Hopefully, with advances in battery technology, homes can become completely independent of the grid.
Especially as transmission capital costs start to skyrocket, and solar capital costs plummet.
I have yet to see an economic argument in favor of utility scale solar over residential solar that takes into account the T&D upgrades necessary from utility scale solar.
Whole-home generators are expensive and get used rarely but are often justified as a “just in case”. Solar doesn’t enjoy this kind of leniency, unfortunately.
Being less dependent on the grid has many benefits that get ignored over a perceived return on value.
Cheap and safe batteries paired with solar will help, but the capacity will likely still be an issue for extended outages.
Also fairly trivial to rig up a resistive heating system for melting the snow in cases where the above isn't possible. Even possible to automate it based on time of day and expected power input.
Couldn't you just run power through the solar cells as if they were giant LEDs? Or don't they like that?
Sure you can DIY it and get close, but most people are not going to do that.
It would have been foolish to have a whole house generator where (and when) I lived before I moved where I am. Where I live now, utility power is less than three nines, and some years doesn't quite make it to two.
Solar without storage usually is grid tied, but even if it runs isolated, it doesn't help overnight. Batteries for a multiday outage are still quite expensive compared to a generator.
A whole house battery would be nice though, at least some of the systems can switch power quick enough that I wouldn't need UPSes at all my computers, and the battery maintenance that requires (of course, the large system would probanly require maintenance)
In this context I'm saving my pennies for a solar and battery set up - it both makes financial sense when connected to the grid, and obviates the annoying side effect and high cost of running the backup generator during outages, unless they're extremely lengthy.
A gallon of gasoline produces about 36 kWh, and costs about $3.6. Assuming that the motor + generator + inverter chain has efficiency is 25%, it's 9 kWh of electricity per gallon, or about 40 ¢ per kWh. Likely twice as expensive as the grid, but fine for a few days.
The issue you really run into is that, even at idle, the generator burns a fixed amount of propane. The minimum is about 2 gallons per hour. Which is roughly $6
So you can imagine that, for 3 days of usage, $500 provides a strong incentive to seek out alternative sources of power.
We run about $1200 a year in propane costs for the generator, estimated.
All the loads that I might consider a generator for are intermittent (well pump, fridge, microwave, space heater).
I've wondered if it would make sense to get inverters for the fridge, microwave, and heater and get a pool of batteries, and just use the generator for charging batteries and powering the well pump.
With a sufficient number of batteries in the battery pool it should be possible to only need to run the generator when there are sufficient batteries to charge that the generator can run at its most efficient output.
At that point the generator will only run if the batteries dip below e.g. 20% charge, making it extremely affordable.
And the indestructible resiliency of distributed power production from tens of millions of rooftops is unparalleled.
Sounds like he is allowed to sell excess back to the grid and payback period would be <20 years. They are warranted for longer. If financing is available it is basically free. ;)
Big if that but more realistically the real kicker here is that all of that is about x3 larger than what most households need.
I get that not everybody has $10k laying around to plop down on panels/batteries all in one go but if you do you can get off the grid now.
If you want one rooftop’s worth of electricity, you can either pay someone else for a rooftop’s worth of real estate and have them run solar panels on it, and transmit the power to you over wires, or you can put solar panels on the rooftop-sized area you already own at zero marginal land cost, and have the electricity already right where you want it.
That that works out economically doesn’t seem like a surprise.
Solar panels are rapidly falling in price, and now I'm generating the power right where I'm using it - so no transmissions losses, no power transmission infrastructure, no transformers, no poles to replace when they get old, no lines to replace when trees fall on them, no trees to trim. No accounts to maintain, no billing, no credit card fees, no taxes. In fact, to get power to my house for the next ~30+ years requires absolutely zero labor from anybody.
Of course it's economical, it would be baffling if it wasn't.
Between those two and people who have tried an electric or hybrid vehicle and had it turn out poorly (totaled because the battery went bad in the heat and it isn't worth replacing). There is a degree of wisdom to the advice "chemical energy storage is more convenient, dependable, and cheap for intermittent to constant daily use". I look forward to on site residential solar powered propane production and liquification for this reason.
Do you mean carbon capture?
That would be great but isn’t it similar to flying cars where it’s not feasible around humans because you have to move a LOT of air?
2) not quite. Well, it is a form of carbon capture, but with the intent of releasing again soon.
3) 4% co2 is everywhere (open a window and turn on a fan and you have almost infinite). Water is everywhere humans are. I think it is a lot more an engineering problem than a feasibility problem
So how much air do you have to move to put a day worth of propane into a car?
