Will Tesla's Rooftop Solar Panels Revolutionize the Power Industry? (teslarati.com) 192
Long-time Slashdot reader 140Mandak262Jamuna brings news of a triumph for a Tesla power project in South Australia: about 900 residential rooftop solar panels, coupled with storage batteries, "all linked up to central control, to form what they are calling a 'Virtual Power Plant.'"
Nothing virtual about it, distributed power plant would have been a better name. That project, designed to link 50,000 homes and their solar panels, is just 2% complete. About 1000 homes. That 2% complete project had enough juice and control to step in, detect the frequency drop, increase power from the batteries and save the day.
But does this have implications for the future? "The opportunity for Virtual Power Plants to reach a large scale will benefit all energy users through added competition to deliver services at reducing prices," says the executive general manager of emerging markets and services for the Australian Energy Market Operator (in the linked-to article above from Teslarati).
The original submission from 140Mandak262Jamuna argues this could be a game-changer for renewable energy: This is unprecedented. The electric utilities have been government-sanctioned monopolies for over a century, protected from competition... The battery bank will stabilize the grid so well, there will be no surge pricing for peaker power plants...
At present the Return-on-Investment comparison between solar/wind storage versus gas turbine power plants include the surge pricing benefit in favor of the gas power plants. It will be gone.
But does this have implications for the future? "The opportunity for Virtual Power Plants to reach a large scale will benefit all energy users through added competition to deliver services at reducing prices," says the executive general manager of emerging markets and services for the Australian Energy Market Operator (in the linked-to article above from Teslarati).
The original submission from 140Mandak262Jamuna argues this could be a game-changer for renewable energy: This is unprecedented. The electric utilities have been government-sanctioned monopolies for over a century, protected from competition... The battery bank will stabilize the grid so well, there will be no surge pricing for peaker power plants...
At present the Return-on-Investment comparison between solar/wind storage versus gas turbine power plants include the surge pricing benefit in favor of the gas power plants. It will be gone.
How much does it cost (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: How much does it cost (Score:2)
Surge pricing will simply increase as surge frequency decreases. We expect far more 9s for the uptime of electricity than these lithium ion batteries can supply with solar. Unless the solar is massively overprovisioned relative to nominal output.
So no, you can't get rid of the cost of backup.
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Batteries are taking over the world. They are providing far longer than 9 second buffer. The grid batteries being planned are of the order of 350 MW for 4 hours. Or 175 MW for 4 hours. They react in milliseconds but have juice measured in GWh.
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They're not saying '9 seconds' they're saying 'multiple nines' -- as in uptime reliability; eg 99 vs 99.9
I made the same mistake at first.
Re: How much does it cost (Score:4, Interesting)
Los Angeles County (just the county, not the greater LA area, or the State) used about 68 TWh of energy in 2018 [ca.gov]. Break that down, it's about a (68000 / 365/ 24) 7.8GWh consumption.
That 1.4 GWh capacity? Yeah - that's a (1.4/7.8 * 60) 10 minute supply. We'll need around (60/10 * 4) 24 times that amount, for 4 hours, for just Los Angeles County.
Given that the Gigafactory builds about 24 GWh of batteries per year, we'll need around (24 * 1.4 / 24) 1.4 YEARS of 100% dedicated output from that factory for just 4 hours for LA County.
Gonna take a while to actually make a dent in the power grid, and to take over the world.
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Amazing. LA County has 3.5 million housing units. About half of those are "detached" units, or what we think of as houses. Imagine if half of the houses were in neighborhoods with "virtual power plants." Sure, it'll take time to make a dent, but what an amazing dent it will be.
And, in the years that it will take for this to be normal, we'll most assuredly have new advances that make it even easier to distribute power production.
Also, are we even calculating the loss in power due to transmission from cen
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Yeah, as far as I can tell, solar panels are already cheap enough, in many places they are generating cost effective power.
