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Under Current Policies, Residential Batteries Increase Emissions In Most Cases (arstechnica.com)
schwit1 shares a report: Another year, another reason to take the promises of residential home batteries with a grain of salt. This month, a group of researchers from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) published a paper in Environmental Science and Technology reporting that there are very few cases in which operating a residential home battery reduces overall emissions -- assuming that households are economically rational and trying to minimize costs.
Of course, if the battery is only discharged during periods of peak emissions and only charged when fossil fuel use is low, then a household might reduce emissions. But across 16 representative regions, operating a battery this way ended up being costly. "There may be good reasons to decentralize the grid through ubiquitous installation of small RES [Residential Energy Storage], but cost-effective emissions control is not one of them at the moment," the researchers write.
Of course, if the battery is only discharged during periods of peak emissions and only charged when fossil fuel use is low, then a household might reduce emissions. But across 16 representative regions, operating a battery this way ended up being costly. "There may be good reasons to decentralize the grid through ubiquitous installation of small RES [Residential Energy Storage], but cost-effective emissions control is not one of them at the moment," the researchers write.
What? The people wealthy enough to afford a powerwall, smugly looking down on all us regular plebians for ruining the planet were wrong. When they double-down and insist saving the planet in their garage is economically sound so the poor have no excuse is also wrong.
What a shock!
in locality of where batteries replace toxic carcinogenic exhaust fumes.
Science funded by oil is fascist.
You have a battery and most days you have a trickling, free energy source just bouncing off the top of your head being wasted. A high % of people who would add the greater expense of batteries would no doubt add solar.
It's a no brainer yet they don't consider it somehow?
I'll remove the PowerWall, and start using the coal burning furnace, and the wood stove and fireplace. /s
If it pays off in the end say over 10-12 years then makes profit. WHO CARES.
Seriously we all feel guilty while governments (I am talking planet earth) are not switching away from fossil fuels.
Capitalism is not going green until it is profitable.
Just look at PV mode.
Change in CO2 is clearly one-sided.
Unless they claim having PV always increases CO2 -
then battery with PV clearly reduces it.
Even a lithium-ion battery has only 99% charge efficiency, so it makes sense that adding a battery to your photovoltaic (PV) system can increase emissions compared to a PV system with no battery.
Note the following:
This is why it needs to be a revenue-neutral carbon tax. If the tax is 10 cents per kWh and the average person uses 4,000 kWh per year, then everyone would receive a $400 check every year whether they used any electricity that year or not.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
home batteries are about cutting the COST (i.e. saving money off the home's electric bill)... by storing low off-peak energy (from whatever the fuck the energy generation source is) for use during high-cost peak times.. it has abso-fucking-lutly nothing to do with emissions for most people and most installs (an exception would be an off-the-grid home with solar or solar/wind + battery)
Intuivively, if a battery perfectly stored the energy from the power plant, and perfectly released it, the amount of emissions would be the same as if the battery wasn't there. So it shouldn't be surprising that using batteries doesn't lower the emissions.
The article supports the intuition by making it apparent that trying to use batteries to arbitrage the emissions from the power plant based on variable emissions efficiency of the power plant isn't likely to cost-effectively work either.
It's no surprise that the batteries aren't 'green'. If you charge the battery from the grid, then it's only as 'green' as the grid itself. However, that's not the main point of these batteries.
As an Electrical Engineer (Power and Energy), home batteries are to make my life much easier and, as a reward, people get cheaper electricity. I'm not sure where the idea that these batteries will be better for the environment came from.
(Also, don't put the blame on the batteries. Put the blame where it belongs: Power companies using massive amounts non-environmentally-friendly sources)
I don't really get solar WITHOUT the batteries.
The people I know in Minnesota with panels literally don't see much payoff for 10-ish years. The utilities are eventually going to get their way and greatly cut their payback rate for grid buyback.
Generating and storing energy for your own use is the only thing that makes sense, but right now the economics of it for the average homeowner don't work well.
I see your three scenarios......
