Utilities Battle Homeowners Over Solar Power 533
HughPickens.com writes Diane Cardwell reports in the NYT that many utilities are trying desperately to stem the rise of solar power, either by reducing incentives, adding steep fees or effectively pushing home solar companies out of the market. The economic threat has electric companies on edge. Over all, demand for electricity is softening while home solar is rapidly spreading across the country. There are now about 600,000 installed systems, and the number is expected to reach 3.3 million by 2020, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. In Hawaii, the current battle began in 2013, when Hawaiian Electric started barring installations of residential solar systems in certain areas. It was an abrupt move — a panicked one, critics say — made after the utility became alarmed by the technical and financial challenges of all those homes suddenly making their own electricity. "Hawaii is a postcard from the future," says Adam Browning, executive director of Vote Solar, a policy and advocacy group based in California.
But utilities say that solar-generated electricity flowing out of houses and into a power grid designed to carry it in the other direction has caused unanticipated voltage fluctuations that can overload circuits, burn lines and lead to brownouts or blackouts. "At every different moment, we have to make sure that the amount of power we generate is equal to the amount of energy being used, and if we don't keep that balance things go unstable," says Colton Ching, vice president for energy delivery at Hawaiian Electric, pointing to the illuminated graphs and diagrams tracking energy production from wind and solar farms, as well as coal-fueled generators in the utility's main control room. But the rooftop systems are "essentially invisible to us," says Ching, "because they sit behind a customer's meter and we don't have a means to directly measure them." The utility wants to cut roughly in half the amount it pays customers for solar electricity they send back to the grid. "Hawaii's case is not isolated," says Massoud Amin. "When we push year-on-year 30 to 40 percent growth in this market, with the number of installations doubling, quickly — every two years or so — there's going to be problems."
But utilities say that solar-generated electricity flowing out of houses and into a power grid designed to carry it in the other direction has caused unanticipated voltage fluctuations that can overload circuits, burn lines and lead to brownouts or blackouts. "At every different moment, we have to make sure that the amount of power we generate is equal to the amount of energy being used, and if we don't keep that balance things go unstable," says Colton Ching, vice president for energy delivery at Hawaiian Electric, pointing to the illuminated graphs and diagrams tracking energy production from wind and solar farms, as well as coal-fueled generators in the utility's main control room. But the rooftop systems are "essentially invisible to us," says Ching, "because they sit behind a customer's meter and we don't have a means to directly measure them." The utility wants to cut roughly in half the amount it pays customers for solar electricity they send back to the grid. "Hawaii's case is not isolated," says Massoud Amin. "When we push year-on-year 30 to 40 percent growth in this market, with the number of installations doubling, quickly — every two years or so — there's going to be problems."
Help me out here a little... (Score:5, Interesting)
IT's early (for me) and my standard disclaimer of "the caffeine hasn't kicked in yet" applies, but "a power grid designed to carry it in the other direction" doesn't make a huge amount of sense to me.
I admit that circuits was a long time ago, and I never took (or had to take) the high power courses... But what does that even mean? The system is still AC, isn't it? So it's been handling carrying things in both directions forever.
Is this industry BS, or is there something to this claim?
Re:Help me out here a little... (Score:5, Informative)
There's something to this claim. The power electric companies traditionally have control over all inputs to the system. Home solar changes that.
Unfortunately, the power company is still expected to make sure that the power comes in at the right voltage and frequency. And with control on only part of the inputs, that's a lot harder. The fewer inputs they control, the harder...
Theoretically, you can design a control system that'll handle the problem. But, so far, noone has bothered to, because noone's had a need to. As solar becomes more common that'll change, and the problems will go away.
One part of the problem is NOT going to go away however - they have to pay to maintain the lines. Right now, that cost if covered by your electric bills. As the amount of electricity you draw from their generators goes down, they're going to reach the point of needing to charge you a flat fee just for the connection to the power lines, plus the usual fees for actually using their electricity.
Re:Help me out here a little... (Score:5, Interesting)
To really handle it, you have to be able to prevent solar producers from putting power on the lines if there's too much production for the consumers. That means there need to be some restrictions on the design of solar systems so they don't keep dumping excess power into the grid when it's not needed. Ultimately this may mean that for cities with lots of solar systems, there will be parts of the day when your system limits itself to only producing what you can use in your house and puts no power back on the line.
Re:Help me out here a little... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Help me out here a little... (Score:4, Interesting)
That really depends on your efficiency. Small scale is often more expensive.
If a 10 kWh system costs $10K while a 100kWh system costs $70K then the country as a whole would be better off with 100kWh systems.
Re:Help me out here a little... (Score:4, Interesting)
The properly handle the problem Tesla Motors needs to start producing home batteries and not just batteries for cars. This will help them and help us. It would be logical for Tesla Motors to come up with a complete kit ready to be installed, panels,batteries, inverters and obviously a direct socket to plug in a electric vehicle for power in either direction.
Re:Help me out here a little... (Score:5, Interesting)
If you have one large lake located up high somewhere and can pump water uphill to it, problem solved.
Does Hawaii have any high ground? Thought so.
Or if you're concerned about ecosystem alteration due to changing water flows, then
if you have one very large hydrogen tank facility somewhere with an electrolysis system (new efficient designs are here or almost here) and fuel cells, problem solved.
Or if you have an ocean floor where you can store a whole bunch of large balloon bags full of air, problem solved.
It's true that these storage methods have a low round-trip energy efficiency, but that energy is coming from the fricking sun - photosynthetic life is about 2% efficient at using solar energy). PV with inefficient storage of its peak generation is still a way better idea than continuing to burn coal and gas to make electricity.
Re:Help me out here a little... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, but the point is that all of those solutions cost money to build and maintain. Now let's be clear, the energy companies are freaking assholes, but their argument is that since the solar people brought the panels, then they should be the ones who pay for those water pumping stations to be built, and share in the cost of the employees to run the place. Otherwise, the solar people need to have their own on-premise storage and stop dumping into the line.
The big diff is that the power companies are subsidised heavily, unlike the independent solar. So I would say that the energy company has an obligation to not push the cost of peak transmission onto independent producers.
