Haven't we more or less concluded that a million piecemeal rooftop installations of solar are about the worst way to do it? More complicated and expensive to permit and install, less efficient operation, difficult to repair, difficult to insure, difficult to upgrade, inefficient to integrate into grid, etc.
You also just have issues like the low chance of having clear skies after a hurricane or a bushfire.
For disaster situation power, a diesel generator is still the cheapest and most reliable option.
Also, diesel and gas were pretty much inaccessible for the first 5 days of the disaster, so unless you have a stockpile that's been treated for longevity, you might not even be able to run your whole home generator for long.
Is this a thing IRL? Every system I've looked at stops feeding the grid as soon as the grid goes down
But that's more a policy decision than a technical restriction. We could change it so power can flow on both sides of a fault instead of only the "upstream" grid side.
a) government mandates that turn over existing grid infrastructure to such a project, because the existing grid infrastructure is almost all privately owned
OR
b) building new infrastructure to create an isolatable local grid
Neither of these seem particularly likely to me.
This is so those F150s are not backfeeding the wires while a repair crew is trying to fix it.
Ergo, if the local grid is "taken out", those F150s cannot be "on the local grid".
The lightning extended range has a 135 kwh battery and can backfeed 90A@240V. That's a heck of a lot of power.
Yes, and sort of.
Inverters will prevent power flowing to the grid if the grid is off. However most inverters will continue to supply power into the house while the grid is off.
There are various factors in play here, and you need to do proper homework, but certainly a fraction of the house can be powered, if not all of it.
I'm not sure if this is "special" inverter or not. Every one I researched had the same functionality.
The shelf life of diesel is about a year; the shelf life of propane is effectively unlimited.
But yes, distributed solar will not be the general solution to decarbonizing our energy systems as a whole. Does serve a meaningful role though and there is no reason to not do both.
As of lunchtime today, nearly 50% of all electrical generation on the national grid was rooftop solar (and another ~10% was utility-scale solar).
Rooftop solar works just fine if utilities don’t actively try and obstruct its use.
> As of lunchtime today, nearly 50% of all electrical generation on the national grid was rooftop solar
Not 'As of lunchtime' but 'At precisely lunch time'. An hour later it wasn't 50% anymore, and it won't be 50% except at noon for a long time yet. As of the moment I am posting this, solar is 0% and coal is 80%. If Australia cares about global warming they should build nuclear plants and stop generating 70% of their overall power from coal.
It's still remarkable how much solar is growing and I hope it's 100% 24/7 soon!
If I'd looked the example when South Australia's interconnector with the rest of the NEM went out, they had periods with the instantaneous penetration of rooftop solar was over 90%. AEMO, the body that manages the Australian electricity grid, are aiming to be able to support a 100% instantaneous renewable mix on the NEM within the next year or two.
As for Australia's overall electricity mix, that is rapidly changing (and the numbers get a bit distorted by the amount of self-consumption of rooftop solar). We're at 40% renewables overall now, and while it may not hit the government's 82% target by 2030 we will almost certainly reach 70% or so by 2030 and I'd think 90% by 2035 is very doable. The last 10% is harder, but there are enough options (gas with CCS, green hydrogen, biofuels, long-term energy storage of other kinds) that I reckon we can get there. We are in the fortunate position of not having solar completely go away for months in the winter.
As for nuclear, it's never, ever going to happen in Australia (despite the claims of the conservative side of Australian politics). Even if Australia could build nuclear power as efficiently as South Korea - an extremely big ask, given we have the same challenges at building large infrastructure as the rest of the English-speaking world - it still doesn't make economic sense.
One such example: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/sep/08/...
Perfect is the enemy of good
The data shows that you are correct. Utility grid solar provides low cost power and consumer rooftop solar does not and will not. The rooftop solar price is usually hidden because no power source has been as subsidized as rooftop solar. Besides direct subsidies, wealthier home owners have often been paid the retail rate for the electricity they sell to the grid which causes higher electricity bills for those who can't afford to put panels on their roof - sort of a reverse Robinhood scheme.
As the statista.com report says:
>...Rooftop solar photovoltaic installations on residential buildings and nuclear power have the highest unsubsidized levelized costs of energy generation in the United States. If not for federal and state subsidies, rooftop solar PV would come with a price tag between 117 and 282 U.S. dollars per megawatt hour.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/493797/estimated-leveliz...
Looks like that report is a year old, but I doubt the installation costs have really gone down much since then. (Panel prices come down, but labor costs, etc. don't.)
It generates power at roughly the cost of nuclear. It's distributed and resilient. It works around sluggish government and/or corporate monopolies. It reduces transmission requirements. It enables and encourages electrification and time-shifting of load. Adding it at build time can be cheaper than tiling.
