Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

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This is something I've been considering of late. I was an 'early adopter' for Solar and have had 5kW of panels on my roof for 14 years now. Initially we were on a 'watt for watt' type rate schedule with a flat true up at the end of the year (basically net usage would be billed every 12 months). This was a good deal for me, and a bad deal for PG&E apparently. Over the years they have morphed that into something much more in their favor and with the help of "smart" meters have factored in various timing aspects which all work toward increasing how much I pay PG&E even though I am using about the same amount of power that I was before.

The only answer then is to go 'all in' and just cut them out of the equation. But battery maintenance is a huge challenge with lead-acid packs, a fire risk with lithium ones. I'd love to have a locally owned and operated 'storage depot' where I could shove my excess power to the depot, and pull power when I needed it (like being grid tied) but consolidate and amortize the cost of maintaining the power storage component across a bunch of customers.

Can you legally do something like use the solar power for your lighting or small appliances and use the company's electricity for your heating? With different sockets and wires?

Yes, I could do that.

What I can no longer do is come out revenue neutral if I generate exactly the same number of kwH that I consume in a 12 month period.

I don't think that would be fair anyway. There is more value in electricity than net kwH used in a year. Ignoring other value that power companies provide (such as supplying for large demand fluctuations over days and seasons) and asserting that you should get them for free seems disingenuous at best.

Interesting use of the term fair. If I had 'super capacitors' or pretty much any 98% or better charge storage device I could take my house off the grid and give the power company zero dollars for power. In my ideal world I would set up solar to nominally charge the base load charge supply for my house, and power the house from the base load charge supply. In the event my base load charge supply dropped below a set limit, I'd use natural gas to run a fuel cell for some number of hours to get the base load charge supply back into the right zone. I continue to use gas for heat applications (stove top, dryer, house heater, water heating) but would be no longer part of the electricity grid.

Right now, to do this costs more than the 'surcharge' I'm paying PG&E to be a utility with electricity on demand. But once the economics switch I'm going to kick their electricity service to the curb. And I consider that both right and fair.

Why wouldn't you be able to?

If you are asking why I don't end up with a $0 bill it is because PG&E builds a per kwH 'cost' schedule that includes various tiers of usage. But they don't adjust how much credit I get by baseline usage.

As a contrived example, let's say Baseline is 200kWH and .10 per kWH, and I use 300kWH which is billed at 200kWH at 'baseline' rate, and 100kWH at 'premium' rate of .125 per kWH. My "billed" cost is $32.50, If I then generate 300kWH I get "credit" for 300 baseline rate kWH or $30.00, and have to eat the difference between the baseline rate and the premium rate or generate and extra 25 kWH to cover the difference. I've had extended phone conversations with them and they completely understand that this is exactly the situation, they are pretty pleased with themselves for getting it through the regulators.

> I'd love to have a locally owned and operated 'storage depot' where I could shove my excess power to the depot,

I don't understand why the utility companies can't convert some of their regional substations to local grid level storage locations, to counter this trend. They have the scale to utilize larger scale banks of batteries, hire people to manage them, and even exploit more dangerous technologies (like the emerging molten salt batteries).

Simple: Most established companies don't have the stomach for that kind of innovation. They've been delivering their product for basically the same way for over a century, and their shareholders don't see the upside to changing.

Of course, that leaves them ripe for disruption, but the nature of local monopolies makes that somewhat less likely.

Alternative Hypothesis: Large battery banks are uneconomical compared with existing generation mechanisms. Coal/Gas/Hydro are much more efficient and cheaper stores of energy than batteries. This is a major factor is not adopting solar much earlier.

The cost of battery maintenance might benefit from some economies of scale, but even if it did, they'd still pass those costs on to the consumers.

Absolutely. But even when/if we get to cost parity, I doubt we'll see utilities scrambling to adopt the new ideas.

What's frustrating is that many utilities are actively trying to preserve the status quo through legislative maneuvers.

Yeah, that kind of thing sucks.

On the other hand, I think some utility providers are investigating alternative battery tech. Look into Vanadium flow batteries as one option.

The problems with lead acid and Lithium are better handled by Liquid electrolyte batteries, which can scale better and seem to be much more stable in storage scenarios. The downside is that they can be huge, so they'll never be any good in cars, but might be great in warehouses.

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