Utilities Face Billions In Losses From Distributed Renewables 280
Lucas123 writes: Over the next 10 years, adoption of distributed power in the form of renewables such as solar power has the potential to reduce revenues to grid utilities by as much as $48 billion in the U.S. and by $75 billion in Europe, according to a new study. The study, by Accenture, revealed that utility executives are more nervous (PDF) about the impact of distributed — or locally generated renewable power — than ever before. 61% of those surveyed this year indicated they expect significant or moderate revenue reductions compared to only 43% last year. The cost of rooftop solar-powered electricity will be on par with prices for common coal or oil-powered generation in two years, and the technology to produce it will only get cheaper, according to a recent report from Deutsche Bank. New technologies, such as more efficient solar cells, are also threatening to increase efficiencies and drive adoption.
The study... (Score:5, Insightful)
...by Accenture
Stopped there.
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Any specific reason for that?
Re:Predictions (Score:5, Funny)
Is that a prediction?
Re: Predictions (Score:5, Insightful)
It should not matter anyways. Utilities such as these should be there to serve the people. They should only worry about covering costs, not making a profit.
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It should not matter anyways. Utilities such as these should be there to serve the people. They should only worry about covering costs, not making a profit.
I mostly agree, though unfortunately that almost by definition means they may need to be nationalized... ie. the one thing that could be done to make them lose even *more* money...
Re: Predictions (Score:5, Insightful)
Why the hell is that unfortunate? Utilities should be nationalized. Their existence and proper functioning is essential to society and shouldn't be subject to the whims of shareholders and career tigers or 'operating at a profit'. Even though I believe nationalized industries do not necessarily have to be less 'efficient' than private ones (the efforts to make them efficient have been meager and successes underreported), I'd rather have inefficient organizations operating at a net loss than ones that will fuck me over left and right to extract every penny they can and don't give a flying fuck about the service they should be there to provide.
This 'socialism bad, free market good'-crap really needs to stop.
Re: Predictions (Score:5, Informative)
On behalf of Canada, I apologize for destroying all your capitalists wet dreams with our mixed economy. Sorry, sorry!
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Utilities such as these should be there to serve the people. They should only worry about covering costs, not making a profit.
A profitable utility is a utility which is covering its costs.
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Ohhh so stupid... There is NO enterprise without PROFIT.
Communism doesn't work. Efficient people are greedy, regulated capitalism exploit greed to benefit the people. Without profit there's no capitalism.
At the same time... Electricity distribution will continue, it will just use a different electricity flow profile, it will be more focused on transporting electricity between consumers instead of from large generating assets to consumers.
Re:Predictions (Score:5, Funny)
I predict that consulting companies face billions in losses as the markets continue to lose faith in their predictions.
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I beg to differ. Anybody can predict the future, and millions of people do it every day, when they buy a lottery ticket, bet on a horse, play the stock market or put money into a retirement plan. What I think you mean is that nobody can accurately or reliably predict the future.
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Utilities such as these should be there to serve the people. They should only worry about covering costs, not making a profit.
They aren't trying to predict a very chaotic system, like the weather, ten years out. Energy production is a pretty staid field and I think it is possible to make predictions and build up likely scenarios.
For example, people aren't going to magically stop driving cars or plugging stuff into wall outlets (unless, of course, you're in some sort of near future apocalyptic scenario) over ten years. And without massive government-level interference, demand and demand trends aren't likely to change that much o
Reduced revenues != lost profit (Score:4, Informative)
reduce revenues to grid utilities
And there are costs associated with generating those revenues (pun intended). Will it tip the utilities into loss? Certainly not to the extent the summary implies.
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Will it tip the utilities into loss? Certainly not to the extent the summary implies.
I would suggest that depends entirely on how many people install solar panels.