It just doesn’t seem feasible to me at a home but I’m not a chemist or physicist. At industrial scale it works but involves a lot of fans and energy.
https://climeworks.com/subscriptions
Those supply you with up to 50kg of carbon a month from DAC (direct air capture). If I were to drive a sedan 120 miles (entire day commute) then I would probably burn 250kg of propane and only 80% of the weight of propane is carbon.Therefore, you are exactly correct that it is not feasible. However it may become feasible if I get creative: hybrid work and different fuel sources.
So for me to be perfectly carbon neutral I would need an average total daily commute of 30 miles to be able to have 100% of my fuel usage from solar powered propane.
I think this is some tech in infancy. I think I would be willing to install a o2 tank and a c3h8 tank on my car to have better efficiency if I had to produce all my own fuel.
Fun line of thinking.
I just don't see how this is feasible at a residential scale. Certainly not with the convenience of solar plus battery storage.
Carbon capture and fuel synthesis is very exciting technology, especially when combined with solar for load shifting. Generate "clean" fuel from excess sunlight. But even then it doesn't scale as well as direct transmission. Combustion fuels will have to be reserved for those cases that really need the energy density, like aviation. Battery electric is far more practical for self-sufficient personal transportation.
Independence from the government was the revolutionary idea of the American colonies, eventually culminated at founding the USA (with checks and balances to limit the government). Calling this idea "conservative" is weird, but I understand why some may see it like so.
Renewable energy is a piece of what needs to be a much larger effort to fight climate change.
It's really a no-brainer up to a certain amount of your grid mix (and that amount can be quite high).
Also.. Mining for solar panels has never been the major energy cost. Solar panels are primarily silicon (re: sand). The actual energy expensive part for them is/was melting the sand into glass. Even the next major element, aluminum for the brackets, accounts for far more energy expenditure than the mining of the doping agents.
Even for windmills, the major energy cost isn't mining, it's the smelting the steel for the tower.
Renewable energy is a piece of the puzzle and not everything. It's a major and important piece. Switching the grid away from fossil fuels accounts for a huge portion of emissions and renewables are some of the fastest and cheapest to deploy solutions currently.
I don't understand we keep using "energy intensive" as a euphemism for "emits carbon". The two aren't synonymous. Energy-intensive processes aren't a problem at all, the problem is dirty energy generation processes. Fix your energy generation, and there's no problem.
The trick to good propaganda is to create something that makes you say "well I know it's propaganda, but this doesn't seem so wrong..."
For example, I think it's a dumb idea to turn every road into a "solar road" just because "who cares".
If your energy is dirty, fix your energy. Don't make downstream consumers feel bad instead.
I think there is irresponsible consumption of solar panels, particularly when it's done more as a performative action rather than actually producing power to be used.
Utility-scale solar has better capacity factors and installation economics.
I think it's going to be barely possible to keep our current quality of life and reach a low-CO2 economy. We have limited resources, and even if a residential solar panel "pays back" its energy in 2.5 years, we are better off putting it in a desert where it will pay back that energy in a year.
I think residential solar was a decent bridge to get things going, and the installed capacity we have is helpful.
Now, though-- at midday we have a glut of power. Residential installations are more expensive per kilowatt hour and don't do as well in reaching into the late afternoon when we need power most. There's no need to add more capacity like this. Better for those panels to go somewhere else.
There are still times that non-utility scale solar make sense-- it's usually when you get some kind of non-normal-generation related benefit that tips it over into worthwhile, e.g.
- getting a shade structure for a parking lot as part of the rollout
- if you want power backup for your house, adding a bunch of storage and solar
etc.
At this point, there are a lot of residential neighborhoods that need more distribution and even transmission capacity (because their peak power movement is now exporting power at mid-day rather than the previous smaller peak loads used). And operating the grid has become a much more complicated task.
Again: residential solar isn't worthless, but in many places we've reached the point of diminishing returns where any additional capacity is much less useful-- unless there's an ancillary benefit that justifies it (like backup power for your house when deploying storage).
So please stop repeating that useless whine.
Chinese solar panels cost less than 15 cents a watt. In the NW with residential prices at 10 cents per KWh, it takes 1500 hrs to break even. With 4hrs of "full sun" per day on average at PNW latitudes, about a year. This is just the panel not the system. The BS that panels take more energy to produce than they generate is disproven.
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/In-Stock-TRINA-Vertex...
The tariffs on solar are stupider than the Iraq war. If China can produce panels at 10 cents a watt wholesale, we should give them billions of dollars to make as many as they can. Train everyone in the military to install them.
Smelting aluminum and silicon or mining aluminum and iron ores with electricity produced by solar and wind is ideal: else that energy of light and air motion would be wasted.
Steel and concrete are harder to produce in an emission-free ways, but steel smelting in arc furnaces is very much a thing, and can be powered by renewables, at least partly.
The real problem is we need to reduce consumption. We also need to rework our energy supply chains with renewables when appropriate as well as nuclear that isn't vulnerable to meltdowns.