What’s it going to take before US homeowners start putting solar on their roofs en masse? With all the power outages in Florida after the hurricane, rooftop solar would have been useful.
I would also like to see rooftop solar become widespread in the near future. But I think for most people to get on board, they'll need to be able to break even on the investment within something like 3 years.
These exist nowadays [1]
Most are so focused on reliability they are quite resistant to pushing the limits. There must have been some cost savings such as avoiding building or upgrading a substation
https://www.tesla.com/blog/next-step-in-energy-storage-aggre...
and Pacific Gas & Electric
http://www.solarcity.com/newsroom/press/solarcity-and-pge-co...
green mountain power appears to be a retailer of electricity and not a distribution company; they don't own any power lines. The distribution co. will have to be on board to safely accept power flowing in the opposite direction (from the load), and for the most part they have no incentive for this so don't really care.
Green Mountain Power (GMP), a subsidiary of Gaz Métro, is the largest electricity distributor in Vermont, serving over 70% of the market and more than 260,000 customers. GMP’s core business includes the distribution, transportation, generation, purchase and sale of electricity in Vermont and, to a lesser degree, electricity transportation in New Hampshire and electricity generation in the states of New York, Maine and Connecticut.
The GMP network comprises over 1,500 km of overhead transmission lines, 18,000 km of overhead distribution lines and 1,600 km of underground distribution lines, located mainly in Vermont but also extending to New Hampshire and New York.[17]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaz_M%C3%A9tro#Vermont_operati...
You may be confusing them with Green Mountain Energy, which got spun off and bought by someone else:
The power grid in the US is way more unreliable than any other country I've experienced, and I can only think that it's because the utilities are so profit-focused that they put lowering infrastructure costs above losing a little revenue due to power outages here and there. After all, the real societal costs due to unreliable power are completely externalized onto their customers.
The utilities are fine talking about reliability when it comes to newfangled competitors like solar, but that's mostly because they're a threat to their bottom line, not because they actually care about reliability.
There is more that goes into transmission line engineering than cost. "Agility" is important, and it is a lot harder to tap underground transmission lines than overhead lines. Outages, while less likely for underground, are actually, on average, longer than overhead line outages.
whatever your connection fee on your monthly bill is (mine is $10 CAD), would you like it to be 4x higher?
I don't think most solar installations are designed to operate without a grid connection though, and even not all powerwall installations can run off grid.
Though I'm not sure that they beat a generator (diesel or connected to your gas line) if you really anticipate regular grid outages and probably won't for a while.
We need to decentralize energy generation (solar) AND cellphone signals (mesh networking).
Here I expound on it at length:
You mean the car that is parked during the day in your office parking lot a few tens miles away and the laptop and phone that you are carrying with you?
Seriously, without some form of (efficient) storage system, the whole thing depends on exchanges on the grid.
Off grid - as I see it - is a very nice solution (still with some minimal storage) for a hut in the woods, where everything is specifically designed for low power (and where you don't have a dishwasher, a washer, etc.), replacing - in a more environment friendly way - the noisy generator, but still it remains something good for youe being there on - say - every other weekend.
Having an el-cheapo (diesel or gasoline) small generator for emergencies is handy, but only for those hopefully very rare emergencies, the cost for a good quality (suitable to run often and in several hours stretches) generator and for the fuel is not competitive with solar (though of course the initial cost of solar is still higher).
Edit:clarity
The idea in my previous post was:
>the whole thing depends on exchanges on the grid.
and anyway we were talking of off-grid setups.
In the normal run of things though, I agree, the correct and sensible thing is to be grid connected, and have sane regulations that ensure that excess from generating customers gets redirected to their neighbours and that everyone gets compensated fairly for their contribution to a well running grid so that incentives are correctly aligned.
This value will in most cases be more than utilities would be prepared to pay if left to choose a number themselves and they will unfortunately generate propaganda to make solar installations seem like free riders rather than go by actual studies of how much they reduce the peak demand. In both Australia and the USA studies have found Billions (with a B!) in savings thanks to solar installations.
I have the same thing here, up in Maine. I live in one of the windiest places around and it hasn't been a problem. It gets flipped for blizzards, mostly.
I guess this was one of the first: http://www.smainverted.com/how-to-explain-secure-power-suppl...
At $500 additional cost, calling it a design issue is probably the correct thing.
Of course an auxiliary plug is way less convenient than whole house power, but a couple thousand watts is way more convenient than no electricity.
???? That's a 33% discount rate. Kind of insane expectations... I put solar on my house in 2014, after doing a bunch of analysis showing the breakeven point was 8-12 years. After having it and checking the utility bills, it looks like it's going to be 10-11 years. Maybe less if they raise their rates.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2012/07/25/why-m...
>All told, the Edison Electric Institute estimates (pdf) that some 18 percent of the country's distribution lines are buried. For the transmission system, only about 0.5 percent of lines sit beneath the surface. "Undergrounding an entire power system," says EIA, "is considered cost prohibitive." Instead, most utilities will just try to bury a few key lines.
Repairing underground lines takes longer than overhead lines.
Here's a respected centrist think tank's take:
https://www.brookings.edu/research/rooftop-solar-net-meterin...
"Nevertheless, by the end of 2015, regulators in at least 10 states had conducted studies to develop methodologies to value distributed generation and net metering, while other states conducted less formal inquiries, ranging from direct rate design or net-metering policy changes to general education of decisionmakers and the public. And there is a degree of consensus. What do the commission-sponsored analyses show? A growing number show that net metering benefits all utility customers"
So it's not a subsidy.
The structure of how power plants generate electricity and are paid for it are idiosyncratic to their particular operating and economic conditions. It would make no sense to try to force something completely unlike that in to their regime.
Thus the many efforts that are designing a "value of solar" regime that encompasses the important aspects of solar, so that equitable and efficient cost schemes can be designed.
I don't think they're impact resistant ?
Generators already have the inverter built in. "Storage" is your tank of gasoline or whatever fuel it uses.
Generators are cheaper and more reliable for emergency situations right now.