Re:Reduced revenues != lost profit (Score:4, Informative)
The graphs in the study are not scaled properly and are misleading. The middle US case, which even has some dubious assumptions, only represents a 5% drop in total demand. It doesn't include important things such as costs to increase capacity if demand actually continues to rise. Most predictions show a continued overall energy demand far greater than predicted to be generated by wind or solar. Status quo of a non-increasing demand is actually good for their profits as they just need to maintain what they have. Solar power which produces during the peak energy hours helps them as well since the peak surges are covered using gas turbines which are very expensive to run (hence the reason for tiered pricing based on time of usage)
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Not really flat, but not growing as it once did. The utilities missed business in the communications game but the UTC.org was moving in the right direction.
Utilities could get in to the solar game themselves, but think more like telcos and other utility monopolies. At some point, all commercial monopolies fail, dying ugly deaths after trying to buy protective legislation.
Oh, wait.....
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Not flat and not growing as fast as before. Most estimates show 1-2% growth per year http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/a... [eia.gov], depending on whose estimates you use and the future oil prices. The sad part is that the loss of US manufacturing to China is partly responsible. Demand in some regions and states like California continues to climb much faster than the US average, driving the higher rates in those areas.
I suspect you'll see co-ops and companies investing in and maintaining local solar farms once the pri
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Utilities could get in to the solar game themselves
They can always get into the solar game later when it makes economic sense to do so. Or a government could pay them a few billion dollars to dabble.
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Good thing nobody has electric heat in the winter or an electric water heater... Oh wait. The grid is not going away. Batteries can't power stuff like that.
Re: Reduced revenues != lost profit (Score:4, Informative)
Do you watch use your computer after dark? There is 400 watts. Watch TV? Do laundry? cook? Run your refrigerator? Have a shower? You numbers are very far off.
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Do you watch use your computer after dark? There is 400 watts.
LOL, on slashdot that's funny. My VMWare hosts which are dual 10 core Xeon's with 384GB of ram, multiple network cards and fiber channel HBA's peak just over 300W:
Last Week-
average 183 W | 625 BTU/hr
peak 301 W | 1027 BTU/hr
Unless you're running dual GPU with a 60" display there's no way you're using 400W.
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Bullshit.
"Night time" is not when you sleep, it's when it's dark. Which in the winter is still 14+ hours for the majority of the population and more for many.
Re:Reduced revenues != lost profit (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, they're kind of in a losing position - raise rates to pay for losses, and people just move to renewables sooner.
It seems pretty clear that generating electricity from free sunlight is going to be cheaper than mining and transporting fossil fuels to a complex facility to burn them. Solar has it's own "moore's law" equivalent that says the price of the panels goes down by 50% every time we double installed capacity. We're currently only powering less than 1% of the world from solar, so there is a lot more room for doubling. You can find a study that goes either way, but supposedly solar is already at parity with coal power in certain regions, and fossil fuels only get more expensive, not less.
Regulated or not, if you're selling the horse and buggy and someone else is selling the automobile, your industry will die.
Re:Reduced revenues != lost profit (Score:4, Informative)
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Ah, my mistake.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Costs do halve roughly every ten years at present rates.
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From $4 per watt in 2008 to $0.5 per watt in 2014 that's a lot more than halving every ten years, I wouldn't be surprised if the price halved again within the next 2-3 years, that would lead to utility solar being cheaper than coal power.
Re:Reduced revenues != lost profit (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, they're kind of in a losing position - raise rates to pay for losses, and people just move to renewables sooner.
It seems pretty clear that generating electricity from free sunlight is going to be cheaper than mining and transporting fossil fuels to a complex facility to burn them.
Even IF green energy becomes cheaper, this doesn't mean distributed power is going away anytime soon,
it just means that large power companies will have to move to green energy sooner.
Economy of scale still applies to solar energy. It's still going to be cheaper for a utility company to set up hundreds
of solar panels and sell the electricity to consumers than it will be for everyone to buy/maintain their own system.