At any rate, you've hit the crux of the issue, who pays for the grid to handle this stuff? The electric companies think the solar folks should pay 100%, the solar folks think the power company should pay, others think it's a mix. Even if the total cost comes out a few million to start plus a few hundred thousand for employees and upkeep a year, the power companies want solar producers to float 100% the cost and a large group of them have indicated that they'll only pay for it kicking and screaming.
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By whom? Where's the budget item in the state/local/federal budget? Or is there a "Power Industries Charities, Inc." that I don't know about?
Stop repeating paranoid memes.
Re:Help me out here a little... (Score:4, Informative)
> By whom?
By all levels of government.
> Where's the budget item in the state/local/federal budget?
Right here:
http://www.eia.gov/analysis/requests/subsidy/
It's about $30 billion a year in direct subsidies. This does not include outside R&D, like the share of nuke development that happens as a side-effect of weapons programs (which has very recently dropped to just about zero now that MOX is largely run out). It excludes more wishy-washy issues like nuke liability insurance issues, or the more nebulous concepts like funding the Navy to keep the sea lanes open. This is pure, direct subsidies.
> Stop repeating paranoid memes.
Stop repeating BS that ten seconds of google will prove to be blatantly false.
Re:Help me out here a little... (Score:4, Interesting)
On those days, everyone will also be trying to run their air conditioning full blast, and although newer homes will be adding power to the grid, it probably won't balance out the extra usage from all the older, less insulated homes and businesses.
Besides, unless I'm misremembering my basic electronics, having extra power available is usually not a problem unless there is someone to consume it (*). I can hook up one side of a 110 volt outlet to a piece of aluminum foil, and until someone is stupid enough to touch it, it won't burn up. Overloads are caused by demand exceeding the available supply as it passes through some resistance (the wiring, for example). If all the houses are producing way more power than they need, that's not a problem, because the current isn't flowing anywhere. It becomes a problem when some business that normally draws power through some massive feeder lines from a cogen plant starts drawing power from all of those houses through wires that weren't designed to allow that much current draw.
Basically, the utility companies are mad because for the most part, they used to be able to ignore residential usage of electricity, because it almost never involved enough power to require precise monitoring. Now that they're suddenly able to produce power that might be consumed elsewhere, the wiring has to actually be big enough to potentially carry all the current that their rooftop systems might produce, and that requires a little bit more safety planning, and in some cases, limiting the number of solar installations and/or increasing the size of wires and transformers.
(*) There is an exception to this rule. When you have mechanical generators, having excess power is bad, because the generators have to run within a certain speed range, both to prevent damage to the generators themselves and to stay in phase. If the draw is too low (or too high) for the amount of mechanical energy going in, you could have a serious problem unless the generators have built-in governors. Of course, this problem can be solved by shutting down generators that aren't needed. More importantly, power companies have to do this anyway in response to varying load throughout the day, so the presence of solar doesn't change things very much except for possibly making the fluctuations more or less frequent and/or more or less severe.
Re:Help me out here a little... (Score:5, Informative)
Besides, unless I'm misremembering my basic electronics, having extra power available is usually not a problem unless there is someone to consume it (*). I can hook up one side of a 110 volt outlet to a piece of aluminum foil, and until someone is stupid enough to touch it, it won't burn up. Overloads are caused by demand exceeding the available supply as it passes through some resistance (the wiring, for example).
You've got most of the right answers in there, but a little mixed up. The aluminium foil survives because it has low resistance, so little power is delivered over it. Electrical power is distributed across a circuit in proportion to resistance : P = I^2 * R. Low-resistance components (eg wires, and your foil is just a flat wire) are therefore less susceptible to oversupply. But put more power into the system, and more power will be delivered to all components, and some of them will fail and catch fire. Don't believe me? Get a 3V filament bulb and connect a 12V battery to it -- it will pop because too much power is delivered across the resistive filament.
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Re:Help me out here a little... (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree in there really isn't such a thing as too much grid power,
Thousands of electrical fires say you're wrong.
Re:Help me out here a little... (Score:5, Informative)
Household inverters will dump power into the grid as long as the grid is being maintained within some tolerance of voltage and frequency. This tolerance is quite wide, because otherwise inverters wouldn't work a lot of the time.
But the utility company would ideally like to be able to control the grid to whatever tolerance makes sense under current conditions, and this problem is not simplified by random (from its perspective) energy sources dotted around.
Also, the utility company has to maintain generation for the base load, and when a cloud greatly reduces the solar it has no control over, it has to quickly ramp generation up and then back down when the cloud goes away.
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...As the amount of electricity you draw from their generators goes down, they're going to reach the point of needing to charge you a flat fee just for the connection to the power lines, plus the usual fees for actually using their electricity....
I already pay separately for delivery (i.e., connection to lines) vs. generation (i.e., use of electricity). so no change needed here.
.
Having said that, I do have some agreement with the utilities on this item: utilities say that solar-generated electricity flowing out of houses and into a power grid designed to carry it in the other direction has caused unanticipated voltage fluctuations that can overload circuits, burn lines and lead to brownouts or blackouts.
Re:Help me out here a little... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not just some but essentially full agreement. The problem here is that when solar starts a production spike, all houses in the region with solar will suddenly spike at once. That is what causes the overloads in the residential circuit which was never designed to handle such spikes because they were never considered when grid was built.
The only solutions are:
1. Massive investment into grid upgrades, which comes with increase in maintenance costs.
2. Capping solar's ability to dump into the grid while keeping the current grid and it's relatively low maintenance costs (solution proposed here).
Problem with #2 is that it significantly reduces ROI of solar installation, as it's being actively marketed with ROI that enables solar microproducers to dump excess into the grid at a good price. This was lobbied in back when solar was just starting, and no one thought of the current scenario - solar that is popular enough to threaten grid stability.
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That would work if the power distribution network was ideal and didn't have any resistance/reactance.
In real-life, the spike from all the solar installations would cause network instability unless controlled distributively (i.e. measured and limited at the spike sources). The question of who would pay to maintain that type of system is one of the major issues that needs to be solved. Of course the people who pay for solar want to shove all the power they can back on the grid to help subsidize their costs,
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Re:Help me out here a little... (Score:5, Interesting)
There is another problem here as well, which has caused significant upheaval in Australia. Solar subsidies have effectively ended up as a tax on the poor which is subsidising the rich. This is because poor are forced to pay full price for all electricity they use, while rich can simply buy the microproducer plant to put on their roof and use net metering to effectively get paid from common pool paid mostly by poor who can't afford those.
