Cheap solar power is sending electrical grids into a death spiral | Hacker News Reader

Cheap solar power is sending electrical grids into a death spiral

economist.com

106 pointsblackhawkC17118 comments

> "lots of self-generated power will ultimately be wasted."

This is sunlight falling on a roof. If you convert it into electricity but then don't use that electricity, is it really a waste? It's like saying that the overflow from my water tank that collects rain water off the roof is 'wasting' water.

It could be argued that it's a waste in the sense that the generated electricity could have gone to someone else if there was a grid, but if the grid operator isn't allowing excess to be put back into the grid (e.g. because there's no demand at that time because it's sunny and everyone is using solar), then the grid operator needs to solve that with some form of energy storage (e.g. batteries).

The hubris in this article is unreal: it's posing that privately owned utilities are a good thing and that bypassing them is some crime that's done by ratepayers. I hope that business model dies in a fire.

Instead the entire paradigm of centralized generation may need to be called into question and we should instead be focusing on a hybrid centralized baseline + local generation and storage. Places like China do fine with promoting residential solar where nearly half the solar was on residential rooftops (2023) [1].

[1] https://globalenergymonitor.org/report/china-continues-to-le...

Wow. Did you read the next three paragraphs to the end of the article:

| Policymakers are now attempting to come up with solutions. “You can make solar play nice with the grids,” ...

| Yet the best solution would be for energy firms to respond to the competition and sort themselves out.

The article is talking about: * how solar is disrupting the traditional utility model * in countries where the utilities provide a poor service wealthy people are doing there own thing producing their own power with PV * how this leads to less customers for the utility leading to more expensive power for people who cannot afford to generate their own power * that solutions like grid-tied home PV instead of independent systems provides a better outcome for everyone in the area.

I don't think it it to much of a stretch to say that the article is advocating for, as you say, "a hybrid centralized baseline + local generation and storage."

You forget that governments built the grid. Then they sold them, usually for far less than they're worth to "friendly" companies to get some money to spend. These companies, in a complete baffling coincidence then provided a suspicious number of those politicians with board seats after they retire from government, or "government liason director" positions and the like. Now the government is forever paying interest ... well, not so much the government, of course, the customers are. You and me. The government got the money, spent it, it's gone.

BUT, a while ago rich people started to get off the grid. And this has advantages, such as much greater flexibility in where to live, so they did.

Middle class people could get off the grid, which ironically the government paid them for. So they did.

Companies largely got off the grid (it's more complicated, they built solar plants, then sold the electricity for electricity at night or somehow traded with grids, and locked in these contracts for decades). So they're effectively off the grid.

So who's paying this eternal interest that keeps increasing?

Who isn't off the grid? The governments themselves, and poor people. Governments have, of course, decided they don't pay for the grid themselves (not even for maintenance). It's in your electricity bill ... which due to government financial responsibility (such as the previous German government entrusting all this ... to Putin. Yes, really, that Putin) ... is climbing fast. One might add that one story is that the head of the government that entrusted German energy to Putin was threatened during an official visit to Putin ... by Putin setting dogs on her (he had read she was terrified of dogs) ... she STILL went through with entrusting the energy infrastructure to Putin. Then Ukraine blew up a major part of the infrastructure Putin built. You can't make this up. Personally, I'm the sort of person that if someone sets dogs on me ... anything after that is going to be a tough sell.

So now poor people effectively have an extra tax in high electricity prices that are climbing fast (the increases are now down to 5x the rate of inflation. Yes, DOWN, that's correct). Oh and to make matters worse, as the article points out, it's become ever easier to get off the grid. Which means the people served by the grid ... still dropping. Not just houses in suburbs are disconnecting, but city houses as well. And there may be other reasons. It's green. Or my favorite: the Israeli reason (these people are brilliant and insane). Convincing people to buy solar power because ... it does not disconnect in case of war. Apparently it's popular in Arab countries too.

Since this allowed past governments to spend more money, they now have no problem spending a less, or paying that money back, of course. Yes, that last sentence was a joke. No, in reality they're coming up with ever crueler and more forceful methods to make sure poor people pay the extra tax, such as making it non-dischargeable. Making it a crime to disconnect from the grid. To take it out of unemployment benefits before the person sees the money. To threaten everything a person has in case of non-payment (e.g. school subsidies for their children). Etc.

