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There Is a Point At Which It Will Make Economical Sense To Defect From the Electrical Grid (qz.com)
Michael J. Coren reports via Quartz: More than 1 million U.S. homes have solar systems installed on their rooftops. Batteries are set to join many of them, giving homeowners the ability to not only generate but also store their electricity on-site. And once that happens, customers can drastically reduce their reliance on the grid. It's great news for those receiving utility bills. It's possible armageddon for utilities. A new study by the consulting firm McKinsey modeled two scenarios: one in which homeowners leave the electrical grid entirely, and one in which they obtain most of their power through solar and battery storage but keep a backup connection to the grid. Given the current costs of generating and storing power at home, even residents of sunny Arizona would not have much economic incentive to leave the electric-power system completely -- full grid-defection, as McKinsey refers to it -- until around 2028. But partial defection, where some homeowners generate and store 80% to 90% of their electricity on site and use the grid only as a backup, makes economic sense as early as 2020.
[A]s daily needs for many are supplied instead by solar and batteries, McKinsey predicts the electrical grid will be repurposed as an enormous, sophisticated backup. Utilities would step up and supply power during the few days or weeks per year when distributed systems run out of juice.
[A]s daily needs for many are supplied instead by solar and batteries, McKinsey predicts the electrical grid will be repurposed as an enormous, sophisticated backup. Utilities would step up and supply power during the few days or weeks per year when distributed systems run out of juice.
The power companies are still going to charge the same amount people are paying now even though they're buying less energy. I don't know how much the spend on the actual fuel for their power plants but I doubt their overall operating costs would go down much.
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One of the big drawbacks to going completely off grid is the control systems are very expensive compared to the panels. If it's a choice between doubling the capacity or having a battery backup, well, one has a monetary payback...
The thread will now include posts about nutcases who still believe in coal, petroleum, propane and propane accessoires and who believe solar and other renewables are a scam.
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The problem with this is that power is needed for many purposes both in the public sector and business that can't easily be replaced by off grid solutions, once people jump off the grid the grid has to be funded in other ways so many of the goods you buy, public services you use and buy will all go up in price as the price of power will have to go up in order to maintain many of the fixed infrastructure costs. basically you may save on your power bill but you will be hit on your grocery, tax and anything else you buy.
This is a very large batter bank, even if you omit high loads like A/C, dishwasher heated dry, electric dryer, and electric oven.
The utilities cannot exist as a backup for 3-10% power demand; the cost of delivery would far exceed the cost of energy. Most homeowners would quickly turn to a small natural gas or gasoline generator to recharge batteries. Fortunately, cities don't work especially well for off-grid, so there should be some form of baseload.
By my math, batteries at $250/kWh(B) are comparable to a generation cost of around $0.07/kWh when fully discharged each day. The problem for off-grid is that you are going to want enough batteries that you don't need to start your generator more than a few days per year, which almost doubles your battery count. It quickly becomes poor resource utilization.
I would think that it is far more likely that we will see variable voltage/variable frequency distribution circuits that allow opportunistic load management options: the lower the voltage/frequency the higher the cost, and the greater the incentive to feed back into the grid. With customers having a bi-directional inverter, it becomes easy to manage.
I find find it funny that these same retarded progressives, the ones who defend obamacare by saying that insurance companies are just like streets and have to be paid for, then go and claim that a real utility is inherently bad and that they shouldn't have to pay for a share of the infrastructure.
Rooftop solar isn't reliable, even after having blown several trillion dollars on subsidies. If you're betting someone's life on oxygen or air conditioning or refrigerated foods, then pay your share for the grid. Don't steal from others with net metering. Don't bet someone's life on your bespoke solar installation.
In many municipalities, being grid connected is required for occupancy. In fact there have been a number of stories of governments condemning "off grid" homes even though the home had all the amenities that a grid connected home has.
Unlike the actually-unreliable solar that requires complex processes to use its power, coal only requires them to clean it (an easy enough task without regulations designed primarily to kill coal).
Coal provides reliable enough power to last many generations and survive large-scale disasters while being able to do so in nearly any location. Its only drawbacks are political in nature (well-heeled environmental lobbies).
That might not sound good for the tree-huggers wanting to modbomb me, but it's true.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Keeping in mind that most grids have charge back systems where you can sell back excess electricity to the utility, and that the grid is already built, it may never be reasonable to leave the grid. Basically, the grid becomes your money maker plus back up supply.