Since we're talking about infrastructure that is necessary for everyone, it ends up as excessive tax on poor that is used to subsidise the rich on costs of infrastructure used by everyone.
Re:Help me out here a little... (Score:4, Interesting)
Why aren't there companies offering to put solar PV on your roof (e.g. even if you're poor), and you can pay them basically the standard utility rate for your electricity.
The company can make the difference in profit, after fixed costs. Such companies are operating in the US.
Meanwhile, solar infrastructure is built up, as it needs to be to reduce GHG emissions.
Re:Help me out here a little... (Score:5, Insightful)
Theoretically, you can design a control system that'll handle the problem. But, so far, noone has bothered to, because noone's had a need to.
Why don't you ask the Germans how they have manage to do this already . . . ?
Re:Help me out here a little... (Score:5, Informative)
But germans on average just use a tenth of the power an american uses, so bottom line we pay less than you.
My yearly bill is like 650EURO for electricity and roughly the same for gas.
Re:Help me out here a little... (Score:4, Informative)
Its not just frequency and voltage, there is phase and power factor [wikipedia.org], harmonics etc. Grid tie inverters are not simple pieces of equipment by any means - they try to synchronize and follow the grid power delivery by following grid input AC waveform at the point of connection, which is a limited bit of information and may not be fully in sync with macro-scale grid need at any given moment.
For a perfectly synched network you would have to have atomic clocks and low latency radio link network with each point of generation, that's obviously not going to happen, so hacks, power factor correction systems, extra reactive loads etc are and will have to be implemented.
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Because the power involved is on a completely different level. Solutions used in low power applications would burn out when used for high power applications.
Essentially your entire argument is about your utter ignorance of how grids work. They MUST be centralized and aware of the entire grid because parts of grid failing have a nasty tendency of causing cascade failures. And that is really, REALLY hard to do, so instead we have what is essentially a patchwork of hacks of various kinds to keep the frequency,
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I agree with most of your post, but i disagree with the assertion that grid "MUST be centralized". It must be well-coordinated, and centralization is one of the ways to achieve coordination, but not the only one.
Power grid currently is built with assumption of central coordination, that's why there are these growing pains with distributed generation.
Re:Help me out here a little... (Score:5, Informative)
Coordinating the power grid needs information, today the information carried for proper coordination ( AC waveform detecion by grid inverter ) is not sufficient to make things work at large scale.
Whether you transmit the coordination signals ( i.e. extra bits of information ) in-band ( over powerline, superimposed on the AC wave ) or out of band on a separate carrier is the question of implementation. Both in-band and out of band would have their upsides and downsides.
Fact of the matter is that todays grid is not built for that.
Simple case, assume there is a dozen or so high power solar installations in my neighborhood, delivering most of the peak power output. The requirement for grid-tie inverters is matching the phase within 1% of the 50/60hz waveform read at the connection point. The question is, _whose_ waveform is mine really following ? Is it the neighbors ? Which one is his following ? How does the error propagate and does it multiply ? That is the gist of the coordination problem.
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You do not understand error propagation.
Synchronizing at the point of connection does not mean that you are synchronizing with any particular "power plant", you are synchronizing with a relatively randomly distorted signal that gets its contributions in worst case from multiple neighborhood inverters that are also trying to sync and are all somewhat off, and nearby real world loads with different apparent power and other sources of noise.
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Re:Help me out here a little... (Score:5, Informative)
EE working for a utility here, and I agree with all of this. The utility I work for, and a lot of others, don't even generate any power, we just do transmission and distribution, i.e. "poles and wires". Solar still causes us headaches. Don't get me wrong, I love solar, and I want reduced fossil-fuel usage, but the issue really is more nuanced than the public perception of "the utility just doesn't want us making our own power so they can keep charging us money".
Most people seem to operate under the assumption that power distribution is a network, where it flows in any direction. On the transmission side, yes, this is true. For distribution, it's generally false, except in large cities. More common are radial feeds, where several circuits, also called feeders, come out of the substation, each one typically having multiple branches and serving a certain area. Think of it like an artery system. The main trunk of the feeder has larger size wires that can handle more current, the branches have smaller sizes, etc. It's designed for power flowing from the substation to the customers, and not vice versa. There are a number of issues that arise when this expectation is violated. As a few examples:
If the homeowner at the end of the branch puts in a large solar installation, the wires and distribution equipment may not be sized to handle the power he's producing.
The variability of generation and inability to measure it is definitely an obstacle. Let's say there's an area with 20MW of load, and 15MW is being provided by solar. The solar output is unpredictable, but to the utility, who probably only has real time metering at the substation, it just looks like 5MW of load, so they don't know that when the sun goes down or a storm passes through they're going to see a major load increase.
It's a safety issue. The utility does not, and absolutely never will, assume that a customer has a properly functioning transfer switch that prevents backfeed during outages, which can be hazardous to both linemen working to restore power. There are certainly safety precautions that linemen can take, but it's still a danger.
On the billing side, the utility still needs to maintain equipment to provide whatever class of service the homeowner has. They need to be able to provide, for example, 400 amps, even if the homeowner gets solar and winds up having a bill of $0 from the utility. The O&M costs for such customers wind up being effectively subsidized by people who don't have solar.
I like solar, and I'm not afraid of it putting me out of a job, at least in my lifetime. I think when battery technology is more mature, it could help alleviate a number of issues that currently exist. But the public perception that its conspiracy by big bad utility is just trying to stifle competition is untrue. I'm not going to say that anticompetitiveness could never be the motivation for a utility to fight the proliferation of solar, but from an engineer's perspective, there are real obstacles that exist that many people don't realize or appreciate.
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My power company here in Australia charges me 0.673700c a day for the fixed connection to the grid and 0.259500c for each kWh of electricity I use. Other electricity providers I have been with in other places in Australia do the same thing (per-day charge and per-KWh charge)
There is no reason utilities in the US and elsewhere can't do the same thing (charge all customers a fixed per-day fee that covers the cost of maintaining and running the network and stuff then charge customers for each kWh of electricit
Re:Help me out here a little... (Score:5, Informative)
There are already strict requirements that must be met in order to connect a solar system to the grid. The devices that do this have all sorts of requirements regarding what the power must look like regarding conditioning and interesting things like disconnection should power drop in order to prevent energizing an electrical line that a worker thinks is dead because he doesn't expect you to push power. Meters that "run backwards" are also used with grid-tie connections already.
