Net metering is already starting to go away as utilities convince regulators that they shouldn't be paying peak prices for power they can buy or generate for less.
In fairness to them, should they?
Imagine it to the extreme, everyone has solar and annually produces what they consume, but not as they need it. Everyone needs power at night and at odd times, but wants to feed the extra to the grid (which no one wants).
What does the power company do? Run power plants to provide night power, maintain a grid, all for zero bills?
Clearly it will stop before that point. The question is, where between here and there.
That is why I refuse to "assume" net-metering when looking at solar, I just don't see it happening.
Now a solar system that can charge a local battery and let me do my own off-set? Sure, I'll look at that, but then the cost doubles again.:)
but it won't take many more years before solar is cheap enough to be the obvious choice with or without subsidy.
I'm interested in knowing how the install cost is going to come down. 74% of all the solar installed in the US last year was utility scale solar. The residential stuff makes the news, but it is a small percentage of the total and almost half of all of it is in one state, CA.
The panels are below a dollar a watt, 75 cents give or take. Maybe a dollar for premium panels. But the other equipment and installation adds $2.50 more to that price.
The panels could be free, it still wouldn't be cheap enough to make any sense. Not here at least.
Ok, so you are angry that you don't get something for nothing?
No, but I expect to get something for something. If I'm going to spend $25,000 on solar power, it has to provide more than $1,500 a year in power bill savings.
From a network effect, rooftop solar reduces system costs: peak demand shifts from 1:30PM to about an hour before sunset, and the total peak magnitude is reduced. This is good for the utility, since it's costs are based on peak power flow.
Good for them, but that isn't my problem. If the utility wants to provide more money to help pay for solar, I'm all on board.
The Net Metering problem though is that users cram power one direction during the day and use it at night. The first solution to this is "smart grid" crap-- making sure your demand is minimized during the new peak period: pre-cool house; water heater, washer, dryer off; don't start cooking dinner until after 7:00; etc. When residential users do this, they reduce their usage of the grid, and can lower costs while still making net metering attractive for everyone. Seasonal effects are worse, and likely should be the first to go-- only carry a 4-month rolling balance or something.
Yea, that SO isn't going to happen.
If you think it will, come over to my house and talk to my wife, tell her that she can't run laundry during the day when the kids are in school, that she can't cook dinner for the kids, well, at all, since the kids go to bed at 7:30pm, they eat dinner at 6pm. You won't get 10 feet with most moms when you start messing with their schedule and kids.
And it is 100+ degrees in the summer, you can't really "pre-cool the house", the AC has to actually come on during the day.
As for water heater and cooking, the irony is that our cooking, our clothes dryer, our furnaces, and our water heaters are all natural gas powered, so those are beside the point. If you don't live in an area with natural gas, you probably don't think about it, but a decent chunk of our power needs are met with natural gas directly, not electricity. And that isn't going to change any time soon, we just replaced both the hot water tanks and the HVAC within the past few years, it will be a decade or more before they need replacing again.
We use about 5 times as much power in the summer as the winter, due to all the natural gas power sources. My electric bill is often $400+ in the summer, but only $100 (or less) in the winter. There is no way to average that out.
Well I happen to be a certified accountant and the fact that some of these subsidies are not cash money doesn't make them any less real. In cost accounting it's called an externalized cost. Literally a cost someone else pays.
Yea, but it doesn't hold up to direct payments. I get the concept, you aren't telling me anything new, but frankly it is rather dishonest to compare a "we wish we had carbon taxes" thing to "real actual dollars being spent".
75 cents a watt, there you go. That is dirt cheap. The cost to get those panels installed on my roof? $3.50 a watt.
Making the panels free wouldn't really do much to the overall cost of putting them on my roof.
The cost of land is generally not an issue
It is always an issue, it costs something.
there is plenty of available land on rooftops
Installing on a roof costs more than on the ground, eating away the savings of space.
Nonsense. We absolutely are paying billions to oil companies to pump more oil. It's not even a debate. 20 Seconds on Google would disabuse you of this false notion.
And you prove my point. You're the one with the false notion. Here, I'll use your own link you provided:
"The Guardian has found that:
A proposed Shell petrochemical refinery in Pennsylvania is in line for $1.6bn (£1bn) in state subsidy, according to a deal struck in 2012 when the company made an annual profit of $26.8bn."
A jobs subsidy scheme worth $78m to Marathon Petroleum in Ohio began in 2011, when the company made $2.4bn in profit.
Those are state incentives given to build a business in the state. All sorts of businesses get such things. It just "happened to be oil", but it could have been any type of business. It is about bringing jobs to the state, nothing more or less.
To claim they are "fossil fuel subsidies" is dishonest. They are business and job subsidies. If Pennsylvania hadn't given that state subsidy, then Shell may well have built that refinery in another state, or even another country.
Nevada gave a $1.25 billion dollar subsidy to Tesla to build their gigafactory there. Why? Jobs and economy. Same reason as the above for Shell and Marathon Petroleum.
Also many of them have 'gaming' rules. So lets say you want a battery bank and net metering. Well you cant (legally). It would be gaming the system. I can not shunt power to a battery bank then once that fills up shunt the excess to the grid. In my state you are either grid tied or not.