It’s generally a good thing and we'll see even more if it as the tech progresses and gets cheaper.
Yes and:
With the rise of "virtual power plants" (VPPs), "all the above" (PV, batteries, EVs, water heaters, HVAC, residential geothermal) will be stitched together to create decentralized, more resilient power grids, capable of peer-to-peer power sharing.
Analogy:
Remember the term 90s "convergence" (turrible term)? Describing how the computer (digitization) was becoming the everything tool? VPPs (turrible term) is just the electification of "all the things", unifying all energy (heat, electricity) stuff (source, sink, storage).
It's a good way to anticipate this interation of "convergence". eg VPPs' analog to "traffic shaping" is "load shaping". eg Just like internet is a network of networks, the "intergrid" will be a network of grids. Etc.
It's really easy to see the rough outlines (age of renewable energy) once a person learns of the 100s (1000s?) of puzzle peices currently being assembled. Just reflect on the internet and superimpose those notions onto energy.
Thanks for listening.
Home solar is a big win, and if nothing else allows capital to be sourced from a million home owners.
Centralized solar is a big win, generating grid power Erich is obviously important.
It's not a question of either, it's a question of both.
https://energyandpolicy.org/fossil-fuel-funding-opposition-r...
(Although, if you factor out all the extra driving needed for the suburban life, it would likely still come out negative compared to a proper city.)
Six. The most heat escapes through the roof, but thermal loss through the floor is generally about 10-15% of the total.
Same goes for the slab/foundations (which can also have substantial thermal transfer in many contexts).
It really depends on what you mean by 'worst'. In terms of land-usage it's the best. In terms of speed-of-deployment it's the best. In terms of distributing capital spend its the best.
In terms of capital return, that will vary from one house to the next because it depends on location, energy consumed (and when), elec prices in your region, grid stability, and so on.
If it can remove the need for a grid-tie, then rooftop solar can be significantly cheaper and more efficient. Can be, but isn't yet, because enough overcapacity and storage to eliminate the need for a grid tie is still too expensive.
Rooftop is competitive with the meter price, but unless you can cut the cord entirely, connection fees and rates will just keep increasing proportionally
More durable for individuals in the face of large scale failures. You're paying for something real there.
Either you're assuming residential battery storage systems replacing the grid, or your ignoring the connecting rooftop solar to the grid requires permits and planning (the grid may not be able to handle it).
I can actually get balcony solar here in Germany for about 240 euros. Here's how that works:
- I buy a kit on Amazon. I found several nice ones. This one is rated for 850w and includes cables, inverters and other bits and bobs needed.
- I zip tie the panels to my balcony
- And I plug in the equipment and connect it to a wall socket
The idea is that this would offload some of the power used by e.g. my fridge. Not the same as a rooftop setup obviously and in my case quite pointless since I don't have a lot of sun on my balcony.
But I might actually qualify for a rebate if I do this and get all or most my money back. The government is sponsoring this and landlords can't stop you from doing this. Nor do you need their permission, a permit, or special insurance.
The point is that this stuff is cheap, easy, and pretty much plug and play. Roofs aren't a whole lot more complicated than this from a technical point of view. You need more panels and more expensive equipment and you probably need some professional electricians and installers to do the work.
The rest is just nonsense that relates more to your local government and legislation than anything being inherently expensive or difficult. I'd suggest reminding your local politicians of their responsibilities during the next elections and maybe voting for the ones that aren't being jerks on this front.
Otherwise, solar panels are pretty reliable and generally covered by long warranties. Repairing them is mostly not a thing, somebody would come and simply replace them. I doubt that a lot of solar panel companies and installers are suffering a lot under the enormous burden of this happening all the time for the simple reason that it this isn't a thing.
The reason that's affordable there and requires subsidies in wealthier nations is all the nonsense the nanny states we live in come up with to over complicate things. You need certified this and that. Only people in possession of a special license can plug component A into component B, or strip some wires. And then there is the local grid monopoly that throws up all sorts of obstacles.
There's a way around this. Just buy some panels and batteries on amazon and wire up your shed, boat, cabin in the woods, etc. It's all plug and play. You don't need any permits, special skills, etc. And you end up with a system that can provide a couple of KW of power. Not that hard. There's nothing special about a rooftop. You might need a ladder to get there and you might want to take some safety precautions to avoid dropping off.
Maybe when battery prices come down even more. But the cost of grid-level storage are also falling, and wind pretty much only works at grid scale. Grids have to change but won't become obsolete anytime soon.
Smarter grids are an even better solution; batteries backing local high-variance demand combined with rapidly negotiated requests for transmission power to meet expected future demand (and then stored in the batteries) reduces (electrical) inefficiency to a minimum.