Solar panels are cheap. The problem is storage. Peak power demand is 4-7pm, when the sun is low or already set.
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How much of that is because existing solar panels are reducing demand earlier in the afternoon?
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If everyone would just agree to charge their Tesla cars between 8am and 4pm
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It does not matter when actually the peak is.
Usually you have two peaks anyway, and a plateau in between.
If you can contribute with solar power to that plateau it is already a nice win. If you actually overproduce and can store something for the following peak, even better.
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Apparently it's the same price, so anybody building a home or replacing their roof would be crazy not to.
Here in California, there is no choice. Solar roofs are mandatory on all new construction.
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Propane generators have always been things you can set up in a day, rooftop solar is a more complex long-term investment. You don't do solar in a hurry.
Mandating solar on new homes still leaves open competition for the places 40 million people currently live in, namely already-constructed buildings. The problem is when you create a surge of demand with legislation it's going to take a few years for the supply to catch up. Until the supply catches up, solar installers can keep busy with new homes and forget
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The problem is when you create a surge of demand with legislation ...
It is not much of a surge. There is very little new construction of anything in California. The NIMBYs and BANANAs don't allow it.
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Yeah, only 51,000 new homes were approved for construction in the first six months of 2019, hardly any building going on at all! /s
Down slightly from last year, but then last year was a record high.
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Keep in mind that we have no idea what Mr. Adams actually told the solar installers, it's likely he didn't do his homework first so really had no idea what he actually wanted. My dad was a remodeler and spent far too much time over the years with prospective customers who called him for an estimate, only to find when he got there that they had no idea what they really wanted or how much they could even afford to spend. The demand is such right now that the installers don't have the time for that kind of h
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Battery storage removes the most obvious disadvantage of wind and solar. They are intermittent. So the ability to store will greatly make them viable. If the cost is low enough, of course.
But storage will hurt solar/wind in the short run.
Wind/solar is not yet cheaper than base load power plants running on natural gas. They make about 7.2 TWh of electricity a day. The
Re:How much does it cost (Score:5, Interesting)
Coal is gone, coal is dead.
Coal is dying in America.
Elsewhere it is alive and well. Dozens of coal plants are under construction in India, and many more in Africa.
These plants have a productive lifetime of 60 years.
Stopping these new coal plants should be our top priority. A solar panel installed on a roof in India will offset WAY more CO2 than a solar panel installed in America.
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The nation is on track to cap installed coal power capacity at 1,100 gigawatts by 2020. However, its coal and power industry groups are proposing further expansion to capacity of 1,200 to 1,400 gigawatts by 2035
Meaning their coal capacity is already more than 6 times their solar capacity, and it's a growing rift. Factor in a reasonable capacity factor [wikipedia.org] for solar of 25% (generous) and 60% for coal (conservative) and we see that China not only gets about 15 times more power from coal than solar, but that it's share of electricity from coal is expanding, not shrinking.
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Right on man! When do send in the troops?!
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A solar panel installed on a roof in India will offset WAY more CO2 than a solar panel installed in America. ...
As a typical american uses 10 times as much power as a typical indian, that calculation is a bit more complex
Bottom line: 1GWh power produced by solar replaces 1GWh equivalent of CO2. Does not matter at which place it is build.
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First ones to take advantage of battery will be these base load plants they will be able to run at full throttle all day churning out maximum capacity
That is the definition of base load. Plants that run 24/365 on maximum capacity. So, adding solar - or batteries, will reduce the need of base load plants, not make them in any way more effective.
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It is pretty cost competitive, although $/MW of grid-scale solar is much lower than distributed rooftop solar. You need to factor in other benefits to make the economics work— lower reliance on a high reliability grid, lower total infrastructure cost, ability to island, etc.
As for existing coal or gas, it already beats the operating economics.
