Fusion power you can install on your roof. Throw in a little storage and a decent climate and the power companies are on track to be thoroughly screwed.
I have a hard time making sense of this. I log into HN and see comment after comment about how solar is taking over, then I read articles like this[0], that state that countries heavily invested in renewables, like wind a solar, are going backwards. They are now trying to label natural gas as "green investment" in Germany, otherwise they won't have energy capacity. They have to build more fossil fuel plants.
Do you really think "power companies" are "screwed"?
[0]https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/eu-indecision-over-gas-...
- If retail electricity prices are moderate/high and excess solar power generation gets a net metering credit. I don't think that this will remain common as solar penetration increases, but some early adopters in different regions will be able to take advantage.
- If the electrical companies invested too much in transmission and distribution infrastructure and are now making up for it with high prices per kilowatt hour. This describes the Australian rooftop solar boom and at least parts of California. Note that this can be a financial winner even without retail-priced net metering; you're just thrifting on how much overpriced electricity you buy from the power company.
- If the location is far from the existing grid and you're expected to pay to build the intervening connection yourself. Solar plus batteries, even with today's relatively high battery prices, can beat the cost of building that connection.
Mostly I expect power companies to survive the rise of solar power just fine. Most solar generation will come from large facilities owned by large companies, not household rooftop units. The over-representation of small rooftop solar units in Germany has contributed to the high cost of their energy transition. I see the German policy decisions favoring small solar units as a carrot used to ensure broad population support for solar power. Maybe it was politically necessary. But the generating costs would be lower had they favored fewer, larger installations.
There are different kinds of power companies.
Utilities with a regulated asset base that get to socialize all of their costs across rate payers aren’t screwed.
Asset-light energy suppliers/retailers in competitive deregulated markets aren’t screwed.
Asset-heavy power generators in competitive deregulated markets might be screwed .. if they have a large portfolio of legacy assets.
Solar PV creates two problems for them.
Firstly, distributed solar reduces the load available to them to serve.
Secondly, centralized and distributed solar depress wholesale energy prices in the middle of the day (and causes increasing frequency of negative-price events).
Together these reduce the volume of sales, reduce profitability, and can increase running costs, because many legacy generators weren’t originally designed to be flexible with the ability to ramp up and down every day.
While solar PV isn’t good for some power companies, it’s generally good for consumers.
Considering there are so many people whose solar is grid connected you would think that they would often ask themselves how difficult it is to maintain repair and operate the grid they rely on every time it snows or rains or at night.
“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.”
https://www.brookings.edu/research/rooftop-solar-net-meterin...
edit: actually I think it did :) ignore me
They are selling back to the grid, with a smart meter that counts power in both direction. Theres many types of policies in net metering like details about what rate you buy and sell power to the utility. In some less favorable places, the grid sells you power at retail prices but buys it back from you at wholesale. In these places, to achieve a $0 utility bill you would be generating more during the day than you consume at night. If your net metering deal paid back at retail rates you may get a credit, but as far as i understand each utility can offer totally different net metering deals, if they offer it at all.
* Solar doesn't yet have enough market penetration for the duck curve to be a problem. We're still in the early days where cutting peak usage benefits everyone.
* Social good rationalizes the cost shifting
"It hasn't happened yet" and "it's for the best" are VERY different arguments from "it won't happen." Why the deception? Shifting the grid's role from generation to storage is not impossible. Barring that, distributed storage is not impossible. Making PV panels cheap was a huge but tractable step that is now behind us. Figuring out storage is the second huge but tractable step and it's well on the way to being solved. In the meantime, it absolutely makes sense to deploy PV at least until it starts cutting into base load, and from that point the economic case for storage becomes clear and obvious. The facts are on our side, so why lie?
My intent in no way is to deceive or put forth bad data.
In the meantime, we should be talking about how best to make storage happen, because anyone who isn't busy playing semantics games can see that storage (critically: paying for storage) is going to dominate the back half of this transition.
If you combine net metering with time based pricing, it seems like there is plenty of incentive for smart people like you to build energy storage and make money off of arbitrage.
Peak electricity demand is driven by AC, primarily when it’s hot... in the summer.
I don't know about you, but the indoor temperature above which I start wanting AC is around 72-75F, or ~23C. Lots of the PNW gets over that for much of the summer. It didn't used to be this way, but I've wanted AC in Seattle for at least a few weeks a year, sometimes as much as 6 - 8 weeks, since 2013 or 2014. Particularly because the insulation in a lot of apartment buildings meant to make them more efficient in winter causes them to heat up like a furnace in a hot summer.
AC sure is a quality of life if not a necessity of life... Though if our homes were built for this climate rather than by Californian companies using shoddily adapted designs it might be another story.
As solar keeps getting cheaper the question shifts further from how do I get maximum power to how do I maximize my investment. Which is a slightly different and far more complex optimization problem.
Residential installations are usually setup to maximise the total output, and often the positioning is constrained by the geometry of the roof. Residential solar installers are really in a race to the bottom.
One up and coming trend which might have a significant impact on this is for residential retail tariffs to be directly linked, at 30min resolution, to the wholesale energy market prices.
From what happened in Texas recently that sounds like a nightmare for consumers. https://www.npr.org/2021/03/06/974417969/texas-wont-reduce-1...
They avoid the Texas problem by limiting the maximum rate to be no more than the government regulated "default power offer" over the entire year.
Planning on getting both solar power and a battery system in the next 12 months, changing my electric hot water to a heat pump and moving to hydronic heating and split system airconditioning.
I'm also going to install a second circuit back to my smart meter that will connect to my apartment garage space so that an EV charger can be installed in the future.
In our case I definitely recall most of those outages happening midday as it screwed up lunch. There were other factors as well (I think transmission efficiency diminishes as you approach capacity, so localized issues are a thing)
10 million watt-hours of electricity
Your system would produce 10 million watts if it did 10 million watt-hours per hour.
It does seem like close to retail rates aren't outrageous to believe are fair for small quantities. I think you'd need to get to the point where generation was a significant fraction of local usage before transmission was costly or inefficient... but by then you'd likely find batteries cheap enough to also just load shift by physically storing the electricity in small buildings around a city.
Maybe the retail rate should go down, but it does make some sense for a tiny generator right next to or even in the same building as a user should get closer to retail rates than generator rates. If enough people did it they could eliminate transmission lines entirely and just use batteries.
At the time we had them installed, both the federal government and Oregon had very generous subsidies.
We do have a loan to pay off the balance not covered by those subsidies, but the monthly payment on the loan is about $40 cheaper per month than our electric bill was prior to having them installed. So, even with the interest on the loan, we are paying significantly less for our monthly electric usage. Once the panels are paid off, our bill will just be $12/month.
We do have a loan to pay off the balance not covered by those subsidies, but the monthly payment on the loan is about $40 cheaper per month than our electric bill was prior to having them installed. So, even with the interest on the loan, we are paying significantly less for our monthly electric usage. Once the panels are paid off, our bill will just be $12/month.