As it stands today in our existing system if an electric producer has excess they sell it to OTHER grids tied to their system, it doesn't simply go to waste. On an island like Hawaii that may not be possible but on the mainland it certainly is and those connections also stretch into other countries like Canada.
In short - most all of your assumptions about how power is just being thrown willy-nilly onto the grid are incorrect and already accounted for. If you think an electric company is going to allow you to (legally) connect without having passed those standards you haven't done your research. Look up Grid-tie to learn more.
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Solar PV generates DC, which gets inverted to AC. Cheap inverters generate square-wave AC, less cheap inverters generate stepped or modified square wave AC, and even less cheap inverters synthesize sine-wave AC, just like you're supposed to get from the grid. What I've seen on an oscilloscope of the output from my "sine-wave" inverter looks more like a *lot* of tiny steps, but it looks more like a sine wave than stepped square wave inverter output.
Not that you're allowed to attach a square wave inverter to
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Is this industry BS, or is there something to this claim?
The power companies do actually have somewhat of a point but, in many ways, the issues are very similar to what's going on with internet technologies.
Part of your electric bill goes to maintaining the electric grid and the LV (Low Voltage) network that serves your neighborhood. Suppose there are 10 homes on an LV network and 2 of them install 7,000 watt solar arrays. Now the cost of maintaining the LV network has to be split among 8 homes instead
Ok.... Here's the thing, though ..... (Score:5, Informative)
The complaints that the rooftop systems are invisible to the power companies "because they sit behind a customer's meter and we don't have a means to directly measure them" can be addressed pretty easily with updated electric meters.
The power companies are all moving towards "smart meter" technologies anyway. Why not make sure they've put one in that can monitor the output of a PV solar (or even a wind turbine) installation while they're at it?
When I had my solar system installed, the power company had to switch out my meter. And even though we're one of the last remaining areas around here that doesn't yet use smart meters, they still upgraded me to a bi-directional meter so my power generation vs. usage can be tracked. So they're spending $'s on labor and hardware to mess with your meter each time a new solar system is put in. It's their short-sightedness if they don't put more useful equipment in place while they're doing that anyway!
And when it comes to solar, I think the output is fairly predictable too. The only real "fluctuations" you get with the output are based on the day's weather conditions. If you compare my panels to my friend who lives on the other side of town and has a PV solar installation, our daily power generation numbers are within 2-3KWh of each other, and the hourly rates on a graph look almost identical. The power company receives and has to sign off on a registration form stating you've installed a small power generation system and they're made aware of its exact size/maximum output at that time. So even with NO other metering capability, they'd be able to predict that in a certain part of the circuit, they now have someone who will add, at most, a specific amount of power back to the lines between the hours of 10AM and 2PM (when the panels produce the most power). It seems like this is data they should be able to work with.
Re:Ok.... Here's the thing, though ..... (Score:5, Funny)
They're businessmen.
Dealing with that requires a change to their process, which means costs (ie: new meters, people smart enough to handle monitoring the system, etc.). They will whine to high heaven about it until a) the government steps in and writes them a check in exchange for shutting the fuck up, or b) the Courts order them to do it anyway.
Re:Ok.... Here's the thing, though ..... (Score:5, Insightful)
The power companies are all moving towards "smart meter" technologies anyway. Why not make sure they've put one in that can monitor the output of a PV solar (or even a wind turbine) installation while they're at it?
For that matter, it seems perfectly reasonable to require the homeowner to install such a meter as part of a solar installation, as a condition of being able to sell power to the utility -- or even to push power into the grid at all.
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Have to agree, as the home owner is becoming what is essentially a competing power company. If not the entire meter, then at least the difference in cost from a typical one to the bi-directional variety.
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They're a competitor to the power generation company, and a partner to the power distribution company. Frequently, they're the same so the homeowner will be viewed as a nuisance and a competitor.
Re:Ok.... Here's the thing, though ..... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is not that the meters can't measure the power in both directions. The problem is the latency the communication network on the meters can deliver the information to the control room. Smart Meters typically send home a simple KWH "energy" import/export number every so often for the purposes of billing. What systems engineers in control rooms need is real time access to the instantaneous power being generated by roof top solar systems. Their meter reading infrastructure is not designed for this kind of response.
Now all of a sudden meter paradigms change from a billing information collection program to a Power Quality program. Its a different system with different requirements.
It gets even more complex because you have lots of coops that do not generate power but only transmit it. How in the world do they get that information to the person they are buying power from at any given moment?
Its a HUGE issue that is not simply the evil power company wanting to stick it to the little guy. The Power companies have a big responsibility to keeping the grid stable. We take for granted the complexities involved to make stable 60hz ac power.
Re:Ok.... Here's the thing, though ..... (Score:5, Informative)
Just more lame excuses.
Australia, a giant country that's almost as large as America but with only 1/15th the population went from nearly ZERO rooftop PV in 2009 to over 4GW by the end of 2015. It's true that the utilities there have been whining about voltage surges since 2011 but the amount of rooftop installations have increased 10x since that time and the grid hasn't melted down.
In other words, if the utilities in the USA are only as marginally as competent as the ones down under, they should be able to deal with a 5-10x increase in solar across the same population / geographic area.
Re:Ok.... Here's the thing, though ..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Australia's solar policy has been called an "unmitigated disaster". It's basically a method of subsidising the rich by taxing the poor which is approaching the point of collapse. Even the massively pro-green sites like reneweconomy have been forced to admit there is a significant problem (though they try to obfuscate this by talking up the other relevant points like spinning reserve that burns coal).
http://reneweconomy.com.au/201... [reneweconomy.com.au]
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"This is despite the fact that residential power prices have risen 70 per cent since the Barnett government came to power in 2008"
If prices rose this much in any of the Freedom-lovin' states in America, there would be a vast exercise of 2nd amendment rights. This hurts the poor FAR more than any perceived subsidising of the "rich", really the middle class.
I have quite a few friends in Australia who have solar PV. NONE of them - ZERO - are wealthy, mostly all working couples in modest homes with 1-3 kids, us
They have to put in safety equipment in any case (Score:5, Interesting)
Linemen don't like becoming part of the circuits, so they successfully called for the disconnect-if-zero laws.