For new housing, however, particularly in rural areas, simply having 48 hours worth of battery backup may make it viable to skip connecting to the grid. Instead add a back up generator connected to either the same natural gas pipeline you use for your stove, or your heating oil tank (obviously a different type of generator).
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we pay for out of our own pockets, plus they're terrible for the environment if they store power. Li batteries don't make sense despite what Musk says, and lead-acid batteries are the cheapest form of power storage, but they're terrible for the environment.
People will be leaving sooner because of overbilling* by utilities using smart meters.Not to mention house fires, medical issues, and interference with wireless communications like cellular, WiFi, and fixed wireless (WiMax).
*some may be fraudulent, utilities may already know there's a problem and are covering it up.
There is no reason to meter electricity anymore. Just charge a flat maintenance fee for the hookup.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
is that those who can't afford solar benefit from the electric grid. When the ones who have money to power their homes themselves what happens to the ones who don't? Does the grid shut down and leave them without power? Probably.
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In the end, this will just mean that monthly fixed costs will rise, while transmission costs per kwh will fall. The cost of the electricity grid is actually in practice almost independent of the amount of electricity transferred overall - instead it has to be sized based on peak usage. The gist of it: A house that is connected to the grid and runs out of battery for just a day requires the same grade of connection to the grid like a house without batteries does. Therefore they should also pay the same, including administrative costs etc. Maintaining the grid in a city is actually not expensive at all. It simply makes no sense to put batteries into your own cellar instead of the utility buying batteries and using them as necessary. The only reason for this can be electricity prices that roll costs into the price per kwh which are in practice not based on overall usage. So the fix for the problem described in the study is to get rid of elements of electricity prices that distort the market. Then there won't be an incentive to go off-grid anymore.
OutlawCountry: project of the CIA targets computers running the Linux operating system
"Today, June 29th 2017, WikiLeaks publishes documents from the OutlawCountry project of the CIA that targets computers running the Linux operating system. OutlawCountry allows for the redirection of all outbound network traffic on the target computer to CIA controlled machines for ex- and infiltration purposes. The malware consists of a kernel module that creates a hidden netfilter table on a Linux target; with knowledge of the table name, an operator can create rules that take precedence over existing netfilter/iptables rules and are concealed from an user or even system administrator.
The installation and persistence method of the malware is not described in detail in the document; an operator will have to rely on the available CIA exploits and backdoors to inject the kernel module into a target operating system. OutlawCountry v1.0 contains one kernel module for 64-bit CentOS/RHEL 6.x; this module will only work with default kernels. Also, OutlawCountry v1.0 only supports adding covert DNAT rules to the PREROUTING chain."
https://www.wikileaks.org/vaul...
-- Leaked Documents :
= OutlawCountry v1.0 User Manual
https://www.wikileaks.org/vaul...
(PDF) https://www.wikileaks.org/vaul...
= OutlawCountry v1.0 Test Plan
https://www.wikileaks.org/vaul...
(PDF) https://www.wikileaks.org/vaul...
+1.
Here in Oz, aboiut 1/4 of the cost is generation, 1/2 transmission and distribution, and 1/4 admin overheads, old solar subsidies etc. So the fixed cost does not even begin to cover the transmission and distribution costs.
The other thing to note is that home solar power needs to compete with the 28c/kwh we pay for power retiail, and not the avg 6c/kwh that is paid wholesale. So batteries start to become economical at about AU$1,000/kwh. And a natural gas generator will fill in the cloudy days.
So we are in for bg changes. And I think there would be a riot here if any government tried the US trick of forcing people to be on grid.
This will have an interesting social impact.
As more people leave the gird, income will drop for the utilities, forcing them to raise prices and cut capacity.
This will drive more people to leave the grid.
But, only those that can afford the capital outlay will be able to do so, those that can't will be stuck paying higher and higher prices for power that they can afford less and less.
At current prices for an off grid system in the southwest on my house it will take about 7.5 years to pay for itself without any tax credits.
.. and the solution was to tax solar panels owners.
We don't have gas lines here. People have propane tanks. Gas trucks roll through the neighborhood, it's a hassle. They could install gas powered generators, but in a scenario like that people would probably go with a diesel generator which is a more common way to provide off-grid power for people without solar. They might have a low-power solar/battery system for lights and the fridge, then fire up the diesel to do a load of laundry, run a space heater, or use tools in the workshop. On a community-wide basis, if the big utility abandoned us we might form a local. That's how our water is--it's a local serving a few thousand people. The big utility would divest from our part of the grid, we'd float a bond or something. When you have 5000 people in a district, a solar plant + natural gas backup financed over 30 years doesn't look that bad. Maybe it would even be cheaper than PG & E but I have no idea. Hopefully it doesn't come to that.