There is a potential saving by being able to eliminate distribution costs so it's possible that local generation could
bet out economy of scale if distribution costs are a significant part. So the question really becomes
what percentage of your electricity price is generation and what percentage is distribution?
The other way that local generation wins is if people start installing solar for reasons other that cost of generation.
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Economy of scale still applies to solar energy. It's still going to be cheaper for a utility company to set up hundreds
of solar panels and sell the electricity to consumers than it will be for everyone to buy/maintain their own system.
That pretty well describes Elon Musk's business plan with Solar City. From what I've seen, it looks like they've already passed the tipping point into self-sustaining progress. Their main problems seem to be keeping up with demand and managing the "growing pains" of such rapid business expansion.
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"So the question really becomes what percentage of your electricity price is generation and what percentage is distribution?"
Admin, grid, profits = 50% of the price you pay for electricity. That means your solar system can be nearly twice as expensive (per watt) as the utilities and still break even.
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Actually, many homeowners putting up solar panels these days are just allowing solar power companies to put them up and then leasing back the power from them. That model is becoming more and more popular. Imagine if a traditional power company bought one of those solar lease companies - they'd now own the solar panels on your roof...
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I doubt the grid will go away anytime soon. The idea of self sufficient power at that level is a ways off. Renewables will grow certainly but a lot of that growth will be tied to the grid to be distributed. Someone will get paid to run the grid at the very least. I expect power companies to also start to build renewable power facilities as well. Your analogy doesn't fit really. They'll still be selling electricity no matter what the source is.
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Well, they're kind of in a losing position - raise rates to pay for losses, and people just move to renewables sooner.
Raising rates is just one option. If they raise the base connection fee, that will not move people to renewables sooner. If they reduce the feed-in tariff, that will actually discourage the adoption of renewables.
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and fossil fuels only get more expensive, not less.
Tell that to the price of oil (plunging, as we speak).
Re:Reduced revenues != lost profit (Score:5, Insightful)
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That's why most utility bills have a "minimum charge for being connected to the grid", and then a consumption component.
Three problems:
1. The connection charge and consumption charges are do not always reflect the actual costs.
2. Another big cost is base load generating capacity. Base load is priced assuming it will run 24/7. But if solar can supply 100% of power on a sunny day, then the base load generator will be sitting idle.
3. Another big cost is dealing with intermittent supplies from renewables. If solar is providing much of the load during peak hours (mid-afternoon), and suddenly some clouds roll in, the power c
Re:Reduced revenues != lost profit (Score:4, Informative)
2. Another big cost is base load generating capacity. Base load is priced assuming it will run 24/7. But if solar can supply 100% of power on a sunny day, then the base load generator will be sitting idle.
Assuming there will be many base load generators at that point in time... Much has been made of the fact the Germans started building new coal plants like crazy, but what gets ignored by conservatives (in the general meaning of the word) is that these are "flex-load" plants, with the old base-load coal plants are being closed down.
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Re:Reduced revenues != lost profit (Score:4, Insightful)
Twenty four hours may not be enough. During a big storm solar will be degraded for much longer than that. Also at higher latitudes winter solar output can be as little as 1-% of summer output. One can either massively over produce in summer or rely on grid power in the winter. If one is relying on winter grid power then the equipment generating that power will only be used a fraction of the year.
but storage costs are on the same downward trajectory as the renewable generation costs.
The problem with local storage is that it is mainly batteries. Batteries are not environmentally friendly.
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Actually, *many* utilities currently have net metering without significant minimum charges (like $5), usually decided by state utility commissions. Honestly who knows right now how well that covers their overhead. I'm sure utility companies claim is doesn't and customers claim it does.
But it's clear that charge is only going to go up as reliable non-renewable power gets more expensive to produce. Hopefully it's offset by the reduced hourly rates due to increased renewable use...
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I do not think you have thought that through.
