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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."
Still, the Edison Electric Institute, a trade group representing America’s investor-owned utilities, recently announced that its members will help to encourage electric vehicle use by spending $50 million annually to buy plug-in service trucks and invest in car-charging technology. “Advancing plug-in electric vehicles and technologies is an industry priority,” said EEI President Thomas Kuhn.
Uh, "advancing as a priority" is actually the opposite of fear.
Southern California Edison is planning to spend about $9.2 billion through 2017 to allow the two-way flow of electricity on its system, said Edison International CEO Ted Craver. “We are certainly big supporters of electric transportation,” Craver said. He added: “That electric car isn’t just going to stay at home. It’s going to go other places. It’s going to need to get charged in other places. And I think our ability to provide that glue for all those things that are going to plug into that network is really how we see our core business.”
Again, sounds positive. Actually the only negative thing in the article is that electric cars might cause a load our infrastructure isn't ready for -- to the contrary a solar charging station in the home would mitigate this. Is the new journalism format to title your articles with a thesis directly contrary to all the actual evidence you're about to present?
My work here is dung.
How much money they spend on protecting their status quo.
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.
Electric utilities would in fact love local storage for solar rooftops. The big technical problem for them is that when a cloud goes over an area, all the electricty being pumped back into the grid suddenly drops drastically and the power company has to have generation capacity to add in within seconds to avoid brown outs. By having even 30 minutes worth of storage in the home, the batteries could fill in for the local drop and ease the imapct on the power company.
This is becoming a very big problem in Germany now and there are companies whose sole business is to supply incredibly expensive (thousands of dollars per kilowatt hour in some cases) electricity within a few seconds notice. I believe there was even a bloomberg article on this a few months ago.
Apart from the handful of nukes and hydro installs, the electric companies are a segment of the fossil fuel industry.
You're looking for quotes? See my journal.
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.
it costs them? You have ZERO clue how electricity works or solar grid syncing systems work?
I pay 100% of the equipment costs, I pay 100% of the installation costs, I pay 100% of the inspections and certifications. they pay NOTHING. Then they get to resell my power to my neighbors. Their meter does not run backwards to give me any credits. They do nothing at all.
I strongly suggest that you learn about what you are spouting off about before you open your mouth and sound like a complete and utter fool to the rest of us that actually have solar installations.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
My public utility is totally behind renewables and if they could reduce the demand from the community they would.
They are "greenies," as are most Americans.
So both the claim that utilities are scared, and the claim that greenies think they are scared, these are both dubious to me.
Demand won't actually shrink, growth will flatten. Greedy companies will freak out, public utilities will breath a sigh of relief.
The Edison Electric institute is a trade group for electric utilities. They published this report in January of 2013.
http://www.eei.org/ourissues/f...
That report changed the attitudes of a huge number of electric utility executives. Before this report, I would describe most electric utility executives as indifferent to solar PV. They viewed it as a marginal technology and that it would probably always be a bit-player. After that report, pretty much none of them feel this way. Many executives at electric utilities are terrified of solar and are spending significant amounts of money lobbying against it.
As I understand it, most of the power company's objections to solar is being forced to buy the power back and subsidize it.
Maintaining the lines to your house is a fixed cost and they are recovering that cost using amortization over periodic billing based on usage. People who go solar are essentially the freeloaders in this system as they pay less of the overhead for the amount of transmission service they receive. This is not unlike the gasoline tax for highway funding debate or numerous other situations.
Governments tend to attempt to make things simpler for consumers by mandating "tariffed" service to avoid "skimming" by the providers. Unfortunately that generally doesn't work as governments generally attempt to use these regulations for subsidizing service for some by burdening others and the companies just get smarter about skimming. Unfortunately, some customers discover the workarounds to freeload for a while (e.g., internet VoIP w/o universal service fund fees, or solar panels with forced power buyback, or electric cars that pay no gas tax). They claim their microeconomic observation about their freeloading is the new economic reality and people should just wake up and smell the coffee.
Unfortunately, when there are too many freeloaders them, then the model just breaks down and need to be fixed so that more people pay full freight. Often, the freeloaders then discover that paying full freight isn't makes the it much less attractive (but at least they got theirs whilst the getting was good). The result is generally simply a different reality than the previous, but generally not much different.
For example, the power company would much rather demand be totally flat. Provisioning for more power is a big capital cost (building power plants, increasing transmission capacity, etc.) that they can only recover by amortization. This is the reality that the power companies lived in the 80's with nuclear power decommissioning. Sadly, we have a big nasty habit of kicking the can down the road on these things...
At least when you collect a welfare check directly from the government you are being honest with yourself...
No they dont. They do not install a special substation to handle my solar power, in fact they do nothing at all.
Connections to a solar home and a non solar home are 100% identical. In fact my connection is well over 25 years old and my solar install is less than 5. They changed nothing at all. when I installed the system they did not even turn off the power. just the main house breaker for 5 minutes by the electrician when he tied everything together.
Whoever is telling you they have to install "special" equipment on the power grid to support solar home installations is making things up.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.