Will that system be large enough to handle the yearly worst case scenario? The once-a-decade worst case? The once-a-century?
That is the issue I see with going off grid. Many places in the world have too irregular weather to depend on only solar unless the storage is huge. Especially once you start calculating for worst case scenarios.
But for those lucky enough to not live anywhere where it might be less sunny for an extended period of time it sounds like a good idea. I still think some kind of grid is the right way to go, hook it up to a diesel generator, a couple of windmills out of town and a large low density/low cost energy storage system. Then you wont need quite as big batteries in each house to handle a spell of bad weather. And the individual home owner don't need to scale up the storage to be able to have many guests for a weekend.
How Will I power my OCD Computing Device (OCD)?
Oh no.. the cupholder cpu quad-GB on my Apple Surface just broke... Who you gonna call?
IN-DI-A!
I'd be happy if we could just get gov't out of the 'paying half the cost of every solar install in the US' business, and stop forcing my electrical supplier to pay a premium for unneeded electricity that homeowners solar panels generate...
Ken
If I want to be off grid I need to:
Have storage for multiple days if the sun doesn't shine.
Have excess generation capacity
Have enough power in my batteries to power all my appliances at once.
Now if I get together with a few neighbours I don't need as much excess, since the likely hood of us all turning on every appliance is low we wouldn't need as much absolute power, and we could share some costs of the circuitry. If my neighbourhood got together with another neighbourhood we could save even more and if we got together with neighbourhoods geographically separated from us it would be even better. Ideally we would create a grid stretching across the contentment so that we could share power with people in other time zones or to take advantage of things like potential energy in river water, or maybe a instead of putting our solar panels on the roof we could put them all somewhere more convenient that gets more sun. Maybe we could even pay someone else to manage all this stuff. Get them to do the research, borrow money to build the infrastructure, manage the lines between me and my neighbours,.. I wonder what we would call a company that would do all this for us?
The thread will now include posts about nutcases who still believe in green energy as a viable replacement.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
once in a century ! I've seen grid power go out in my city at least once during most years. Usually it's birds frying themselves.
Nullius in verba
Would it be feasible/desirable in any situation to store and pump water up somewhere and let that run a generator during the night?
Problem is most people couldn't cope with a week of outage.
Bad storm destroys all the panels in a neighborhood, the grid will be back up quickly. Those panels, not so quick. If you've disconnected well so sad. I imagine the reconnect charges would be high as well.
People in rural areas are used to lousy reliability so are likely to have generators and a supply of fuel on hand. That gets difficult in more civilized areas.
I have a whole galaxy installed on my rooftop.
Remember when we didnâ(TM)t have a fat, orange, brooding, man-child in the White House? Trump's a fucking disgrace!!!
1) There is a maximum amount of solar energy available. In round numbers, it's approximately 1 kilowatt per square metre at the earth's surface... period... end of story. You're *NOT* going to see a "Moore's Law" boosting solar panels every year into infinity. Current solar panels are from 15 to 23 percent efficient, and degrade with age. Yes, there is room for improvement, but there is a hard ceiling.
2) Solar panels produce 300 times as much toxic waste per unit of energy output versus nuclear powerplants http://www.theenergycollective... Definitely *NOT* "green".
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
PG&E has started "estimating" my electric bills... at two to three times my actual kWh usage. So now we're having to dispute their bullshit with the CPUC. I have photos of the meter that prove that they have overcharged us by literally 1,200 kWh. But then, PG&E willfully kills people for profit, so this is a pretty minor shocker
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I have a whole galaxy installed on my rooftop.
Thankyou. I‘m here all week.
I think you, too, are oversimplifying it. There's also the fact that less power being used on the grid means that supply increases, which should in theory lower price. Granted, there are also going to be some fixed costs, but I believe the bulk of those costs are already on the sources that are more grid dependent.
One of the last-mile "fixed" costs is the 'pole'. In many areas, the utility poles carry electricity, telephone, cable and internet. Telephone and cable are already fading into oblivion as people cut that cord. If people start defecting from the electric grid en-mass, that will take away all the other utility support for that pole and the price of your internet will probably just go up to make up the difference (just ask those google fiber folks).
you either have massive subsidies for offgrid systems or massively high electricity costs. It doesn't even come close to being financially viable to be offgrid at current prices here, the payoff is never as the battery storage would need to be replaced long before the payoff period was reached, especially the the diminishing capacity of storage over time.
