Hacker News Reader

I feel point 2 is a bit misleading. That solar count includes all solar manufacturing jobs. Utility companies don't engage in manufacturing, so the comparison doesn't really seem to have any utility, if you'll pardon the horrible pun.

If you included all coal, natural gas, oil, and other non-renewable equipment manufacturing, I'm positive they'd beat solar by quite a margin.

Also, requiring jobs is a downside of something, not an upside. But it seemed like he was trying to plug solar by bragging about how many jobs it would create.

It's a cost that the businesses and consumers have to deal with but it is not necessarily a cost for society at large.

It is a cost for society at large. Any workers that are employed in solar are not employed in some other job, so we have to be losing out in production somewhere if we switch our power generation from something that requires fewer workers to something that requires more.

Even if the extra workers required to make solar work came exclusively from the ranks of the unemployed or retired, we are still losing the leisure time they had previously been enjoying, which is a production of sorts.

Most of the non-tech unemployed people I know would happily trade their leisure time for a paycheck.

If you engage in any business that requires or benefits from a working relationship with the political system, then employing lots of people is, without a doubt, a positive aspect of your business.

Good point. I didn't consider that he might have just been speaking about the profitability of his own sector, I had assumed he meant that we as a society should look kindly on solar power for the reason that it employs a lot of people.

Downside to whom?

A "job" is when a human being is required to insert their valuable resources of time and talent to produce further valuable resources, some of which go to the human being (lest they starve), some of which go to a capital owner, and some of which go to society at large.

Broadly speaking, when you get the same benefits but are not draining a human being's time and talent in the process, society wins.

The question of how to distribute those wins may be tricky, but it's the type of problem that, broadly speaking, is good to have. Like when you unexpectedly receive a cash bonus, and now you have the probem of paying taxes on it... yes, it's a problem, but it's a good problem to have. And given that I've heard people complain about getting money because then they'll have to pay taxes, as if that causes the whole thing to net negative (it's silly when I say it baldly, of course, but I've heard this so often it's clearly a common cognitive template), it's really quite like that situation. Let's not be so worried about the possibility that someday wealth may be unequally distributed that we prevent it from being created in the first place.

To the society as a whole. To kind of amplify jerf's comment, think in terms of a society "spending" people, rather than "employing" people. You (the society) only have so many people; if you don't have to spend them on solar, you can spend them on other worthwhile things.

Requiring jobs is not an upside or downside, it is simply a matter of relative expense. If it is cheaper to run the business by hiring people, people will be hired. If it is cheaper to run the business by buying machines, machines will be bought. One is not better or worse than the other.

Worth mentioning, a major tax credit for US solar installations will expire at the end of 2016.[1] No one knows for sure how this will impact the industry, but before you dump all your money into solar stocks, or quit your day job to start a solar startup, you might want to do some research. The general consensus is that things are going to get pretty crazy over the next year as companies try and get installations done before the tax credit expires. And after that, no one really knows what is going to happen.

[1] http://www.seia.org/policy/finance-tax/solar-investment-tax-...

>4. Solar is expected to reach a load defection point (i.e. cheaper to leave the grid) in most places in the next 10-15 years[4].

How can it be cheaper to leave the grid? Won't energy storage be much cheaper if it is done on scale by buy and selling energy as required and letting utility companies figure out energy storage and load balancing?

Here in Australia we have one of the highest per capita uptakes of household solar panels in the world. At some point during the day, most of those households produce excess power and that power is sold back into the grid.

But because there is so much power being generated, the householder is only paid a fraction of the equivalent price of extracting an equivalent amount of electricity from the grid.

At present those householders have no choice but to put up with that dud deal, as they have no where else to put that excess power. But move on a few years when battery technology starts to take off and battery prices come down, that will change.

When that happens, total household electricity costs will be coming down and they will be one very big step closer to being off grid.

Big batteries will always be cheaper and more reliable than small ones.

There may come a day where the difference is so small to not matter anymore, but people won't disconnect from a competitively priced grid before that. There are plenty of entities consuming energy during the day, it's just a matter of adapting the generating infrastructure.

