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Comment by croes | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the US power grid also a problem?

The grid in Western Massachusetts is over burdened. Local colleges are building their own peaker co-gen plants to meet needs.

From my POV the US grid needs a rethink that prioritizes local production with large transmission lines used only for redundancy access.

We should probably break down our energy usage between heating and everything else. The heating load is my biggest obstacle to net-zero. I'm working on solar thermal designs to get to zero. Solar thermal avoids the need to interconnect with the grid which currently is maxed out.

It's basically same everywhere in the world - except some places don't mind nuclear, coal, or natural gas.

Few places have enough elevation and water for hydro (and don't mind submerging loads of land to make it happen).

For almost all countries - experts (engineers and scientists) have been warning grid and production will not be enough, and politicians kept focusing on shorter term wins of votes.

I think (collectively) the voters in many places didn't want green energy enough to actually pay for the large investments required.

What I find interesting is that in the US the cost of developing small solar PV systems is within reach of many homeowners.

The economics are still a little shaky for home solar installations, particularly when you factor in batteries. Larger "water batteries" instead of hot water heaters would make a dent but we need more passive storage.

I started looking at the cost of solar installations vs. future energy costs and this has worked out well.

The long view is critical so I looked at the solar install costs against the retirement cash flow needed to pay for energy.

My first install has got to be over 10 years old by now and has been completely trouble free. I have sold SRECs in that time that have almost paid for the system. I only receive an electric bill in the winter(heat pumps). I also received text incentives at the time. I feel like now I'm in a position where my only costs will be replacing failed components. These components replacement costs will be a fraction of the original install and will perform better.

I recently moved from a house without solar to one with a small ~7kW rooftop installation. Most important variables are similar: House size, electric usage patterns, location, and so on. I'm seeing a very small cost savings compared to my old house, maybe 10-15% at most. And I went from a consistently high monthly bill to a variable (but never zero) one, with an annoyingly giant "true up" cost mid-year. Given the economics, I would have never have chosen to install it if I didn't already have it. It would take decades for the investment to pay back.

The installation is unfortunately also grid-dependent, so it's useless when the power goes out.

It's highly dependant on location. Labor costs, tariffs, net metering arrangements, solar irradiance, solar seasonality and local cost of electricity vary a lot.

If you heat water I'd say solar thermal collectors are more efficient?

The energy can be used more directly. The real bonus of solar thermal for me is that there is no regulation compared to solar pv which is grid tied and regulated for me.

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