My parents are constantly in credit with their electricity company, as they contribute more to the grid than they use. They haven't paid for electricity since getting their rooftop solar panels in 2007, and they're already way past the point where the panels have paid for themselves.
So, why the fuck are people saying it doesn't make sense until 2020?
We're already living in the future, fuckwits: embrace it now, or just fuck off.
Most ppl will charge these at night time. Solar will not work for sometime.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Stupid fucking question, though. Even if the current state (no pun intended) of the grid or self-generation are not yet, the answer is still yes. And it's currently worth it in some places today.
But it won't be legal. Because, "we are part of a community".
Actually the problems will start long before that; when a system doesn't pay for itself, system maintenance starts to be cut. They won't train up replacement skilled workers, then, one day, the grid will suffer a catastrophic failure and be an 'ex-parrot'.
Fuel burning requires air to be ejected and that air is going to be hot, so you're wrong on the 100% efficient part: the flue gasses take away some (a lot of) the heat that burning generated and you can't use the gasses in the home because they're toxic. But large electric generation plants want to keep the power generating power so they try to recover a lot of the waste to sell.
You're ALL wrong too, because you can INSULATE YOUR GODDAMNED HOMES PROPERLY. Instead of building them to the cheapest price point then jacking the price to "what the market can bear" to maximise profit, get the government to mandate some fucking effective efficiency standards. Since home prices are at the market rate, there's no room to increase prices because a house unsold is worth nothing. So it would cut into PROFIT, but not actually cause the house prices to rise.
Cutting the heating needs by 1kw is 100% effective at cutting power loss. Cutting the heating needs by 1kw is more than 100% efficient at cutting power demand because no heating is 100% efficient, therefore to generate that 1kw of heating requires 2kw, say, more power.
Historically people paid for electricity. Now that they aren't paying for electricity, they will have to pay for the backup supply that they want - or they can go without. The idea that those who are 80% off grid should in effect be subsidised by those who can't leave it is unfair. Unfortunately the implementation of the transition - with a rather severe change in the pricing system to reflect the actual costs of keeping power stations available but not selling electricity - is going to be painful. This will be because the opposition will ally those who have got their solar power / wind power / other supplies to those who are campaigning against climate change, who will argue that the tariff changes will discourage low carbon solutions.
Power companies can do the same as home owners. The falling costs benefit them as well, and they don't have to pay retail prices.
Local storage needs to handle your peak night-time usage. This will fluctuate over the year. Storage over a population will fluctuate less. This means less storage and fewer panels are needed.
The other advantage of a central system is maintenance. Panels and batteries will eventually need to be replaced. A power company can have a steady replacement schedule. A home user can have some sort of lease agreement but then you're tied to another company, so don't have the self sufficiency
Anything you can do your utility can do cheaper on a larger scale.
And low quality lowest bidder piles of shit at that.
There are zero-power homes that are well insulated and efficient and manage to work 24/7 on the little bit of battery backup built in, but these homes are not built of wood facings and are therefore well insulated and do not require a lot of power to operate.
Do you know how you can cut your electricity usage by 1/4-1/3 at a stroke? STOP USING THE CLOTHES DRYER. There's a fucking sun out there and wind. They will dry clothes. Just don't do it on a rainy day.
Since demand follows the sun utilities can use on demand gas turbines instead of batteries. Before the batteries become cheap enough for the home owner, it would have become cheap enough for the utilities.
The Grid is not a static target for residential solar to take pot shots at. It too would co-opt viable technologies and it is a moving target. If static analysis predict 2028 for break even in sunny Arizona, dynamic analysis where grid too uses viable solar technology, would move the date to 2050 or beyond.
On the other hand, as people start defecting from the grid, the cost for the rest would go up. Like the transition from street car lines to private automobile showed, it could happen fast.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Well I guess that depends on where you live, I'm not used to power outages longer than say 10 minutes.
If power in batteries run out in a storm then it may well be much longer than 10 minutes before everything is up and running again.
I guess there is a theoretical point where there is enough generation and storage at each point of use that transmission becomes unnecessary. I believe we will approach that, but never achieve it.
Personally I want the option of a grid tie. Let's say I have plenty of solar generation and battery storage - just enough to meet all of my needs, and then I add another electric car - or a swimming pool - It may be worth it to buy excess capacity from someone else instead of installing more solar and more batteries. To do that you need a transmission grid (and a clearinghouse/marketplace for energy trading).
