The fact that lithium batteries aren't the greenest combined with the fact that you can't even live 'off the grid' in a grid tied system is a big uphill for these batteries.
The fact that lithium batteries aren't the greenest combined with the fact that you can't even live 'off the grid' in a grid tied system is a big uphill for these batteries.
A solar panel installer told me that if I add a battery backup to my installation, then at least it'll still charge the batteries during a power outage.
Of course, since your puny little solar installation is incapable of powering a substantial portion of the grid this usually only really becomes a problem when the section that is islanded is small enough.
Some electrical codes allow you to resume powering your own circuit if you physically lock-out your connection during such an outage, and re-configure your inverter to non-grid connected mode.
You will also require a battery in such a case since the stabilizing properties of the grid (it's a very large load and acts as a huge flywheel or capacitor with basically endless capacity from the point of view of your installation).
And of course when the grid outage has been dealt with and you wish to feed power back into the grid again (or consume when the sun is down) you're going to have to undo all of this.
When I built a solar / wind power installation in Canada I decided that the net metering laws and price of power produced by renewables was so low that I scrapped the whole grid connectivity portion and invested the surplus into a much larger battery.
It felt pretty good to have power when the island was down which happened many times every year.
In my case there's some significant financial incentives to stay connected to the grid (I actually get a cheque from my power company for most of the year). That'll change in another 6 years time when this higher buyback rate expires, so I'll be looking very closely at whether I want to remain grid connected at that point.
http://cga.ct.gov/2011/rpt/2011-R-0390.htm
$300,000 liability policy requirement right at the end there.
There's also similar rules for installed generators, it's not clear to me how they would treat a big battery.
Why can't "all of this" be packaged into one idiot-proof box with connections to the grid, your off-grid system, and your house?
http://www.generac.com/all-products/transfer-switches/home-b...
So you can't just add an automatic transfer switch to retro-fit this to an existing inverter, but there are plenty of inverters where an option for an external module can be purchased or where an automatic transfer switch is built into the inverter itself:
http://ww3.wholesalesolar.com/newsletter/MAGNUM-AC-COUPLED-L...
These inverters will first synchronize with the grid before they connect.
It seems like the mandate was written entirely to protect the power company's profits hiding behind a thin veil of trying to protect their technicians.
If the electrical utilities cared at all about the customer they'd mandate something that allows customers to do what they want, safely.
What good is charging batteries during the power outage when you can't use them during a power outage? You can't have power connected during the power outage for fear of "electrocuting the technicians" - so what's the point in spending all this money on solar panels if the only time you can use them is while the grid is up... and you have cheap (comparatively) grid fed electricity? What's the purpose in having batteries if not to use them when the grid is down?
Yeah, it's not the power company's fault for endangering the lives of their workers, it's our fault, you and I regular Joes, for daring to want electricity in case the power company can't supply us with any. How dare you?
I set up a fairly beefy solar/wind powered system in an off-grid configurations specifically not to have to deal with the red tape, installation and insurance requirements of being 'on grid' and I don't regret that but all of those requirements, inspections and gear made perfect sense from an electrical point of view and from a safety point of view.
If a state legislature doesn't allow backup power to be supplied to a home or business with an NEC-compliant transfer switch, there should be some kind of judicial recourse. I'd spend some quality time with an attorney before taking "No" for an answer.
There's a lot of bailing wire and duct tape...or overhead power lines and wood poles if you prefer...in the grid. It's grown based on small decisions over many years. People won't put up with six years of service interruptions while big chunks are rebuilt and debugged...nor will they be happy to underwrite the cost of doing so.
Another group of people who are protected are firefighters. In a typical residential installation the power meter also serves as the service disconnect. Response protocols include pulling the meter before many other life saving and property preserving operations. Live equipment and conductors operating from a second source downstream of the meter are a serious hazard to fire fighting personnel.
Solar panels are a particular hazard because the sun doesn't have a disconnect, many firefighting operations involve working on the roof, and fire burns upward. A collapsed roof may bring a tangle of live electrical parts down into the building and create a hazard that persists long after the fire has been suppressed.
In addition, miscellaneous loads applied to a grid can bring it down. In the Northeast US, much of the infrastructure is old and therefore less robustly engineered than elsewhere.
It's also not that strange considering the farms would often have 20+ panels generating multiple kVs worth of electricity. Afterwards he refused to put any panels on our home without having a proper micro-inverter installed.
When you trip the breaker, the power is still on as far as the box in your house - unless it's shut off by the power company, it's just off inside the house. When you have alternative energy sources that include batteries, the same thing applies. The power from your batteries still runs through your box/breaker (via an inverter), and onward into the house. If you shut the box off, the power is off inside the house, regardless of where the power is coming from.
What's the difference?
