After Blackouts, Texas Became a Top State for New Solar Installations as Thousands Install Microgrids (houstonchronicle.com) 60
"Thousands of Texans who have turned to solar power and battery storage, creating so-called microgrids, as a solution to blackouts," reports the Houston Chronicle.
"With a venture creating the same little power plants for apartment buildings, Texas has become a national leader in residential solar power installations." From 2019 to 2020, small-scale solar capacity in Texas grew by 63 percent, to 1,093 megawatts from 670 megawatts, according to the Energy Information Administration. In the first three quarters of 2021, another 250 megawatts of residential solar were installed in the state, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. In last year's third quarter alone, Texas ranked second behind California in the amount of power from new installations during the period, the industry's Washington, D.C. trade group said.
Surging demand for residential solar power in Texas after the February 2021 freeze put pressure on installers to keep up, said Abigail Hopper, president and CEO of the association. The race to buy new rooftop panels has slowed some, she said, but Texas remains among the top three states for new installations. And the shrinking price of solar cells will help support its growing popularity, Hopper said.
"I think as more and more Americans really struggle with the impact of severe weather — everything from fires, the cold, hurricanes, droughts — and see the impacts on power and power outages, you're going to continue to see folks looking for resiliency," Hopper said.
"With a venture creating the same little power plants for apartment buildings, Texas has become a national leader in residential solar power installations." From 2019 to 2020, small-scale solar capacity in Texas grew by 63 percent, to 1,093 megawatts from 670 megawatts, according to the Energy Information Administration. In the first three quarters of 2021, another 250 megawatts of residential solar were installed in the state, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. In last year's third quarter alone, Texas ranked second behind California in the amount of power from new installations during the period, the industry's Washington, D.C. trade group said.
Surging demand for residential solar power in Texas after the February 2021 freeze put pressure on installers to keep up, said Abigail Hopper, president and CEO of the association. The race to buy new rooftop panels has slowed some, she said, but Texas remains among the top three states for new installations. And the shrinking price of solar cells will help support its growing popularity, Hopper said.
"I think as more and more Americans really struggle with the impact of severe weather — everything from fires, the cold, hurricanes, droughts — and see the impacts on power and power outages, you're going to continue to see folks looking for resiliency," Hopper said.
Isn’t this basically a dupe.. (Score:2)
..of the previous story?
It’s getting a little silly when the editors aren’t even posting a few buffer stories between the dupes.
Re: (Score:3)
and I don't get these stories that are "collapsed" at random, or the need to click on the title and then on the comment count to actually get into the comments section of it for those.
Re:Isn’t this basically a dupe.. (Score:5, Funny)
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They'll follow Florida (Score:5, Informative)
As more people adopt solar for their homes, the power companies won't sit idly by and lose millions of dollars each year. Instead, they'll adopt monthly fees [clickorlando.com] to solar users and/or reduce or eliminate net-metering to solar customers. In short, they'll kill the industry [cnn.com] and the jobs which go with it.
Re:They'll follow Florida (Score:5, Insightful)
they'll adopt monthly fees to solar users and/or reduce or eliminate net-metering to solar customers.
Oh, if only. That would simply drive people to go 100% off-grid even faster.
Nope, the way the power companies are going to approach this is to bribe gov't officials into enforcing laws that REQUIRE people to connect to the power grid whether they want it or not. That, and lots of building code beauracracy (permits, fees, and fines) to badger the people attempting to go off-grid.
Re:They'll follow Florida (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, if only. That would simply drive people to go 100% off-grid even faster.
Unless you’re very rural, going 100% off grid is illegal [insteading.com] and they will eventually even stop all resale [theguardian.com]. Solar panels already cost far too much in the US compared to the rest of the world due to excessive tariffs [seia.org] to “protect American production companies” despite them supplying under 1% of demand. America is going to have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century because the government is dead set on making it unaffordable no matter what it costs.
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It's because developing a domestic energy industry for tomorrow is more important than getting the cheapest junk products today. Every country on the planet uses tariffs to protect their important domestic industries. Japan, Germany, China, Canada, Mexico. Maybe they're right and America is wrong. Crazy, I know.
It's because developing a domestic energy industry for tomorrow is more important than getting the cheapest junk products today. Every country on the planet uses tariffs to protect their important domestic industries. Japan, Germany, China, Canada, Mexico. Maybe they're right and America is wrong. Crazy, I know.