Maintaining a grid also gives us something that should relate very well to IT guys and gals - redundancy. Apple's new campus will generate all the electricity they need on-site and use the grid as a backup.
Redundancy is probably the best reason to build and maintain a grid.
Um, that's just stupid. You sell the extra power you generate back to the electric company! Look into the programs available from your local electric company for more information.
We'll make great pets
I live 40 mi as the crow flies from a major metropolitan area in the USA. Been in this house 10 years. We're 'rural'. Longest time without power knew *week* (it was summer, we had a pool for shower, had a Porta pot , gas cooktop). Typically can go out hours if not parts of days. Mostly weather related.
Guess what? We " lived through it". Dealt with it. We're sooooo soft these days...
One of the big thing the grid is used for, but not really talked about is that the 60Hz (50Hz Europe/Parts of Japan) is that it is used as a timekeeping signal. LOTS of stuff relies on the fact it is kept in sync
Don't need more than a few microamps, but the grid tie makes a lot of things "just work"
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
I like the idea of distributed gathering of solar power. I don't know how to economically arrange it so that others who invest personally in hardware don't feel exploded but there is a fantastic potential. Taking the excuse to have a drink but extrapolating, "it's always sunny somewhere!"
In Ontario, you'll get a "hydro" bill (which is what we call it in these parts) either way. We get a combined bill in most (all?) regions for actual electricity usage, drinking water and waste water all together, then they top it off with electrical debt retirement charges, delivery charges and a "global adjustment fee" which is basically a mysterious tax to subsidize all the green energy schemes, carbon tax and low income electricity customers who get a reduced rate. You could go entirely off grid and still get a bill that would include all of the above except electricity usage. There's literally no way to avoid getting reamed by our government and local power authorities.
For the record, my "hydro" bill is about $500/month and I'm not a big electricity user. It's obscene and scandalous with people choosing between paying their hydro bill and eating. And our provincial government has now started to borrow billions of dollars (some estimates are now that up to $90B will be borrowed and added to our debt over the next 30 years) to subsidize hydro bills now in an attempt to mask what our left wing activist government has done to our power system after 13 years in power. I.e., make our kids and grand kids pay for it instead so they can get re-elected next year. This is what green energy, carbon taxes and especially government graft gets you.
I have the technical skill and equipment and resources (domain, web hosting) to run my own email server. I actually did it for 3 years. Eventually I gave up and switched to a hosted service (first yahoo, then gmail).
The reason is that it's great running your own service when everything works. But when stuff breaks, *I* had to fix it. If I was waiting for an important email, I had to drop everything I was doing and fix it. If I was waiting for an important email and didn't notice it broke, then I blissfully continued waiting until a day later when a friend asked me "Why haven't you responded to my email?" The final straw was when it broke when I was on vacation, leaving me technologically incommunicado unless I abandoned my vacation to fix it. I already have a job, and it's not babysitting a mission-critical email server. So I switched my email service to one run by a company who monitors it 24/7, notices outages within minutes instead of hours or days, and has expert staff who are more skilled at fixing it than I ever could be unless I quit my day job.
Unless you're an expert at diagnosing and fixing home solar installations and batteries, and can drop whatever you're doing at any time of the day (or night) to run home and fix it when the wife calls to say the house has no electricity, you don't want to be off the grid. Sometimes the first indication you'll have of a problem with your array will be when your battery dies because it hasn't been getting any power from the panels all day. Then you'll be stuck trying to fix it without the benefit of having electricity (to, say, search the net to try to help diagnose what the problem might be). Even if you've got a backup generator, it requires at least annual maintenance and the fuel has to be refreshed (gas goes bad after about 6-12 months, quicker if it's an ethanol blend and your storage container isn't completely airtight).
Things that you use intermittently like a car or a washing machine, it's OK to own because you can survive a short downtime without it if it should break. Things that need close to 100% uptime like electricity or email or phone service, you want it provided by a company with staff on hand 24/7 dedicated to providing it and fixing it when it breaks. Solar panels on your home supplement this reliable power source, not the other way around.
Usage is likely to only increase. Electric cars will increase it about 1kwh for every 3 miles, converting from natural gas to electric heating consumes even more kWh. The average annual usage isn't what is needed, peak average seasonal usage is and things like air conditioning or heating often use several thousand to tens of thousands watts per dwelling which turns into added kWh.