Scenario "Demand Shifting" saves money
Scenario Solar (which you call "PV Self Consumption") saves emissions.
Scenario "Arbitrage" saves both.
So, I can save money, or I can reduce emissions, or I can do both at the same time. Looks like a winner to me!
Why exactly does it have to be a DOUBLE winner, if people are ALREADY taking up solar and storage in rapidly increasing numbers?? Why is ONE type of win not enough?
****
But also, in none of your press releases did you say how many years you're depreciating the costs over, which raises a little warning flag in my head, since both the numbers from Tesla, and the independent reviewer estimate it a complete solar payback in 10-15 years, and a guaranteed lifetime of 20 years, means solar would also recoup its costs completely.
So immediately I wonder how you get the solar setup costing more annually?
I don't think I've ever consciously noted this being a bullet point on any pro/con breakdown for PV.
IMO, batteries aren't meant to decrease emissions. They are a tool towards autarky or optimizing income by putting power into the network when it's most advantageous.
Or even as a backup if your network isn't very stable some days.
But reducing emissions really has never been something I think I ever heard as a serious argument.
Charging batteries from the grid is insane in the UK unless done purely for power security. Most storage systems are hooked up to microgeneration (almost all PV) and the battery is used to avoid selling power cheaply to the grid then buying it back for much higher prices later. Any effect on emissions is a side effect, albeit one that should reduce them.
Payoff on panels for me is about three years. Admitted lots of sun but no spectacularly good deals on the tariff. Payoff for batteries would be so long they'd be unlikely to ever break even.
It doesn't seem like this would reduce emissions at all and infact increase it, since charging/discharging batteries is not a 100% efficient process and even more energy would be lost in the ac to dc charging conversion and then dc to ac inversion process. The only way this might make sense is if you live in a location where utility power prices differ throughout the day between high and low demand periods of the day. Charge your home battery bank during the cheaper low demand period and use the battery power during the pricier high demand period. I am not sure there would ever really be a savings with this considering the price of the battery pack and the price difference of power between high and low demand periods. Seem more like a way for someone with money burning a hole in their pocket to give the middle finger to the power company.
I have honestly never heard of home battery banks being used this way, I always thought they were generally connected to a home generation method, solar or wind to store power for periods of time that the home generation is not producing power so the home could be 100% off grid, rather than a grid tie system that dumps its excess power during the day into the grid for a "profit" and then you buy your energy back at an elevated rate when you are not producing power.
Nice post
Where's that, California?
The only reason I can see for having a battery and NOT having your own solar/wind/hydro (there are home sized hydro installations for people that have streams on their property) is if you have some kind of critical need to prevent power outages, like medical necessity.
In which case, emissions are not your driving concern.
Buyback rates will have to drop at some point. How long do you think those utilities can afford to buy power at consumer rates?
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Of course, if the battery is only discharged during periods of peak emissions and only charged when fossil fuel use is low, then a household might reduce emissions. But across 16 representative regions, operating a battery this way ended up being costly.
I'm pretty sure the time at which the battery is to be charged is set by user preference. It's not the battery that increases emissions, it's the owner of the battery who wants to reduce cost as a priority. It is more important to have a few extra bucks a month to spend on more consumption and pretend to be doing something worthwhile for the environment, than actually do something worthwhile for the environment. However this article tries to blame the battery by hiding the facts under the weasel words "Under current policies". Hey anything to bring down Musk, because if OrangeMan is Bad, Musk is Satan himself. How about the combination battery + solar panels. How does that affect emissions? FOUL scream the power companies...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The paper examines cost savings on one axis and the carbon reduction on another. It showed reduced cost and reduced emissions does not happen. Under certain circumstances it can happen. The aim of the paper seems to be to provide spokescritters, spin masters and the politicians to claim, "Residential battery does not reduce carbon emissions, as shown by the (implied impartial) UCSD study".