That is the same here, we have to be grid tied and it has to go off if the grid goes down.
Now you can put two meters on your house (normal solar here is one smart meter, you need two smart meters to do this) and do an internal tie where the grid connection goes down and you switch to internal battery, but the cost would be crazy expensive.
Most of the cost these days is not the cells themselves anyway. It is the install cost. Getting a certified electrician willing to climb onto a roof is not cheap. I can get the parts form 5-15k before rebates. Then add another 10-15k for install.
Yep, install cost is the big issue. Panels are cheap, but the panels alone are not enough. You need a smart inverter, wiring, mounting brackets, and a bunch of other odds and ends. I've found a complete "do-it-yourself" kit for $17,000 that provides everything you need to install a 10KW system yourself, but I haven't been able to find anyone to install it for less than $15K. Which I think is nuts, but whatever.
It doesn't help that I have a tall house, my first floor ceilings in the main living room are 18+ feet tall, the peak of my roof is over 35 feet off the ground. I have zero interest in climbing up there.
Still, it only cost $10K to put a brand new 25 year roof on, and it took them only one day to do it (with like a billion Mexicans of course). And that price included materials, labor, and a complex roof install fairly high up.
I think solar prices, at least in my area, are just expensive because so few people are doing it. I have 100 companies to call for a roof.
While that is true, that is what reprocessing and breeder reactors are for.
Also, 4 Sv may kill you, but that isn't one ounce of material in isolation.
You may have 500 tons of low level crap laying around that can be processed into 5 tons of useful fuel. The trick is getting all the actual radioactive stuff together and apart from the 495 tons of other stuff.
That is why we need work in this area, but it isn't because done because of the irrational emotional people.
What have you done to improve the energy efficiency of your home?
Replaced HVAC with a really good Trane 2 stage, 2 speed 16 SEER unit, cut $100 average off my bill overnight, best upgrade I ever did. For $17,000 (5 ton and 3 ton units, including everything inside and out), I get a colder house and $100 a month back in my pocket. And my old unit broke, so I had to spend money anyway.
Did you need to do any upgrades to your roof to make it viable?
No, I have a brand new roof as of 2 years ago, thanks to hail (and Allstate)
Generally speaking, rooftop solar is $3/W for a complete installed system
$3.50 a watt here, I've been quoted by three different companies, that is just the going rate. $35,000 for a 10KW system.
advantageous if your blended cost of electricity is $0.15/kWh or more at a minimum effective rate of return of 13%
I pay 10 cents per kWh and my cost is $5K more than your estimate.:) That is part of where it torpedoes.
If you are at a more risk tolerant and only need 8% return then you are good down to $0.10/kWh.
It is actually closer to 5%, given my install cost and my power cost. But even that might be worth doing, if I could get a 10 year net-metering guarantee.
But yes, the kicker is net metering.
Yep, that is what torpedoes it. There is no chance that net-metering will survive as it stands today. Taken to the logical conclusion, imagine if we all had solar enough to offset our annual bill, but that we needed the power company to provide power at night, but we all fed power back during the day. And we all had zero bills because of net-metering, yet expect the power company to provide a grid.
That will never happen of course, so somewhere between today and then it would have to change.
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In principle, I would LOVE to have solar power, how cool would it be to have clean free power from the sun! But it has to make financial sense, and it just doesn't.
BTW, to give you an idea, I live in a city of 250,000 people and there is a local solar association here. By their own count, a whole 150 homes in my city have put solar on the roof. Out of 250,000 people. It simply doesn't make sense here. I have never actually seen a solar install on a roof in person, only pictures on TV or the Internet. It just isn't done here.
Do you have some actual numbers to back this up? For our installation our payback period is 7 years with subsidies. The panels have a 20 year warranty and are likely to produce power for another 10 after that. How does that not make sense?
The lowest installed cost here for a 10KW system is about $35,000 before rebates. I have gotten quotes from more than one company, I think it is high, but that seems to be the going rate around here. Considering I pay 10 cents per kWh for my house, that simply makes no sense, even with the 30% back from the IRS. For a $35,000 up front investment ($25,000 after tax credit), I'd save about $125 a month in power, or about $1,500 a year.
Saving $1,500 a year for a $25,000 investment is a lousy return on investment. Double that when you consider net-metering will go away at some point.
I would be far better off doing a lot of other things, such as spraying foam in my walls, replacing my windows, doing a radiant barrier in my attic, etc. Those would all return more than solar panels would in terms of monthly costs saved.
BTW, does your 7 year payback assume net-metering? What if that goes away next year? We have net-metering at the moment, but that will only last for as long as not very many people have solar. It will, for economic reasons, HAVE to go away when 20% or so of the houses in an area have solar. If everyone has enough to offset most of their bill, then the power company will have to run power stations at night, run the whole grid, but collect nothing for power. That doesn't work. Net-metering has no future.
The 20 year warranty only means something if you can collect on it. Lets see some major national brands and companies behind these things before that becomes a selling point.
I pay 7 cents per kWh for my office power and 10 cents per kWh for my house power, both coal.
It would cost me 10 cents per kWh for my office to be powered by 100% wind and 13 cents per kWh for my house to be powered by 100% wind. Solar isn't even an option here (at least from the power companies).
