billion was spent on K-12 education. Of this amount 67% was spent on Special Education and Education for the Disadvantaged programs.
Between 1994 and 2004, average per-pupil expenditures have increased by 23.5% when adjusted for inflation.
Between 1984 and 2004, real expenditures per pupil increased by 49%.
Between 1970 and 2005 per pupil expenditures increased three times from $311/pupil to $971/pupil.
Just another day in Paradise