Power companies (at least in Canada and large parts of the world) already have equipment to deal with the fact that the power can flow both ways. In fact, claiming they don't have equipment is only true IFF the power companies are the ones who like electrocuting their employees (;-))
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That's why the linemen say it's not dead until it's dead and grounded. They are supposed to bond the line to ground before working on it and that bond is supposed to only be disconnected right before the line is turned back on.
But since mistakes happen, it's a good thing that home inverters won't power a dead line.
The biggest danger to linemen (and has been for a while) is id10ts wiring their portable generators in or plugging them in with a "widowmaker" (A generator chord with a male end to plug in to the
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They don't need the data.
They already don't have control over distributed demand.
Therefore they don't need control over distributed supply.
Joe stuffing 2kW into the local grid in a not-monitored-in-realtime, not-centrally-controlled fashion simply helps to offset Fred's not-monitored-in-realtime, not centrally-controlled air conditioner, or Tim's arc welder, or a concert venue firing up on a Saturday night, a 500-ton factory press, or...
Of course someone has to distribute this power, and that someone is "th
Re:Ok.... Here's the thing, though ..... (Score:5, Informative)
Batteries are not cost-effective. The electrical grid must always be balanced. As such, utilities try to find methods of stabilizing the grid without using batteries. Technically this works. However, the economic impact of the guaranteeing a market for subsidized solar and wind power, is another set of hidden subsidies. Ironically, some of these hidden subsidies are going to fossil fuel companies.
To make a complex story short, the grid must always be balanced. If the power source cannot be controlled (like solar), or if the power source is unreliable (like wind), then it is necessary to make up the difference in some other way. The cheapest methods are to remotely turn on and off loads, and to remotely turn on and off generating stations.
The problem with starting and stopping loads is that there are not many loads that can be turned on and off remotely, and still accomplish something useful. Ontario has been experimenting with ways to turn off home air-conditioners during the day. Also, big consumers often get a preferred electricity rate, with the understanding that their electricity is "interruptible". However, there is only so much that this can be pushed. People want a cool house. The price of "interruptible" electricity is a few cents per kWh, which is often below cost.
This brings us to starting and stopping generating stations. A nuclear station takes days to start and stop. A coal station takes on the order of a day to start and stop. A natural gas turbine take about 3 to 6 hours to start. Natural gas (NG) turbines have the ability to run at a "hot-idle", but this is expensive. At "hot-idle" an NG station is still running, it is just not producing power. Hydro power plants (hydro dams) can be started quickly, however unexpected rapid changes in water levels have killed people downstream. As such, very few generating stations can turn on and off as quickly as wind-power changes.
Probably the best way to solve the problem is to have many small power plants, either small hydro-dams or small NG-turbines, and only turn on and off a fraction of those units at any one time. If the grid operator is required to purchase significant amounts of wind-power, then the grid-operator might have to go very far afield to find a sufficiently large enough pool of existing small generating stations that can be started and stopped quickly. In the case of Ontario, Canada, it needed to pay US power plants to not produce electricity to keep the grid balanced. Ontario has a large energy grid, however Ontario was not large enough to deal with wind-power's fluctuations without external help.
In the case of Ontario, which is purchasing solar at 90 cents/kWh and wind at 17 cents/kWh under certain existing contracts, then a "hidden" solar/wind subsidy is going to mines and smelters and fossil fuel producers to keep the grid balanced. This subsidy is cheaper than battery and capacitor banks. However, conservation is far cheaper than many of the above schemes.
Compared to solar/batteries, conservation is the way to go. LED light bulbs almost make sense at current electricity prices. At 90 cents/kWh, converting existing fixtures to LED light bulbs is cheap. Appliances can be moved from electricity to propane or natural gas. Stoves, hot water heaters, furnaces, and even the fridge and air-conditioner can be converted. This is cheaper than paying for battery storage. What little load is left, can then be powered off a roof-top solar / battery system. Conservation is by far the cheapest option.
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Sorry, all numbers you give here are wrong (or outdated since 50 years)
I suggest to read wikipedia or google around a bit. Not even a coal plant that was in cold storage for years takes longer than 6h to power up.
The biggest mistake is your gas turbine: a gas turbine is from cold to 50% - 75% max load in 30 seconds or less, and in less then 5 minutes it is on maximum yield, usually in about one minute
Batteries exist (Score:5, Interesting)
Batteries are too expensive (Score:5, Interesting)
Batteries need to come down in cost before it makes sense to switch to an off-grid solution. I have a 1kW battery/solar system (not grid-tied) as an emergency power source and I have to replace the lead acid AGM batteries aver 5-7 years at a cost of $500 to $1000.
The only way to beat the utilities is to go completely off-grid, but that is too expensive at the moment.
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Beating the utilities that way isn't even a goal that makes sense. Making the utilities work for the public should be the goal. Their function should be to get power to people that need it, when they need it, at the lowest cost consistent with that goal. They should belong to the public so there's no conflict of interest. Once solar systems are installed, they're the lowest cost source because they either produce power or the sit there in the sun not producing power. Generators have to be on line to ma
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ALL HAIL IRON MAN. BUILDER OF LION BATTERIES. [cleantechnica.com]
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Not really. At least not in Germany. Certain people around the country have calculated that it is cheaper to store their own electricity then giving it away to the grid, while they have to by electricity during the night. For most such installation, they are now 80% independent. True there are still 20% not covered, but consider you get an guarantee price in Germany as a household for selling "renewable" electricity. So this might be different for other countries. Especially, Germany is pretty far north on
Re:Batteries exist (Score:4, Insightful)
There lies the rub. If you push to much of the burden out to homeowners they just might start going off the grid. A little in improvement in battery or other storage tech and it could happen.
That is a problem too because it will create a question of capital. If I have the capital resources to invest in a home energy system to go off the grid and say the payback time is 15 years. I and many other people might decide to do just that.
Where does that leave the people who don't have $30K + maintenance costs to purchase said system? It leaves them on a grid with fewer and fewer customers and probably the customers less dependable for on time payment at that. Because the grid has to go where the people are the fixed operating costs don't go down much, and I doubt the variable costs of distribution are significant. Eventually the local PUC will have to allow distribution and connection fees to go up faced with a bankrupt distributor that nobody will buy and may simply shut its doors otherwise.
