Slashdot Mirror
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.
The Official Site of 1337 Pwnage
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 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.
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.
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!”
So Obamacare is bad because we should just trust the free market, but if/when going off grid becomes a financially savvy thing to do, then we should no longer trust the free market and should be forced to buy energy from our designated provider?
Yeah, yeah, "but solar isn't free market because subsidies" -- well sorry, but everything is subsidized. Fossil fuels are subsidized. Bad health habits are (arguably) subsidized.
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
People can buy a lot of battery power. Have it installed. Heat with gas or wood, cook with gas, gas hot water.
The problem is then A/C, the washing machine, dryer.
That battery system in the home has to cover the electrical draw as the dryer, washing machine, the A/C turns on.
Get new appliances that start up in a different way that will not cause any battery problems? Consider a gas dryer?
Move to a state with no AC cooling needed in summer?
New big battery pack, covered for power all year, no more appliance issues. Use gas and wood.
The utility has one final method of keeping its grid power connected and been paid for.
Government.
A house is not considered ready for humans until its grid connected.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
+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.
McKinsey has been accused of being many things over the years, but this is probably the first time they've been called "retarded progressives".
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?
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
the power plant is the small part of the cost, the cost is the millions of kilometres of power lines, poles, transition stations etc etc. the majority of which will need to still be maintained and operated.
Yup, that's what I do. I pulled the electric stove out of the apartment because nobody that cooks uses an electric stove. Now I just carry 25 lb propane tanks up 4 flights of stairs twice a week. I have to bring in the tanks at night because the landlord would freak if he saw what I was doing. I nearly asphyxiated before I figured out how to vent the kitchen. Yes, the landlord would freak if he knew. I know it's not very safe or very convenient but what I cook tastes better. You probably feel stupider just for reading this post. I know I did when I read the parent posts.
That would be me :-)
The grid ends 600 metres up the road. the last quote to get to to my place was AUD$33K for single-phase, *excluding* tree-clearing costs - so imagine the reaction from my neighbours were I to propose cutting down a bunch of trees in the street......
Back on topic - ~26 degrees south latitude, ~9kWh/day consumption, no A/C (temperate climate, but seriously tempted to put in some A/C, last summer was HOT, it'll take a few extra PV panels to run it, 2.5kW panels on the roof, 5.5 kVA petrol genny backup (it also runs the clothes dryer when necessary), and 1320ah lead-acid batteries. Wood-burning stove for heat, cooking and hot water, 45KG bottle gas for backup.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
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'.
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.
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.
You are NEVER going to get either one changed. In both cases, you are fucked.
I suspect the climate where I live is a little less temperate than yours.
I've got an evaporative cooler out on the patio to cool the 110 degrees fahrenheit (~43 celsius) temps so that the outdoor cats have someplace to go that's a little nicer, the air coming out of the evap is 74 degrees F (~23 C) and the water temp is 68 F (20C) in the sump of the evap cooler. A friend of mine cools his whole house for the bulk of the summer with an Australian-sourced Bonaire Durango system that works exceedingly well. Neither draws much power, just enough to run a 1 horsepower 120VAC 60Hz motor. I think the sticker on my Mastercool unit says something like 7 Amps draw.
Given how effective an evap cooler ("swamp cooler") is, you may want to consider looking into it. They're getting to be more expensive than they used to be but they're still far, far cheaper to purchase and to operate than a heatpump or other refrigeration-cycle air conditioner.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Coal is actually more-expensive than solar at this point. The range of costs to build and operate the facilities has overlapped for years, in favor of coal (some coal plants would have been cheaper than any possible solar plant per generation capacity); however, solar and wind power have hit parity, and slightly passed it.
Support my political activism on Patreon.