In most parts of the world you can't lose with solar now.
Generally in the 1st world, only those nations that have stepped in and either subsidized solar or taxed the crap out of everything else. Sure, in Germany where you pay 35 cents per kWh, yea I'm sure solar makes sense. But so what, they are paying up to 5 times my power rates.
To some degree you could say the same about fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are hugely subsidized by governments to the tune of something like $5 trillion worldwide. Solar is just a small percentage of that.
It is SO easy to report a number like that, but you really have to be careful in doing so.
The VAST bulk of these "subsidies" are not real money. No one is paying $400 billion a year to Exxon or BP.
For example, from the very link you provided:
"The bulk of energy subsidies in most countries are due to undercharging for domestic environmental damage, including local air pollution"
So it is just the IMF's opinion of what carbon taxes SHOULD be to make up for the pollution. It isn't remotely the same thing as direct tax payments to install solar.
That's to be expected for an emerging technology. You subsidize a technology like this until it can scale up to the point where it can compete on its own merits.
Except, it never likely will. The problem with solar is not the cost of the panels, those are already dirt cheap. The cost is in land, labor, and other items needed to build solar out, either utility scale or distributed scale.
The panels could be free tomorrow and it wouldn't change the install cost by that much.
What doesn't make sense is subsidizing fossil fuels which are a mature technology and one we wish to deprecate the use of.
See above. We really AREN'T subsidizing fossil fuels. No one is paying hundreds of billions of dollars to Exxon to pump more oil.
Lots of things are subsidized by the government and our tax dollars. Like $550,000,000,000 PER YEAR IN DEFENSE SPENDING. More than 20 times the amount of the top 10 biggest spenders COMBINED. I'm not worried about tens of millions in subsidized alternative energy rebates that arguably helps to make our country cleaner. Get a grip people.
While that is true, it is worth noting that the spending on defense is in fact the primary purpose of our federal government, it is right in the Constitution.
Spending on solar panels is not. It also isn't a few tens of millions a year, it is closer to a few tens of BILLIONS a year.
However, even that number is fairly small when all things are considered.
The REAL point is that if solar ever takes off for real, it'll have to do so on its own. The current government support for solar could never last if it started to get deployed in a serious way, because then it would start to cost what the defense budget costs.
The next question is: "Is this the best way to replace coal, oil, and natural gas power?" I would submit that we could outright give away a free nuclear power planet each year for the cost of all this solar, and in reality, if we simply provided $5 billion towards the cost of each plant, we might get 3 a year built.
What brings more value to us, the solar we are getting or 3 new nuclear power plants a year? That is a separate debate, but I think it is one worth having.
Basically they don't install it where you live for exactly the same reason as you wanted it installed. You would have installed it to pay less in electricity, to increase your available money, and they don't install it at your place because it would not increase their revenue. Shocking.
You're missing the point. They won't install it here because there isn't enough government money in the form of local rebates and incentives to do so.
Translation: Solar only works if a decent part of the cost is paid for by taxpayers.
1. Almost 40% of the distributed PV capacity in the U.S. is located in California. The next nine states after California account for another 44%, according to the EIA.
This is key because CA pays one of the highest kWh rates in the US (places like Hawaii are higher, but there aren't that many people there).
San Francisco pays 40% higher energy prices on average than the rest of the US. So of COURSE solar makes more sense there. But it doesn't most other places.
California's leadership in distributed solar capacity is driven by a combination of factors, including high electricity prices, a large population, strong solar resources, and state policies and incentives that support solar PV, according to the EIA.
2. One of the factors spurring growth last year and this was the impending expiration of the U.S. government's solar investment tax credit (ITC). That measure, passed in 2008, offered a 30% tax credit for residential and business installations. It was due to expire this year, and the tax credit was supposed to drop to a more permanent 10%. In December, however, Congress passed a three-year extension on the 30% ITC.
So a crap load of tax dollars are propping this market up. It actually goes further than this. There are many state and Dept of Energy programs that further fix the rate of solar power to above market rates, to provide guaranteed returns for utility solar power.
3. The total operating solar PV capacity in the U.S. is expected to reach 25.6 gigawatts (billion watts or GW) of direct current (DC) by the end of the year, according to GTM Research's U.S. Solar Market Insight Report 2015 Year in Review. Last year, solar installations broke all previous records, but the amount was only 16% more than in 2014 with 7,260 GW of new DC solar power.
That sounds impressive, doesn't it? Well, consider this: In 2014, the United States generated about 4,093 billion kilowatt hours of electricity.
So the new DC solar power being installed is 7.2 billion out of 4,093 billion total. It is nice, but we could install that much every year for the next 20 years and it wouldn't make a real dent in the total.
Last year I called SolarCity, they are offering to install panels for "free" to your home, then sell you the power for less than you're paying now.
Sounds like a no-brainer, right? No up front cost, no maintenance, guaranteed power for less than you're paying now.
Why NOT say yes?
Except, they won't install in my area. They WILL install 2 miles away, because that is a different electric energy provider that gives bigger rebates than mine does (I live in a co-op that doesn't provide huge rebates and tax incentives).
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So it really comes down to the fact that all this solar makes sense only if you count on a whole pile of tax dollars.