The situation on the generation side too is not entirely dissimilar, although the generation business has more variable costs their are limits to how quickly it can scale down. Certainly not as fast as individual home owners can deploy domestic systems. Plants are built with 60 year anticipated service life, if you suddenly only need to generate only 30% of the power in year 20 you anticipated, it may not be efficient to operate the plant profitably at that level.
I want to EMPHASIZE STRONGLY I AM NOT ADVOCATING ANY POLICY POSITION in this post but I think its an interesting question because technology that allows middle class folks to go off grid affordably very much has the potential to result in haves and have-nots when it comes to reliable electrical power, while today even the very poor for the most part have dependable electricity in this country(USA).
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Going off the grid is silly. The reason we have a grid in the first place is because it's much more efficient (specifically COST efficient) to have centralized production of power that doesn't easily cut off when something goes wrong.
If you want to go off grid on your own, go for it. I suspect that experiment won't last very long once you discover just how difficult it is to actually maintain a stable 120/220/230V 60/50HZ AC 24/7 that stays in phase. Most people really don't want to go back to third world s
Solar is here to stay (Score:5, Interesting)
I was island hopping in the Philippines last week. Coal there is very expensive. Oil there is very expensive. Power, in general, is very, very expensive. An AC unit is within financial means of many people who already own a flat screen TV and/or western game console. Yet they live without air conditioning in very hot/humid conditions. Malls there are really popular as a result.
The first thing i noticed when I got in a taxi from the airport was the number of Solar + Wind advertisements. Solar has already arrived in SE Asia, and it is here to stay. There's about a billion people in SE Asia outside of China. Solar makes a heck of a lot of sense in the developing world or disconnected parts of the world, where a surprising number of people live. That's right you don't have to go back one sentence, I said a Billion with a 'B'. There's about 30 million people living in the Metro region of Manila without air conditioning because electricity is too expensive. The other half of the country is lucky to have reliable electricity.
These places exist, and they're prime candidates for distributed solar in a big way. Solar is already cheaper than mains electricity, even installed, even with big import duties. Now they're just waiting for the products to arrive en masse.
Why does this matter?
America is still waiting for price parity of mains electricity and home grown solar, but while you can stem the tide of Solar in America temporarily, the price is going to drop like a rock as manufacturers race to supply the third world with Solar, and soon American electric companies will be competing against the price of affordable solar in the third world. It may be five or ten years before Solar truly takes off in the US, but as soon as someone rolls out a $500 "Air Conditioning assist" kit that tells your AC to run at full tilt whenever the solar panels have enough juice to keep it running (who doesn't love coming home to an icy cool house when it's 100F/35C out? especially if that AC was free?), the reasons not to go Solar are going to fall like dominos.
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You can drive an 18500 BTU window unit with 6 solar panels. What you need is a control box that will turn it on when power is sufficent and turn it off when power is insufficient. (even better if it can scale the cooling to available power as long as power is available).
If you cool during the day, the house stays cool and you don't have to cool it for several hours when you get home.
Battery cost has dropped by 94% in 20 years. I think that's going to be a key element. Instead of grid-tie, you just have
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The other problem is that many single family homes in the Philippines are poorly insulated. Single pane windows, little or no roof insulation, that sort of thing..
Re:Solar is here to stay (Score:5, Interesting)
"The other half of the country is lucky to have reliable electricity." - You're spot on with that assessment. Brownouts in the Philippines are a way of life. it is particularly bad in rural areas. Many of the condos in Manila boast of their own power supplies independent of government power. Like a lot of other things in the Philippines, rampant corruption and cronyism has ruined nearly every industry. Before cellphones took off there it would take literally years to get a land line phone installed and you would probably have to bribe someone at that. Now just about everyone has a cellphone and the coverage is actually pretty good. The technology literally leapfrogged the old technology and I believe the exact thing will happen with solar once the price of the panels comes down.
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> Now they're just waiting for the products to arrive en masse.
For the Phillippines, that was 2014. They went from 3 MW installed in 2013 to 117 MW in 2014 ( http://www.pv-tech.org/news/ih... [pv-tech.org] ).
Worldwide, installations are expected to increase from 44.2 GW last year to 57 GW this year ( http://www.pv-tech.org/news/gl... [pv-tech.org] ). I think we have reached en masse.
The power should be cached in the community (Score:3)
Have hierarchies of power distribution.
Federal... or across state lines
State...
County...
City...
Neighborhood.
The management of solar power should be bounced around a neighborhood. It doesn't need to go farther than that. That means the federal, state, county, and city networks all remain clean. No back feeding of power.
Each segment could also fall under different jurisdictions and be the responsibility of different institutions. That might be helpful or not. It should be done to the extent it is helpful.
Here some complete asshat will tell me "but in this circumstance it might not be helpful"... then don't do it in that circumstance. I wouldn't need to explain this if reading comprehension were especially dependable on this site.
Then we really need to work on storage. If these houses can store their power then they might not need to be connected to the grid at all.
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You don't need to cache that much power. Just enough to move power efficiently around a neighborhood. There are some centrifuges that have been used for that purpose in a few places. They spin up quickly and discharge quickly as well. And they can go back and forth repeatedly. Keep in mind, each one of these things is going to store only a few minutes of power each. But the point is render the power draw for the whole neighborhood ZERO while the neighborhood is producing a net positive. yes, the area will g
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A small lead acid bank capable of driving a house for an evening isn't that expensive.
Please define "not that expensive".
Eight of these for example would run you just about $3000 (I chose 8 to get you to a 48V system, the common configuration for off-grid systems these days). I include shipping but not the wiring and interconnects and such to make them work for you:
http://www.wholesalesolar.com/... [wholesalesolar.com]
A lead-acid system shouldn't be discharged more than around 20% in order to avoid longer term damage; you can discharge them more deeply but you'll shorten their life significantly:
ht [solar-electric.com]
Electricity is too cheap to meter (Score:2)
Change the business model. Make the grid global for generating and load distribution, and everybody can pay a flat fee for infrastructure hookup.
Again batteries are the key (Score:3)
But as both solar and the batteries get better this would then become a natural migration to where people would go completely off grid and have some sort of crappy generator (that is cheap but possibly not efficient) to top them off on the occasion that they don't have enough.
