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Why Elon Musk's Batteries Frighten Electric Companies
JoeyRox writes: The publicized goal of Tesla's "gigafactory" is to make electric cars more affordable. However, that benefit may soon be eclipsed by the gigafactory's impact on roof-top solar power storage costs, putting the business model of utilities in peril. "The mortal threat that ever cheaper on-site renewables pose" comes from systems that include storage, said physicist Amory Lovins. "That is an unregulated product you can buy at Home Depot that leaves the old business model with no place to hide."
the local power company, SRP, is attempting to get permission to charge an insane amount of money for a solar home to be connected to the grid. They're trying to scare-off home solar by making it as expensive or more expensive than being grid-connected. In the middle of the desert.
If nighttime storage issues get resolved, many homes won't need to be on the grid here, as our peak power use is also the time of year with the longest daylight hours and the highest demand is in the mid-afternoon when it's hottest and the HVAC units are running. If they get solar and battery tech going well enough that we can generate all the power we need at-peak and still have enough for nighttime use, then customers won't need the power company anymore.
I am strongly considering this. I have a room that is climate-controlled but not part of the house that could be a battery and inverter room, and I've got enough land that I could install a demand-load generator if my demand or nighttime use peaks above production or storage capability. The only significant downside is that I have no natural gas service, so I would have to have fuel delivered for the generator.
If I had natural gas service I wouldn't think twice about going solar for electricity and getting off-grid for electricity service.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Better battery technology would be an incredible benefit for some utilities. They could store some of their excess generation output at non-peak times and sell that electricity later on at times of peak demand.
Absolutely!
But... So could we. Currently, solar has become cheap enough that you can see an ROI on a grid-tie system in well under a decade (under five years if you can do most of the work yourself and just get a sign-off on final inspection from a licensed electrician). Key phrase there, however, "grid-tie" - Meaning you don't need to care whether or not your installation actually meets your home's total demand, nor do you need to care about aligning your home's production and demand curves.
In order to make going totally off-grid viable, you need the ability to cheaply and safely store somewhere in the ballpark of 100KWH (three to four days for a typical US household). Currently, that costs a small fortune in batteries, not to mention the space they take up, the weight, the outgassing, the useful lifetime, etc. If Elon turns all those problems into one pallet-sized box that sits outside your house and has one wire in from your array, and one wire out to your breaker box, all for a few grand - Suddenly a hundred million Americans have no use for the local electric company.
won't need to be on the grid here
Don't worry, they'll almost certainly add being connected to the grid to be a mandatory part of the housing code or something.
The local trash monopoly did something similar. Trash service is about $60 a month, but you can take your trash to the landfill for $15 per ton. Some people were opting to take their trash to the landfill. So the trash company, which works under city contract, got the city to condemn houses which were using the competitive service. This happened to one of my rent houses. I had to pay $800 in back trash payments to get the house uncondemned and the tenants had to pay stiff fines and could have gone to jail for "creating unsanitary conditions". ie, for disposing of their trash through a competing trash service.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
yes they do. Around here you can not legally live in your home if you do not have electrical service at your home. it specifically says, electrical utility with an active account.
Also they fight like hell to make it illegal for solar installations to have grid interties.
They dont want you to be off grid, as you dont make them money.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Want to get that law changed really quickly? Find yourself a prosecutor who grew up poor. Get that person to press charges against the power company for cutting off people's power when they fail to pay their bills, because doing so forces people to choose between committing a crime and leaving the area, which potentially constitutes election tampering. :-)
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That seems very pessimistic. Laws requiring electricity are typically to force a minimum standard of living
Then a home solar installation should satisfy that standard, no?
Not to mention, some people consider not having electricity as a higher quality of life. Should we force the Amish to stay up late watching TV just because most Americans feel horrified that someone, somewhere might not know the latest news about the Kardashians?
pushing power to the grid is a matter of complexity and annoyance rather than greed.
Complexity? Fire up a generator at home. Use a double-male plug to connect it to an outlet. Congrats, you've just backfed power to the grid. In fact, it counts as so easy, doing what I just described actually breaks the law and makes you liable if a lineman gets injured or killed because of you (thus all grid-tie inverters either have anti-islanding protection, or a hard physical cutover).
The complexity comes entirely from billing. Suddenly, your net power usage for the month no longer accurately describes your real use of the grid. Since your local electric company doesn't care where you get your power (you pay them for transmission, the actual cost of the electric supply gets billed through them but they don't keep it), this reduces to a simple matter of greed - They have no motivation to fix their own shortcomings because they won't make any more than they would by simply blocking end-user generation.
I suppose you could fairly call that "annoyance", but y'know what? I really don't care in the least about whether the likes of PG&E or CalEd find my choices convenient. Though a utility, they still count as a for-profit company - They can either provide what the customers want, or the customers will find alternatives.
Just randomly connecting to the grid and backfeeding power causes real problems (i.e. your generator electronics get fried, you can electrocute the guy trying to fix a power outage, etc.). You need special equipment to make sure there are no phase mismatches, it needs to detach itself from the grid if the grid-side drops in a power outage, and you need a new meter.
Then a home solar installation should satisfy that standard, no?
The issue isn't individuals, but the broader society. If we allow only those who can afford electricity or solar to have it, the poorer segments are deprived and that ends up hurting everybody.
Basic services are provided to just about everyone. Electric companies are regulated and have been quasi-monopolies because having 15 separate power grids running around town is wasteful. By allowing a single company to server a broader area they can amortize the costs of the more expense areas against the lower cost areas and give everyone access to the basic services. It's the franchise model that works well at getting widespread deployment but once that's done becomes a hindrance to innovation (i.e. cable companies).
The problem is that if the rich areas start being able to mostly go off grid, the franchise provider is now screwed having to provide to the high cost areas while still also serving the low cost areas, but receiving much smaller revenue due to the roof top solar/batteries cutting usage of the grid.
It's a macro-economics and social situation we're going to see more of as disruptive technologies challenge the entrenched franchises. Killing the franchises outright is bad, but not innovating and moving forward is bad too.
How to move forward right now is the question.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Yes, and? The Electric companies have no love of coal or anything else. They'll make power however it's cheapest to make it, limited in their ability to switch to new powerplants by the NIMBY problem, and limited in their ability to improve existing plants by the crazy perverse incentives in the environmental regs in most places. Natural gas is incredibly cheap right now, and generating would switch to it completely if it were practical.
(I had college roommate who was an environmental engineer who worked for a while in this area. It drove him out of the field - you can't improve anything, even simple cheap ways to dramatically reduce smokestack pollution, without losing the "grandfathering" and having to pay more than the plant is worth to completely modernize every single component. And what's worse, the requirements for new plants weren't "get emissions below X" , they were often "you must use this exact emission control device, coincidentally manufactured primarily by someone close to the lawmaker at the time the law was made".)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.