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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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
That kind of argument can go both ways. When one single power line goes out, whole neighborhoods go without power. If the average household had a solar array with a Tesla (or other battery powered car plugged in), it could keep on running whether or not there were major interruptions in the power grid.
Your analogy of lighting a stadium with a bunch of shitty Christmas Tree bulbs makes no sense here.. especially if the stadium was covered in solar panels with a battery storage unit.
You're basically trying to argue that a centralized power grid is better than a decentralized power grid.. It certainly isn't going that direction in computing (depending on how you view the cloud).
--- We need more Ron Paul!
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.
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.
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/