A very interesting test case to watch will be what happens with PG if it gets broken into dozens of regional utilities there could be significant change to how w
No cost is not the issue at all (Score:2)
It's how good it looks. Have you taken a lok at a tesla roof? fuck ya, i'd buy one for looks if they were affordable. And surprise, they are when you consider the pay back on the solar. People think about this ecatly backwards. They look at the pay back on the the solare, and if you do that you find it's not as good as a conventional butt ugly conventional framred solar panel. And even then it's marginal and too long a duration to amortize for most people. The claim is it makes your house worht more
Re: How much does it cost (Score:2)
Re: How much does it cost (Score:5, Informative)
Why, in fact yes it does, indirectly. It is how that C02 is generated, it just doesn't exist from no where, it is generated by burning really quite toxic fossil fuels, all sorts of carcinogens are created during that combustion process when carbon monoxide (a lethal gas) and carbon dioxide (a less lethal gas) nitrous oxides and many other pollutants are generated.
So in metropolitan areas with high traffic and high population density, which way do you think the people living there will start to demand, keep putting up with the toxic fossil fuellers or demand the air they breathe be much cleaner and require only electric vehicles be used in metropolitan areas. Cleaner air, nicer to walk there, a lot quieter no sounds of combustion, higher property values, gentrified high walk ability cities, huge improvements in quality of life and property values.
Fossil fuellers are fucked because electrics are good enough now, they still will get better but quite simply they are good enough now and other forces of socio-economics will now force further changes due to better socio-economic outcomes with those changes, all electric metropolitan areas, zero burning, huge improvement in quality of life and with that a major improvement in property values. To take that into account in proper future planning, all future buildings should be topped off with 20% floors as residential, to provide more residential space, more evenly distributed across now much clean and far more breathable cities.
The roofs of the burbs of course is where a lot of energy for the cities would be generated, some roof design probably required to maximise energy generation potential and cheaper longer life batteries (weight or size not a consideration for a high capacity long life home battery and grid battery, one of each, surplus goes to the grid battery).
They are coming for your Weber grill (Score:2, Funny)
They won't just be coming for your gas-powered car.
They will be after your Weber grill. And the meat that you put on that grill. Your car is just the beginning.
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it is generated by burning really quite toxic fossil fuels, all sorts of carcinogens are created during that combustion process when carbon monoxide (a lethal gas) and carbon dioxide (a less lethal gas) nitrous oxides and many other pollutants are generated. ...
And all that "nasty stuff" is filtered out in scrubbers, since the late 1970s.
CO is converted to CO2 in catalyzer
Go figure ...
The main polluters are cars and even more ships ... not power plants.
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"h, CO2 emissions cause cancer now, do they?"
Maybe not directly but..
Burning coal (for power generation) causes both CO2 emissions and cancer.
CO2 emissions cause Climate Change
Climate Change causes (among many other things) more wildfires
Smoke from wildfires causes cancer.
Re: How much does it cost (Score:2)
Dumbass.
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Not in the amount they do at the moment ... Congo, Amazon, Australia, last year: Germany.
The dumbass seems to be you, or you are simply very bad out of the loop.
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The main thing that matters is cost.
No. The main thing that matters is CO2 emissions. Money isn't going to cure your cancer.
The thing that will actually cause change is cost.
The change could be due solar eventually naturally costing less than coal, or via artificial cost increases in CO2 producers (a carbon tax). Either way, cost will be the driver.
Re:How much does it cost (Score:5, Insightful)
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if people would be traditional they wouldn't be saying stuff that implies that co2 would be causing cancer directly.
look, if you want rational people to not buy big ass honking gas guzzler cars, tax them higher based on co2 emissions. works fine for most countries. that's rational.
also - more than any money could ever be? you spend all your money running at doctors? unlikely.
Costs are the main thing holding up fossil fuel use. it's so frigging cheap. that tax money that comes form it being taxed 100%-500+%
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If people were rational, cost shouldn't be the driver.