Even utility scale solar, which I've looked at investing in purely from an investment point of view, requires tax dollars to make work.
http://www.absolutelysolar.com... FIT Program Areas FIT â" LADWP: The Department of Water and Powerâ(TM)s new solar Feed-In Tariff program. Buildings and land in the city of Los Angeles and parts of the Owens Valley are eligible. Look at the very bottom of that page:
And you hit the nail on the head. But you didn't even ask the best question...
How much in tax dollars is being spent to make this happen? More or less, all of that solar (and wind) power is being funded with tax dollars in one form or another. Either with direct rebates, or via tax credits...
I've looked at investing in utility solar and the return on investment is completely dependent on tax money in one form or another.
While the new stuff is nice, the real question is, how do you install 100 times this much and pay for it? Because what they have installed is simply noise compared to the totals.
Before anyone even starts, de-centralized power is in 'development' stage. I see rooftop solar as more of an energy saver/efficiency more than anything else but not a 'break even' per se. I expect most of the coal plants in the U.S. will get replaced with natural gas.
I've looked into rooftop solar three times, the most recent two months ago.
I spoke with a local solar installer. It just makes no sense, no matter how far you turn your head to the side. And that is with the federal government picking up 30% of the cost outright, plus another rebate from the local power company, plus cheap financing. It STILL makes zero sense.
You have to REALLY make a lot of assumptions about the future for it to kinda sorta make sense. As in, regular power prices will double over the next decade. And the new equipment will work for 20 years trouble free. And you'll always get net-metering. And it will add 50% of the system cost to the value of your home.
And so on. Do all that, and yea, it can make sense. But it takes ALL of that, plus the tax money, to work.
Hindsight. Which of these things would we have known was a problem before? And SCRAMing the reactors was a good move.
No, it was a terrible move, but it was in the rule book so they did it.
Had they not shut down the reactors, they wouldn't have had any problems. They had their own power source and shut it down. They would never have needed the diesel power at all, they had nuclear reactors!
None of the water or flooding causing any problem with the reactors themselves, it was all the backup power sources.
The known problem was having the backup power at too low an elevation so it could be flooded, it should have been mounted up much higher. The seawall also wasn't big enough, a known problem.
This generally comes under the heading "economically produce power".
Well we won't know until we do the research, now will we?
The problem is almost all development in the US ended decades ago, not much more has been done elsewhere, so we're way behind where we should be.
As for "economically", consider that having a fleet of 11 aircraft carriers isn't exactly economical, but we do it anyway for reasons other than "saving money".
Perhaps being completely energy independent and not emitting a crap ton of carbon would be worth spending money on. Burning the used fuel and waste may well be cheaper than trying to store it for hundreds of years.
No news is good news, and that's almost every day for the safest form of large-scale power!
Yep, 10% of the world's power is produced using nuclear and you just don't hear about it that much.
Here we're talking about a minor problem from a 5 year old accident that was caused by gross human stupidity that could have been avoided if management had a clue.
The reality is that most nuclear power is very safe. Here in Texas we have multiple reactors that have been humming along for decades producing crazy amounts of power without a fuss.
Actually, I agree with you. The guns by themselves may not help much if we ignore all our other rights, and yes, we have issues there.
I think we put people in prison for too long, take away their rights to vote too easily, and so fourth.
I think the government is kidding itself about encryption, the bad guys will just use other options besides the ones the government wants, but frankly a lot of people high up in the government don't understand technology, so that it what it is.
My point is that without guns, you're just subjects because you don't even have the option to revolt. I consider the Declaration of Independence just as important as the US Constitution, even if it isn't a legal document.
"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."
^ That is hard to do without guns, sad to say. Humans are a rather violent species.:(
I don't care what bodily function you're doing, don't let me see it.
While you're welcome to that viewpoint, you aren't likely to get very far. After all, eating is a bodily function.
Just because you want something doesn't mean you're right or that you should get it. Maybe you're a racist. Fine, but that doesn't mean you get to discriminate when you hire people. You live in this thing called society, where we all agree to work together so that we can all live well.
One of those things is respecting a woman's right and need to breastfeed her child without making a big deal out of it.
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Oil provides only 5% of our electric power. It is really all coal and natural gas, which are domestic.
Oil comes into play in gas prices for vehicles, not in power prices for homes and businesses.
Net metering is already starting to go away as utilities convince regulators that they shouldn't be paying peak prices for power they can buy or generate for less.
In fairness to them, should they?
Imagine it to the extreme, everyone has solar and annually produces what they consume, but not as they need it. Everyone needs power at night and at odd times, but wants to feed the extra to the grid (which no one wants).
What does the power company do? Run power plants to provide night power, maintain a grid, all for zero bills?
Clearly it will stop before that point. The question is, where between here and there.
That is why I refuse to "assume" net-metering when looking at solar, I just don't see it happening.
Now a solar system that can charge a local battery and let me do my own off-set? Sure, I'll look at that, but then the cost doubles again. :)
but it won't take many more years before solar is cheap enough to be the obvious choice with or without subsidy.
I'm interested in knowing how the install cost is going to come down. 74% of all the solar installed in the US last year was utility scale solar. The residential stuff makes the news, but it is a small percentage of the total and almost half of all of it is in one state, CA.