It isn't working.

Oh and that this debacle, which is entirely the decision of the currently in power party, even if the head of the government was swapped, is driving people in droves to other parties (ie. AfD), is the fault of Zelensky, Putin, Musk, Netanyahu ... and frankly everyone ... except of course the party that actually did it.

How can you write so many words on the subject with zero mentions of neoliberalism?

I used to build microgrids and work closely with utilities - generation, transmission, and distribution. This was probably 15 years ago, but they talked about the 'solar death spiral' even back then.

In my opinion, a lot had to do with how they set retail rates. The retail electric companies set different rate categories and tiers. Most residential customers don't realize that they're often subsidizing commercial and industrial customers. So, of course there's going to be a death spiral when those residential customers decide to generate themselves.

I thought industrial power consumers paid more because of inductive/capacitive phase shifting.

Industrial power consumers are billed differently - so it could be more or could be less. The bills are more complicated - industrial customers will generally pay for things like power factor, capacity, demand, time-of-use rates, tiered rates, etc. On a per kWh basis it would depend from customer to customer. If you had a factory that operated overnight for whatever reason, their electricity would be very cheap.

Maybe once, but today's industries will have a total power factor pretty damn close to 1.0

The closing sentence summarizes the article:

> Rooftop solar offers an alternative to a monopoly that can no longer be considered natural.

Electricity generation can no longer be considered a natural monopoly. That sounds like an endorsement of rooftop solar.

Weird, I didn't read it like that at all. The article really just comes off as an explanation of the effects of decentralized solar on existing utility companies. It doesn't ever say that solar installers are bad.

In fact, it even somewhat welcomes it by pointing out that the competition utility companies now face will force them to offer better service.

> Instead the entire paradigm of centralized generation may need to be called into question and we should instead be focusing on a hybrid centralized baseline + local generation and storage

I don't think that moving the generation around is really an "instead", because the problem at hand is that distribution is expensive and someone has to pay for it if you want a grid. And most of that cost is the local stuff.

So how do you get everyone connected that wants to be, without it costing them a ton of money? You might have to make the grid cost into a mandatory tax.

Whether the electric company is private or state-owned is mostly a separate issue.

I don't think there is a viable answer to that. The thing is a lot of what we pay for with the grid is reliability. Until rates are set up in a fashion to properly express that we will have problems.

Wind and solar reduce fuel use, but they make for very little reduction in required infrastructure. Thus the value to the utility company is approximately the value of the fuel that's offset minus the costs of handling the situation.

Combine these and you see that the true value of wind and solar is pretty low other than from an environmental standpoint of reducing carbon emissions. (Now, if you have a use case of something that's power intensive but can freely be turned on and off then there could be some appreciable value.)

It’s not 100% “instead”, but equally it’s not 0%. A grid with more distributed generation (and storage and load flexibility) can be smaller and cheaper.

This is almost what is happening. Rate payers are paying less and less in order to compensate for production cost, and increasingly more in order to be connected to the grid and that the grid is stable. For the moment that cost is mostly attached to how much energy is consumed as a matter of billing, but that can change.

And the "almost" is the problem. Making the grid fee semi-optional based on how much electricity you buy is a massive destabilizing factor.

Rooftop solar with storage and a grid disconnect is fine. The problem comes about when people expect the grid to be there during the 5% event but otherwise be free (or even worse, that the utility be required to pay them for low-value power that overloads puny distribution systems during undesirable generation hours. It's a matter of economics - centralized generation, transmission, and distribution is expensive. Someone's got to pay for it if we want it to exist. A lot of people crow about their great solar setup and don't talk much about the power that they pull from the boring old grid.

If we're ok with everyone being an island or building a system capable of massively distributed generation, great. It will be massively more complex, less efficient, and more expensive to maintain. Let's just be honest about the nature of the problem.

Its like reading or watching/listening to Murdoch news/sky news in Australia. sounds like the exact same bullshit mindset.

I'm so, very sick of it.

This narrative is going to ruin us all. The rich and powerful will be ruined as well, it'll just take a little bit longer.