In some sense those who paid for this study are likely to be disappointed by the delay in the report. Already PG&E has awarded four battery projects (two small experimental, and two full scale) for peak power generation. It is retiring three natural gas powered combined cycle gas turbine peak load power plants and replacing them with a 1.2 GWh ( 300 MW for 4 hours) and a 700 MWh (175 MW for four hours). Already the Southern Australian grid made up of wind mills connected by long lines with very serious load imbalances have bee stabilized by batteries. In fact the battery vendor is complaining the batteries are responding so fast, in milli seconds, the sensing equipment used for payments is too slow and it is being under paid.
Utility scale battery storage is a game changer. Already solar PV and onshore wind is cheaper than natural gas powered CCGT! It fell below coal in 2014 and no new coal plant has opened since. It is falling below CCGT now, and future plants are going on ice. Solar PV is 1 $/Watt installation cost. Storage is 12 cents a watt. For 1.12 $/watt you can have renewable solar/wind providing the same kind of "power when you want, not when I make" deals provided by traditional power plants. I doubt new CCGT plants will be built after 2020.
It will take a very long time to replace existing plants with renewable sources. In the short run, the electricity spot market for load balancing is going to go away. With all utilities storing enough energy for quick load balancing, the insane prices for spot electricity will be gone. Solar makes lots of money providing peak power. So its revenue could be adversely affected in the short run.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Why should you get to use their distribution network for free? In fact, there should be a maintenance fee as well. And wiring fee and monitor fee and solar fee and pole fee and light fee and ...
You are, of course, only getting that with net metering. You're cheering for stealing from the poor. They pay extra so you can sell electricity to the grid at retail prices.
You mean this thing using power is not lowering emissions, but actually using power?
Who knew?
It takes effort to charge batteries. Even when highly efficient, it's still wasteful because an energy conversion is at play, which are always lossy because Physics.
The least amount of conversions is always going to be more efficient. (likewise the least amount of wasting forces at play also help, like leakage of power / gas, friction slowing flywheels down, etc.)
It was only ever supposed to be used to help balance the power grid and make solar / wind (transient) more reliable.
But neither of them are efficient enough, nor are the power grids good enough, to make batteries even remotely reliable for full-time use. They need to be in higher numbers and more distributed for it to be reliable.
Countries like the UK have done a decent job, more so Scotland where I am, as has some in Europe, but there is still a massive fundamental flaw at the core - the old power networks.
Again, UK, I do know the National Grid updated massive chunks of the grid, but it's still not useful for transient power sources. I've even had a brown-out recently, actually. 2 weeks ago. In a fairly large town at that.
There is still lots of work to be done.
It's a pain in 20 dicks to make power grids work for transient power sources, and more so for home-based power generation being sold back in to the grids which is why some try to avoid it and just lower your power costs instead.
So much power could be going to waste simply because the economy for it isn't there.
Under Current Policies [] Assuming that households are economically rational and trying to minimize costs
These two assumptions already exclude any setup that would decrease emissions, with or without batteries. What the study says is that batteries aren't going to decrease your emissions if you're not using them in a way that would decrease emissions (i.e. to store solar/wind power), but in the way that is cheapest for you. Of course "under current policies" the most polluting energy sources are also the cheapest, because their environmental cost is ignored. That has nothing to do with batteries and batteries are not to blame for it.
Of course they didn't. Their mission was to show "batteries no good", so of course they choose their scenario accordingly.
"Studies" like these are why science and scientists gets a bad rep. If you are a scientist, stop showering us with these retarded, bought and paid for "studies" which is nothing but laughably transparent self-fulfilling prophecies. It would be a huge step towards putting science back in good standing.
You're using people you know in Minnesota to explain solar economics for the average homeowner? You don't spend much time thinking about this, do you?
Solar without batteries uses the grid. Storage is inefficient; so is transmission. If you generate and someone half a mile away consumes, that's more-efficient than battery storage or than transmitting from the power station 15 miles away.
Because the grid net meters over long time spans, this is more economically-advantageous to the homeowner than using a battery.
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If you charge at night when rates are low, you are using baseload power which is often from coal plants. If you discharge during peak use, you are offsetting natural gas turbine plants. Coal produces more CO2 per kwh than natural gas.