Wrong. Making solar panels cost 50% more than the rest of the world limits installation and adoption shrinking the markets domestically while preventing any export greatly reducing growth and market share potential. This only hurts the very growth its supposedly meant to protect. The overall cost in jobs and the hit to the economy makes it completely not worth it even down to the personal level of citizens lives. If instead you were to give subsidy for American companies to lower the costs and do so unde
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Bull. You're in the crew who were screaming how evil it was of the Obama administration to support solar. And who increased the tariffs - oh, that's right, it was IQ "trade wars are easy to win" 45.
The actual price on solar panels keeps dropping.
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good gods, your trump-addled minds don't bother with facts or data AT ALL, do they?
If your dear leader "won the trade war" ... then biden is STILL winning it:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/26/politics/china-tariffs-biden-policy/index.html
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-04/biden-extends-trump-solar-tariffs-with-key-exemption
But then, your minds don't get much past "(R) == GOOD!, (D) == BAD!", now do they?
Even when the people with the different letters behind their names are doing THE EXACT SAME
I'm impressed (Score:2)
That first link was astounding.
No, not the content.
Rather, that even after a year with littlesnitch, it popped up with at least nine trackers that I found myself looking up and slapping down . . .
Re:They'll follow Florida (Score:4, Interesting)
I’ve got FPL and my power bill is never less than $130, and frequently goes north of $250 in the summer. Can’t install solar because reasons*. I find it very difficult to feel sympathy for someone who has the income to afford a home with a PV system large enough to offset their entire electrical usage, and they’re miffed over a $30 electric bill. I’d be downright thrilled if ANY of my utility bills were that cheap.
* including: you have to own a site-built home, the system must be installed by a licensed and approved solar contractor if you want to grid tie, and it’s still incredibly expensive if you’re on a tight budget.
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I've got FPL and my power bill is never less than $130, and frequently goes north of $250 in the summer. Can't install solar because reasons*.
So go the other way around and install stuff that will reduce your energy consumption.
Dig a trench and bury some pipes in the ground to make use of geo-thermal heating/cooling so your heat pump doesn't have to work so hard. Next time your heat pump dies, buy some 38 SEER high efficiency mini-splits. They're super quiet and brought my power consumption WAY down.
Move any heat producing appliances you can outdoors or at least into rooms that you don't run the A/C so hard. Clothes dryers not only create a lot o
Re:They'll follow Florida (Score:5, Informative)
This is a safety issue, actually. When there's a blackout in your area, the utility has to send someone around to fix it, and there are plenty of cases where idiots backfeed their generator - they plug their house into the generator using a suicide cable and forget to cut the main breaker, backfeeding the generator. That power then goes up to the transformer and gets transformed into the distribution voltage (around 7200V). If you're trying to clear a branch off some trees, the last thing you want is for a dead line to be electrified by someone backfeeding.
Sure, there are a lot of precautions, including grounding, equitpotential and line tying (basically, all phases are tried together and grounded on both sides of the work area. This makes it safe, but it also means clearing a branch now takes 45 minutes instead of 5. But it's better than killing someone.
And demonstrations have shown that even when all this happens, no breaker will trip - none of the house breakers will trip, the generator breaker wouldn't trip, and none of the distribution fuses or other things will trip either.
So if you have a generator, they do make proper generator hookups with physical lockouts that let you turn the main breaker or generator breakers off, but won't let you turn both on - one must always be off to turn the other on.
With solar, the same thing applies, but you have the added complication that you need to feed power to the grid. So you have the odd case where you have to feed power to the grid, and also make sure you're not backfeeding the power in case the power goes out.
This is why inverters are so sophisticated - because they are line-sensing inverters. They sense the phase of the AC and make sure when they feed power, the phase is in line. Some can also even detect reactive power and apply power properly (this can make the power grid more robust but reducing reactive power and bringing everything back in phase). But they also detect if there is line frequency - if the line frequency disappears, they have to shut down to avoid backfeeding problems.