If any power source becomes cheaper than what we have, the utilities will simply impliment it themselves. The worse things we will see is a drop in rates the utilities pay for net metering or abandoning it altogether.
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With enough votes you can fix the city governments.
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Please provide relevant examples or citations of cities that *require* you to pay for a utility if you don't need it. It would be really interesting to see...
Re:Reduced revenues != lost profit (Score:5, Informative)
Utilities are regulated monopolies when selling to residential consumers. They are forced to sell at fixed power rates that don't vary with demand. Business power though is mostly unregulated. Companies pay for power at different rates every hour. Night time is very cheap but daytime power can be very expensive for a company. Utilities make the bulk of their profit on business power. Solar is going to be pushing power into the grid at peak amounts when peak commercial use is on. This is going to drive down peak power pricing dramatically and may actually flip it to nighttime. So rather than charging a business .30 kwh from 2-5pm with their 10% margin on top is going to get reduced significantly and could even go negative which will wipe out commercial profits almost entirely.
That's what they fear more than anything. If they end up as a company that only makes money on the grid maintenance and not power they won't be worth 10% of what they are today.
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If they end up as a company that only makes money on the grid maintenance and not power they won't be worth 10% of what they are today.
Small government, small utilities? ;-) I actually think that they almost wouldn't deserve to be paid for the maintenance of the current grid, but nothing prevents them from building long-range HVDC conduits that are going to come in very, very handy one day.
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I've noticed a lot of companies are starting to generate their own power. The local Frito-Lay operation burns their used oil to generate power for their plant.
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Here in Australia more power companies are forcing residential customers (especially those with grid-tie solar connections) onto "time of use" metering where you pay more at times when demand is higher.
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Will it tip the utilities into loss? Certainly not to the extent the summary implies.
I don't see how you can possibly be "certain" about it based on the tiny amount of information and unknown future of the industry. Not saying it *has to*, but when you have a HUGE amount of capital tied up in many, many, billions of dollars of power plants that could either become idle or highly underused, it can get pretty hard to turn a profit.
Not that I really care about the profit of a power company for it's own sake - but the problem is renewables just aren't going to meet 100% of the needs any time s
That day (Score:2)
The cost of rooftop solar-powered electricity will be on par with prices for common coal or oil-powered generation in two years
That will be a beautiful day.
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The cost of rooftop solar-powered electricity will be on par with prices for common coal or oil-powered generation in two years
This is only true if you live in an area that current has ridiculously high electricity rates. Places like California and Long Island with rates hitting as high as 25-cent/kwh. It's certainly not true for places like where I live that are running 6.5-cents/kwh. Ironically the high rate places are so high because demand has increased and the utilities are having to recoup the cost of increasing capacity or buying outside power by raising their rates. Decreased daytime demand will probably _lower_ the ra
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"It's certainly not true for places like where I live that are running 6.5-cents/kwh."
Does that include all distribution fees and taxes? Because if it doesn't then your parity rate is likely closer to 10 to 15 cents, which is about the current going rate for large scale PV. Residential it's higher until you remove the price of a roof job. Still not parity, but not far.
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"It's certainly not true for places like where I live that are running 6.5-cents/kwh."
Does that include all distribution fees and taxes? Because if it doesn't then your parity rate is likely closer to 10 to 15 cents, which is about the current going rate for large scale PV. Residential it's higher until you remove the price of a roof job. Still not parity, but not far.
Yeah, if you roll in the service delivery fee I'm at 7.9-cents/kwh.
I have trouble believing a estimate of 15 cents/kwh as the going rate for large scale PV. The lowest estimate I could come up with for lifetime cost per kwh on personal solar setups was 22-cents/kwh. I'm going by the calculations at http://www.nmsea.org/Curriculu... [nmsea.org] and using a much lower panel cost of $2.50/watt (versus the 2013 cost numbers they have) and assuming similar costs for the install labor, batteries, etc. Those calculations
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"Cost" is not the same thing as "Price". We should bear this in mind any time the government is involved - power, oil, health care, internet...