The panels are below a dollar a watt, 75 cents give or take. Maybe a dollar for premium panels. But the other equipment and installation adds $2.50 more to that price.
The panels could be free, it still wouldn't be cheap enough to make any sense. Not here at least.
Ok, so you are angry that you don't get something for nothing?
No, but I expect to get something for something. If I'm going to spend $25,000 on solar power, it has to provide more than $1,500 a year in power bill savings.
From a network effect, rooftop solar reduces system costs: peak demand shifts from 1:30PM to about an hour before sunset, and the total peak magnitude is reduced. This is good for the utility, since it's costs are based on peak power flow.
Good for them, but that isn't my problem. If the utility wants to provide more money to help pay for solar, I'm all on board.
The Net Metering problem though is that users cram power one direction during the day and use it at night. The first solution to this is "smart grid" crap-- making sure your demand is minimized during the new peak period: pre-cool house; water heater, washer, dryer off; don't start cooking dinner until after 7:00; etc. When residential users do this, they reduce their usage of the grid, and can lower costs while still making net metering attractive for everyone. Seasonal effects are worse, and likely should be the first to go-- only carry a 4-month rolling balance or something.
Yea, that SO isn't going to happen.
If you think it will, come over to my house and talk to my wife, tell her that she can't run laundry during the day when the kids are in school, that she can't cook dinner for the kids, well, at all, since the kids go to bed at 7:30pm, they eat dinner at 6pm. You won't get 10 feet with most moms when you start messing with their schedule and kids.
And it is 100+ degrees in the summer, you can't really "pre-cool the house", the AC has to actually come on during the day.
As for water heater and cooking, the irony is that our cooking, our clothes dryer, our furnaces, and our water heaters are all natural gas powered, so those are beside the point. If you don't live in an area with natural gas, you probably don't think about it, but a decent chunk of our power needs are met with natural gas directly, not electricity. And that isn't going to change any time soon, we just replaced both the hot water tanks and the HVAC within the past few years, it will be a decade or more before they need replacing again.
We use about 5 times as much power in the summer as the winter, due to all the natural gas power sources. My electric bill is often $400+ in the summer, but only $100 (or less) in the winter. There is no way to average that out.
Well I happen to be a certified accountant and the fact that some of these subsidies are not cash money doesn't make them any less real. In cost accounting it's called an externalized cost. Literally a cost someone else pays.
Yea, but it doesn't hold up to direct payments. I get the concept, you aren't telling me anything new, but frankly it is rather dishonest to compare a "we wish we had carbon taxes" thing to "real actual dollars being spent".
The panels are NOT "dirt cheap"
Yes they are, 1 dollar a watt, or less.
http://www.directsolarsupply.c...
75 cents a watt, there you go. That is dirt cheap. The cost to get those panels installed on my roof? $3.50 a watt.
Making the panels free wouldn't really do much to the overall cost of putting them on my roof.
The cost of land is generally not an issue
It is always an issue, it costs something.
there is plenty of available land on rooftops
Installing on a roof costs more than on the ground, eating away the savings of space.
Nonsense. We absolutely are paying billions to oil companies to pump more oil. It's not even a debate. 20 Seconds on Google would disabuse you of this false notion.
And you prove my point. You're the one with the false notion. Here, I'll use your own link you provided:
"The Guardian has found that:
A proposed Shell petrochemical refinery in Pennsylvania is in line for $1.6bn (£1bn) in state subsidy, according to a deal struck in 2012 when the company made an annual profit of $26.8bn."
A jobs subsidy scheme worth $78m to Marathon Petroleum in Ohio began in 2011, when the company made $2.4bn in profit.
Those are state incentives given to build a business in the state. All sorts of businesses get such things. It just "happened to be oil", but it could have been any type of business. It is about bringing jobs to the state, nothing more or less.
To claim they are "fossil fuel subsidies" is dishonest. They are business and job subsidies. If Pennsylvania hadn't given that state subsidy, then Shell may well have built that refinery in another state, or even another country.
It is no different than this:
http://www.rgj.com/story/news/...
Nevada gave a $1.25 billion dollar subsidy to Tesla to build their gigafactory there. Why? Jobs and economy. Same reason as the above for Shell and Marathon Petroleum.
Also many of them have 'gaming' rules. So lets say you want a battery bank and net metering. Well you cant (legally). It would be gaming the system. I can not shunt power to a battery bank then once that fills up shunt the excess to the grid. In my state you are either grid tied or not.
That is the same here, we have to be grid tied and it has to go off if the grid goes down.
Now you can put two meters on your house (normal solar here is one smart meter, you need two smart meters to do this) and do an internal tie where the grid connection goes down and you switch to internal battery, but the cost would be crazy expensive.
Most of the cost these days is not the cells themselves anyway. It is the install cost. Getting a certified electrician willing to climb onto a roof is not cheap. I can get the parts form 5-15k before rebates. Then add another 10-15k for install.
Yep, install cost is the big issue. Panels are cheap, but the panels alone are not enough. You need a smart inverter, wiring, mounting brackets, and a bunch of other odds and ends. I've found a complete "do-it-yourself" kit for $17,000 that provides everything you need to install a 10KW system yourself, but I haven't been able to find anyone to install it for less than $15K. Which I think is nuts, but whatever.