People that claim "money doesn't matter", shouldn't criticize others for being irrational.
Most CO2 emission growth is in India and Africa, where new coal plants are currently under construction. Good luck convincing Africans who can barely afford to feed their kids that money doesn't matter.
Money represents physical resources and is by far the best way to choose between alternatives. If wind costs less than solar+battery, then we can remove more CO2 with wind, and putting resources into solar may be misgu
Re:How much does it cost (Score:5, Insightful)
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Solar power only exists outside of pocket calculators and communications satellites because the government hands out money for people to buy it.
Operators of solar power installations in countries around the world where there are no subsidies would disagree.
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Most CO2 emission growth is in India and Africa, where new coal plants are currently under construction. Good luck convincing Africans who can barely afford to feed their kids that money doesn't matter.
Which is stupid, since the fuel needs to be imported. It's not a local choice, though. These things are put up with bribes from the IMF/World Bank/etc. to deliberately trap the country in a cycle of unending debt that facilitates the theft of their natural resources and impoverishes the population. If you don't believe me I would recommend perusing 'Secrets of the American Empire' by John Perkins, whose job used to be to make these "development" packages possible until he accidentally grew a conscience.
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Good luck convincing Africans who can barely afford to feed their kids that money doesn't matter.
those africans only exist in war torn regions like south Sudan or Somalia. And no one is building coal plants there.
South Australia is very sunny but not so windy, Depends what you call south Australia. I would start at the South coast ... which is super windy.
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Do you have rooftop solar?
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Re: How much does it cost (Score:2)
OPM is how leftists pay for all their failures.
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Here's what rational people that studied the problem of energy today have told me - we need to put a price on pollution in all forms (and any other externality that is currently under-priced) so that the market has more incentive to avoid them. If your activities cause $x amount of damage to the rest of us, you should be paying $x amount to all of us.
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If that were true you'd never see "coal rollers".
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nuclear a better near term base load option. A nuclear plant can't change loads quickly, but with that battery capacity it may not need to. ... they are the base on which the load following and balancing plants are orchestrated. Can't be so hard to grasp.
Base load plants don't change load. That is why they are called base load
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Re: How much does it cost (Score:2)
It's easiest to just compare to cost of fuel. Assuming we stop using coal for the most part, the fuel savings a wind/solar install creates for a natural gas power plant over its economic life needs to pay for it (plus a bit for extra grid infrastructure). Then wind/solar will truly be interesting without subsidy. I think they are close in Australia.
apart from very short duration peaking I doubt dedicated batteries are economical. Using say 20% of electric car batteries might be, if owners go along with it (
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The plan is not to use batteries for peak demand.
That is already covered by current balancing power plants and reserve power plants.
They are intended to suck up surplus power and by that help balancing into the other direction.
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With short duration peaking I mean covering the time it takes for a hydro/gas-turbine power plant to spool up.
As I said, I don't think batteries without subsidy are useful for more than that.
Screw the power companies... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well it could be done, but ONLY if each user cooperates.
And I am sure the established power companies will use every dirty trick in the book that can think of or dream up to fight this tooth and nail.
They will start by siting safety concerns, and if that doesn't work they will go to their well paid elected representatives to pass some sort of regulation or law making the whole process either outright illegal or put up so MANY barriers as to make it financially impossible for the regular home owner.
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Unfortunately, that "Reduce any cash payments for power given back to the grid." becomes quite justifiable when the proportion of customers with solar power (or wind power) rises. I forget the exact numbers I've heard, but at a certain level they start destabilizing the grid. This *can* be handled, if the grid adds extra storage facilities, but those aren't free.
I have heard claims that this limit exists because the grid was designed to have have customers generating power...but I couldn't evaluate those
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Will Tesla's xxx Revolutionize? (Score:2, Insightful)
No.
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It should but not likely (Score:3)
there are multiple reasons for this.