If you opt for a single inverter system over a microinverter system, or you go for a full power management center, you can have the ability to have an "emergency bus" - a power sub-panel where power can be provided either by solar or mains - the inverter will feed the sub-panel directly, using solar when it can, augmenting with grid when it can't. If there is too much power, the excess is pumped to the grid like usual. If there is a blackout and the solar is providing enough power, the sub-panel will be powered completely by solar so that panel can be for essential loads like fridges and other things that should remain powered. Home battery storage systems like Tesla Powerwall also do the same thing - they will take power from mains and feed a essential bus sub-panel, providing power from the grid or batteries as needed,
Of course, the most sophisticated system will be a power management center where grid power, solar power, and battery power is all brought to one location and it's managed from there - you can designate circuits as always on, grid/solar only and other things, and the system can optimize for economy - using solar for as much as possible, charging the battery, and so on. The fancy ones even have provisions for electric car support - letting the car charge at a rate that consumes excess solar energy so you're basically getting it all for free.
Problem is, these are issues that do require a proper solar contractor to properly install because you don't want your system to accidentally create a backfeed situation.
Re:They'll follow Florida (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a problem being seen in California here. The subsidies for solar are essentially being paid for by the bills from non-solar customers. And solar is being bought almost exclusively by people with above average income. Which means overall, rich people are paying less than poor people. If you cut back on subsidies though, then it takes a much longer time for solar to pay for itself (and many customers want this, they're not getting solar to be good citizens).
Utilities should figure out how to separate costs; cost for production is one part of the bill, and cost for creating and maintaining power lines is a second part of the bill. But it won't happen, the utilities won't voluntarily let power reduction or safety measures reduce their profits. Which is why the public utility commissions give them a fixed income, which means that the more energy they save the higher the profits they get. The PUC needs to step up and support solar here. The for-profit model needs fixing.
Re:They'll follow Florida (Score:4, Interesting)
I hate to support the utilities, but I’ll give them a little leway here: I have an 8kW PV system that offsets 120% of my annual energy consumption. I am lucky to be on a legacy net metering plan. My average power consumption is ~1kW, which is essentially what a utility designs their infrastructure for. My neighborhood has ~25 homes served from a single 25kVA transformer. That means when I am solar power, I am using ~25% of the transformer’s capacity. About half of the other homes also have solar, and nobody has batteries. So, during the day, the transformer is loaded at about 200% of its nameplate, which will cut its life down to maybe 10 years.
For the utility to remedy this on their end they need to install ~3 more transformers and split up the 120/240V network a bit. Without any additional revenue.
For me to remedy this I need to add about 20kWh of battery, which would allow me to self-consume my solar plus export at a maximum of ~1kW, which essentially makes me look like a normal (small) customer to the utility. But my utility bill won’t change either.
I’ll do it for reduced grid dependence, but that lack of an economic justification is a hard pill for most people to stomach.
Re:They'll follow Florida (Score:5, Informative)
My neighborhood has ~25 homes served from a single 25kVA transformer. That means when I am solar power, I am using ~25% of the transformerâ(TM)s capacity. About half of the other homes also have solar, and nobody has batteries. So, during the day, the transformer is loaded at about 200% of its nameplate, which will cut its life down to maybe 10 years.
Uhmm, not sure I follow how you think the transformer is loaded 200% of it nameplate.
You may be only using 1kW average, but you've got solar panels shading your house. The other half of your neighborhood without solar are likely using much more than 1kW each to keep their houses cool. And since you're all on this side of the same transformer, a lot of the excess electricity you're producing is going straight to the non-solar houses, without even going through the transformer at all.
The only time the power company might have to put in more transformers due to solar would be if everybody behind the transformer are net producing more than the neighboorhood is consuming. And doing so at a level approaching more than the 25kVA the transformer is rated for.
Where I live, the power company buys any excess kWh's from me at wholesale price levels (super cheap), then turns right around and bills the non-solar houses using my excess kWh's at retail pricing. The power company is thus turning a profit from my excess kWh's. You shouldn't worry about the power company having to install more transformers -- they'll do it and profit off your cheap electricity if you're really producing that much excess to necessitate more transformers.
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Daytime generation is about 60kW by my estimate, and consumption is likely under 12kW at that time of day-- low air conditioning use.
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As more people adopt solar for their homes, the power companies won't sit idly by and lose millions of dollars each year. Instead, they'll adopt monthly fees [clickorlando.com] to solar users and/or reduce or eliminate net-metering to solar customers. In short, they'll kill the industry [cnn.com] and the jobs which go with it.