Anyway, and answering lumberjack's question, I'm yet to see a competitively priced grid. It's a natural monopoly, normally maintained by either an expensive government bureaucracy, or a private company whose main goal is to extract big rents. At this environment, I'd expect houses to organize into largish units that share batteries, if the government allows, or just get enough batteries for themselves.

> but people won't disconnect from a competitively priced grid before that.

> At this environment, I'd expect houses to organize into largish units that share batteries, if the government allows, or just get enough batteries for themselves.

This is exactly what's happening in Hawaii right now. Because power is so expensive due to petroleum used to generate power, it is cheaper to go off the grid entirely with your own batteries than to wait for the utility to approve your grid tied solar system.

Texas had (has?) a similar problem with wind energy. The utilities were actually paying for people to use the energy. Batteries are the game changer for solar and wind since on-peak, off-peak will have less dramatic differences

I don't know how it works in other countries, but here in Germany you basically have two fees: First there is the "connection fee", so you pay around 5 to 10 dollars monthly just to be connected to the grid even if you use no power. On top of that is the actual usage fee per kWh.

I guess when more and more people generate their own power the connection fee will eventually increase while the usage fee decreases. So even if you have an average usage of 0 kWh per month because of solar panels you'll pay the grid just to be your battery to buffer the peaks and give back power at night. And I think that's actually fair. If you don't want that high connection fee you'll need to buy your down battery and disconnect completely.

If a low expectation of profit from excess generation is to become expected, we could do with a smart way to dump excess energy into cooling or heating reservoirs, either on a unit or local scale.

pipe dream

The flipside to the dud deal you claim these solar owning householders get is that they are not paying their full share for the grid connectivity that they need to sell their excess electricity into.

The majority of the cost of retail electricity is the maintenance of the transmission network (>50%) (poles and wires)[1], with metering/billing being the next highest contributor (<20%). The cost of generation is around 20%.

Many of these householders with solar are paying very little or nothing for their grid connection. Thus they are being subsidised by the non-solar households for their ability to stay grid connected.

Household level batteries could change that scenario if they are good enough to allow complete disconnection from the grid.

If household level batteries are successful, then we will reach a point where it will not be economically viable to maintain the grid. Every house will then need to become self sufficient for electricity generation and storage.

[1] https://www.dews.qld.gov.au/energy-water-home/electricity/pr...

> The majority of the cost of retail electricity is the maintenance of the transmission network

I can't speak for the rest of the world, but here in Australia that's just not true, since the utility companies have a tendency to "gold plate" those grids.

Here are some detail:

http://www.smh.com.au/business/goldplating-the-power-grid-20...

When governments sold the grid to private enterprise they also allowed them to "gold plate" their systems and pass on the costs to the consumer.

The result was massive increases in electricity prices.

What those utility companies got wrong was thinking the consumer was a captive audience and would put up with those rip off prices.

Those massive increases in electricity prices actually made solar an option, hence the massive addition rate in roof top solar here in Australia.

What those utility companies have got wrong is the genie is now out of the bottle.

If a utility has invested large fixed costs in a long-term investment, then their prices may be a bit inflexible for the foreseeable future. A classic example would be nuclear, which has a huge upfront cost, but then cheap running costs for 60 years.

Utilities are often heavily regulated, with large fixed costs and legal requirements to serve many customers with the same price structure.

Some of those customers are going to be better served by doing something else. As the price of solar and local storage goes down compared to the legacy cost structure of utilities, it can make more sense for more of those customers to leave.

What sort of software? Firmware for the charger-inverter, load scheduling & management, something else?

The OP's company appears to be: UtilityAPI.com.

Some more info about solar tech companies here: https://powerhouse.solar/companies/

Point 4: "load deflection", aka "grid parity" sounds good on paper but doesn't reflect the fact that the cost of conventional sources is a moving target controlled by governments and monopolies (not that there's much of a difference). No doubt that solar cost is dropping fast given huge investments in R & D. But the cost of conventional sources can be dropped with the stroke of a pen.

What problems are there that software engineering can help fix? You sorta left us hanging there :)

@diafygi, what type of problems are need to be solved?