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Does this include the cost of the base load plants that still need to exist in case there is a storm and the solar panels do not work as well? Does this take into account the seasonal variation in electricity production? For example, Germany produces ten times as much solar energy in June as it does in January. Therefore to produce one unit of electricity in January costs ten times as much as in June.
Re:That day (Score:4)
You may like living in the stone age, but most of us would rather be comfortable.
One o the best ways to stay comfortable is to not get your home destroyed by the crazy weather created by your cheap electricity rates.
No change in the discussion I'm sure (Score:2)
Seems to be a lot of very similar articles at the moment.
If you would like to know how this thread will turn just go here - http://hardware.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org]
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Wall street is running a LOT of articles on it right now because it's a tremendous change in the status quo that will affect investors pretty massively. The Motley Fool runs a couple articles a week on all the changes. And yes there are that many changes and developments going on.
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I trust the Fool a hell of a lot more than I trust the WSJ.
An important point left out... (Score:2)
The cost of rooftop solar-powered electricity will be on par with prices for common coal or oil-powered generation in two years, and the technology to produce it will only get cheaper...
They have good reason to be nervous (Score:5, Insightful)
They have good reason to be nervous... They'll still be on the hook to provide full power when solar is producing less than peak capability or isn't producing at all, but there's little chance they'll be allowed to significantly raise their rates. This works out to being required to maintain full generating and transmission capacity with sharply reduced revenue.
Not to mention that very few people installing subsidized and/or cheap solar panels will spend the money to install unsubsidized and expensive battery capacity. That's long been a deep flaw in the thinking of solar power supporters - that they can have their cake and eat it too, the unspoken assumption that the utilities will always be there and will always have the capacity to make up any lack. You get what you pay for folks, TANSTAAFL.
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Re:They have good reason to be nervous (Score:4, Insightful)
It is like the owner of corner grocery charging everyone a dollar extra because he was robbed the previous evening.
Pretty sure grocery stores do pay for repairs/stock loss/insurance through increasing the price of their goods. How else would they do it?
What planet are you from? (Score:2)
What planet are you from? No utility I'm aware of gives away power for free. Not to mention you completely ignored the required to cover periods when solar is providing sufficient power during the day. (Etc... etc...) You have no fucking clue what you're talking about.
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With a bunch of residential solar panels feeding electricity back into the grid during the day when people are not home, the providers can afford to supply electricity at night when they were giving it away for free before.
Who's paying to store this power for supply at night? And without an increase in demand (say from a hoard of electric cars recharging), you just made the oversupply problem even worse.
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Tesla: 85KWh battery.
If a car can have a 85KWh battery then why can't a house have a 10KWh battery? The price of batteries is set to plummet due to mass scale production of electric cars which need the batteries and the billions going into battery R&D.
Most of the cost of Solar PV is in the installation and bureaucracy now.
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I never said they couldn't - I said they'd be expensive. (And 10KWh isn't very much.)
Which means that if you add additional demand for batteries for houses... the prices are going to go right back up. (Supply and demand, simple economics.) And even "plummeted" prices are still very expensive - into five figure
Uh, no. (Score:3, Informative)
Guys, "lost revenue" is not the same as "loss". If I buy widgets for 99 cents and sell them for a buck, and my customers start buying fewer widgets, I'm not losing $1 for each widget they fail to buy from me, but that's exactly what the paper is suggesting.
Now, if my customers can make their own widgets and force me to buy them for $1 (as some states require utilities to do), I can claim that I'm losing money on that deal. But my losses are a penny a widget, not a buck.
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Guys, "lost revenue" is not the same as "loss". If I buy widgets for 99 cents and sell them for a buck, and my customers start buying fewer widgets, I'm not losing $1 for each widget they fail to buy from me, but that's exactly what the paper is suggesting.