What you said sounds nice, unfortunately that's not how it works in the real world.

I mean it is "The Economist".

Exactly! Why is it not advocating for being economical?

You are reading that very narrowly. The paragraph is simply pointing out that solar power is cheaper when built out in a centralised way because of: * economies of scale for construction and maintenance * higher utilisation. They don't spell it out exactly, but it is pretty clear fro m the context that, "lots of self-generated power will ultimately be wasted", is eluding to a wider geographic area needing more panels to satisfy all demand when each house has an independent system, rather than being grid tied.

Fair enough.

I think this is true of a lot of things that are 'in our house' (or on our property). A fatuous hypothetical example might be a large central refrigerator shared between multiple properties.

The apartment building I live in has large central boilers for the hot water, to save space in the apartments. This benefitted the property developer, and is probably more energy efficient (although, just like our solar power example, transmission loss needs to be accounted for), but has downsides for the apartment residents.

A better example is private vehicle ownership, as opposed to public transport. It's a good example of something that has moved from a more centralised control to individual control, with benefits and downsides.

What's the downside of the central hot water? (Or heating.)

I've lived in buildings with this, and others (houses) without, and I much prefer the former. There's nothing I need to maintain, and the 'big' version seems to be more reliable than the single-house-sized heating equipment. The one time I remember the hot water being repaired, the janitor stuck up a note explaining that due to some sort of redundancy we'd still have hot water, but it would be less hot than it was supposed to be.

This wouldn’t be true in modern buildings, but in our case the hot water supply isn’t reticulated, and I’m at the ‘end of a (pipe) line’ so if no-one else sharing the same hot water pipe as me has run their hot water taps for a while, it can take 4 minute to get hot water in the shower.

This was bought up in a body corporate meeting several years ago. The cavities that the pipes run through are small enough that a reticulated system would be hard to retrofit. The suggested (tongue-in-cheek) solution was to “wait until you hear your neighbour showering before you have your shower.” Haha - thanks.

Solar panels use energy to create, and have a finite lifespan. If energy is generated but not used, it makes the average lifetime efficiency decrease. This does result in wasted energy.

Almost every innovation along the way to amazingly cheap solar has involved wasting more energy.

Note, I said amazingly cheap, not efficient. We have more efficient solar options but they're in the lab waiting for a breakthrough to make them cheaper or being replaced in the market with options that waste more and cost less per useful watt delivered.

The Economist did a whole issue recently about how amazing solar is and how it is changing the world but they've been mildly climate skeptical for years platforming frauds like Bjorn Lomberg and it still leaks through in their writing, even if they've switched to "solar being too cheap is bad" from "solar is too expensive to help".

Solar is competing against systems that pay for their fuel directly and which still turn two thirds of it to waste heat.

This is only true if the “generated but not utilized energy” is larger than the “total generated and utilized energy” + “total energy to create the panel”. Of courses, this is totally implausible as the lifespan of a typical panel is between 15-20y, and this is enough time for the inequality to turn good for using a panel.

Understood, and I agree. We could make this argument about other utilities too, e.g. mains water vs having your own water tank, public transport vs private cars. I guess municipal water supplies don't face the same 'existential' crisis, but public transport certainly has suffered with the rise of private car ownership, irrespective of the benefits that the latter has bought to individuals.

Do you know the mechanism behind this?

The electricity is switched off. If the system is fancy, maybe it's on a lower duty cycle. The panels just sit there, rotting, wasting their embodied energy.

I thought OP was saying there was actual damage to the solar cell if voltage is being generated but current isn't flowing causing lower efficiency.

This is like saying, "I bought a car and don't drive it." -- which people do.

> This is like saying, "I bought a car and don't drive it." -- which people do.

Well, it is, but in the same sense, if you own a car for a long time and don't drive much, your per-km costs end up high (due to car components wearing out from age rather than mileage) and your essentially fixed costs (insurance, etc.) end up proportionally greater compared to truly variable (gasoline, etc.) costs.

And if you really don't drive much, you get additional problems; the typical recommendation is to drive a car a minimum of a continuous 20 minutes every couple weeks.

Thermal cycling.