Great batteries could even keep the utility relevant for a while by giving them a more reliable source that they could tap when they wanted to from people's homes.
So right now the utilities are having growing pains as this small but growing source of energy is introduced it is that moment that people actually start going off grid that they have a serious problem. As then they will have to risk raising rates that could drive people off the grid which... then the power company will be left with a scattering of customers who simply can't generate their own power using the space they have. This could be apartments, unlucky houses, hotels, and energy intensive industries. That would be a large grid to maintain for far fewer customers.
Personally I have found my local power company to act like total scumbags. While this will provide an extra sense of satisfaction when I go off grid it also will harm any "greater good" arguments they might try to make in the future to get subsidies to maintain the grid. Quite simply people won't buy the arguments and assume that they are trying to keep their obscene bonuses and monopoly returns that the shareholders demand.
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Many people with rooftop solar are not grid neutral, so the batteries would beed external charging.
Why not just make solar part of your business (Score:3)
The power companies could offer people the panels, installation, proper set up and maintenance. You have the money and resources to do it why not make money off those that want to get fully/partially off the grid.
Here is a case for the Internet of things (Score:3)
Yes, you do.
Here is a business model for you: pay a low rate for electricity from sources you can't monitor, pay full* rate for electricity where you put a little Internet of Things gizomo on the line to measure (or even control) output from the source. You could even get the homeowners to pay for the gizmo out of future revenue.
* Yes, I know "full rate" also has its problems, but it'll get set somehow and the point is only IoT installed houses will get that rate.
wish I could... (Score:2)
In a ruling 20+ years ago, my city banned rooftop and "visible from the street" solar panels and all wind turbines in a "nuisance" ruling. That same ruling also bans trash cans visible from the street and having any sort of front yard structure to hide them (these structures are allowed on the side of the house). Living on a corner lot where my backyard is partially visible from the street (I could build a fence, but my backyard is small and would likely block the panel), I cannot legally have solar and the
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There is a federal law that makes it illegal for state authorities, local authorities and community associates/home owner associations/etc to have restrictions on the placement of TV antennas and satellite dishes. Maybe there needs to be a similar federal law regarding solar panels.
What is power worth? (Score:2)
What is management of that power worth? What is spare capacity worth?
Instead of few to many, the grid has to become many to many. The equations for worth are going to become very complex.
What do publicly owned electrical districts say? (Score:3)
As far as I can see these complaints are all coming from investor owned for profit electrical utilities. What do publicly owned electrical districts (like the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power or the Sacramento Municipal Utility District to name a couple of big ones) have to say? Do they make the same complaints or do they just get on with the business of making it all work? If they're not making the same complaints then I think the complaints of investor owned utilities are more about profits than anything else.
Sad to say, they have a point - not what you think (Score:4, Interesting)
.
Most people who put in solar, expect the power co to essentially provide them with free batteries. They in fact aren't free. So they have a point. No, transformers work both ways just fine, and it's quite rare someone has enough to push more net into the grid even at peak times than they would draw at peak times. No one puts up that many panels (room can be an issue even if money isn't). Even though the power co doesn't currently use batteries, the effect is the same - they still have maintenance costs, have to keep wires up, trees off them, and now with this new source, have to be a lot more agile. Older coal and I'd suppose nuclear plants don't ramp up and down quickly as the sun goes behind a cloud, leading to further waste, or having to use faster responding nat gas turbine plants to handle wildly variable loads. I hate to defend these guys - they are evil, no doubt, always have been while I've had this particular company in my neighborhood - their feed-in tariff has varied from 2c/kwh for electricity you produce while charging you 14c/kwh for electricity they sell you - and they demanded two separate meters, so you'd have had to make 7x the electricity you created (after your own use) to just break even. Jerks. For a little while, law made them kinda fair, but they got that overturned first opportunity (they get the best law money can buy, right?). Entitled to a profit...gheesh. Nice to watch from a distance...a great distance. Popcorn helps.
One advantage to living in the boonies off-grid. The power company is aptly named - they have power to enforce building permits - your stupid local gov delegated that one almost everywhere. No permit required, your PP taxes are nil....heh. So I was able to afford 4 homes, taxed as barns...yeah, the solar cost a lot, as did the batteries, and you have to adapt a bit during the "dark month". But...all in all - I win, they can go and die in a fire. This has little or nothing to do with being green. It's more like I'm Scottish. I don't hate nature, but that's not the motivation. Libre was. Freedom to not have to have a job for monthly bills, and other advantages ruled the decisions. Building my own homes was fun too. And you feel like you've done something net-positive in the world. In the boonies you can get this done before the .gov even realizes you're here. And it's fun when there's a major storm, and the power co brings in outside help that asks if they can give you power - despite being the only place with lights on, and can they read your meter? Yeah, I show them my computerized meters....I've even gotten the comment from them "you can't run a house on that" - while I was actually doing exactly that and had been for decades. Doh!
Re:Varies, I suppose (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Varies, I suppose (Score:5, Insightful)
NG has the contract for fixing the lines in the region and is the main energy broker, unfortunately.
This is the ultimate problem: having the power lines and the energy broker/provider be the same entity. The power lines are an obvious natural monopoly. The supply of energy across those power lines is not a natural monopoly. The lines should be owned by one company and the power selling/brokerage should be by a different company.
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NG has the contract for fixing the lines in the region and is the main energy broker, unfortunately.
This is the ultimate problem: having the power lines and the energy broker/provider be the same entity. The power lines are an obvious natural monopoly. The supply of energy across those power lines is not a natural monopoly. The lines should be owned by one company and the power selling/brokerage should be by a different company.
Yeah. These electrons belong to Duke Power, those electrons belong to Con Edison, the ones over there belong to...
The idea that the Free Market makes any sense in the simultaneous transmission of commodity objects (or forces) over a common medium is one of the most insane artifices that anyone ever invented. All you are really selling is the right to bill something that you probably didn't produce going over lines you probably don't own. Capitalism at it's finest!
Re:Varies, I suppose (Score:5, Insightful)
You're making it way too complicated. The power-line company can buy power from whoever is providing, and sell power to whoever is consuming. Just like they do now with home solar power. They can make whatever agreements they like with generating companies as to who gets what share of demand, what response times are required, etc. Add some grid-scale power buffers, even just a few minutes worth, and things get even simpler. While the electrons are on the line they belong to the distribution company, just like while products are in Walmart's distribution channel they belong to Walmart.