Regulatory, Many states have a mandatory connection to the public grid or you house gets condemned, even if you can prove you can supply power to your residence with greater uptime than your power-company that you experience the occasional power-outage with to mild to severe degrees. There is also a good reason to make sure that your power must fail when the grid fails so that workers can safely work on de-energized lines. Yes there are solutions to this.
The Cost, like someone else posted, the cost to break into solar is going to be a major factor, if it is going to take more than 10 years for the investment to pay off many people will not jump on it. Many power companies have gamed the system and getting charge backs on the excess power you generate is likely a losing proposition. There is a literal mine field of contracts and bullshit where solar power is concerned and you really have to do your homework to avoid being screwed.
Support, how many people could manage a DIY power system, regardless of the form it takes? Most people know that 120v comes out of their wall socket in the USA but they don't really know what AMP or WATT means or frequency with AC. They barely even understand what a volt is. They are not going to want to take care of it themselves, but to be honest this technically does not prevent a power revolution, though it is a factor.
And finally the grid itself... regardless of how power is generated someone or something is going to have to maintain a grid because some locations cannot generate enough power to fully support their own loads while other locations can generate more power than their current loads require. Managing that is not going to be a simple task though it will not be excessively difficult either.
If we were an intelligent nation we would be hip deep in a fully distribution electrical grid with battery backup and redundancy by now... but just like with everything else there is this idea of economic feasibility, which is an "emotionally driven" price just like everything else including the price on your home. If we cannot realize this infrastructure though the lens of a Monopolistic Power company we are likely not going to adopt it for many reasons.
Re:It should but not likely (Score:5, Interesting)
the cost to break into solar is going to be a major factor, if it is going to take more than 10 years for the investment to pay off many people will not jump on it.
Just added solar to my boat and disconnected the shore power. It will take 1.5 years to pay for the panels, fittings and installation, that is a lot less than 10 years. So people will jump on it or what?
In fact, nearly ever boat owner I know is talking about installing some kind of solar in the near future, if they have not already done so. Note that shore power is supplied at the same rate as residential power, so this isn't about somebody's monopoly on shore power.
Re:It should but not likely (Score:5, Informative)
Did you take into account capacity factor [wikipedia.org]? That factors in things like night, bad weather, angle of the sun as it moves across the sky, etc. Omitting capacity factor is the #1 mistake I see people make when calculating power generation and payback time for solar panels. They just use the rated generating capacity of the panel in their calculation. Unfortunately that wattage is only attained on a clear, sunny day at noon with the panel aimed directly at the sun. At all other times and conditions, the panel produces less wattage.
For non-tracking PV panels, the average capacity factor for continental U.S. latitudes is about 0.145. That is, a 100 Watt solar panel will produce an average of 14.5 Watts over a year. For northern Europe and Canada latitutdes, it's about 0.10. The high for the continental U.S. is about 0.195 for the desert southwest.
At a nominal electricity cost of 12 cents/kWh, your 1.5 year (13140 hours) payback time would then mean a 100 Watt panel cost you
I seriously doubt you got solar installed on your boat for 23 cents per Watt of capacity. So more than likely you didn't account for capacity factor. If we divide by capacity factor, your 1.5 year payback time is actually 10.3 years. Almost exactly what OP gave as the average. (To avoid future errors, I strongly recommend you use the PWatts site [nrel.gov] to do your solar calculations for you. It properly accounts for a host of oft-overlooked things like capacity factor.)
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Good argument, except that shore power hookup is not metered, rather it is charged at the maximum consumption of the (normally 15 amp, 100 volt) power connection. So I erred in my initial comparison with residential power, however I did not err in my payback estimation. I save $55 per month, full stop. Payback in 18 months.
As a fringe benefit, I avoid the risk of electrocuting myself or others if something goes wrong with my 110 volt connection, and things do go wrong. [proboat.com] Pretty much impossible to kill yoursel
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Err, 15 amp, *110* volt power connection.