The Ars headline, repeated by msmash on /. uses the words INCREASE EMISSIONS, yet the article says nothing of the sort. The closest that it comes is:
This month, a group of researchers from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) published a paper in Environmental Science and Technology reporting that there are very few cases in which operating a residential home battery reduces overall emissions—assuming that households are economically rational and trying to minimize costs.
FEW CASES...REDUCES OVERALL EMISSIONS - ASSUMING... != INCREASE EMISSIONS The sky is falling on /. today.
Tesla markets it as a way to survive power outages. In some parts of the country where power prices vary by hour, it's a way to save money. I've never heard it somehow reduced CO2 emissions.
The argument seems like a bit of a straw man to me.
There are 2 big reasons for residential batteries increase emissions. Politics and stupidity, the stupidity I see already in the comments. It will always be economical with people to share generation and storage of electricity. The more people and the further spread out geographically the better. You can form small groups for local management and then larger groups to spread out differences in local demand, weather and generation. Let's call the local groups utilities and the larger group a grid. You can set up solar panes on your roof and buy and sell the electricity to the utility. The utility can then sell or buy from any other utility in the grid. The utility can also have its own local storage to reduce transporting between utilities and also reduce infrastructure locally. Next we need to have the same pricing structure between all players. So when base load nuclear, wind and solar are all producing at their maximums the price can go to zero and when it's a hot cloudy summer afternoon with no wind the price can go to $10/kwh. One bonus of allowing the price to swing like this is that consumers will change their behaviour. Storing electricity is hard, changing behaviour is easy if you have the political will.
I worked on a very large pilot in Oklahoma. We everyone two pricing options and they paid the lower one at the end of the month. The first was the current system of 12 to 20 cents per kwh. The second was peak prices of $0.78 and the lowest price was free. Average savings per month was $50. Savings for the utility would have been double that. The reason for the huge savings to the utility is it would have reduced the utilities peak demand. Over 10% of a utilities infrastructure is used for only hours a year. Eliminate that peak and you save the utility tens of billions of dollars. The pilot was an amazing success. The regulator of the utility then went and fucked the entire thing up so badly that they pretty much killed the idea for all of North America. Oh, and the politicians all patted themselves on the back for preventing an evil utility from making huge profits. If Oklahoma and Gas and Electric had rolled out the concept for everyone in the state their profits under their new regulated prices would have dropped.
The people found leaving N. Korea would definitely agree with your democracy assessment. /S
Keep laughing as every socialist country has begun to tank. Enjoy your Venezuela LOL I'm sure those folks are laughing as well
With a $0.10 difference between low and high pricing, a load shifting battery bank will pay itself off in ~8-10 years.
Solar without batteries make sense in southern areas where large amounts of solar power mean large amounts of AC. So in that case, it's just lowering peak use costs. In those cases, the correlation of power to usage is very direct.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
But much less efficient when it causes a coal power plant trying to spin down. On the whole, blindly dumping power from solar onto the grid is less efficient.
The only LED bulbs I've ever had burn out were the cheap ones bought at the dollar store.
Then you haven't bought as many as I have. I've had a fair number go bad including some expensive ones. Don't get me wrong, most last a really long time and work great but I've had some pretty pricey ones fail for various reasons. Still better than incandescent bulbs by a country mile but not failure proof. Brand does seem to matter somewhat in my experience but it's not the only factor. You need a fixture designed so the heat they do produce won't fry the electronics. I've lost a few to that problem before changing the fixtures. They also seem to fail fairly early in their life if they are going to fail in most cases. And some percent seem to fail for unknown reasons regardless of make or model.
Also, there's no mercury in LED bulbs, unlike fluorescent bulbs.
That's true and good but LED bulbs aren't exactly devoid of toxic materials. They often contain lead, arsenic, and other materials that need to be properly handled when disposing of them. Safer than CFLs in most cases but not anything you want to go around licking if you get my point.