That's because you don't understand the difference between fixed costs and variable costs. The cost of the plastic used to make the widget, that's a variable cost. Every widget you buy has this cost built in. Every widget you don't buy saves you this cost.
The cost to pay yourself and your marketing staff, that's a fixed cost. It doesn't matter if you buy zero widgets, or 10000 widgets, you get paid the same, the rent gets paid, the phone bill gets paid, the company computer equipment is amortised.
If you buy
I thought power companies were happy to shed load? (Score:3)
We have a load control transponder here which allows the power company to temporarily shut off the air conditioner and/or water heater, basically creating a "rolling blackout" of just those devices when demand for power exceeds supply.
The fact that they deploy such devices suggests utilities would be happy to shed some load, especially during the brightest time of day when solar works best and air conditioners are working hardest.
So what's the deal? They want us to use more power after all?
The problem with short term thinking (Score:3)
Those utilities are not envisioning the fact that all that power savings that is "eating into their profits" today is energy they can sell to tomorrow's customers. Why? Because populations grow over time, and they grow quite quickly. Instead of bitching about the paper loss they think they are seeing, they should be celebrating the fact that they don't have to build more power-plants and infrastructure for 10-20 years and will be able to serve a much larger base with the same infrastructure. So that 2% increase to the electric bill they apply for in 2024 will mean much, much more actual revenue for them - for exactly the same fixed cost.
But no. Greed. Let's bilk people today because they dare try to do something to save money and stretch current resources by diminishing consumption.
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But they do have to build more infrastructure to handle solar. They may not have to build more plants but they have to change the design of the network to handle inputs from different locations at fluctuating rates.
That said I don't read anything that shows the energy companies here in Australia are overly concerned by solar. In fact most of them push it to their customers. Solar allows them to get electricity at a cheaper price to sell to someone in a different spot. There is money in moving electricit
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Oh? And what would you suggest he should do differently?
Let me guess? Change tax laws with no consultation? Would you suggest Tax laws that were on the very edge of constitutional legality?
Mineral resources are owned by the states. Environmental policy is lead by the states with Federal environmental law being able to be MORE strict not less. The federal government has no ability to ban mining, no ability to ban certain types of power stations, or ability to shut a power station down. So how exactly is
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The problem here
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If it was 1914... (Score:2)
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Except that the Horse and Buggy industry did not have to keep thousands of units on standby for when the automobiles didn't work. The electricity producers have to keep capacity on standby to deal with weather and seasonal variations.
Don't forget batteries for storage (Score:3, Insightful)
http://disinfo.com/2014/12/elo... [disinfo.com]
Yet Musk’s so-called gigafactory may soon become an existential threat to the 100-year-old utility business model. The facility will also churn out stationary battery packs that can be paired with rooftop solar panels to store power. Already, a second company led by Musk, SolarCity Corp. (SCTY), is packaging solar panels and batteries to power California homes and companies including Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) - See more at: http://disinfo.com/2014/12/elo... [disinfo.com]
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Off-topic side note about WalMart. I've done data cable work at more than a few and found that they do one really neat trick when they build: For their main electrical room they haul in a 40' container (before the walls are up) and set it in the back of the store. All the electrical mains come in there through a wall. All the main breakers and the telco demarcation point is in there so if they catch fire the rest of the store has a chance. Off-topic but kind of cool if you're into that thing, which I am
Beautification (Score:2)
Time to tear down all those ugly power lines.
I LMFAO at utilitys (Score:2)
Um, like, what? (Score:2)
Ok, so maybe I haven't spent enough quality time with TFA and the overproduced marketing blurb from Accenture that it was quoting, or maybe I'm the stupid that everyone is with, but it seems like the real meat of the article wasn't there. The whole thing reads like a deep fried twinkie.
