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Utilities Battle Homeowners Over Solar Power
HughPickens.com writes Diane Cardwell reports in the NYT that many utilities are trying desperately to stem the rise of solar power, either by reducing incentives, adding steep fees or effectively pushing home solar companies out of the market. The economic threat has electric companies on edge. Over all, demand for electricity is softening while home solar is rapidly spreading across the country. There are now about 600,000 installed systems, and the number is expected to reach 3.3 million by 2020, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. In Hawaii, the current battle began in 2013, when Hawaiian Electric started barring installations of residential solar systems in certain areas. It was an abrupt move — a panicked one, critics say — made after the utility became alarmed by the technical and financial challenges of all those homes suddenly making their own electricity. "Hawaii is a postcard from the future," says Adam Browning, executive director of Vote Solar, a policy and advocacy group based in California.
But utilities say that solar-generated electricity flowing out of houses and into a power grid designed to carry it in the other direction has caused unanticipated voltage fluctuations that can overload circuits, burn lines and lead to brownouts or blackouts. "At every different moment, we have to make sure that the amount of power we generate is equal to the amount of energy being used, and if we don't keep that balance things go unstable," says Colton Ching, vice president for energy delivery at Hawaiian Electric, pointing to the illuminated graphs and diagrams tracking energy production from wind and solar farms, as well as coal-fueled generators in the utility's main control room. But the rooftop systems are "essentially invisible to us," says Ching, "because they sit behind a customer's meter and we don't have a means to directly measure them." The utility wants to cut roughly in half the amount it pays customers for solar electricity they send back to the grid. "Hawaii's case is not isolated," says Massoud Amin. "When we push year-on-year 30 to 40 percent growth in this market, with the number of installations doubling, quickly — every two years or so — there's going to be problems."
But utilities say that solar-generated electricity flowing out of houses and into a power grid designed to carry it in the other direction has caused unanticipated voltage fluctuations that can overload circuits, burn lines and lead to brownouts or blackouts. "At every different moment, we have to make sure that the amount of power we generate is equal to the amount of energy being used, and if we don't keep that balance things go unstable," says Colton Ching, vice president for energy delivery at Hawaiian Electric, pointing to the illuminated graphs and diagrams tracking energy production from wind and solar farms, as well as coal-fueled generators in the utility's main control room. But the rooftop systems are "essentially invisible to us," says Ching, "because they sit behind a customer's meter and we don't have a means to directly measure them." The utility wants to cut roughly in half the amount it pays customers for solar electricity they send back to the grid. "Hawaii's case is not isolated," says Massoud Amin. "When we push year-on-year 30 to 40 percent growth in this market, with the number of installations doubling, quickly — every two years or so — there's going to be problems."
The power companies are all moving towards "smart meter" technologies anyway. Why not make sure they've put one in that can monitor the output of a PV solar (or even a wind turbine) installation while they're at it?
For that matter, it seems perfectly reasonable to require the homeowner to install such a meter as part of a solar installation, as a condition of being able to sell power to the utility -- or even to push power into the grid at all.
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I guess you could use an electric chainsaw for that. During the daytime, on a sunny day. Unless you have some massive, hazardous, storage batteries though you are going to likely want that pole back in the evening. I know where I live our A/C runs all night during the summer and has started running a chunk of the evening already.
The problem is not that the meters can't measure the power in both directions. The problem is the latency the communication network on the meters can deliver the information to the control room. Smart Meters typically send home a simple KWH "energy" import/export number every so often for the purposes of billing. What systems engineers in control rooms need is real time access to the instantaneous power being generated by roof top solar systems. Their meter reading infrastructure is not designed for this kind of response.
Now all of a sudden meter paradigms change from a billing information collection program to a Power Quality program. Its a different system with different requirements.
It gets even more complex because you have lots of coops that do not generate power but only transmit it. How in the world do they get that information to the person they are buying power from at any given moment?
Its a HUGE issue that is not simply the evil power company wanting to stick it to the little guy. The Power companies have a big responsibility to keeping the grid stable. We take for granted the complexities involved to make stable 60hz ac power.
Theoretically, you can design a control system that'll handle the problem. But, so far, noone has bothered to, because noone's had a need to.
Why don't you ask the Germans how they have manage to do this already . . . ?
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They're also not knee deep in Libertarian mumbo jumbo.
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There lies the rub. If you push to much of the burden out to homeowners they just might start going off the grid. A little in improvement in battery or other storage tech and it could happen.
That is a problem too because it will create a question of capital. If I have the capital resources to invest in a home energy system to go off the grid and say the payback time is 15 years. I and many other people might decide to do just that.
Where does that leave the people who don't have $30K + maintenance costs to purchase said system? It leaves them on a grid with fewer and fewer customers and probably the customers less dependable for on time payment at that. Because the grid has to go where the people are the fixed operating costs don't go down much, and I doubt the variable costs of distribution are significant. Eventually the local PUC will have to allow distribution and connection fees to go up faced with a bankrupt distributor that nobody will buy and may simply shut its doors otherwise.
The situation on the generation side too is not entirely dissimilar, although the generation business has more variable costs their are limits to how quickly it can scale down. Certainly not as fast as individual home owners can deploy domestic systems. Plants are built with 60 year anticipated service life, if you suddenly only need to generate only 30% of the power in year 20 you anticipated, it may not be efficient to operate the plant profitably at that level.