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Re:Varies, I suppose (Score:5, Funny)
Seldom are contradictions so obvious.
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You're making it way too complicated. The power-line company can buy power from whoever is providing, and sell power to whoever is consuming. Just like they do now with home solar power. They can make whatever agreements they like with generating companies as to who gets what share of demand, what response times are required, etc. Add some grid-scale power buffers, even just a few minutes worth, and things get even simpler. While the electrons are on the line they belong to the distribution company, just like while products are in Walmart's distribution channel they belong to Walmart.
Not all products belong to the company selling them. For example Coke, Pepsi, and Frito-Lay commonly lease shelf space and stock product set price themselves while the selling is still handled by the store itself.
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First world countries generally have more capacity than needed, otherwise blackouts and brownouts would be commonplace.
Just because water flows in rivers does not make it free. Damns are expensive and need to be insured against breaking, and those costs among others make the water not free. (More fundamentally, water rights are a part of the purchase price of riverside land.) You might as well argue that coal or oil is free, because they're already buried there, waiting to be used.
Analogous to current telecom situation (Score:3)
You're making it way too complicated. The power-line company can buy power from whoever is providing, and sell power to whoever is consuming. Just like they do now with home solar power. They can make whatever agreements they like with generating companies as to who gets what share of demand, what response times are required, etc. Add some grid-scale power buffers, even just a few minutes worth, and things get even simpler.
While it sounds good in theory, power plants and grids take years to expand, and the information needed to project power plant demand would be in the hands of the grid owners. It would be much harder to scale power generation smoothly with demand, and potentially increase the number of power company crashes due to the potential boom/bust introduction. This would allow the line owners to control the winners and losers in the power generation industry, and create a scenario similar to the way content produc
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Yeah, we couldn't build them overnight - but it needs to be done. No time like the present to get started. We've got the Tesla Gigafactory being built, and there's others like Aquion building non-toxic long life batteries specifically for grid applications. And some locations have options for pumped water and other very large scale power buffers.
Yes, we could put them in peoples houses, but that greatly complicates the system and makes it more expensive - economies of scale apply. Personally I think a tim
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Average voltage on an AC line is 0 volts. RMS is probably what you intended. But yes, Watt-hours are all basically the same for a given RMS voltage/frequency. We will ignore power factor, that would take a lot longer to discuss...
Just to be pedantic:
The electrons going through your appliances are almost entirely the ones that were in the wire of the appliance to start with. Some electrons may actually drift enough to have come from your house's wires. But for any significant number of electrons to phys
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NG has the contract for fixing the lines in the region and is the main energy broker, unfortunately.
This is the ultimate problem: having the power lines and the energy broker/provider be the same entity. The power lines are an obvious natural monopoly. The supply of energy across those power lines is not a natural monopoly. The lines should be owned by one company and the power selling/brokerage should be by a different company.
I fear I would then end up with two bills, one covering the cost of the energy I want and another to allow the delivery of that energy to the location I desire...
And because the lines are not owned by the power seller, when an ice storm takes them down I would probably get a bill for my portion of the repair! Yes, they already pass those costs on, but it is spread amongst many more customers. I don't want to see the bill for my exact share of the repair of the circuit that runs from the power source clear
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I fear I would then end up with two bills, one covering the cost of the energy I want and another to allow the delivery of that energy to the location I desire...
I really don't understand what worries you, over here the lines do belong to a separate company and I can shop around for a supplier of electricity
Exactly the same as with internet or telephone, many providers to choose from, one utility that does the delivery.
I pay one bill that has the KWh's and transmission as separate items, transmission is then paid by the electric supplier/provider to the cable company, it's not my worry at all.
Oh yeah, surprise, there's a third item on that bill, taxes ):
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I receive a single bill with several itemized charges: meter charge, transmission charge, stranded cost recovery charge, system benefits charge (WTF!), KWH distribution charge, energy charge, and electricity consumption tax. 7 items, 1 bill.
Repairs are part of the cost of doing business, not a separate line item on the bill. Of course, the consumer pays them eventually
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Re:Varies, I suppose (Score:4, Interesting)
The grid can't handle micro-generation. So... who is going to pay for upgrading the grid? And guarantee electricity during peak need but lowest production?
A far more economical solution is a more intelligent home that uses all of it's produced electricity. Run the AC more when the sun shines, charge the electric car, etc. Eventually the grid gets rebuilt to handle 2 way with far more local rebalancing, but that's a decade or three away.
Re:Varies, I suppose (Score:5, Interesting)
Bullshit. Hawaii power was forced to do an ACTUAL study instead of pulling number out their ass like you. They have areas with 50% of the power solar and the study found they can handle it just fine.
The utilities should keep in mind here, they push back hard enough and the cost savings of going completely off-grid will eventually reach the point that people just unplug entirely. It's better to offer backup power than no power at all.
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Yes, it's laziness. Not massive costs associated with having to build up monitoring and measuring on massive scale but "laziness".
Re:Varies, I suppose (Score:4, Interesting)
But such systems are already existing on large plants
I was recently shopping around for PV panels and found out Germany requires a controller for domestic use to have an interface for a future monitoring and controlling system.
In Europe the generator and distributor are already separate entities and it's the generator that has to pay x cents per KWh for transport.
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Upgrade the grid?? This article is ridiculous. They are saying they can't measure power output of solar generation on homes? Almost every single solar installation out there has a data stream with this info. I think they are just too lazy to collect it.
Ridiculous? Not at all. This was a known issue when my parents were getting an extension built in the 80s and wanted a wind turbine. It wasn't possible to connect it to the grid at all back then due to the risk of substation fires, and the technology available wouldn't have powered anything useful, so they didn't get one. Since then, a lot of money has gone into improving the grid here and developing smart controllers to prevent problems, but many parts of the world still have networks that are physically i
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communication mechanism to control power output.
So what happens when the utility system operator has a block of cheap power switched onto the system and says, "We don't need all this solar right now. Switch it off." Conspiracy theories will spring up all over about how the utility is trying to 'do in' solar. Not that some of these won't be legitimate. Power companies like to buy the cheapest blocks of power first and put the expensive stuff on standby. Smart grids and technology aside, I don't think many solar system owners are going to like their genera