So what does "billions of losses" mean in this context? It's certainly more money than my beer budget, or what I'm likely to ever win on the Powerball, but what is it as a percentage of the total revenue of the electricity
Partially driven by hate (Score:2)
I fail to see how they're "losing money" (Score:2)
I can see them losing market share to renewables, but that's not the same as losing money.
There is nothing about legislation anywhere in North America that guarantees the continued success of an obsolete business model. No matter how many congressmen and senators the MPAA and RIAA have bought off.
Demand Is Falling Hard (Score:3)
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Germany and other European nations are quickly eliminating fossil fuels and nuclear.
Take a look at these actual numbers. Nuclear Power down 0.1%. Brown Coal down 3%. Hard coal down 11%. Gas down 18%. Their overall production also decreased by 21 TWhrs or 4%. So any reductions in nuclear or brown coal can be covered by decrease in demand. Sorry but Germany will be using nuclear and fossil fuels for quite some time yet.
Take a look at January 2104 (Page 13). 80% of electricity was produced by conventional sources.
the cascade of stories (Score:3)
....smells suspicious - all the meme-generating about "utilities are terrified of renewables" from multiple sources and multiple directions makes me think that someone's laying the ground work to fight the eventual effort of "Ah, so, now that renewables are so fearsome, I guess we need to pull their subsidies".*
*to be clear, I would love to see the subsidies pulled from ALL power generation, conventional, nuclear, and renewable, and let's actually see which wins out in the marketplace as the cheapest (or, if not precisely cheapest, the best compromise for the bulk of the populace between cheap, sustainable, and clean). But that's a Pollyanna belief; I know there's too much money/power in power for it not to be gamed by every side simultaneously.
Look at the loses this way (Score:2)
All those billions saved by the consumer will be funneled back to the local economy and smaller companies. Those companies will develop new technologies faster than some company only concerned with profits over market innovation. As an added bonus the gov will get a bigger chunk of tax since the little guya will pay way more corporate tax than some big ass corporation.
They should sue! (Score:2)
doubtful progress (Score:2)
After following PV solar developments for over 40 years, I've noticed two things:
#1 - Every month there is a technology breakthrough that will 'revolutionize' the industry.
#2 - After 40 years (40 X 12 = 480 breakthroughs) we are 2X as efficient as before.
The utility industry needn't panic immediately. We'll need a few hundred more revolutionary breakthroughs first.
Oh, and storage technology? You guessed it, many more revolutionary improvements needed. Or maybe we should just return to the original meaning o
Big utilities faces losses! Oh my! (Score:2)
So, what are we supposed to do? Is there some call to protect their interests? Are we supposed to shun solar now because somebody might not make their projected profits? Are we being told that our economic system abhors self sufficiency? For capitalism that appears to be so.
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Just Green propaganda, Utilities aren't scared.
After oil dires up. we shall fold the tents.
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Earning less than expected == loss.
Blame the Democrats for that kind of thnking. Every time some agency gets less of an increase than before they whine about budget cuts, when really it's a cut in the amount of budget increase.
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Yeah, that's like threatening to work harder.
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Rural areas are very much able to go off-grid. I have family who used to own a sheep station 100s of km from the nearest town and they ran for many years off a combination of a diesel generator and batteries with a small wind turbine (this was back before solar panels really became anywhere near viable). Provided all the power needs for the property. No reason why rural properties elsewhere couldn't do the same with solar/renewables and batteries with a generator (running off the same diesel they use to run
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Two things that might balance this though is that someone of less means might have a greater incentive to trim their budget and will be willing to make compromises to achieve th
Re: (Score:2)
It costs the utilities a certain amount to provide you with a grid connection (grid maintanence costs, power station maintanence costs, repairs, wages, capital expenditure etc) no matter how much electricity you use. So why shouldn't the electricity companies charge you this fixed cost directly instead of trying to roll it into the variable per-kWh cost?
My power company charged me for 420kWh of "anytime usage" and 56 days of "service to property charge" on my last bill and there is no reason electricity com