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Comment by skrause | Hacker News Reader

But still the question is, why would I want that? I'm all for distributed power generation, but it can still be optimized better when it's connected to a grid.

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There are many possible reasons. You might enjoy the feeling of independence or self reliance that supplying your own power brings. You might be a weed grower and not want to be found out because of your energy bills. You may feel that it's more responsible to produce your own electricity and have a clear understanding of its environmental costs. Grid power may be unreliable in your area, or expensive. Maybe you think that power lines give you cancer. Maybe grid power is simply unavailable in your location.

All those are good reasons to also have your own power. You'll get your independence and might even save some money.

But even then it's still good to be connected to the grid. It will serve as a backup line and if you produce more enery than you can consume, you might be able to sell something back to the grid.

And THAT is a primary reason utility companies are fighting grid-connected consumer solar right now. If you are grid attached you are part of the cost of maintaining the grid that is normally offset by your revenue to the utility. If you are just using it as a glorified battery backup by feeding in excess during the day and pulling during the night and you are a net zero to then company then your per-customer revenue is much much lower. If only a small percentage of customers do this then you can level it out. If that percentage starts to grow then something has to give. Either you lower your maintenance budget, lower your operating costs, or lower your net profits. No one directly involved wants any of those to actually happen. This is obviously greatly simplified (e.g. The extra cost of handling customer generated power), but you get the idea.

Or you negotiate with whomever licenses you to be allowed to change your charges so that the maintenance is covered by a connection/subscription fee and usage is billed separately.

This is increasingly how utilities are structured in Europe: You have connection charges, and usage charges, and they may be due to different companies (though are often billed together via the provider you pay usage charges to).

This has come as part of breaking up utility monopolies so that people can e.g. pick "their" electricity provider (of course in practice this just means the providers settle overall relative supply between each other).

My utility here in the US has a per-custom base fee, but I think the issue is the base fee is regulated and not high enough to cover the costs of solar customers.

The "grid" doesn't yet exist in certain plots of land. One may want to build a house in the woods, but not pay the costs to get electric/water/sewage run to the property from whatever main road is closest.

The question isn't "why would I want that" it's more "given that I live in a place where grid hookup is $100k since I'm 10 miles from the nearest power line, what is my next cheapest alternative?"

Once the question is framed properly -- at least for a few million people in the US -- then the motivation for storage becomes much clearer. If you have a battery and an inverter then you hook that up and it feeds the house. And all your other power generation choices feed the battery. Solar, wind, hydro (if you live on/near a stream or river), small generator, etc.

If it costs $100k to get hooked up and then you're paying some fee for power every month it might make sense to buy the battery for $20k, buy a generator for $5k and spend $10k on a wind turbine and $10k on solar. That's $45k versus $100k which is a good chunk of change plus you can expect your prices to go down as solar panels and batteries and whatnot get cheaper, whereas fuel is only going to get more expensive.

Even with a grid connection, this would be useful as it would allow the power companies to generate more during off peak hours. A distributed power storage solution combined with a centralized power generation solution would be extremely efficient. It's like turning your home into a hybrid.

And fail hard too - blackout (then brownout) are more and more a concern. Then there's the question of the power price. I don't think the battery will be cheap when revealed, but after a while, they will and help us with solar/wind created energy.

> And fail hard too - blackout (then brownout) are more and more a concern.

Maybe I'm just spoiled by the German power grid. As far as I can remember I only a single blackout of 30 minutes in the last 15 years (some time around 2008).

Arguably with money cheap at the moment, it's a good investment.

(One must still be cautious - even with 0% interest rates - since the principal is still repayable. If your part of the economy goes bad, a default on a 0% loan is just as bad/likely as a default on a 5% loan.)

It's an independence thing. If that isn't important to you, none of this is going to seem terribly useful.

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