The other grid operators have to lower their production during the day. That itself can be expensive, but more importantly they run their same equipment to power fewer hours of the day; when solar is not available, which is expensive since they have significant fixed costs. Batteries are not a grid scale solution any time soon, but maybe one day.

You can also adjust energy prices to shape demand. It's not like baseload power plants have ever had constant demands there's always a curve.

The solution is of course a mix. Solar/wind/hydrogen/gas/etc., big grid/home systems. It will require grid upgrades.

Batteries are already happening [0]. And electric cars + home solar systems with batteries have a further ability to allow additions to this at scale if the grid supports it

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_energy_storage_syste...

That’s not true everywhere. See Australia[1] , California [2], Denmark [3], Iceland [5] for some counter examples.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Australia

[2] https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/Others...

[3] https://www.wri.org/update/sustained-portfolio-policies-have...

[5] https://gogn.orkustofnun.is/Talnaefni/OS-2021-T009-01.pdf

I guess you could say "batteries are not a grid scale solution" as long as you ignore ERCOT and CAISO...

In 2010, someone sticked some battery shortcoming knowledge (e.g., not grid scale) into their head, but it takes double the amount of energy to update it today.

Batteries are not a grid scale solution.

What we see at grid scale are batteries being used for quick response power while other generators are being spun up. The thing is the grid very much doesn't like it when demand exceeds supply. Systems shut down to protect themselves and you either dump loads very quickly or suffer a cascade failure (see the 1965 blackout--and note that that only stopped growing when the operators were able to dump enough load.)

Since this is in disaster territory the utilities obviously try to avoid it and ensure there's always enough to cope with any surges--which means they must have more stuff spinning than they actually need. Enter facilities like the big batteries: keeping them hot costs almost nothing and they have a very fast response when called upon. This buys the utilities time in which to spin up other generators and thus allows them to operate with less waste.

... you started your comment with "batteries are not a grid scale solution" and then you described one of the primary reasons batteries are useful at grid scale.

I don't get it, did you put an extra "not" in your opening sentence?

We use batteries in South Australia to stabilize our grid already.

It was an infrastructure investment with the idea that it returns an expected amount of energy over an expected life and an assumption that that energy has a value that makes it pay for itself in X years.. If its not worth using a lot of that energy that's a first slide.. A much further slide is when the energy to produce it is never paid back in what it produces, which can be considered true for the enormously over provisioned.

One just needs to align supply with demand. But since the centralized model doesn’t like such a “decentralized” idea, they cast the problem as something impossible to be solved, which is very funny I have to say.

Unlike the economist I know something about accounting. If there is excess power at zero marginal cost someone cunning is already planning on making some coin off it. As it is utilities with excess solar and wind are rapidly adding battery storage.

I think there are three stages of renewable development. The first stage renewables partly offset traditional suppliers. The second stage is you actually have excess part of the time. And the third stage you have a lot of season excess. China and Texas are in the first stage but California is in the second stage already.

> If there is excess power at zero marginal cost someone cunning is already planning on making some coin off it.

I'm not sure it's that simple as evidenced by the ever increasing hours of negative electricity prices.

As far as I know, there are so far no good applications for short bursts of negative prices. Everything that would love those is so capital intensive/high fix costs that even 10 or 20% utilisation rates at negative prices are not enough to make it economically viable.

Season excess is also a big problem. Batteries to smooth the days/nights cycles are fine, you can use them ~365 times a year. But a battery to smooth out summer/winter cycles can only be used once a year!

I look at California ISO's site

https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply

The difference between summer and winter for renewables is 20%. In California the difference is driven mostly by solar.

This is an interesting page.

http://www.statsmapsnpix.com/2021/11/world-population-by-lat...

Majority of the worlds population lives between 40 north and 10 degrees south. And also some places like Scotland had lots of wind.

Definitely winners and losers in the transition.

Exactly. This statement quite really does not make sense as this is literally how electricity works with grid too, since you need to have a reserve margin

I do find the rest of the article more or less balanced in the discussion of the issue, even though it tries very hard not to actually squarely put blame where it lies

Yep, we’ve been wasting the suns energy for billions of years

It’s even worse than that. We’re wasting all the energy of every star in the Universe every second we spend not building Dyson spheres around them.