Well, guess what, maintaining connection to your home still costs even if you're not using it at the moment. Maintaining standing power reserve for when you run your battery dry still costs. Upgrading all the transformers and other systems to be capable of running two-way, and dealing with wild swings of everything the moment sun goes behind a cloud costs a ton. Running peaker power plants for when renewables fail to provide enough electricity costs ten tons. Who exactly do you think should pay for all of t
It's dystopian when you think about it (Score:4, Insightful)
Meanwhile the prospect of a mild tax raise is enough to scare off any attempt to fix the problems with the grid since we're all barely making it as is and even a small reduction in or take-home pay would be devastating. Almost as if it was set up that way on purpose... Nah, that's just a conspiracy theory right?
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Actually, Covid shutdowns kind of proved that most people aren’t actually doing essential work. The rich won’t care until the kid who flips their burgers freezes to death, and then they’ll insist the reason no one else is filling the position is because “lazy freeloaders don’t want to work”, and will use that as justification to cut social safety nets even further.
Human nature doesn’t change.
Doom and gloom (Score:1, Troll)
People who can afford to can and will let the proper grid collapse on the people who can't just haul off and buy generators and solar. Of course if you know anything about how human intelligence works you know that abandoning large swaths of the population to the dark ages means you're going to miss out on a lot of very smart people who otherwise could have been making your life better. But on the other hand if you can sit on top of all of it like a king you can leverage The 7 billion people on the planet to your advantage even while you leave 6 billion of them or more freezing to death in the cold.
Meanwhile the prospect of a mild tax raise is enough to scare off any attempt to fix the problems with the grid since we're all barely making it as is and even a small reduction in or take-home pay would be devastating. Almost as if it was set up that way on purpose... Nah, that's just a conspiracy theory right?
OK doomer.
I don't think you know anything about how human intelligence works, or what our culture is all about.
Our culture is chock full of people who will help out in a crisis, and abandoning large swaths of the population simply doesn't happen. As a country we're the first to lend aid in a catastrophe (Haiti earthquake), we're the world's policeman to our own detriment, and we give financial aid to every 3rd world country on the planet.
Every time there's some local catastrophe - tornado, earthquake, fire,
We've been able to produce enough food (Score:2)
Maybe things will get better on a long enough time scale but that doesn't help people who are suffering and dying right now.
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Same for natural disasters.
Most of that 'aid' to poor countries, is really just aid to the farmers selling the goods at above market prices. You could give them the money instead and they could buy way more useful things for themselves with it.
All of your 'America world police' is solely for your own benefit. Any benefit for anyone else is just a lucky side affect.
Why do the sick people need 'go fund me' for basic medical care in the first place? Why
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It is common to use the grid as backup, when the weather is cloudy and solar does not yield as much. For that service, I think a minimum fee is appropriate.
But if someone goes completely off-grid, they won't put any load or stress on the grid, so where is the problem?
By the way, a standalone microgrid is more expensive than you might think. On top of the solar cells and the inverter, you need batteries to tide you over the night and maybe a generator for longer periods of cloudy sky.
Microgrid? Nope! Individual Property supplemental (Score:1)
Way to misuse and redefine a term. Micro grid is not an individual property installing solar for themselves. Nor a building installing solar for their building.
If it is, then they need to follow all the same regulations and inspections and oversight and backups that an actual energy grid must do.
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Technically, a micro-grid can be as small as a single consumer as long as it can be disconnected from the larger grid and has generation and consumption component. There was a BS term of “Femto-grid” about 10-12 years back to refer to individual consumers, but it never really caught on.
A microgrid is different from distributed generation in that pure distributed generation cannot go into island mode transparently.
Neighborhood level microgrids (or tiered migrogrids with a neighborhood component
Just remember (Score:5, Informative)
Texas sued the federal government for the right to fuck up their grid.
California, too (Score:1, Flamebait)
Texas sued the federal government for the right to fuck up their grid.
Just remember, California was warned (by the fed. govt.) about the Oroville Dam decades before it almost killed 30,000 people.
California was warned about the wildfires long before they became an annual event.
Also, how's that California grid working out for you? Will you have rolling blackouts again this year, or have you fixed that?
The Texas grid failure wasn't due to their political system, but the California failings most certainly are.
Re:California, too (Score:5, Insightful)
The Texas grid failure wasn't due to their political system, but the California failings most certainly are.