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Omitting capacity factor is the #1 mistake I see people make when calculating power generation and payback time for solar panels.
You got it just opposite.
Using capacity factors, especially in discussions, is the #1 mistake people do.
If you want to install solar power, you for fuck sake measure the angles. Get a table of solar distribution over the year, and narrow down your expected production into a +/- 2% range of true production. You can not do that with capacity factors, especially not if you get stupid
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In the long run, the batteries will remove the peak load charges for big customers. Malls and office complexes might find it cheaper to buy batter banks and charge them steadily using low rates overnight, use them during the peak A/C load and avoid paying peak load charges and peak prices. So the utility will lose some revenue.
People who can afford to buy enough batteries and solar to go off the grid are
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"Malls and office complexes might find it cheaper to buy batter banks and charge them steadily using low rates overnight,"
Power for Business and Industrial is a different ballgame. Those buildings are going to pull in far more juice than residential buildings and definitely require grid electricity and unless we develop some radical new PV tech it is not likely they will be contributors to the grid and even though residential can contribute to the grid it will not be in sufficient quantities to support bus
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Total BS. All the “problems” have long been solved. Some states may require a utility connection for certificate of occupancy, but none force that as an ongoing expense.
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https://preppingplanet.com/off... [preppingplanet.com]
Call those guys up and tell them that they are total BS.
"Off grid living legal states: The off grid living legal states are, Alaska, Nevada, Montana, Texas, Tennesse, Montana, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Missouri, Ohio, Arizona, Hawaii, and Washington. While some states will encourage you to live off the grid others outright will make it impossible to do it legally.
In most states living off the grid might be illegal, however, there are some states with more relaxed laws where yo
But what about profits? (Score:5, Informative)
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Beware of propaganda, America is a big place and there is probably always some place where (anything) is done poorly. That doesn't mean that the statement is generally true; in fact, the vast majority of Americans can even receive tax incentives for investing in distributed solar.
My own utility allows anybody with a modern digital service meter to do micro-generation, using any approved inverter from a long list that includes all the common brands and models. They pay at wholesale rate. You can run solar, o
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Many people were concerned when the pro-renewable energy Labor government was replaced by the ostensibly climate-change denialist Liberals (at least Federally). But in this case the Libs have continued strong support for renewables. Great to see this issue is finally bi-partisan.
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This didn't smell right so I did a search. This is what I found. https://electrek.co/2017/09/19... [electrek.co]
So, you are incorrect.
You found a single example of a person who tried to go off grid and wound up in court for two years, probably with legal fees in the 5 to 6 digit range and while she won, that’s only for that one city/county. It’s still functionally illegal to be off grid in residential areas in Florida [cufsf.org], as well as most of the US. So you are wrong.
itâ(TM)s illegal to power your house during power outages with solar,
Is it illegal to get power from a generator too? I call bullshit on this. Another search result that backs up my first link and goes into more detail on matters of using solar power during utility outages. https://www.snopes.com/fact-ch... [snopes.com]
Lobbyists have literally made it illegal to switch your house off from the grid to use solar panels. [boingboing.net]
and itâ(TM)s a myth that rooftop solar or distributed residential production is an irreconcilable danger to repair crews.
I made no such claim. I merely pointed out that a rooftop solar panel is required to shutdown if configured to feed power to the grid. This automatic disconnect is how danger to repair crews is mitigated. A system not configured to backfeed power is not required to shutdown, because this configuration poses no hazard to the repair crews. Much of this is explained in that Snopes article linked above.
Local utilities might not like it if someone goes off grid but there is nothing legal they can do about it. They can file a claim with the city but this only means the homeowner that wants to go off grid has to prove that they have a sufficient means to keep their home safe to live in. People smart enough to do their research to install solar panels on their roof should know this already. The people making these false claims in the news are ignorant, or willing to lie to make the utility look bad. News agencies aren't afraid to publish these lies because they have enough lawyers paid by newspaper subscriptions and web clicks to argue that they reported the truth. The truth being some asshole lied to the reporter that the electric utility was forcing him to have a grid connection.
