Solar Power Battle Puts Hawaii at Forefront of Worldwide Changes
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I agree with the electric companies on this point. If they dont need the electricity, why should they be forced to buy it? That will increase costs for non-solar customers as they end up footing the bill for the battery storage needed by solar customers. I think the proper way to do these installs is to have customers always have on site batteries which store the energy for their own homes use. Yes, its nice to sell back electricity to the grid, but that feels like a very hackish way to use 'solar'. It makes sense also. If you want to save money on your electricity, you need to make your own, so you draw less from the grid- Not make it for someone else when nobody wants it.
Does anyone know if the power company is required to buy all forms of electricity currently? Could you just setup thousands of solar panels in a field you own and demand money from the grid? Seems like a easy return on investment, depending on the cost of panels/equipment.
As to, if they do not need the power, why should they buy it? Well, there are two reasons, one is that everyone else on the grid already gets to, so it would be anti-competitive to not allow it for the little guys, and the other is that someone will always want power, so it makes economic sense to buy the power and build storage to offset it and make money through arbitrage.
So you contribute a dollar worth of power, and you take out the same power at a later point in time, and the power company basically gives you a 5 cent credit.
The power companies make fistfulls of cash on the arbitrage.
They still hate it though, because distributed power generation threatens the model of power monopolies that get to fix prices while steadily reducing service.
Hawaii in particular has faced historically terrible load balancing, so some of the distributed generation is a response to the poor existing services and constant outages. HECO basically created all the incentives for the public to hate and want to work around them.
You couldn't just give them an out on whether they wanted to buy the power or not, since they despise distributed solar generation. They'd just build a messy and expensive quick spin up generator, buy expensive power from that during midday, and claim they don't "need" the solar, to deter investment in the technology, even though it'd be better for everyone if they bought the solar.
You can't ask a kid how much he needs foul tasting medicine. Sometimes you just have to deliver it.
>Most net metering programs take solar from a home when the grid is facing its highest demand and energy is most expensive for the power company. They then provide a credit to your bill in watts. With a solar installation, you're drawing energy at night, when the grid basically wants to give away power to keep things balanced.
Do you have a source that states production from solar meets peak demand?
Edit: we had our house unoccupied for 2 months with everything unplugged and off, but our pool pump and sprinkler system. Based upon that, and looking at our historical usage, I would say our pool pump accounts for about 65% of our monthly kwh.
If it something that interests you, you could probably reduce the power usage considerably by switching to a smaller pump that runs for more hours. All else equal, the power required for pumps increases much more than linearly (proportional to the cube of the flow), so a pump with half the flow rate that is run for twice as long would use less than half the total energy per day for the same amount of water circulation.
Martin Holladay is a trustworthy source with a good writeup: http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/musings/your-...
http://www.hawaiianelectric.com/portal/site/heco/menuitem.50...
http://www.poplarnetwork.com/sites/default/files/peak-shavin... http://static.squarespace.com/static/545e40d0e4b054a6f8622bc... http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_nLHRC8dC8wI/S8tjxUq6cxI/AAAAAAAAAD... http://www.northcoastjournal.com/110305/chart.jpg
It's like electric cars & the gas tax. Electric cars are great! But gasoline taxes paid at the pump are a major source of funds for road maintenance, and electric cars pay none of them. That's ok for now because so few people have them. And that's not to say we don't want electric cars. But we better figure out how to handle them before half of the population is driving them and the DOT is faced with a major budget shortfall.
This depends on your jurisdiction; in the UK you can put up to 4kW on an inhabited building and get a subsidy. Larger installations require pre-approval.
A) Because they are operating a utility monopoly. We are forced to be their customers. They should be forced to be ours.
B) They could use it, but they would rather sell you the output from their oil fired power stations because the profit is higher for them. That is why they don't want your solar panels hooked up - not because your neighbors couldn't use the electricity they generate - because it challenges their monopoly position and eats into their profit margins.
If this were truly about electric companies not needing the electricity (as opposed to them viewing any challenge to their monopoly as a 'free market evil'), then they would be arguing for market pricing for your solar generated electricity. They are not. They want your solar panels to be completely disconnected. Ideally you shouldn't even have them at all.
>Yes, its nice to sell back electricity to the grid, but that feels like a very hackish way to use 'solar'.
Your argument for how energy policy should be set are informed by what you think "feels hackish"?
Hawaii tried geothermal, but for some odd reason it made a loud whistle sound when letting off exhaust. People didn't like that, so the idea stopped cold.
I'd have just had some shitty engineer spend ten seconds proposing an easy fix for that, but then again if the power company gave me millions NOT to do that, why would i?
As for the situation of selling power back to the grid, I would argue the solar users are still the customers. The power companies don't want it because the changes need to be paid for by current customers but only benefit ex-customers. The solar users are using the grid as a giant battery and an insurance policy for cloudy days.
If the power companies are paying what they charge, then the laws of physics say they are losing money due to losses to heat, etc. So of course their margins are higher on their power.
I never said it was a trivial problem. I said that it was a problem that the utility companies have a vested interest in not solving.
I'm really surprised that people on HN are blind to this.
>The power companies don't want it because the changes need to be paid for by current customers but only benefit ex-customers
This is false. The power companies do not want it even if it is paid for by current customers because even if it is, it eats away at their profit margins. Every kwh generated by a home owner's solar panel is not a kwh they are being paid for, even if they just use it themselves and don't transmit it across the grid.