Density is also an issue, for example in many urban areas people are stacked vertically and not in large expansive residential estates. Suddenly the rooftop of a building can't support more than the top few floors leaving the rest with no feasible solar solution. Walls won't help much either unless it's far taller than other structures, yet even that obstructs those around it. The density of urban areas hits 30k people per square mile today and is increasing (roughly 30M square feet or 30M watts peak radiated power) which works out to 1k sqft per human or less, you would need 50+ sqft at 100% efficiency, 250sqft today, that isn't likely enough to accommodate roadways, open areas, green spaces, walkways, or the general being able to see the sun that humans are used to. This will only get worse in the future as density goes up and the suns energy dosent.
Tl;dr while there is enough energy shining down on the world to provide all electrical needs, going off the grid or even small local grids isn't going to be a feasible stand alone option for high density urban areas under which a substantial part of the population lives.
Utilities, disguised as public entities, are just like any vested interest, they'll seek to maintain the status quo by economic and legal means. In TX, a very sunny state, Net Metering is only available in small geographic areas, not universally by the main electric utility grid. The reason given is "reliability of the grid" and cost of implementation of new metering models - this despite the fact many other states do it 100%. What's really in play here is fear that they (electric utilities) will slowly lose control over the flow of power and, not incidentally, money. Change is going to be hard for those addicted to controlling the flow of power - electric and monetary.
Getting off the grid has serious drawbacks. Only part of the country has steady sunny days. In many parts of the country weather is not so good for substantial part of the year. Grid gives assurance that power is always available regardless of the household demand. Being attached to the grid also allows to sell excessive energy back to the system and earn money. Having EV car in the garage will increase power demand big time, possibly way beyond the capacity of the installed system or the system will require much more cost. For example Tesla powerwall battery has 13 kWh capacity and is scalable to 10 batteries. Tesla model S car battery has 100 kWh. Having such car would practically max out powerwall system. Most people charge their car overnight, when sun is not shining. All that 100 kWh power would have to come from the house battery. Good luck with reasonable cost.
That's a nice little theory you have there. Too bad it's bullsh*t in reality. There are simply too many users that can't replace distributed power with solar. Even if it makes a dent, YOU, dear green citizen, will get hit with some sort of tax to support the infrastructure. And that's all assuming that the subsidies and other market distortions like net-metering remain in place. Once those are gone and the market returns to normal, it will make less economic sense for the average homeowner to go solar. In addition, nobody is talking about what happens when the panel efficiency degrades to the point where they are no longer generating enough for the homeowner's needs and they need to be replaced. Who's going to pay for the replacement and disposal of the old ones?
what is needed is massive collection structures of clean energy and long distance UHVDC lines to carry to distribution grids. Of course, it's great there are many that can benefit from collectors on their own property, but that's not going to support our country.
One thing they didn't take into consideration is the so called "Ready to Serve" minimum fee people pay Edison to even have power available that is about $100 per month. That's right. The least you will pay for electricity in California even if fully off the god damn grid is $100 dollars because Edison got the fucking law passed by the state to ensure there was enough money to maintain the grid. The only way you as a property owner to avoid this fee is to be a minimum of 1 mile from any power line. Otherwise you have to pay this unexplained tax every month.
The other factor that comes into play is the cost of electric power in California where all of the utilities want Demand Pricing - meaning instead of a flat $0.18 cents per Kw, they can and do charge $0.50 cents per Kw during the day for residential customers. This supposedly discourages people from leaving their A/C's set to 65 during the day but it's really a play to exceed what the regulators supposedly allow in profits and as the electric utilities are now unregulated for the most part, they can exceed the 10 percent profit they were originally allowed. Now they get what ever they can and screw everyone else by writing laws that simply means they get it for doing nothing.
You are getting the poor to pay for your backup power and are a twat.
Charging batteries is lossy, discharging batteries is lossy. If you have excess capacity, why are you storing it instead of selling to grid? If grid power cost difference during peak hours/off hours is enough to justify the battery even with losses then what are the solar panels good for? Charge from grid during off hours, discharge back during peak hours, battery becomes a money generating machine. Obviously this doesn't work, because the price difference is not enough and losses are too much. If it did work, then large companies would be doing it on larger scale and better efficiency than homeowners can. But if it doesn't work, then there is no point to home battery at all, you can instead use the grid as virtual battery. Home battery is snake oil, it makes no sense to buy it.
It is fairly cheap to have an off-grid solar system if the battery stack can be low capacity. The problem is electric loads with high start currents, notably compressor motors in fridges/freezers, but likely washers, driers, dishwashers.