Snopes is full of corporate shilling and not the actual fact
Slashdot question.. Answer is NO (Score:5, Insightful)
When a title is a question, the easy answer is "NO". The probable answer is also "NO". The best answer is "Probably not." The most interesting answer is "Probably not, but..."
So the title question reduces the answer to be solar panels from Tesla, AND installed on roofs, AND that they will "revolutionize" the power industry. That is a tiny fraction of the solar industry. So the answer is "NO".
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Betteridge's law of headlines, my friend.
You say you want a revolution... (Score:2)
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Most places have a "connect" fee and a "usage" fee. Even you generate 100% of your own energy you still pay for the connection.
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The main users of the grid pay: the industry and other commerce!
Or do you really think the few house holds are the reason you have a grid in your country?
At least they're placing it on the right place (Score:2)
Instead of you know, trying to make roads out of the thing.
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No until power storage is cheaper (Score:2)
But it still doesn't address the biggest issue with renewables: how to store all that power generated after the Sun sets and the wind conditions aren't optimum. We need as much research into developing cheaper means of power storage before renewables become REALLY viable.
Old news, already common practice (Score:2)
Solar panels are going up on roof tops at a fast rate in Australia. Some government subsidy and no snow to deal with.
The all come with an inverter that pushes excess power back to the grid.
They are profitable because of power saved, at retail price which is about 4 times wholesale prices.
No idea why you would want some sort of centeralised control.
Storage batteries are nonsense (Score:2)
P.S. Storage batteries are not economical yet. For the individual household, they might be worthwhile soon, because the are saving the purchase of electricity at the retail price, not the wholesale price.
For large scale they are nonsense. We still produce most of our day time power by coal, so no storage necessary. Eventually we would need more storage, for which pumped hydro looks good. But it is unlikely that Australia will ever actually reduce its carbon emissions so that is academic.
We like it hot
Utilities solar death spiral (Score:3)
Virtual vs. Distributed (Score:2)
Nothing virtual about it, distributed power plant would have been a better name. ... what exactly would a distributed plant be?
The term "virtual power plant" is well established in the industry. That is a virtual power plant and not a distributed one
The point is in day ahead planning, the whole thing is considered to be one plant. Depending on forecasts, they use a typical "load curve" to make a prognosis what this "virtual plant" will be producing the next day, at which hour, usually actually in quarter
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If it's cloudy and windy, you just need to diversify your power generation. Sure, it doubles the payoff time, but the days that are cloudy and still are few and far between.
More broadly, if we can do this and distribute the power over a large enough geographic area, we can run solely on renewables. There's already been a study which showed that Texas can run on wind alone. Between the pan handle and the coast, there's always a LOT of wind somewhere in Texas. Add in solar, and some batteries, and you actuall
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Tell that to anyone who lives in a foggy place, San Francisco for example.
The reality is that we should not be looking for one size fits all solutions. We should be pursuing a variety of clean energy options and encouraging localities and individuals to choose the correct one for their circumstances.
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Same thing here. During the winter you can go a week or two without seeing the sun. The people who invested in solar panels here will have them paid off by the year 2100 or so...
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is home appliances also be available in 12 volt DC also making the DC to AC inverter unnecessary,
Do you own stock in a copper mine?
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You may disagree ... (Score:2)
... but it sure as hell was no trolling.
What do you do on /., when the troll has the mod points?
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If you think that, then good luck in applying for a job in a power company.
It is not a micro grid, and no one claimed hat.
It is two virtual power plants:
a) a solar plant
b) a battery storage, useable as reserve power plant or balancing plant - at current stage obviously only long enough to have time another coal/gas plant can be powered up or adjust load