It doesn't help that I have a tall house, my first floor ceilings in the main living room are 18+ feet tall, the peak of my roof is over 35 feet off the ground. I have zero interest in climbing up there.
Still, it only cost $10K to put a brand new 25 year roof on, and it took them only one day to do it (with like a billion Mexicans of course). And that price included materials, labor, and a complex roof install fairly high up.
I think solar prices, at least in my area, are just expensive because so few people are doing it. I have 100 companies to call for a roof.
While that is true, that is what reprocessing and breeder reactors are for.
Also, 4 Sv may kill you, but that isn't one ounce of material in isolation.
You may have 500 tons of low level crap laying around that can be processed into 5 tons of useful fuel. The trick is getting all the actual radioactive stuff together and apart from the 495 tons of other stuff.
That is why we need work in this area, but it isn't because done because of the irrational emotional people.
So we burn coal. Which is also radioactive.
The irony...
What is your current monthly bill?
Average $250 a month
What effective interest rate were they charging?
I can borrow from my house at 3.5%
What have you done to improve the energy efficiency of your home?
Replaced HVAC with a really good Trane 2 stage, 2 speed 16 SEER unit, cut $100 average off my bill overnight, best upgrade I ever did. For $17,000 (5 ton and 3 ton units, including everything inside and out), I get a colder house and $100 a month back in my pocket. And my old unit broke, so I had to spend money anyway.
Did you need to do any upgrades to your roof to make it viable?
No, I have a brand new roof as of 2 years ago, thanks to hail (and Allstate)
Generally speaking, rooftop solar is $3/W for a complete installed system
$3.50 a watt here, I've been quoted by three different companies, that is just the going rate. $35,000 for a 10KW system.
advantageous if your blended cost of electricity is $0.15/kWh or more at a minimum effective rate of return of 13%
I pay 10 cents per kWh and my cost is $5K more than your estimate. :) That is part of where it torpedoes.
If you are at a more risk tolerant and only need 8% return then you are good down to $0.10/kWh.
It is actually closer to 5%, given my install cost and my power cost. But even that might be worth doing, if I could get a 10 year net-metering guarantee.
But yes, the kicker is net metering.
Yep, that is what torpedoes it. There is no chance that net-metering will survive as it stands today. Taken to the logical conclusion, imagine if we all had solar enough to offset our annual bill, but that we needed the power company to provide power at night, but we all fed power back during the day. And we all had zero bills because of net-metering, yet expect the power company to provide a grid.
That will never happen of course, so somewhere between today and then it would have to change.
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In principle, I would LOVE to have solar power, how cool would it be to have clean free power from the sun! But it has to make financial sense, and it just doesn't.
BTW, to give you an idea, I live in a city of 250,000 people and there is a local solar association here. By their own count, a whole 150 homes in my city have put solar on the roof. Out of 250,000 people. It simply doesn't make sense here. I have never actually seen a solar install on a roof in person, only pictures on TV or the Internet. It just isn't done here.
Do you have some actual numbers to back this up? For our installation our payback period is 7 years with subsidies. The panels have a 20 year warranty and are likely to produce power for another 10 after that. How does that not make sense?
The lowest installed cost here for a 10KW system is about $35,000 before rebates. I have gotten quotes from more than one company, I think it is high, but that seems to be the going rate around here. Considering I pay 10 cents per kWh for my house, that simply makes no sense, even with the 30% back from the IRS. For a $35,000 up front investment ($25,000 after tax credit), I'd save about $125 a month in power, or about $1,500 a year.
Saving $1,500 a year for a $25,000 investment is a lousy return on investment. Double that when you consider net-metering will go away at some point.
I would be far better off doing a lot of other things, such as spraying foam in my walls, replacing my windows, doing a radiant barrier in my attic, etc. Those would all return more than solar panels would in terms of monthly costs saved.
BTW, does your 7 year payback assume net-metering? What if that goes away next year? We have net-metering at the moment, but that will only last for as long as not very many people have solar. It will, for economic reasons, HAVE to go away when 20% or so of the houses in an area have solar. If everyone has enough to offset most of their bill, then the power company will have to run power stations at night, run the whole grid, but collect nothing for power. That doesn't work. Net-metering has no future.
The 20 year warranty only means something if you can collect on it. Lets see some major national brands and companies behind these things before that becomes a selling point.
Where do you live?
Texas
I pay 7 cents per kWh for my office power and 10 cents per kWh for my house power, both coal.
It would cost me 10 cents per kWh for my office to be powered by 100% wind and 13 cents per kWh for my house to be powered by 100% wind. Solar isn't even an option here (at least from the power companies).
In most parts of the world you can't lose with solar now.
Generally in the 1st world, only those nations that have stepped in and either subsidized solar or taxed the crap out of everything else. Sure, in Germany where you pay 35 cents per kWh, yea I'm sure solar makes sense. But so what, they are paying up to 5 times my power rates.
https://www.ovoenergy.com/guid...
To some degree you could say the same about fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are hugely subsidized by governments to the tune of something like $5 trillion worldwide. Solar is just a small percentage of that.