Capitalism is not going green until it is profitable.
As a general proposition going green already IS profitable. Waste disposal costs money and the cheapest way to reduce that cost is to not make the waste in the first place. Energy consumption costs money so technology that minimizes energy consumption improves profits. "Going green" very routinely is a very easy path to improving profits and companies are well aware of this. Not to mention the economic benefit that comes with technology development and deployment of green energy sources.
Generally speaking the only time "going green" actually reduces profits is when we create perverse incentives for people to dump their waste improperly or to burn fuel unnecessarily. Fossil fuels only seem cheap because we heavily subsidize them (to the tune of around $5 trillion globally per year) and don't require them to pay the full cost of the pollution they generate. Fully burdened they are already FAR more expensive than many "green" options. Coal that has to pay for all the particulates and carbon it emits can't begin to compete with solar or wind or hydro or even nuclear.
For example, our politicians are trying to convince the public that driving a 2500kg electric car is `greener` than driving a small and efficient 800kg gasoline car.
That's because in many cases the EV actually IS the greener option. There is no such thing as an "efficient" internal combustion engine, at least in https://www.quora.com/How-ener...">comparison to electric motors. My Chevy Bolt EV has a fuel economy better than any remotely similar sized vehicle with an ICE you can buy. It's not even close. Furthermore it generates less waste to operate too. I don't have to change ANY fluids aside from wiper fluid for the first 150,000 miles of operation. I've driven mine around 8000 miles since purchase which means I haven't burned approximately 400 gallons of gasoline. Because of the electric option I purchase from the power company my power mostly comes from green sources too (solar, etc) so I don't burn much in the way of fossil fuels at the power station either. Hell I can charge it from the local nuke plant in theory.
They promote solar panels but fail to properly insulate old houses.
So because they haven't solved every problem, they shouldn't bother solving any problem? Insulating old houses well generally is FAR more expensive than installing solar panels on either new or old construction. Of course it's a good idea to insulate better but how do you propose to finance that on old homes on a large scale? That's an important long term project but the bigger problem is the pollution from generation using fossil fuels. We can solve or at least mitigate that problem in a few decades. Insulating every old house doesn't solve the pollution problems AND it will take a lot longer and cost more to accomplish. Solve the problems you can solve today.
I've never understood why people think it's legitimate to expect an electrical generation company to buy surplus power from home owners at full retail rates. Why should a home owner be any different than any other generator who sells at wholesale rates? It simply doesn't make any economic sense to force an electrical company to buy power at retail rates when they could get it from other sources at wholesale rates.
Add to that the problem of peak residential solar not really lining up with peak demand in many places. In many cities with lots of suburbs, midday demand for electricity is fairly low because people aren't home. More power is needed it in the mornings and evenings when people are home and running A/C, washing machines, etc. Batteries fix this problem of course.
Zero-emissions generation facilities (e.g. solar, hydro, wind) are slow to start up and slow down, making them poorly suited for peak/transient loads.
No idea what you are talking about. Solar panels and wind turbines can be turned on/off extremely quickly provided you have spare capacity. When combined with an appropriately large bank of batteries their response time to load changes is effectively instant and FAR faster than an fossil fuel source.
You also are ignoring the fact that solar as a general proposition tends to work best precisely when the sun is shining the brightest which is super helpful for use cases like air conditioning that correlate strongly with how bright the sun shines on a given day. For places with lots of refrigeration or cooling needs (like a grocery store) solar is a great idea to mitigate peak demand.
Coal, natural gas, and diesel are far more responsive.
Your facts are incorrect. Coal plants are not quick at all to respond to changes in demand. They have significant lag time. Diesel is faster but isn't particularly efficient in a lot of cases. Natural gas is rather quick - FAR quicker than coal which has a lot to do with its current popularity.
Buyback rates will have to drop at some point. How long do you think those utilities can afford to buy power at consumer rates?