Variable frequency motor drives, as opposed to cheaper induction and universal motor drives would help here.
Lastly, the specific heat capacity of water is quite high, so unwanted solar electricity (off-grid) could be used for hot water through immersion heaters in water tank(s).
Some people aren't only considering finances when analyzing the potential for detaching from the grid. Many, myself included, are also "pricing in" getting rid of the headaches of having to deal with the crappy customer service and other issues that come with using the utility. Not to mention the movement to have customers with on-premises generation subsidize users who elect not to in the form of connection fees. There's a certain satisfaction and stress-reduction in telling your utility to fuck off and come and collect their meter.
The next movement will be just like with trash service in many cities ... you are required to purchase it whether you use it or not.
Studies like this never account for maintenance and repair costs. Sure, you can pay it off in 20 years and then it's all free, but what happens when a hail storm comes along and wrecks your panels. Or what happens when you over-discharge or over-amp your pack? You get to replace equipment and set back your payoff date. Solar power is still just a novelty folks, and will be for many years to come.
After everyone went digital the post office still lavishes swanky benefits on its employees.
The government is just here to pick your pocket.
On the grid you have a few hundred square miles target where something can go wrong. Vs your your own power where the target for something going wrong is a few hundred square feet.
Yes, but that's not the whole story. My own power generation was set up by a hobbyist (me) with limited resources and access to only consumer level and home-made equipment and is maintained by that same hobbyist in his scarce free time.
The power utility has a much larger system to maintain, but does so with an annual revenue of over $10 billion, many decades of experience, and a team of several thousand subject matter experts. "Squirrels" taking down large sections of town on a regular basis is pretty pathetic.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Sure, getting off the evil grid sounds great, but is it actually a good thing? All these batteries we're talking about have a huge environmental impact as well. They also will need to be replaced regularly. With a grid, electricity can be stored far more efficiently, and less of it can be stored at once to meet everyone's needs. I don't see how everyone having their own giant batteries is a desirable solution. The issue seems to be that the grids are still powered largely by coal and natural gas. Once we eliminate these and move to nuclear, thermal, hydro, and wind sources, using a grid will continue to be the ideal solution. Granted, having these grids and utilities controlled by private companies is completely unacceptable. That needs to change, but that's another matter entirely.
I think that the big question is whether partial disconnect scales.
Consider what happens when solar batteries become exhausted - and the need for a backup (grid or on-site generator) comes into play - and the cause is widespread due to reasons like:
Bear in mind that there is no longer one Electric Company anymore. The industry has been broken up into Generation, Transmission Systems, and Retail (or local) delivery. Each are owned by separate corporate interests. None of them are going to want to support maintaining excess capacity, even if they're paid to.
And like the Great Recession, the systems and procedures for dealing with a sudden surge in demand because of a widespread event are not going to be well designed, maintained, or tested.
Consider what'll happen if several counties need to resort to a backup mechanism suddenly. Transmission lines will be overwhelmed. On-site generators will fail - or will operate inefficiently and produce enormous pollution. If they're fed by natural gas, the natural gas system will be overwhelmed too.
Solutions to this would require more invasive government regulation of battery systems, backup generators, etc. than people who classically want to go "off grid" would tolerate.
Where I live it is those little grey terrorists that are the most dangerous threat to the grid. A few of them get BBQed by pole pigs every year in my city and someone looses power.
Time to offend someone
As people move off the grid and the demand for grid power declines the prices are going to keep increasing for whoever is left.
As those prices continue to rise it will drive more people away from the grid and onto renewable power.
The issue becomes what to do with the existing infrastructure. The power companies have to make money to maintain the plants and the distribution which means either:
Everyone will continue to pay a base rate for the privilege of having grid power as a backup.
Grid power prices skyrocket due to lack of demand.
The government steps in and props up the utilities (hint: with your tax money)
At any rate as others have mentioned I wouldn't want to switch until its as automatic as my current grid connection is. I don't want to have to buy fuel, I don't want more stuff around I have to fix and maintain.
We have a similar issue with the water desal plant here. Everybody wants magic ocean turned to drinking water when we're in a drought, but once it rains and prices stabilize nobody wants to pay to maintain it. So when the drought happens again guess what - no magic water.
In Australia, the electricity industry has been largely privatised after state government-owned vertical monopolies were broken up in the 1990s to create a national electricity market and allow private enterprise to invest. There are now generation, high-voltage transmission, low-voltage distribution and retail companies.