It is SO easy to report a number like that, but you really have to be careful in doing so.
The VAST bulk of these "subsidies" are not real money. No one is paying $400 billion a year to Exxon or BP.
For example, from the very link you provided:
"The bulk of energy subsidies in most countries are due to undercharging for domestic environmental damage, including local air pollution"
So it is just the IMF's opinion of what carbon taxes SHOULD be to make up for the pollution. It isn't remotely the same thing as direct tax payments to install solar.
That's to be expected for an emerging technology. You subsidize a technology like this until it can scale up to the point where it can compete on its own merits.
Except, it never likely will. The problem with solar is not the cost of the panels, those are already dirt cheap. The cost is in land, labor, and other items needed to build solar out, either utility scale or distributed scale.
The panels could be free tomorrow and it wouldn't change the install cost by that much.
What doesn't make sense is subsidizing fossil fuels which are a mature technology and one we wish to deprecate the use of.
See above. We really AREN'T subsidizing fossil fuels. No one is paying hundreds of billions of dollars to Exxon to pump more oil.
Lots of things are subsidized by the government and our tax dollars. Like $550,000,000,000 PER YEAR IN DEFENSE SPENDING. More than 20 times the amount of the top 10 biggest spenders COMBINED. I'm not worried about tens of millions in subsidized alternative energy rebates that arguably helps to make our country cleaner. Get a grip people.
While that is true, it is worth noting that the spending on defense is in fact the primary purpose of our federal government, it is right in the Constitution.
Spending on solar panels is not. It also isn't a few tens of millions a year, it is closer to a few tens of BILLIONS a year.
However, even that number is fairly small when all things are considered.
The REAL point is that if solar ever takes off for real, it'll have to do so on its own. The current government support for solar could never last if it started to get deployed in a serious way, because then it would start to cost what the defense budget costs.
The next question is: "Is this the best way to replace coal, oil, and natural gas power?" I would submit that we could outright give away a free nuclear power planet each year for the cost of all this solar, and in reality, if we simply provided $5 billion towards the cost of each plant, we might get 3 a year built.
What brings more value to us, the solar we are getting or 3 new nuclear power plants a year? That is a separate debate, but I think it is one worth having.
Basically they don't install it where you live for exactly the same reason as you wanted it installed. You would have installed it to pay less in electricity, to increase your available money, and they don't install it at your place because it would not increase their revenue. Shocking.
You're missing the point. They won't install it here because there isn't enough government money in the form of local rebates and incentives to do so.
Translation: Solar only works if a decent part of the cost is paid for by taxpayers.
A few interesting points from the article:
1. Almost 40% of the distributed PV capacity in the U.S. is located in California. The next nine states after California account for another 44%, according to the EIA.
This is key because CA pays one of the highest kWh rates in the US (places like Hawaii are higher, but there aren't that many people there).
http://www.bls.gov/regions/wes...
San Francisco pays 40% higher energy prices on average than the rest of the US. So of COURSE solar makes more sense there. But it doesn't most other places.
California's leadership in distributed solar capacity is driven by a combination of factors, including high electricity prices, a large population, strong solar resources, and state policies and incentives that support solar PV, according to the EIA.
2. One of the factors spurring growth last year and this was the impending expiration of the U.S. government's solar investment tax credit (ITC). That measure, passed in 2008, offered a 30% tax credit for residential and business installations. It was due to expire this year, and the tax credit was supposed to drop to a more permanent 10%. In December, however, Congress passed a three-year extension on the 30% ITC.
So a crap load of tax dollars are propping this market up. It actually goes further than this. There are many state and Dept of Energy programs that further fix the rate of solar power to above market rates, to provide guaranteed returns for utility solar power.
http://energy.gov/public-servi...
Just a sample of some of the various programs to pay for solar and wind.
3. The total operating solar PV capacity in the U.S. is expected to reach 25.6 gigawatts (billion watts or GW) of direct current (DC) by the end of the year, according to GTM Research's U.S. Solar Market Insight Report 2015 Year in Review. Last year, solar installations broke all previous records, but the amount was only 16% more than in 2014 with 7,260 GW of new DC solar power.
That sounds impressive, doesn't it? Well, consider this:
In 2014, the United States generated about 4,093 billion kilowatt hours of electricity.
So the new DC solar power being installed is 7.2 billion out of 4,093 billion total. It is nice, but we could install that much every year for the next 20 years and it wouldn't make a real dent in the total.
Last year I called SolarCity, they are offering to install panels for "free" to your home, then sell you the power for less than you're paying now.
Sounds like a no-brainer, right? No up front cost, no maintenance, guaranteed power for less than you're paying now.
Why NOT say yes?
Except, they won't install in my area. They WILL install 2 miles away, because that is a different electric energy provider that gives bigger rebates than mine does (I live in a co-op that doesn't provide huge rebates and tax incentives).
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So it really comes down to the fact that all this solar makes sense only if you count on a whole pile of tax dollars.
Even utility scale solar, which I've looked at investing in purely from an investment point of view, requires tax dollars to make work.
http://www.absolutelysolar.com...
FIT Program Areas
FIT â" LADWP: The Department of Water and Powerâ(TM)s new solar Feed-In Tariff program. Buildings and land in the city of Los Angeles and parts of the Owens Valley are eligible.
