Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomaytotomato | Hacker News Reader

A family member lives on the Outer Hebrides of Scotland.

There is a community trust on one of the islands which has built wind turbines.

However it took about 2 years before they were certified and connected up to the grid, and rather disappointingly it hasn't made local prices cheaper.

The electricity is sold to the grid and that money goes to the community trust.

Which seems bureaucratic?

I wish we could have decentralized electrical grid generation.

(not an Electrical engineer)

View on HN

It is illegal to sell electricity directly to someone else. To sell electricity you need to be licensed as an energy supplier.

So currently it is illegal to, for instance, sell your excess wind or solar electricity to your neighbour. You have to sell it to the grid and it goes into the "common pool".

With battery storage is it feasible to isolate/disconnect, move and then reconnect at another location, or once certified and turned on is it considered part of a system that can't be divided. It would be adding a significant cost to enable 'movement' of energy if you didn't need storage before and would need to be charged ahead of time, but it seems similar to fuel where I could give gas to a neighbor. I wouldn't expect that kind of scenario to work for the vast majority of people, but on a remote island it could be the kind of solution that gets engineered to keep homes working when an official solution takes a long time to arrive.

There are plug-in batteries these days. Charge it in one home, then chuck an extension cord over the fence to discharge to another home (ignoring safety concerns...)

What you want is an electric car with "V2G" (vehicle to grid) technology. Still not quite publicly available yet.

But we do have decentralized grid generation. What we do not have is fixed price transit rights and the ability for smaller generators to make direct deals with local customers.

If I put up a lot of solar panels I'm not even allowed to give my electricity to my neighbors, they have to buy it from the grid which I am allowed to sell it to at a stupendous discount. The so called free energy market has mostly failed, it isn't fair to consumers and commercial grid operators have taken over resources paid for by those very same consumers and are milking them for every penny while slow-walking the required investments so they get more subsidies.

Out of interest, what would happen if you were to sell/give it to your neighbours anyway? Is it a slap on the wrist, or are we talking of multi-thousand pound fines?

I ask because whilst I believe there are no doubt (probably very strict) regulations around the selling of electricity, I wonder how enforceable they are on the average Joe. If I were to run a cable to my neighbour and just deny I was sharing my electrical store, how far would they go, and who would _they_ even be?

10% of turnover (Electricity Act 1989).

Realistically, no-one's going to care about running a cable to your neighbour. If you start running cables to multiple neighbours, or connecting the cable directly into the mains supply of the other properties, you may attract attention.

Mostly for the potential of microgrids to upset the delicate balance of power-delivery and frequency-stability of the wider grid. There are a few initiatives around peer-to-peer power sharing and microgrids, but nothing particularly mainstream in the UK yet.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1989/29/section/4

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1989/29/section/27O

> or connecting the cable directly into the mains supply of the other properties, you may attract attention.

That would be a stupendously bad idea.

Well, unless you invest non-trivial extra work, you're going to start showing up on grid monitoring and finally someone will drill down in problem looking for broken substation and find you doing exactly the things that caused the problems and the reason for it being illegal to "just hook up".

It's just that often in many places law lagged in ways of dealing with islanded operation, and semi-islanded cases (where you invest in serious gear to separate your local micro grid from external grid preventing the issues that cause technicians to show up and report you)

A disconnect isn't a huge deal, most houses have one but they don't have a lock-out position and that's a must for an islanding operation and you'll need inverters that are happy to produce power even when the grid isn't present. Those are not the norm, but you can buy them (I'd recommend Victron). You'll also need a fairly large battery to stabilize the whole thing, without a battery you'll see massive voltage fluctuations as the inverters try to adapt to load without the required low internal resistance backing, so I would definitely recommend against that unless you like buying new stuff every other week.

Hypothetically for obvious reasons, I would put a socket on the outer wall of my garage with a sign saying 'do not use'. This would enable an enterprising person to siphon off up to 3600 Watts continuously while the breaker in my garage would be in the 'on' position. I could use my home automation setup to determine whether there is a surplus generated and only enable that socket through remote control as well.

Direct neighbour as in your properties touching might be a different matter, but to get right of way to cross public or another entities property as a random person or company, that will most certainly be problematic.

Is that Eigg? I thought they had their own micro-grid, but it sounds like they are subject to National Grid authority nonetheless?

> I wish we could have decentralized electrical grid generation

Getting the right amount of power on in a stable fashion is not a trivial problem. Poor control systems can cause things like the Spanish blackouts.

Wind turbines are not base load, so they do not lower electricity prices.

That is just false. Of course wind turbines can and do lower prices, regardless of wether or not they‘re base load not

They lower the prices a lot when they are producing at full tilt. This means that prices, at least to some degree, go up when wind turbines are not producing at full capacity, since the other power sources need to amortize their fixed costs across fewer kilowatt hours sold.

Going up or down: there is more supply, so prices go down wrt. a situation without wind turbines, at least momentarily until the wind drops down indeed when we go back to a system w/o wind.

If you can store the energy, your energy cost goes down (but storage is not free of course, though getting cheaper).

Amortizing the fixed cost will mean the 'fossil' power is more expensive per kWh indeed, making it more and more attractive to buy storage as to bridge the gap between windy/sunny periods that do have cheaper electricity.

Some electricity markets have or a re looking at capacity mechanisms, they pay simply to have the capacity to generate power at any given time, even if not generating, eg. to be a backup. Eventually, that will be the business case for any fuel-powered power plant I suppose

They lower electricity prices by a lot in Spain.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com