Building new power generating plants is very expensive in terms of capital and regulatory expenses. It is also really difficult politically with the "not in my back yard" crowd. By encouraging consumers to generate their own power (using net metering / power buyback), utilities can delay the need to build new power plants. While this is expensive because the utilities in effect pay to act as a big battery (at minimal charge to the consumer), this cost can be less expensive than the cost to build new power plants.
I don't really get solar WITHOUT the batteries.
The people I know in Minnesota with panels literally don't see much payoff for 10-ish years. The utilities are eventually going to get their way and greatly cut their payback rate for grid buyback.
Generating and storing energy for your own use is the only thing that makes sense, but right now the economics of it for the average homeowner don't work well.
Yeah, I feel the same way. Massachusetts also had a law where you had to sell solar/wind power back to the grid and you couldn't install home batteries (while connected to the grid for power). That's being changed because solar vendors realized that they could make more money by adding the Powerwall to the solar package.
Dunno why my solar array should subsidize coal plants. That's a problem for them to solve. If they think batteries are necessary, they can install them at the coal plant.
Why should homeowners be forced to sell the energy they generate at below market rates? Would the coal plant operator accept a law forcing them to sell at wholesale?
Unless you're tying them to an actual means of production (solar, micro-wind, micro-hydro, etc), you're not really doing anything to decrease emissions.
You're basically playing "hot potato" with grid resources.
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Wouldn't putting it on the grid cause the power load to fall, thus reducing how much power you're consuming? Meanwhile you still need your night time base generation, so running off batteries at night is inefficient.
Solar on your house is just daytime generation, and would displace load. When using batteries to store solar, actual consumption at peak is higher than just putting the extra power on the grid.
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Solar reduces the volume of load on coal, but exacerbates the rate at which peak load on coal increases. Just as solar is dropping off, peak usage is ramping up. Coal has issues keeping up. The solution is to throw more fuel at it, which greatly reduces efficiency.
Depends on what you mean by "market rate". Only about 30% of price per kwh is actually the energy. The rest is infrastructure costs, which is relatively fixed. As a source, you don't get the infrastructure value.
The article's conclusions of higher energy generation with batteries at end-points reflects penalties arising from maintenance of grid capacity. These issues can (and fact must) be addressed by different grid topologies.
Residential missile batteries do not increase emissions.
That's a great theory, but renewables are shitting,on the grid and forcing the increase in fossil fuel generation. Right now, natural gas is in, so you generated more CO2 stabilizing than with coal or nuke, but grid stability in the US and western Europe had been trashed by renewables.
SMALL home reactors would be the best bet, but the "public utility companies" will never allow that! They would use any an all means $$$$$$ to stop people from disconnecting permanently from the grid.
This study does not seem to account for a whole lot of stuff, so it is really hard to make heads or tails of what is going on from it. Like why is peak demand so expensive? Oh yeah they are kicking on extra generators, usually ones that spew out a lot more CO2 per MWh than base load plants. What percentage of renewable is actively generating power when you need it and what is the CO2 cost of having 'spinning capacity' to back variable renewable energy such as wind power? What is the carbon cost of building these batteries? If we had a clean grid with copious battery storage, wouldn't the CO2 cost of making those batteries go down? (Chicken and the egg problem.) What about those times in California (the state this university is in) where so much renewable energy is created, they are paying neighboring states to use it? Wouldn't it be better to stick that excess power into batteries and then sell it at peek demand? What about using residential batteries as a large virtual power plants like Tesla is already doing in several places and would do it in more places if more utilities paid attention? What about the carbon cost of making and using UPS units with lead acid batteries instead of say Tesla Powerwalls? Just mandating that utilities invite homeowners with Telsa Powerwalls to participate in virtual power plants would probably go hugely into the CO2 reduction category. It seems while it is true there are many wrong ways to do this just as there are many wrong ways to do most anything, it should not be too hard to make small residential batteries a huge reducer of CO2. There are even fairly natural things like having utilities lower their "grid services" costs with virtual power plants made up from small residential battery units and pass some of these savings onto their customers as in paying them some of that money saved.
Carbon tax smart.
Humans dumb.