Secondary sources of electrical power such as solar panels, batteries, etc are connected downstream of the meter, i.e. connected to the load side from the perspective of the utility provider. Pulling the meter disconnects utility service but does not disconnect the secondary sources of electrical power. The dwelling therefore remains energized [and that's the point of installing such systems].
The difficulty in deenergizing the system presents a hazard. Finding and identifying the various disconnects takes time and is subject to error: who knows what was done for convenience or through poor planning or plain old stupidity.
Even if there is a disconnect for a grid of solar panels this only deenergizes the load side of the grid. Panels exposed to sunlight remain energized. Similarly lead acid batteries maintain an electrical potential when disconnected from the load side.
There are solutions for this, it costs a little bit of money and depending on local regulations it may or may not be allowed.
So yes, you can override this and if you mechanically disconnect from the grid then you are typically allowed to operate your installation in island mode. But if you get caught backfeeding the grid when the grid is down then you will more than likely lose your hookup.
Most cheap/light inverters need an external power source to sync to and will automatically shut down if the grid is not available for synchronization purposes, which makes them compliant with the demands of the utilities. If you want to go to island mode you'll need a system that is considerably more expensive (batteries, load based inverter rather than generation capacity based) than one that can't.
When the grid goes down, your power goes down. You then have to go trip the switch in your box to shut off the power between the grid and your house. Only then can you switch on the trip for off-grid power bringing the power back up in your house.
I guess you could have some kind of a relay where on-grid power would flow right through, but if on-grid power goes off, the relay redirects the circuit to your off-grid power - I think this is the basic principle behind the automatic transfer switch. Being on vacation or "not detecting a power failure" isn't really an option because as long as there's power, the power would flow into your electrical box from the grid. As soon as the power goes out, the relay that connects the circuit from the grid to your power box would flip to your off-grid circuit. The two circuits aren't connected but your household power can run from either one or the other.
I guess if you're wanting to sell power back to the grid, or supplement your power needs, that's different, but if it's a grid vs. off-grid situation, there isn't a problem.
http://www.businessinsider.com/most-dangerous-jobs-in-americ...
I wonder if energized lines are the big problem.
(They die from electrocution at 35x the normal population rate, while the death from falls is 5x the normal population rate.)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1568699/pdf/envh...
That's just fatalities, ignoring the other dangers like getting your arms blown off.
The person trained to operate the manual switch was on a scheduled vacation (hurricane season in the US is six months it ain't reasonable to prohibit vacations). It took over an hour to get the system back online. Now keep in mind that all of this was with emergency services grade equipment trained professional staff and regular inspections and testing. And everybody wasn't away on vacation by policy.
Proper wiring is a necessary, but not sufficient condition. Power grid failures are many sigma events.
And there's the problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islanding
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1547
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=ul1741+pdf
...if you wanted to power your house from a battery-fed inverter you'd have to install an automatic transfer switch, just like if you had a back-up generator.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_switch
http://powerequipment.honda.com/generators/connecting-a-gene...
What is the difference between Battery backup and a wind turbine/solar? Somehow you are allowed to have solar and pump back to the grid, but not battery, geee wonder why that is.
Surely there is some safe way of preventing this?
If I were an electrical worked I'd treat a power line like it was live regardless of whether there is a power outage or not.
I can't find any references for your stated claim about Connecticut, however it seems deeply illogical given that a generator (which surely aren't banned), solar panels, wind, etc, all have the potential of feeding energy back to the grid in an outage. Which is why there are regulations and home inspections and all of that, to ensure that the appropriate safeties and switches are in place. Simply banning one of many possible mechanisms of generating power would be very short sighted.
Many regions that offer feed-in time-of-day tariffs are rightly trying to figure out how to accommodate battery systems, where some users are trying to game the system by charging a big battery array during low cost hours, and then "selling" it back to the grid during peak hours (at inflated, subsidized prices).
EDIT: As a reply to msandford, given that I can't reply lower -- the reason they have this limit is that the tariff price paid to home solar/wind generators is way above the bulk, "wholesale" price of power. It was created as an incentive to encourage green energy. So when you feed back their own power to them, it does them no favor given that now they're paying 2x+ what they would pay on the normal power market for power, and simply undermines the entire incentive program.
The idea that a utility wants a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose kind of situation is annoying at best and downright infuriating at worst. If they're willing to sell power for $X now and willing to buy it later for $Y, what does it matter the method? I mean, there are people working on grid-scale storage batteries to do precisely that because utilities desperately NEED additional peak capacity when it's a hot day and everyone's A/C is on in the late afternoon. Why would it be OK for the UTILITY to utilize grid storage, but not an INDIVIDUAL?
If they're willing to sell power for $X now and willing to buy
it later for $Y, what does it matter the method?