I want to EMPHASIZE STRONGLY I AM NOT ADVOCATING ANY POLICY POSITION in this post but I think its an interesting question because technology that allows middle class folks to go off grid affordably very much has the potential to result in haves and have-nots when it comes to reliable electrical power, while today even the very poor for the most part have dependable electricity in this country(USA).
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NG has the contract for fixing the lines in the region and is the main energy broker, unfortunately.
This is the ultimate problem: having the power lines and the energy broker/provider be the same entity. The power lines are an obvious natural monopoly. The supply of energy across those power lines is not a natural monopoly. The lines should be owned by one company and the power selling/brokerage should be by a different company.
The perception of a big bad utility didn't just magically appear. The efforts by the utilities have created this and they certainly haven't done any planning for alternative power - in fact they seem to fight it tooth and nail wherever possible. I'm not discounting what you say are issues and I appreciate the input but understand that there's distrust for good reason. Utilities need to start helping figure this out rather than simply fighting it. Most folks running solar wouldn't mind batteries IMO if the cost wasn't sky high and the additional regs a little less intrusive.
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Not just some but essentially full agreement. The problem here is that when solar starts a production spike, all houses in the region with solar will suddenly spike at once. That is what causes the overloads in the residential circuit which was never designed to handle such spikes because they were never considered when grid was built.
The only solutions are:
1. Massive investment into grid upgrades, which comes with increase in maintenance costs.
2. Capping solar's ability to dump into the grid while keeping the current grid and it's relatively low maintenance costs (solution proposed here).
Problem with #2 is that it significantly reduces ROI of solar installation, as it's being actively marketed with ROI that enables solar microproducers to dump excess into the grid at a good price. This was lobbied in back when solar was just starting, and no one thought of the current scenario - solar that is popular enough to threaten grid stability.
NG has the contract for fixing the lines in the region and is the main energy broker, unfortunately.
This is the ultimate problem: having the power lines and the energy broker/provider be the same entity. The power lines are an obvious natural monopoly. The supply of energy across those power lines is not a natural monopoly. The lines should be owned by one company and the power selling/brokerage should be by a different company.
Yeah. These electrons belong to Duke Power, those electrons belong to Con Edison, the ones over there belong to...
The idea that the Free Market makes any sense in the simultaneous transmission of commodity objects (or forces) over a common medium is one of the most insane artifices that anyone ever invented. All you are really selling is the right to bill something that you probably didn't produce going over lines you probably don't own. Capitalism at it's finest!
You're making it way too complicated. The power-line company can buy power from whoever is providing, and sell power to whoever is consuming. Just like they do now with home solar power. They can make whatever agreements they like with generating companies as to who gets what share of demand, what response times are required, etc. Add some grid-scale power buffers, even just a few minutes worth, and things get even simpler. While the electrons are on the line they belong to the distribution company, just like while products are in Walmart's distribution channel they belong to Walmart.
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Going off the grid is silly. The reason we have a grid in the first place is because it's much more efficient (specifically COST efficient) to have centralized production of power that doesn't easily cut off when something goes wrong.
If you want to go off grid on your own, go for it. I suspect that experiment won't last very long once you discover just how difficult it is to actually maintain a stable 120/220/230V 60/50HZ AC 24/7 that stays in phase. Most people really don't want to go back to third world style "power doesn't actually work 24/7 and you keep getting outages when something fails", and most of our home appliances are simply no longer designed for that sort of power input. They expect 24/7 reliable power.
Yes, but the point is that all of those solutions cost money to build and maintain. Now let's be clear, the energy companies are freaking assholes, but their argument is that since the solar people brought the panels, then they should be the ones who pay for those water pumping stations to be built, and share in the cost of the employees to run the place. Otherwise, the solar people need to have their own on-premise storage and stop dumping into the line.
The big diff is that the power companies are subsidised heavily, unlike the independent solar. So I would say that the energy company has an obligation to not push the cost of peak transmission onto independent producers.
At any rate, you've hit the crux of the issue, who pays for the grid to handle this stuff? The electric companies think the solar folks should pay 100%, the solar folks think the power company should pay, others think it's a mix. Even if the total cost comes out a few million to start plus a few hundred thousand for employees and upkeep a year, the power companies want solar producers to float 100% the cost and a large group of them have indicated that they'll only pay for it kicking and screaming.
I disagree in there really isn't such a thing as too much grid power,
Thousands of electrical fires say you're wrong.
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Yes, it's laziness. Not massive costs associated with having to build up monitoring and measuring on massive scale but "laziness".
If they hadn't been collecting fees to monitor and measure a massive utility scale operation the past 30+ years, you might have a point. My power bill shows line fees, power fees, fuel fees and all sorts of other fees made to look like taxes that are actually paid to the power company, which happens to also be the energy generation company as well as the distribution wires company.
If you fire a tech guy and hand control over all his servers to someone who does NOTHING to maintain them, they won't all crash tomorrow. Some will be fine even in a year. But when a security update missed does leave a gap through a firewall and every other layer, you don't get to claim it is an unexpected accident, you need to blame the past year of doing nothing. Or thirty plus years of under investment by record earnings producing power companies, as in these cases.