No, Dyson spheres is short term thinking. What we really should be doing is breaking up the stars and storing they hydrogen for future use. Just allowing fusion to happen and radiating the energy away is inefficient and wasteful.

No need to break them up, just ship them to the universe's most efficient storage mechanism - a black hole!

Next level thinking let’s start these conversations early

They likely mean wasting the embodied energy and materials.

And opportunity cost of having unused capacity in one location and unmet demand in another location.

I think the end game is that people that realize they have to live on this planet will disconnect from the grid (because it is cheaper) and use that waste electricity for direct atmospheric carbon capture (because terraforming is our only remaining viable path forward).

If that means the grids go bankrupt and default on payments to the fossil fuel industry, then I will try to pretend to be very sad for at least 60 seconds.

The group of people that will ultimately benefit from this includes just about everyone except the octogenarian plutocrats that are actively accelerating climate change.

Maybe once they die off there will be some financial incentives to help repair the atmosphere (assuming life extension technology doesn’t doom all of us to living with their immortality).

Over-produced electricity can be stored by the private party in a local vehicle/wall battery.

Through a grid it may be sent to a plant which will produce green hydrogen, or to a dam (pumped-storage hydroelectricity)... or sent to another region (even quite remote, via some (U)HVDC line) which will use/store it.

I wish I had this problem with my arrays.

The solution is obvious and cheap. You don't need powerwalls in 2025 all the major backup battery manufacturers now make $3-4k models which you can wheel around and can take your excess with zero conf off the shelf.

Yes, because the solar cells aren't free. They have an environmental and monetary impact while not lasting forever. If you don't use them, you are wasting them.

> "lots of self-generated power will ultimately be wasted."

Takes like this are why corporations will plunge humanity into a painful end through climate change.

Batteries are getting cheaper and better at a brisk clip.

could melt aluminum or heat the ground for winter time, thus waste

The loss is to capitalism

If wed had invested to in socialism,we would build out batteries.

What a selfish techno dystopia

Hopefully what's dying is the concept of privately owned utilities. Everyone knows that, unless they're properly regulated, these eventually turn into a rent-seeking behemoths that corrupt the government (or vice-versa).

However, what will likely happen is that these private utilities will see the writing on the wall and instead do what PG&E is doing in CA and just start charging "transmission fees" to keep their rates even higher despite massive daytime solar abundance.

Everywhere there is state/municipal owned utilities it's almost always considerable cheaper than private.

> Everywhere there is state/municipal owned utilities it's almost always considerable cheaper than private.

Not everywhere, it's really the regulation that matters, not just the ownership - here in Alberta we've got a market where we get municipally-owned utilities where we still get high rates comprising of energy fees + transmission fees + distribution fees.

Yeah, I'm fine with there being a market where private generators can sell power to the grid, but the poles and wires need to be publicly owned.

I don't know how there are still some that haven't worked out that a privatised natural monopoly is one of the worst ownership structures for anything important - as if multiple other companies could ever build a other electricity transmission networks on top of each other in the same area (or water and sewer systems, etc.) and provide actual competition! It's impossible and ludicrous.

The two girds they talk about were not doing that great before solar either.

Eskom South Africa:

>CEO and the cyanide-laced coffee...dramatic example of how criminality has seeped into South Africa’s state...organised theft, mainly of copper, on an industrial scale https://www.ft.com/content/5fe8291d-9895-4272-9e0a-eefa27911...

Pakistan:

>Pakistan's energy shortfall refuses to abate amid scorching heat, load-shedding...Pakistan's urban centres are now suffering up to six hours of load shedding...Calling it a "crisis of leadership and coordination", a former PEPCO head criticised... https://energy.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/oil-and-gas...

Not sure you can blame solar for that. The rest of the world seems to manage solar without death spirals.

https://archive.is/2025.02.13-153306/https://www.economist.c...

Lots of threads lately about power utilities making bad decisions and barriers to starting public utilities, indirectly which can lead to fires and home loss.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42971311

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42975492

If the privately owned utilities are left to their own devices when solar comes in and eats their lunch, expect more "climate change driven disasters," right?

