Wouldnt prices of the grid go down as well? The grid could switch to a storage model too. Making it not that attractive to deal with all the maintenance.
Many people won't (or can't) install their own PV/storage, but everyone needs electricity.
Those without PV and/or storage will need to purchase their electricity from others.
The mechanism for getting the electricity from seller to purchaser will be a grid of some sort.
La plus ca change and all that.
If you had to make the choice between "no electricity to power my fridge, my lights, my laptop" vs "pay double for the electricity", you'll pay double.
If people respond rationally, this would lead to re-designing the grid to be more decentralized and maintain the lower cost of energy we get from solar.
https://www.peninsulacleanenergy.com/for-residents/
https://www.peninsulacleanenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2017...
It'll still be a thing in cities because you don't have enough area to collect sunlight for tall buildings on the buildings themselves, but that's also where the costs are lowest because the density is highest. If technology makes it so you no longer need a power grid in rural or suburban areas, and the economics are no longer viable there, why should we pay a lot of money to continue to have one there?
Hypothetically, if the capex to install PV is low enough, and the transmission costs are low enough, then you could build a type of decentralized generator where suburban and rural generation feeds urban demand. There's early work being done on "smart grids" which enable this pattern, but I could imagine a future company that markets to a private homeowner, one who already had sufficient generation for their own needs, with the offer of upgrading their private PV in exchange for most of the generation profits.
You've got to have utility poles, trim trees away from power lines, etc. regardless of whether you serve 100% or 25% of the customers in that area.
If you lose a lot of customers, you will have to raise prices on the ones that remain. If you're competing against something that already took away some of your customers, then raising prices could have a snowball effect and cause you to lose more.
Upgrade it in a way that failures can be isolated (my house supplies couple of houses around me, etc).
For people with rooftop solar and no batteries, that's already the case (depending on the feed-in tariff of course).
Saw an article about this today: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-05/solar-panels-rebates-...
Is that just path dependence, or maybe there are advantages to having lots of built in range?
If you want to longbets.org this I will have someone put down $1000 this will not happen in any city of over 10k people in the United States in the next 20 years.
Model 3: 3,627 to 4,072 lbs
At best the Tesla is 8% heavier (total weight).
The AP follow distance setting can be set from 1 to 7, and setting it to 1 just ends up with more abrupt braking when traffic encounters a slowdown. A spaced out setting of 4 is a much more comfortable setting.
Might be worth designing a new type of car for this kind of use though.
The model does work great with powerwall-type devices, though.
2) It's a bad proposition to people because you're basically telling them they won't be able to take long trips in the morning and you're going to decrease the life of their battery (people are rightfully really concerned about this).
3) The big concern with utilities right now is how to handle home renewable excess power during the day. All the rooftop PV is feeding a bunch of power back into the grid when it's sunny, then all those homes are sucking down power from dusk to dawn. The utilities need daytime power storage or non-daylight generation to offset this. Storing power at night doesn't do much to actually solve the problem, so there's not much of a business model in it. Grid-scale battery installations are quickly becoming the solution here.
If you're looking for a car-based model that could potentially work for this, it has to involve solar parking lots and also be car-specific. Charge your car at a parking lot during the day, drive it home and plug it in to power your house in the evening. Get a discount from your electric company as a result.
You can just buy batteries for your house. We’re down to what? $200/kWh? Less? If there wasn’t so much mark up in the industry, you could buy a whole house battery for 2-3k that would be good enough to shift most of your energy usage. Utilities just need to incentivize it, which presumably would happen naturally due to market forces as solar adoption goes up.
Not necessarily. You can imagine a grocery store covering the roof of their building in solar panels to run chargers in the parking lot. If solar gets cheap enough they might even do it for free (or below market rates) to drive business to the store. Then you charge up your car while shopping, use the power at night.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m optimistic about replacing fossil fuels and think things are already better than McKay dared to hope for, but I think a grid has to be part of the solution.
Grid is also useful for time shifting power demand/production to smooth out the morning/evening dips, for space-shifting production to deal with clouds etc., and (assuming wind is part of the solution) the best wind resources aren’t where you actually want to build houses.
It looks like you're right that just covering the store and parking lot in panels wouldn't be enough. But then you've got two possibilities. One is the store is in the city, and then it can be on the grid, because there is always going to be a grid in the city. The other is the store isn't in the city and then you've got cheap land next to the store to fill with panels and turbines.
> Grid is also useful for time shifting power demand/production to smooth out the morning/evening dips, for space-shifting production to deal with clouds etc., and (assuming wind is part of the solution) the best wind resources aren’t where you actually want to build houses.
But batteries (especially when they're in cars) do the same thing. Your house may not be on the grid, but it's got panels on it that power it during the day, meanwhile your car is out getting charged up somewhere else, and you use that power at night.
Electric car typically has a >50kWh battery, which will power a typical household for about two days on its own, call it twice that if the house runs on its own panels during the day. So as long as you get the equivalent of a full charge twice a week, that's all you need, right?
http://www.withouthotair.com/c18/page_103.shtml
I’m not saying what you propose can’t be done — and perhaps American cities are different enough from Europeans cities that it makes sense to treat each one as an island grid in a way you wouldn’t want to around here — just that the grid still looks useful to me.
Actually, thinking about what I saw in California and Nevada when I visited, I can easily believe American cities “should” be independent electrical islands once we get enough worldwide battery production.
Those numbers seem high for electric vehicles. You've got a Model 3 doing something like 26kWh per 100 miles and an average commute of 16 miles each way. That's less than 10kWh per day but they're showing 40.
Then there is no extra battery wear.
There are quite a few people here in Palo Alto who can plug in at work. Facebook has more than 100 chargers at their HQ, and half of the EVs at my apartment complex never use our free charger.
It will also accelerate the demise of coal, gas, and nuclear as they are already too expensive and will have no chance whatsoever in an open market where prices are trending down massively over the next decades. The status quo of course is that they are effectively state protected monopolies currently in many places, which will slow things down in some places and is also the reason you get to pay many times the actual market price per kwh.
But cheap batteries will probably means a large downsizing on the large distance distribution grid.