And getting cheaper everyday.
A year ago I paid $8k for 7.8kw on my roof. My Dad just paid $5k for 10kw.
Neither of us will ever pay for power again.
Edit: Western, southern Canada for those asking.
A year ago I paid $8k for 7.8kw on my roof. My Dad just paid $5k for 10kw.
Neither of us will ever pay for power again.
Edit: Western, southern Canada for those asking.
But there's an issue with solar most people don't talk about. Yes it can be variable due to weather and day/night cycles. That's obvious. But a real issue is power lines.
Power lines are built to deliver power to businesses and homes. The cost of that is amortized over the electricity purchased by consumers. If people end up purchasing only half as much power due to more energy-efficient building standards, the use of solar, etc then the cost of the power lines is still the same except now it needs to be amortized over less electricity sold.
This I think is why municipalities tend to limit how much solar power houses are allowed to have. How do you build and maintain a grid when houses are generally self-suficient? Should you? Is it acceptable to not have a grid?
[1]: https://newatlas.com/energy/yarlung-tsangpo-hydroelectric-pr...
So China has largely invested in, deployed and perfected Ultra-High Voltage Direct Current ("UHVDC") transmission infrastructure. China has really shown they think 10, 20 and 50 years into the future with their planning.
As for grids, there are a lot of places that could be self-sufficient with solar plus batteries. A lot of remote towns and houses work this way already.
That’s the first I’ve ever heard this stat.
Right now I pay about $180 a month for electricity. So let’s round it to $2,000 a year.
If I got solar panels, I’d be spending average of $2k a year maintaining them? There are literally no moving parts anywhere. I can imagine having to replace an inverter here and there, or maybe even a panel at some point.
So my guess would be more line $200 a year average, if that.
They are saying the cost for grid running to your house, and for the hydro dams that provide power on a cloudy day are basically fixed.
Net metering doesn't scale at population levels.
That’s already happening with EVs. In my state in the US, since they are earning less from the gas taxes (used to pay for roads) from EV owners, they’ve raised the car registration fees for EV owners only.
And at superchargers they’ve raised prices to 45c/KWh.
So eventually I feel it won’t be much of a cost savings to have an EV anymore.
Don’t see why it wouldn’t be the same with Solar.
Just the electrician's part would be a good chunk of the $5k, where we live (East coast US) before you even get into placing the panels themselves.
I keep seeing cheap panel costs with a "look, now you can afford it!" thing, but for those of us who may be handy but aren't quite willing to do high-power lines & boxes, or confident bolting steel to a roof without either killing ourselves or ruining the roof, the labor costs continue to be very high, and that part's not going down. From what I'm seeing for online "average costs for 10kw in your area" I'd hesitate to pull the trigger even if it were $5k lower than it is, which would probably be an even bigger discount than if the panels and other hardware were simply free.
Couple that with the fact that Canada very likely has subsidies for people adopting solar power.
https://www.solarchoice.net.au/solar-panels/solar-power-syst...
When we had ours installed on a previous house, the roof installation itself was very fast - couple of hours maybe.
Beyond this, state and council/county authorities often have rebates/incentives to encourage take-up of panels and/or battery systems. Our council (county equivalent, I guess) has had group-buy initiatives, as one example, and a virtual power plant scheme.
Seems optimistic? With 2 EVs and almost all electric utilities, I'm well past the ~26 KWH a day electricity your system might generate.
I'm also impressed how cheap your costs are. The install cost alone in the Bay Area is going to be past that. Panels getting cheaper just don't matter much.
Assuming the parent doesn't have EVs and uses gas, oil, or wood for heat, the cost makes sense. "Domestic" electricity usage, when you aren't using it for heat and cars, is quite low.
The power we put in even covers the monthly connection fee.
I’m just about to hit 12 months with mine, 8 Mwh generated, never paid a bill.
In our area the cost of electricity is already Confirmed to increase 5% a year forever, so this will only get better for us.
A household uses up at least around 2MWh per year, most of which during the winter, if you don't use air conditioning in the summer and don't have an electric car to charge.
That means you'd need around 150 (!) Powerwall 3 units. At a price of around 10k GBP each, you'd have to shell out more than 1 million pounds just for the batteries. Not to mention the space that they'd have to take, and the increased risk in having something failing.
In the USA, homes are even less efficient (and depending on locale, people run AC all year round, and drive tens of thousands of kilometers on cars which also need to be powered). 2 years ago MKBHD published a video about his experience with the Tesla roof:
In it, he revealed that his yearly power consumption is 55MWh. His battery was able to tide him over the next cloudy day, and during the winter the solar panel wouldn't ever fully recharge again.
Expecting every household to be energy independent year-round via solar is patently absurd. Renewable energy tided over with massive batteries upstream? Maybe that could work, I haven't run the numbers... But you cannot hope to push that responsibility downstream to every household. Reliable baseline is still going to be necessary for the foreseeable future.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43751178
> We use the grid like a battery, getting a one for one credit for everything we put in. So during summer/daytime we put in enough to then use up our credit in winter/nighttime.
> The power we put in even covers the monthly connection fee.
> I’m just about to hit 12 months with mine, 8 Mwh generated, never paid a bill.
And later the same commenter argues
> When that happens, I’ll get batteries.
If I have to get batteries one day, I sure as heck won’t get a whole years worth of energy. In summer I’ll only need enough to get through the night ( very little ). In winter I’ll obviously need more, and I would have to carefully look at how much the house is using and how much solar I’m generating, but something like one or two power walls would do it. In five or ten years that’s going to be cheap.
Solar and batteries works great in climates with highly predictable weather and where demand only exceeds supply during very short burst. Europe, especially the northern part, are prime example where this is not the case and where supply shortages can occur for months. This is the reason why a single month of energy can cost more than the collective sum of all the other 11 months, since market prices follows supply and demand. This is where government subsidies will hide things with government funded fossil fueled power plants (under the euphemism of reserve energy and grid stability), and they can also just straight pay citizens energy bill when the price hit certain levels. When the government is responsible for energy storage, the cost is placed through taxes or tax-related fees. A common red flag here is when grid connection fees start to become bigger than actually consumption cost.
In 12 months the 7.8kw system has generated smack on 8Mwh.
While the very short days, snow and cloud cover reduce output a lot, it still makes power year round.
It is not absolute zero, but it kind of close, and there is a large period that storage would need to fill. For Sweden it is also the inverse for the demand spike, with winter demanding more energy than during the summer.
November and January were 200kwh each, and October and February were 400kwh each.
So it’s very low in the worst of winter, but it comes back very quickly.
Using the power walls examples above, you then need around 10 units.
How and why does that change anything in any way?
Thats ummm extremely cheap.
So saying most people have an 80 year payback period just feels wildly off (depending on the assumptions in the calculation I think that implies less than a penny per kWh generated).
Before all this our power bills were smack on $100 per month, so I’ve got about a 6.5 year pay off. Electricity here is 13 cents per kWh, but is confirmed to increase 5% per year basically forever. So my pay off is less than that.
The panels are also a hedge against that uncertainty and provide self reliance
For places not already on the grid, using batteries instead of paying for a new grid connection is close enough to be a question worth asking, though from what I've seen not a definite "yes" or "no" in general.
I highly doubt there is anywhere in the world where you can buy the amount of energy specified by the parent as cheaply as you said. Like i think it would work out to less then a penny per kwh
If you are not accounting for amount of generation than this is an apples and oranges comparison.
$0.03 * 11,000kWh/year * 87 years = $28,710.
So either you're vastly underestimating the amount you pay in electricity, or you're using vastly less electricity in which case you obviously wouldn't get a 10kW system.