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Comment by fefifofu | Hacker News Reader

When clouds roll in, people are not OK with their TVs turning off. So you'd always need the traditional grid in place, even if it's for a few days a year.

In that case, the utilities would charge a standby fee for keeping their multi-billion dollar infrastructure in place (it's called a "demand charge" in the utility industry). Then, when you use the electrons during the cloudy period, you'd pay an astronomical "consumption charge", beyond $100/KWh because everyone in the city wants/needs those electrons. The utility share-holders would be fine.

But the people of Hawaii would have the cost of the solar installation PLUS the cost of the traditional grid. The calculation in the article misses this point and only shows the $/KWh consumption costs on the utility side.

So, yes, a huge amount of solar can figuratively blow up the electrical grid.

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> When clouds roll in, people are not OK with their TVs turning off. So you'd always need the traditional grid in place, even if it's for a few days a year.

Sounds like a great argument for municipal generation and storage. If nothing else, it's both cheaper than "everyone on his own" and could lesser the strain for long-distance infrastructure (which could still be nice for geographic smoothing).

> So, yes, a huge amount of solar can figuratively blow up the electrical grid.

Demand-controlled EVs could take a lot of the load. In fact, it's probably one of the sanest applications of massive solar installations (beyond the potential of future power-to-gas tech).

There's a lot of ways to store energy if you're basically getting it for free, and these are generally more efficient at scale. It would be great if a utility could help buffer this for you.

Yes, that's another reason why a municipal grid would be useful: city-wide storage could work better than each house having a small battery (but the roofs are still useful for panels, of course). But it may not need to be a utility in the traditional sense (unless the US meaning of that word is different from what I understand it to be). Just some local company with a contract. Or a few of them.

Here the power company was split up into a generation unit and a distribution unit. What you're talking about is having a third type, a storage unit, to help manage demand.

If you can pull power off the grid very cheaply, even get paid to "dispose" of it, then later return it at a profit, you could arbitrage solar capacity.

Interesting example about the TV switching off. That would of course be inconvenient but there's already multiple large industries and consumer level smartmeters that will turn things off when electricity demand is high in return for cheaper energy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_demand_management

The basic reason for this to exist, even before renewable energy was a thing, is that, as you point out in your comment, building enough capacity just to serve a peak that may only last for a few hours a year is stupidly expensive. So you take the money that you would have spent on a power plant that would only run for a few hours and you give it to people for turning down their air con or their blast furnace for a few hours, keeping a portion to yourself for being so clever. Free-market solutions that save customers and utilities money, save energy, and save the planet. Everyone is happy!

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