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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

It’s a true shame that the public utility commission is so corrupt that we lose the obvious economies of scale from grid-scale installations of same in favor of expensive rent seeking by a state-sanctioned monopoly.

I also have 60kWh of batteries in my kitchen, but for the average person who doesn’t want to deal with this stuff, having to admin part of the power grid is a tragic waste.

If the PUC and power company weren’t bastards, this could all be in a giant field somewhere staffed by a tiny fraction of the people who have to waste their lives dealing with it in their garages. So many unnecessary struts, so much caulk and EPO switches, so many inverters.

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It turns out that the biggest cost of California energy is not generation, it's distribution and transmission.

Highly distributed energy lessens the peak demands on the T&D system, which means that the T&D system can be smaller, which greatly reduces the fixed cost of T&D. Utility scale solar requires greatly expanding transmission lines, to the extent that lack of transmission is the biggest barrier to adding solar to the grid in most of the US.

So even if installation costs of solar are higher on the grid edge, it usually makes a ton of sense, and this is evident in the payoff times of NEM3 systems that include batteries. As batteries get cheaper, or there's more vehicle-to-home systems out there, it will only increase.

This lessened need for T&D is the true reason that utilities in California hate solar and need to stop it. They can take a guaranteed rate of profit from anything they get to spend on T&D, but the same isn't true of generation. So utility solar, which requires building more lines and beefing up distribution substations more, lets them profit much more than residential solar.

How many office parking lots would be covered in solar carports immediately if the corrupt PUC paid reasonable rates for generation?

This solves the T&D problem too, as generation remains distributed.

It’s the money.

Not so easy to reduce the grid load all the time, needs a big battery for every night and for multiple dark days you still need the grid a lot.

Paying reasonable rates for generation also incentivizes distributed storage for anyone who wants to buy batteries and help load shift.

Large neighborhood batteries seem to make a lot more sense to me than batteries in every home.

Would be nice, the rate could be grid size battery/PV + cost savings from localized production. Not sure if it is economically feasible then.

> Large neighborhood batteries

Boy people hated their HOA before, imagine how much they'll hate their HOA (because neighborhood batteries would need to be owned by someone, and that someone is the HOA) when they can cut off your power bc you left a garbage can out too long!

Spinning steam turbine generators also can't just turn on/off instantly. They need to ramp up/down. If you can't ramp up fast enough to meet demand, you have issues. When solar drops off pretty fast, and people come home from work and start turning on appliances, you suddenly have a huge amount of power needed from generators.

Even has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve

The solution of course is more batteries, but you can't really incentivize non-peak generation until you get the batteries. That's part of the NEM3 change that the blog mentions, to change the incentives from just solar to solar and battery.

Big batteries are actually very easy, and getting cheap enough that they account for a significant chunk of new grid assets when there are enough renewables.

Take the Texas ERCOT market, which is the closest thing to a free electricity market that exists in the US. A huge chunk of new grid assets are batteries, becuase they are one of the most profitable things to install right now (see the map at the bottom of the page)

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586

Additionally, many people are now buying EVs, and an EV stores 2-5 days worth of electricity. If big batteries on wheels are commonplace, then simpler and cheaper immobile batteries are pretty easy too.

Ok what do you do after 5 darkdays? You will need the grid.

Is it the generation that cost, or the promise that you'll always have power?

Keeping capacity ready is probably the expensive bit.

you're making a big assumption here - that the demand peak coincides with the distributed generation peak. This is generally not true.

In California, the subject of my comment, it is true.

it generally isn't.

Peak demand on most electricity systems, including California's, is during the evening hours, typically between 18:00 and 21:00. This does not coincide with peak solar generation.

You can see this even as far back as 2018 via CalISO's own data. https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook

That's because residential solar is eating up the daytime peak, thus the duck curve. Residential solar is already saving the state tons of money on T&D costs.

(And becuase the Wikipedia for duck curve shows a day in October rather than a summer day where the peak is much higher, yes the annual peak does coincide with when solar is outputting a ton of power.)

CalISO's charts disagree with you.

Gross peak demand is in the late evening, well after the solar peak. Solar noon in western California is around 13:00.

https://www.caiso.com/documents/gross-and-net-load-peaks-fac...

You misunderstand the charts, these do not take into account residential solar. The reason the peak is getting pushed into the evening is because residential solar doesn't even show up on the chart.

Look at the difference between gross and net: this is utility scale shaving off the peak. This is what is happening with residential solar too, which is not shown.

The fact that so many people are turning their homes into mini power plants is less a triumph of individualism and more a symptom of a broken system

Abstracting away from any particular grid regulatory environment, distributed solar and batteries make sense and make more and more sense as the cost reduces.

Another way of saying that, if we were playing a city simulator as a disembodied beneficent dictator you'd want distributed generation and storage as part of your grid.

In reality there's all sorts of complications, compromises, trade-offs, graft and politics but on balance those factors are working against distributed solar which is succeeding despite them.

Some people have a knee-jerk reaction to anything that requires legislation, regulation or subsidies which clouds the issue though.

There’s distributed and then there’s piecemeal. It doesn’t make sense to try to fit large energy storage safely inside every residential building.

You could build fireproof mini storage substations in blocks or subdivisions to load shift, but taking a chunk out of everyone’s garage space and forcing every person to do inverter and battery maintenance is silly.

My point wasn't that individuals shouldn't install solar, but that the fact so many have to in order to get reliable

Yeah nothing about home install solar + battery soundly beating utility power prices even paying retail rates for equipment and labor for years on end, as prices on the equipment falls year after year, while utility power prices keep going up makes any fucking sense.

That's what I find so wild

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