Transmission and distribution companies have natural monopolies and so are regulated and have to have their forward planning for maintenance and upgrades and pricing approved by government regulators. I believe that this is similar to how it works in much of the USA.
The problem I as I see it is that now with increasing amounts of behind-the-meter generation and storage and overall efficiency improvements (more insulation, CFL/LED lighting, better appliances, heat-pump and solar hot water, etc), the amount of electricity being consumed from the grid is decreasing while the cost of operating and maintaining it is staying the same.
The current way pricing is handled in Australia is that the cost of transmission and distribution is all rolled up into a single unit price for a kWh of electricity, plus a "daily service charge". So electricity prices are going up partly to counter declining consumption and we're going to get caught in a "death spiral" as more people add behind-the-meter generation and storage to reduce their bills, but everyone still needs a grid connection.
As the uptake of electric vehicles increases, the the amount of electricity consumed from the grid will definitely increase which will counter this trend somewhat, but I think that we're going to have to move in a direction in Australia where rather than having transmission and distribution included in the unit cost of electricity, it will be wholly incorporated into the flat-rate "daily service charge" based on the peak capacity of your connection (this is partly how large commercial and industrial customers are already charged). This would be fairer, but would still see many people defecting from the grid as the fixed-cost component would dominate their bills.
So this is why I think the eventual outcome will be to levy a charge on any property that the grid passes by, which is something that is not without precedent. In my state that is what has been done with properties that the public sewer system passes by for 130 or so years. It's a de-facto property tax as the levy is based upon the value of the property and the reasoning behind it is that if you can connect to a public sewer, your land is more valuable as it can be support a higher density of development as you don't need to set aside space for an on-site septic system.
The electricity grid is unarguably a public good just as reticulated water and sewer systems are. The question is, should the natural monopolies of transmission and distribution remain in private hands or should they revert to public ownership like the water, sewer and storm drain systems? If they do revert to public ownership, will the significantly improved levels of operational efficiency that have been achieved under private ownership be maintained?
since we heavily subsidize the infrastructure needed to deliver power. Those subsidies are allowed because they benefit everyone. But the well to do have a much larger voice in this country than the poor. Since Citizen's United that's even part of our legal system. If they no longer benefit from the grid they won't want to pay for it. The poor won't get tax cuts (they never do) but they will get service cuts. In deserts where temps top 100 F they'll be an increase in deaths.
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Unlike the actually-unreliable solar that requires complex processes to use its power, coal only requires them to clean it (an easy enough task without regulations designed primarily to kill coal).
Coal provides reliable enough power to last many generations and survive large-scale disasters while being able to do so in nearly any location. Its only drawbacks are political in nature (well-heeled environmental lobbies).
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The thread will now include posts about nutcases who still believe in green energy as a proper replacement.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Never let it be said that you let a lie or two get in the way of a good story.
Hasn't stopped the Paris Accord proponents, the Sierra Club, or the well-heeled of Aspen.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
In New Zealand, the discussion has already been bought up and the end result was an advisory that if enough people go off grid, they would charge the remaining users a much higher price to cover the running costs and maintenance/upkeep of the existing infrastructure, then charge those who only use the grid at peak times (or times where there isnt enough solar stored in homes' batteries to get through shady periods) through the nose at something like 600% inflated rate. They really dont want to change their business models.
Yes, you're right that there are many things that receive subsidies at the moment, but adding to the number isn't a good idea. The main problem with continuing to subsidise 'back up users' is that the back up users will tend to be relatively wealthy and those stuck on the grid will be the less prosperous, so you are proposing yet another burden on the poor. By contrast most of the things you list are to the benefit of the poor.
The cost of the 'back up' will be far more than just the cost of the grid maintenance; it will be the cost of having a lot of generators available but mostly unused when renewables are generating; although 'most' of the time wind / sun will provide the energy, it's the times - especially the extended times - when they're not, that things will go badly wrong. The capital cost of those and the staffing required to ensure they are available when required is the problem here.
Since the Supremes have ruled Congress can make you buy anything they want, don't bet on having a choice in the future.
The obvious, and economically fair, solution to this is a change in pricing structure whereby customers of the power companies pay a large rental fee coupled with a lower usage rate, thus the utility companies will recover their fixed costs across their customers' rentals and the variable costs will go to customers as they use the utility as backup. If this is adopted it may stifle large scale uptake of self generation in the short term as the fixed costs of current electricity generating/distribution plants are huge. Longer term it may favour smaller centrally generated back-up utilities supplying small communities.