In the UK, to encourage adoption of residential solar panels there is a scheme of "feed in tariffs" where you can generate renewable energy and receive a guaranteed, above-market-rate price for it. The goal of this is to reduce carbon emissions.For example, you can buy residential electricity for 15p/kWh [1] but sell energy from your small hydro installation for 19p/kWh [2].
Obviously, the goal of reducing carbon emissions would not be achieved if people simply charged batteries at 15p/kWh and sold it back at 19p/kWh!
Of course, this issue only arises because feed in tariffs are subsidised.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm... [2] http://www.fitariffs.co.uk/eligible/levels/
Lead acid batteries cost about $100/kWh of nameplate capacity, more like $200/kWh of usable storage. At a 50% depth of discharge you're going to get about 1000 cycles out of the battery.
http://www.mpoweruk.com/images/dod.gif
So assuming 100% charge, discharge, charger and inverter efficiency (reality is more like 60% through that whole cycle) a person stands to make about $0.06 per kWh per cycle (in the UK anyhow) and they can only get 1000 cycles.
$0.06 * 1000 = $60 per kWh per battery lifetime
That's only 1/3 of the cost of the batteries, completely neglecting the capital cost of the charger and inverter and the time spent to set the whole thing up. Further, once you take the realizable efficiencies into account, it's more like $40 not $60 so they're losing money even faster.
This is a problem that -- at least for now -- LITERALLY solves itself.
Peak shaving is if you powered your own home off of your battery pack during peak times. The whole issue is that gamers -- who are essentially ruining "the commons" and pissing in the drinking well -- are instead abusing a system.
Again, no home battery pack is helping the power company. The rates are hugely subsidized to encourage green energy. The people who abuse it simply ruin it for everyone else.
But it is peak generation, which is just as valuable.
> Again, no home battery pack is helping the power company.
Please re-read my comment where I detail the economics of pulling power off the grid at low price and selling it back at high price is actually net-negative for the individuals doing so. From this we can assume that it's net-positive for the utility company because they're basically getting "free money" from the people who aren't good enough at math to see that what they're doing is economically wasteful.
> The people who abuse it simply ruin it for everyone else.
The people who "abuse" it are paying $0.20/kWh of cost to make $0.06/kWh of revenue. That's REVENUE, not PROFIT. This is a losing strategy, it loses $0.14/kWh, at least according to the math I did.
It's entirely possible that my analysis is wrong for some reason, but rather than just stating "they're ruining it for everyone!" maybe you could rebut my reasoning or something? Just stating something as a fact doesn't make it so.
To your final paragraph -- you essentially made up numbers and then demand that I refute them. 10. 14. 1.3e12. Refute that.
The single and only reason this side discussion even happened is that I noted that some power companies will refuse to allow grid feed-in if you install battery packs, for the reason I noted.
Lead acid batteries cost about $100/kWh nameplate. But at 100% depth of discharge they wear out VERY quickly. We'll assume 50%. That means they cost $200/kWh in actual capacity.
At 50% depth of discharge a lead acid battery will only get about 1000 cycles before it's not very useful anymore and needs to be replaced.
$200 / 1000 cycles = $0.20 per kWh per cycle.
That's the fixed cost of a lead acid battery. Every time you charge and discharge it, you've lost $0.20 per kWh in terms of the capital cost of the battery. This has nothing to do with the price of power, but it has to do with the depreciation of the asset.
Okay so now let's deal with power cost. It's 14p to buy low, 19p to sell high. Since I'm in the US I'm going to convert that to dollars at the rate of about 1.5 which means that the MOST money you can hope to make on the arbitrage of low price to high price is $0.06
Now let us compare $0.20 per cycle of cost with $0.06 per cycle of revenue (again ignoring the fact that in reality nothing is 100% efficient) and we can easily see that this is a losing proposition. It'll lose AT LEAST $0.14 per kWh per cycle for the person trying to operate this arbitrage scheme as a business and they'll soon go bankrupt. Problem solved.
Now if the cheap power was $0.01 and the expensive power was $0.50 then they might be able to make money. But from what I understand of the power pricing, that's not the case.
If you'd like to continue to argue, please do so with actual numbers that mean something and/or are based on reality, rather than belligerent trolling. Please see this link where I previously did the analysis that you couldn't be bothered to read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9063702
You are inventing numbers from fantasy, and demanding retorts. What an astonishing bore, your inconsistent, incoherent point not in the least viable. Find a hobby.
There are certainly a lot of perverse incentives and inefficiencies in the current model. Even so, its either ignorant, childish, or intellectually dishonest to act like it is outrageous that a utility has a simplified pricing model that doesn't accommodate the outliers among the outliers (residential customers with large solar and battery installations), or that their overall pricing allows margin for cost recovery and profit on power they deliver, whatever the source.