Don't forget about regulatory capture too. If Idaho Power (e.g. because they're in a republican state with a bunch of wildfires lately) fails or is culpable for billions caused by fires by their lax equipment, someone will bail them out -- probably the tax payer.

If the tax payer is ultimately on the hook, then the tax payers should own the utility.

This reminds me that utilities can limit the size of your rooftop solar system, which locks you into whatever your usage you had at install time. Because of that it's difficult for me to actually achieve net zero electric usage and it's more cost effective for me to remain on a gas furnace instead of upgrading to a heat pump. This is such a shame. I wish I could just get 2 more KWh.

I assume you mean 2kW not 2kWh. And you can; look up "Non-export addition". These are solar panels that are set to zero-export; they will either charge a battery or the current house loads, but never backfeed into the grid.

> they will either charge a battery or the current house loads, but never backfeed into the grid.

I’m not sure I understand how this works unless you split off loads into a subpanel that is fed by a UPS which is fed by solar panels, and also isolated from your utility connected electrical service.

As far as I understand it, you can’t have power generated by solar panels feeding loads in your grid-connected panel without backfeeding the grid, same deal as a generator backfeeding a grid-connected panel. You have to kill the MCB or service disconnect to prevent backfeeding.

If you have links with info on how this work (one-line diagram would be extremely useful) I’d be curious. I sell and run commercial electrical work, FWIW. I’ve done zero solar jobs so my understanding could definitely be wrong!

Zero export inverters are grid-tied but monitor the meter/CTs for load changes in order to curtail solar production/shift it to battery charging. I think they can technically backfeed a little bit if load is suddenly dumped depending on the inverter response time. Some have a secondary hard disconnect for additional protection.

https://knowledge-center.solaredge.com/sites/kc/files/feed-i...

Thanks for the info, that clears things up!

> As far as I understand it, you can’t have power generated by solar panels feeding loads in your grid-connected panel without backfeeding the grid, same deal as a generator backfeeding a grid-connected panel. You have to kill the MCB or service disconnect to prevent backfeeding.

An inverter can limit its output, right? So measure current at a few different points in the system, do some math, and use that to set the inverter's limit.

Thanks for the explanation, that makes sense. Monitor some CTs and let the inverter only discharge enough power to satisfy the current demand without backfeeding the utility.

Or mine some crypto with the excess. I'm only half kidding. Having too much power is a good problem to have.

Wouldn't it be like

Grid < Primary solar > Battery < Secondary Solar

Where the house is powered by inverter directly on the battery (and maybe a second inverter for primary solar to grid?)

You are correct :) Thank you for mentioning non-export additions! I'll give those a look.

If you get more can't you disconnect from the grid? Then they can't stop you. You need batteries of course. Or stay connected with existing system and have more solar that is only connected to batteries separately, no grid.

Some places will condemn your house (or at least threaten to) if you don’t have an active grid power connection. so yes, they can stop you.

Wow interesting, which country/juridiction? Seems pretty extreme

Most cities require a grid electrical connection as a requirement for habitability. The codes all refer to ‘utility providers’ for building permits, and require utilities (including electrical, water, etc.) be present and provided before the unit is considered ‘habitable’. Even temporary power (required to start construction before you could even install a solar installation, with the way most permits are done) has to be permitted and done a specific way.

Here is one example code from Arizona [https://law.justia.com/codes/arizona/title-9/section-9-467/].

And a lot of unclear discussion [https://www.reddit.com/r/phoenix/comments/4ugdtu/is_it_illeg...]

At a state level they’ve been making it clearer that it is technically legal - but it’s still hard to actually do.

There has been a lot of controversy on this topic, with permits getting denied in cities when the plan was to be off grid (and people just caving), and some utilities explicitly raising connection fees to ensure zero-usage customers were still paying them.

It gets people really angry too of course (at least in the US) because ‘what do you mean big government won’t let me do what I want on my own land!’.

The reality is, the types of folks who actually want to go truly off grid (and don’t feel the need/prioritize the backups provided by an optional grid connection, or think it is too expensive) probably already live far enough in the boonies that building codes are largely optional anyway.