Whataboutism.
https://www.usatoday.com/story... [usatoday.com]
A post-mortem at the time – including a key finding that state officials recommended but did not mandate winter protections for generating facilities – has renewed relevance as Texas is roiled by a record storm that has left millions without power for at least three days amid plunging temperatures.
A combination of those 2011 findings, as well as reports from the state grid operators that generators and natural gas pipelines froze during the current calamity and Austin American-Statesman interviews with current and former utility executives and energy experts, suggest a light regulatory touch and cavalier operator approach involving winter protections of key industrial assets.
Why do you think the regulatory body can only make recommendations instead of issuing mandates? You appoint all your crony friends to the board.
Re:Just remember (Score:4, Interesting)
They DO seem to love their "independence", they just don't know how to stop and think about it, figure out if it's a good idea to be independent before they DO it. This solar may be good, although if they're not thinking ahead (like usual...) they'll be installing those solar systems that use the grid as their battery, and are unable to turn on solar production without a live grid connection. (for freq sync)
Then we'll get to laugh at them all over again when their grid goes down, and even the people with solar are in the dark.
"Paving a Plan of Action is not the same as having a Plan." Often "doing" without "thinking about it" provides nothing more than a sense of false security.
But still (Score:3)
They still haven't reached 1,210 megawatts, so it's still not available on every corner drugstore.
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The "backup" generators and solar panels in Lebanon are not a way of shirking the responsibility, they are a reaction to the state-run producer Electricite du Liban (EDL) sucking hard.
Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/11/lebanon-electricity-crisis-disaster-in-the-making [aljazeera.com]
Blackout Solution? (Score:3)
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Use an AC coupling inverter and battery bank to keep your solar PV producing power even when the grid is down.
=Smidge=
Re:Blackout Solution? (Score:5, Informative)
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You also need a special breaker to isolate your house from the grid, since grid-tied solutions will shut down when not recieving grid power to prevent lineworkers from getting electrocuted by power coming from your house.
Bloody hell - people working with lines do not assume they are live or could go live at any moment?
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> Bloody hell - people working with lines do not assume they are live or could go live at any moment?
No, because that makes working on the lines impossible. They take necessary precautions to isolate the section they're working on and perform lockouts/verification of course, but it still needs to be assumed there won't be some random asshole somewhere trying to inject power into the grid.
Beyond that, attempting to backfeed the grid will almost certainly destroy something. Not only are you connecting your
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At least in the US, you can not get a grid-tie inverter that doesn't automatically isolate when the grid goes down, and it's illegal to NOT install such a device if you're connecting it to the grid.
So you don't need a "special breaker" - you just need a code-compliant inverter.
=Smidge=
in TX oil is renewable energy (Score:3)
Just You Wait (Score:5, Insightful)
need batteries (Score:2)
In addition, they really need to encourage homes to move off AC/furnace over to geothermal Heat Pumps.
Finally, I would suggest that they spend some $ on getting nursing homes and hospitals moved over to Alternative energy, along with geothermal Heat pumps.
Grid-tie solar won't help during blackouts (Score:2)
Most of the solar installations in Texas in the last year are grid-tie systems. When the grid goes down, they stop providing power.
During the Snowpocalypse, my home went for 4.5 days without electricity and an overlapping 4.5 days without water, for a total of 7 days reduced function. I was decently prepared. Unlike a lot of my neighbors, I have a gas stove top, that I was able to use to keep the house in the upper 50s. So when it thawed, I didn't have broken pipes. About half the homes on my street were fl
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I'd suggest keep adding incrementally to your off-grid system.
Grid-tie is for the birds. You'll be paying out the rear for permits, electrician, gov't approved materials/parts, etc. And what do you get? The power company buys your excess electricity for pennies at wholesale price levels, then sells it to your neighbors at full retail price. And even if you always produce more than you consume, the power company will STILL charge you a monthly minimum service charge just for being connected to the grid.
I use
Not microgrids, single-home installations (Score:2)
Having a solar+battery installation power one house is not a microgrid. It's not a grid at all until multiple properties are connected.
"As we suffer from more severe weather" (Score:2)
Translation: as the power companies in Texas continue to value ROI over capital plant investment, like weatherization, and while the GOP is suppressing votes of people who might vote for someone who would do something about the "Texas grid"....
Microgrid = Subsidized Generator (Score:1)