A Texas Utility Offers a Nighttime Special: Free Electricity
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Huh. Who'd a thunk it.
made possible by the nearly universal distribution in recent years of residential smart meters
This is key. Demand-based metering and pricing has been available for industrial customers for a long time but residential customers had dumb mechanical meters that only recorded total kilowatt-hours. This sort of thing will also become important as electric cars become more mainstream, to encourage people to charge cars at low-demand times. Otherwise everyone plugging in their car at 6pm when they get home from work, while also cooking dinner and turning on the A/C is going to stress the grid.
> Huh. Who'd a thunk it.
Anyone familiar with Enron. Or Comcast & Time Warner. Or any of a million other companies in a hundred other industries that has miraculously managed to avoid the purportedly inevitable race to the bottom. Of course, in this case "deregulation" isn't the full story:
> The incumbent utility in the area still owns and maintains the local power lines (and is the company to call in the event of a power outage) and is not subject to deregulation.
and "intense competition for customers" isn't the full story either:
> TCAP found that the average consumer living in one of the areas that opted out of deregulation, such as Austin and San Antonio, paid $288 less in 2012 than consumers in the deregulated areas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deregulation_of_the_Texas_elec...
The whole process was practically designed to fail.
This model is really the US standard to screw lower social classes that plays out elsewhere, i.e. credit cards as the national payment system instead of payer initiated direct transfer like in most(all?) of Europe.
Richer people will tend to have strategies and resources (i.e. the money and rights to modify their residence, control over their work schedule, etc) to pay bellow average which will make them richer. People under stress will have to pay whatever the spot rates are.
This is the only defensible position for businesses as the ones with resources and time to invest in organization are the ones who have the resources to use the political system as a tool against anyone who would have them pay their full share.
In fact most smart meter usage to date is reactive; customers have to first use electricity at peak times to learn that it is peak time and then modify their usage. And if the pricing schedule changes you'll be caught out again until you adapt.
It was my understanding that the limiting factor, or rather the "cost" of mining bitcoints, ultimately comes down to power consumption. Effectively if $/kWh * kWh/bitcoint < bitcoint value, you can turn a profit.
What's the retail cost of electricity in Texas during the day, and what do you pay per kWh for your batteries: capital costs and ongoing costs?
If you pay more per kWh for batteries than retail power prices then any consumer is a fool to engage in the battery scheme. And even if a consumer might be able to make money, the wholesale price is definitely lower than retail. I seem to remember calculating that batteries cost about $0.06/kWh all in in the last ~6mo but wholesale power in TX is more like $0.05 and retail it's usually below $0.12.
This is not something you can sensibly do in a residential area. (There are a few people doing Al casting with induction furnaces, but that's not the same as electrolysis of bauxite)
No danger from this.
Funny, that's what anti-wind/solar/nuclear people say!
I think it comes down to a lack of science education and a fear of the unknown.
Yes, I know :). That's (among others) a reason I don't go and point my finger too much :).
> I think it comes down to a lack of science education and a fear of the unknown.
I'd add a collapse of trust in authority as an underlying cause for this and movements like anti-vaccination. I talk to people holding such beliefs quite a bit, and I've noticed they're perfectly willing to (selectively) trust science; they can even have an above-average understanding of it. It's often that they don't trust the intentions of governments and corporations (the "Big Pharma", evil Monsanto, etc.). So I think painting them as anti-science idiots, as it is often done on-line, is counterproductive. Not just because it's always counterproductive to paint the other side as idiots, but also because it's missing the point.
Solar farms are hurting the ecosystem when they break and leak out. Even if they aren't liquid based, solid state versions have thin films which contain some chemicals like cadmium and arsenic. Cadmium telluride has been introduced more recently has it is safer.
Liquid solar panels are simply not a production-ready technology. There are no commercial liquid solar cell farms. Installed solar panels are solid. They're not particularly prone to corrosion and 'leaking', and are >99% silicon with trace amounts of boron and phosphorous. CdTe is actually nastier.
Solar farms are hurting the ecosystem when they break and leak out
[citation needed]
Admittedly, as with all e-waste, we need to look to what happens to solar panels when their life is up and they are landfilled or, hopefully, recycled. That said, over its 25+ year useful life, a solar panel will prevent tons of coal from being burned, which in and of itself would release a non-zero amount of cadmium and other heavy metals into the atmosphere.
Welcome to the fascinating world of Umeshisms/Malthusianisms, per [0]. :).
They actually didn't opt out, they simply didn't opt in. The original law putting deregulation in place exempted cooperatives and municipal utilities unless they chose to join the competitive system. However, that choice is one way and permanent. If a co-op or city opts in, it can never go back. Most of the not-for-profit boards wanted to see if deregulation would be good for the rest of the state before they put it on their members.
I remember when natural gas costs spiked and that sent Texas electric rates, especially in the Texas-New Mexico and Oncor/TXU service areas, skyrocketing. Now that natural gas is less expensive, prices have dropped. Municipal systems, on the other hand, either owned their own generating infrastructure and were buffered or bought long-term hedge contracts that the competitive players were scared to buy (what if they bet wrong?) or were so new that they didn't have the credit to buy.
Be careful what you wish for in terms of deregulation. You have a great utility in Austin.
The culprit is not actually the PTC, it's the combination of the PTC and insufficient transmission capacity from the wind farms to the rest of the state. When additional transmission capacity is added the wind generation will be absorbed (and paid for) by a much larger region and the incentive to under-price will go away.
This comes down to roughly:
$/kWh = $cost of installation / (kWh capacity * cycles lifetime * efficiency)
So if the Powerwall costs $5000 for a 7kWh capacity with a lifetime of about 3600 charge cycles at 80% efficiency, you're looking at $0.25/kWh. If the difference between lowest and highest prices is lower than that, you're better off not buying the Powerwall in the first place.
Once the difference between minimum and maximum price per kWh of electricity from the grid exceeds the $/kWh of the battery, you have an economic incentive to install the battery.
As the price of batteries comes down, companies will invest in battery peaking plants to take advantage of pricing on the energy market. Those bulk battery installations will limit the spread of wholesale time-of-day pricing such that it will never be economically sensible for home users to install batteries as a cost saving device based on retail time-of-day pricing. Domestic units will necessarily cost more per storage/output capacity than commercial units.
For the meantime, installing batteries for your home will only be useful for people who have problems with reliable access to electricity (e.g.: you have frequent brown-outs).
There are advances on the horizon thanks to new battery assembly technology, and Tesla Energy's "Gigafactory" bringing economies of scale and integration into battery manufacturing, with an aim of reducing battery manufacturing costs around 30% for the former and 20% for the latter. There are also some theoretical (and in some cases lab proven) technologies to extend Lithium battery lifetimes to "forever". These all alter the numbers in the equation above: a moderate decrease in $/kWh output will make batteries quite attractive for many grid-connected homes.
So "watch this space," I guess.