To quote a certain replicant: "Then we're stupid and we'll die!"
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
If you are basing your Bolt getting "fuel economy better than .. any ICE .. not even close" on the EPA rating of 100-130 eMPG?
That rating assumes 100% efficient conversion of heat energy into electricity delivered through the power grid to the battery posts in your car.
Yes, I am aware that some electric power comes from zero-carbon sources and that 60% conversion efficiency is claimed for the best combined-cycle natural gas-fired power plants.
The claim that you are getting most of your power from green sources such as solar needs to take into account that in the absence of grid-scale energy storage, solar or wind can make up, perhaps, no more than 20% of the electric power mix? That the 100% green power allocated to you by paying some added fee needs fossil backup power to maintain a stable grid?
You claim to have saved 400 gallons in gasoline for not driving 8000 miles in something other than a Bolt? The Bolt is not a very large vehicle, and there are a lot of vehicles that size that can be expected to average at least 30 MPG over the 20 MPG you are assuming?
But you are "de-rating" the EPA eMPG rating for comparison with an ICE by at least some factor?
Aren't you?
I'd think you'd have to be getting a good deal on the tariff to get that kind of breakeven, I'm in a small city in Colorado where they've refused to create an incentive structure that'd leave poorer residents funding the upper middle class and the breakeven is closer to 5 yrs. The city isn't particularly backwards (indeed we've got free buses, muni fiber and a commitment to be zero-carbon by 2030) but it's hard to match the incentives that the larger utilities do without disproportionately hurting the poor.
If you don't have solar, the tariff is effectively $12.40 + 7.5c/kWh (up to 750) then 8.7c/kWh (up to 1500) and then 9.9c/kWh thereafter. That means that low usage homes have disproportionately smaller bills (in most cases) than high usage homes.
When you switch to solar they reduce your kWh rate to 6.5c/kWh but your monthly service charge goes to $21.60 - which apparently is closer to their actual cost structure.
Isn't as bad of a breakeven as it was a few years ago though. When i looked 3 years ago it was closer to 9 years, but now we're down to 5.
The real risk they are running with this sort of price structure is having affluent consumers leave the grid altogether. Then that'll leave the poor paying progressively more and more of the fixed costs.
Sure if by 'infrastructure costs' you mean shareholder profit, lobbying, marketing, call centres, taxes etc. Here in the UK the grid part of electricity seems to be 10% of the ticket price per kWh.
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To be pedantic, LEDs themselves fail remarkably close to never.
Yeah well we're not buying or using a single LED are we? You aren't being pedantic because you are talking about something completely different and frankly irrelevant. LED light bulbs and LED light fixtures do fail. It doesn't matter if the actually lighting element still functions if some other part of the device fails too.
Anyway I've seen plenty of LEDs fail for all sorts of reasons (usually voltage/current fluctuations and/or heat problems) but then my day job is manufacturing wire harnesses and electronics so I see more of them than most people do. The reason you don't see more of them fail is partly because they are pretty simple and reliable but more often because they are typically attached to circuit boards that are for various reasons less reliable than the LEDs. You don't see individual resistors fail much either for the same reasons.
However, the cheap electronics that they use to convert household current to low-voltage DC fail pretty frequently
Certainly. Remember these are devices that are generally made in bulk and every penny spent on making the electronics more robust is a penny straight off the bottom line of the company making the light. So even the expensive branded electronics have a built in incentive to cheap out on the hardware whenever they can. As a result, some percent of them are going to fail.
There's always adiabatic CAES.
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Since I live in Minnesota, it made complete sense to talk to someone who had panels installed on their comparably sized house.
This was a year ago or so, so I don't remember the figures but it was like a decade before they started to get that good "free" electricity due to paying off the panels.
The excess payments to pay off the panels over 10 years invested in a no-load index fund instead would have resulted in much greater return on investment that could have paid down utility costs to essentially zero and kept them there indefinitely.
I fully agree that the same setup in a warmer, sunnier state with a different electrical consumption pattern would probably shift the economics of it.