Look at the very bottom of that page:
http://energy.gov/savings/ladw...
And there is the program, promising to pay FAR above the "going rate" of power.
So solar works, assuming you can count on the government money to keep flowing.
And you hit the nail on the head. But you didn't even ask the best question...
How much in tax dollars is being spent to make this happen? More or less, all of that solar (and wind) power is being funded with tax dollars in one form or another. Either with direct rebates, or via tax credits...
I've looked at investing in utility solar and the return on investment is completely dependent on tax money in one form or another.
While the new stuff is nice, the real question is, how do you install 100 times this much and pay for it? Because what they have installed is simply noise compared to the totals.
Before anyone even starts, de-centralized power is in 'development' stage. I see rooftop solar as more of an energy saver/efficiency more than anything else but not a 'break even' per se. I expect most of the coal plants in the U.S. will get replaced with natural gas.
I've looked into rooftop solar three times, the most recent two months ago.
I spoke with a local solar installer. It just makes no sense, no matter how far you turn your head to the side. And that is with the federal government picking up 30% of the cost outright, plus another rebate from the local power company, plus cheap financing. It STILL makes zero sense.
You have to REALLY make a lot of assumptions about the future for it to kinda sorta make sense. As in, regular power prices will double over the next decade. And the new equipment will work for 20 years trouble free. And you'll always get net-metering. And it will add 50% of the system cost to the value of your home.
And so on. Do all that, and yea, it can make sense. But it takes ALL of that, plus the tax money, to work.
Well if we'd shut down the 60's and 70's era reactors and build new modern designs, this whole thing would be different, now wouldn't it?
But sadly, the "oh my god the nuclears" idiots just won't let that happen.
So here we are. Burning a crap ton of coal, oil, and natural gas, when we could be running on modern reactors that have fixed these old problems.
Hindsight. Which of these things would we have known was a problem before? And SCRAMing the reactors was a good move.
No, it was a terrible move, but it was in the rule book so they did it.
Had they not shut down the reactors, they wouldn't have had any problems. They had their own power source and shut it down. They would never have needed the diesel power at all, they had nuclear reactors!
None of the water or flooding causing any problem with the reactors themselves, it was all the backup power sources.
The known problem was having the backup power at too low an elevation so it could be flooded, it should have been mounted up much higher. The seawall also wasn't big enough, a known problem.
This generally comes under the heading "economically produce power".
Well we won't know until we do the research, now will we?
The problem is almost all development in the US ended decades ago, not much more has been done elsewhere, so we're way behind where we should be.
As for "economically", consider that having a fleet of 11 aircraft carriers isn't exactly economical, but we do it anyway for reasons other than "saving money".
Perhaps being completely energy independent and not emitting a crap ton of carbon would be worth spending money on. Burning the used fuel and waste may well be cheaper than trying to store it for hundreds of years.
Gross human stupidity and one of the greatest natural disasters ever, combined.
No, because other reactors were fine. Had management done the suggested upgrades as the other reactors had done, nothing would have happened.
This whole thing shouldn't have happened, it was the operator being stupid and cheap.
A bigger wall, the generators on the roof instead of the ground floor, more batteries, not SCRAMing the reactors, etc.
Any one of those things would have made this a complete non-event.
If stuff is still radioactive, then it is still giving off heat and can be used to make power.
Only the "oh my god the nuclears" people who fear everything prevent us from doing the research and development needed to turn it all into power.
There really should be almost no waste from a nuclear reactor. Either the stuff is mostly harmless, or it isn't and can still make power.
That we DON'T use it to make power shows how emotional and irrational people really are.
No news is good news, and that's almost every day for the safest form of large-scale power!
Yep, 10% of the world's power is produced using nuclear and you just don't hear about it that much.
Here we're talking about a minor problem from a 5 year old accident that was caused by gross human stupidity that could have been avoided if management had a clue.
The reality is that most nuclear power is very safe. Here in Texas we have multiple reactors that have been humming along for decades producing crazy amounts of power without a fuss.
Actually, I agree with you. The guns by themselves may not help much if we ignore all our other rights, and yes, we have issues there.
I think we put people in prison for too long, take away their rights to vote too easily, and so fourth.
I think the government is kidding itself about encryption, the bad guys will just use other options besides the ones the government wants, but frankly a lot of people high up in the government don't understand technology, so that it what it is.
My point is that without guns, you're just subjects because you don't even have the option to revolt. I consider the Declaration of Independence just as important as the US Constitution, even if it isn't a legal document.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."
^ That is hard to do without guns, sad to say. Humans are a rather violent species. :(
http://law.stackexchange.com/q...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://petitions.whitehouse.g...
In short, the US Government has said "If the people of Texas want to leave, they'll have to go to war to force the issue."
I don't care what bodily function you're doing, don't let me see it.
While you're welcome to that viewpoint, you aren't likely to get very far. After all, eating is a bodily function.
Just because you want something doesn't mean you're right or that you should get it. Maybe you're a racist. Fine, but that doesn't mean you get to discriminate when you hire people. You live in this thing called society, where we all agree to work together so that we can all live well.
One of those things is respecting a woman's right and need to breastfeed her child without making a big deal out of it.