It’s pretty rare that a random city dweller is going to be trying to go 100% off grid in their condo, or would have the physical space or legal ability to do so, regardless of what the city says.

And code enforcement looking too closely at things way out in the sticks tends to find itself in some very dangerous situations - the type people just disappear from sometimes and are never found - especially out in the remote parts of America’s deserts/woods.

Not sure if your utility allowed for planned usage changes (ie, planning to buy an(other) EV, planning to install heat pump). This is what my installer submitted to justify my 180% over-specced solar install. This is PG&E in CA.

San Diego's limit is 150% but if you don't have a heat pump/car charger to start with, you're def going to be at more than 150%. Did you have to show them concrete plans for EV charger or heat pump?

The existing comments here already capture most of my thoughts on the subject: users reap benefit + shareholder loose revenue = disaster!

Disaster for who? Not the users that's for sure.

Another aspect of this in the US electric utility context is that if more power is genrated locally, and exxcess is distributed as locally as possible, then long distance distribution is reduced. THere aren't as many needs, and certainly this reduces planned expansion of long distance distribution.

However, this is also a "disaster" as defined above, since construction of those long distance transmission facilities are also payed for with public bonds and therefore direct taxpayer funding.

The economist never ceases to amaze in this twisted logic...

Weird how when the rapacious whims of capitalists destroy things people value the economists posit that "those things weren't viable in the market, we have to be realistic" but when business models that capital finds valuable are under threat from technological commodification the line is "disaster, death spiral"

I have to say, my days of not taking economics seriously as a science are certainly coming to a middle

I built a garage with a flat roof to accommodate a solar system. I assumed it would make sense. However between the city rules on setback and the extra cost of a grid-connected system, it didn't make sense. Since then I've been strongly considering an off-grid setup. I'd like to see those get more uptake because there are so many fewer dependencies and regulations.

One Jack Rickard, RIP, who was quite an opinionated jerk imho, coined the concept of "selfish solar." The idea was that solar was on its way to becoming so cheap that one should just install enough panels and batteries such that you basically never use the grid, it's just a backup for uncommon events. Basically grid use drops to that 1 or 10% of the time the sun doesn't shine for days. I think we are there on the panel side, and will be there soon on the battery side. Selfish solar could make sense but it would change the economics of solar and electric grids substantially. If everyone went selfish solar, grid electricity and infrastructure would become prohibitively expensive. We are decades away from that or at least one decade (IMHO), but we need thoughtful regulation on this point. Will we get it? I suppose time will tell.

That might work in southern latitudes where the seasonal change in solar irradiation isn't much different. In the North, like in Canada, there's just not enough solar in the winter. We really need a way to store excess solar from the summer into the winter. Like on the scale of a 500 gallon propane tank.

There is a finish company working on something that might fit this need: domestic sand batteries.

https://polarnightenergy.fi/sand-battery/

doing fine @ 45°north thank you, and know people living and making all of there income from solar even further north, with I might add equipment that is now outdated, but was much more expensive than what is availible now, which has almost doubled in efficiency, and is less than half the price, retail, with palet loads becoming bizarly cheap. When combined with a new build semi passive solar house, conventional heating systems can be omited entirely. There is a comming "solar divide" ....those who pay energy bills, and those that dont.

Or a big deep hole full of pipes circulating water making dirt hot.

https://archive.is/MJyhB

I mean, what power grid provider makes it easy to work with them to sell solar back to the grid? Bogus fees, negative rate metering, and lobbying against the consumer drives consumers to ever-cheaper solar and storage options.

This is self inflicted behavior from monopolies that ignore user research.

What's wrong with negative electricity pricing? Are utilities meant to let consumers overvolt the grid and use their industrial customers and utility-scale generators to counteract it without any compensation or disincentive?

I have no roof but I would happily have a day of battery around in the bad weather and use it to drastically cut my electricity costs in good weather. In a world with competitive grids or grids that couldn't charge negative, I think some regulatory complexity would suddenly evaporate and someone much like the paradoxical utility sponsored energy saving consultant might show up to help me do that.

We are going through the same thing in Australia. In fact I suspect it's happening everywhere with solar.

The current solutions look to be market based, which boils down to getting rid of "one fixed price per kWh" and moving to something closer to paying whatever the wholesale market is charging. Not exactly that as the wholesale market is wild. It can varying by over a factor of 1000 during the year. What has happened is time of use charging which boils down to different fix rates for different times of the day. Controlled loads, which translates to the supplier being able to forcibly turn off things in your house. If you agree to that for your car charger for example, you get to pay about USD $0.05/kWh to charge your car. And there are demand charges, which means you don't pay per kW/h used but rather your peak draw in kW over a 3 month period.

Net metering was never a thing here, but now they can forcibly turn off the feed-in. In return they where used to set the maximum feed-in very conservatively based on how much the grid could absorb form every panel in the suburb at the worst possible time, now they will take the maximum your wiring supports.

Finally they now allow households to form themselves into power plants, that sell the power they generate / store directly on the wholesale market.

Meanwhile, the story is talking about grids disallowing net metering as a big step. It ain't a big step. It wasn't even a first step for Australia, as the distortions it caused were obvious so it was never allowed.

It looks to me like Australia has largely solved the day to day "grid instability" problem the article talks about. We do have places whose yearly average is 70% renewable, and they are fine. I'm not so sure about how them solving the "sun hasn't shined and the wind hasn't blown" for a week issue. It's not insurmountable as even on cloudy days, solar outputs 20% of peak. However, right now the solution in that 70% state is gas peakers.

It depends on the utility company. Some are better than others.

The grid is a utility. They weren't originally built with the idea of customers sending power back at a small scale. So it's tricky to maintain power fluctuations when you have all these extra data points. Plus considerations for the quality of consumer hardware. So naturally companies would prefer to have solar installations at scale as opposed to by residential basis.

ComEd, the main electrical provider in northern Illinois, actively encourages homes and businesses to install solar power and offers net metering to solar-equipped customers.

https://www.comed.com/smart-energy/my-green-power-connection...

> After ComEd receives confirmation that the project has passed municipal inspection, it can take anywhere from 6 to 18 weeks to complete the permanent residential electric service and up to 6 months for a permanent industrial electric service, depending on the amount of work required.

6 month turnaround sounds pretty weak.

https://secure.comed.com/MyAccount/MyService/Pages/RequestIn...

Six months for "permanent industrial electric service" sounds pretty reasonable, actually.

Oh, yes, I misread. 6-18 weeks still is a high enough barrier to drive a lot of people away.

The residential one seems a bit high, but the industrial one doesn't seem crazy to me.

Yep, very reasonable

If 6-18 weeks turns you off from an investment that will fully pay itself off in 5-10 years, what are you even doing?

How long do you expect it to take?

Related: I've been trying to get my electric company to register the meters they installed in August so I can get billed properly. It's been months of back and forth. I just want to pay them money for electricity, it's all I want from them.

Had a similar situation back in 2018/2019. Electric company offered a flat rate for electric vehicle charging but you needed to install a second meter. Took them forever to install the actual meter (it had been jumped by the electricians and covered by cardboard) and then months of not being billed for it.

California can permit standard residential installations same-day with SolarAPP+

That's fantastic, I wish simple things could be permitted that fast here. It takes weeks for simple stuff to get approved here.

Just make roof solar panels with tiltable shades that limit the incoming sunlight for this kind of situations. This is when there is no battery storage involved.

If the solar-roofed house can involve home batteries, problem solved.

You don't need to. If you don't draw the energy from the panels, nothing happens. It's not like a turbine where you'd have to dump the energy into a dummy load. Solar power not used is simply not produced.

Nice, in this case the solution is really easy, just a switch that the grid operator can turn off to cut the solar panels off the grid when there is not enough demand.

That's how it does work now, at least in Australia, the energy meter on your house is connected to the internet and when the market rate goes negative (oversupply) solar production gets disconnected.

If you've got a battery you can continue to charge it, as well as consuming power from your own panels, but you won't feed back power at these times.

The Economist, a journal that speaks for the British millionaires

Anyone who paid some attention saw this coming.

You can't run a grid with maxed out cheap renewables. It's like having a society where the police and prisons staff closes shop and goes home when the sun sets and still expect law and order to persist.

NYPD tried that. Law and order persisted.

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