They don't want to buy back power at the same rate they sell it, and since they can't control the nodes - the power from solar panels on homes is less valuable than that from larger independent producers since it costs more to control a distributed system. I'm sure they would buy it back, but people will be very angry about what they're willing to pay.
People are also free to get batteries if they don't like what the market prices are for buying electricity.
> I never said it was a trivial problem. I said that it was a problem that the utility companies have a vested interest in not solving.
They probably would solve it, but they know that the cost of solving that subtracted from the rate they pay their energy producers is low enough that people will complain and it's not worth it. They probably come out ahead by not solving that problem, I'm not sure how you can mandate they solve a problem so people that want to go "off grid" don't have to buy their own batteries. That's really what they're trying to avoid - there is nothing preventing people from going completely off grid, they just don't want to buy their own batteries.
They're not doing that because they want to.
>They don't want to buy back power at the same rate they sell it
They don't want to buy power at all. Certainly not if they have existing capacity that they would rather use. Definitely not if it is a future threat to their bottom line.
>People are also free to get batteries
Batteries are a much more inefficient way of using power than selling it to your neighbor.
>They probably would solve it, but they know that the cost of solving that subtracted from the rate they pay their energy producers is low enough that people will complain and it's not worth it.
Let's not pretend they're not solving the problem for our benefit. This is about their profits.
>I'm not sure how you can mandate they solve a problem so people that want to go "off grid" don't have to buy their own batteries.
Because they are a monopoly and a utility. We mandate they solve problems because otherwise they will just milk their monopoly for all its worth and the only party that benefits from that is them.
Market pricing is exactly what a lot of utilities in the EU are now pushing for. Solar panel owners don't like it, because market prices now frequently dip below zero when solar and wind peak simultaneously.
The second issue is the cost of providing and maintaining power transmission. Traditionally, the utilities just tack on transmission costs on the electricity costs. When everyone buys all their electricity from the utility, this is a reasonable compromise. However, when you get rooftop solar, the cost of providing power transmission to you doesn't go down at all, yet your electricity purchases do go down.
A fairer way to price electricity transmission would probably be by your maximum draw from the grid, or by the size of the fuse that connects you to it.
Transmission would be better handled by local government. If they want to favor homeowners' solar panels, so be it. If they want to favor the local power plant, again, so be it.
If you let generators run the grid then they will do everything in their power to kill any forms of competing power and they will succeed thanks to their monopoly power.
There is no intrinsic reason why rooftop solar shouldn't be given subsidies (direct or indirect), also. It is greener than almost all alternatives, after all.
That's exactly how it works in Finland and a lot of the rest of Northern Europe. I buy transmission and electricity from different companies.
You are basically paying tens of thousands of dollars to shave $100 off your electricity bill every month. You would do far better investing your money in normal things and just using the profits to pay your electric bill.
If you want solar to not be reliant on the grid, you need batteries. If you want solar to be a investment that gives you xx$ of benefit a month, you should look into doing something besides solar.
Do they have to buy the power? Yes, but not without limits. The system is built on "net metering". Every kWh we deliver to the grid can only go to offset one that we already have or will use. If your system is so large so as to make you a net producer of energy when averaged over a whole year, you will be giving that away to the utility for free.
The rules also limit installation of PV systems to a level that will not exceed the minimum daytime load on the local circuit, exactly because there is nowhere to store the power. So every kWh they get from us is one they would otherwise have to generate to supply to one of my neighbors.
It's clear that the utility companies aren't happy with this. But studies have shown that these "extra costs" the utilities talk about being saddled with are offset by savings to them as well.
Solar power typically produces power during times of high power demand, so the net effect of solar is actually to even out the daily load variance. This is good for the utility because they need to make sure they have capacity to handle peak load, even if it's only for a small fraction of the time. These "peak power" plants are expensive, because you almost never get to operate them. When PV reduces peak load, they don't need these plants and this is a net win for them.
Electricity can be made from a variety of energy sources. Some are fossil fuels such as oil, coal and natural gas. Over 90 percent of all the energy used in Hawaii for electricity, surface and air transportation comes from imported fossil fuels, mostly oil but some coal. (The synthetic natural gas used in Hawaii is refined here from crude oil.)
I think nobody here has the patience to wait for this particular dynosaur-consuming monster to catch up.
Heres their current fuel mix:
http://www.hawaiianelectric.com/heco/Clean-Energy/Latest-Cle...
Scroll down to see to see Oil listed at >60%.
The idea that customers should care about the utility company's long term investment, in their 100 year grid is not a good one. Consumers shouldn't have to care about a companies long term investment "paying off". All that means for the company is that their investment failed, and they need to try again.
Ex: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_pole lasts an average of 25-50 years depending on area, but Hawaii is at the low end of that scale.
It has plenty of hills to build a bit of pumped hydro storage on too.
Hawaii, if you actually sit down and look at where the geothermal resources are (big island and a tiny amount on Maui, not where 90+% of electricity is used on Oahu), will force you to conclude that they couldn't copy Iceland and are stuck with other renewables.
Was oil a bad choice when there were no affordable regenerative methods? Probably no. My concern isn't with their initial choice, it's with their more recent choice to fight solar and other regenerative energy sources instead of embracing them.
The facts are the exact opposite of your thesis.
In a parallel line of discussion you would presumably tell me the increase in heroin consumption is evidence of a more welcoming stance on its use in society. No, its just such a powerful drug that the DEAs activities only increases the number of addicts.
Regulatory capture can slow this trend. But as the article indicates, it's only temporary. Advances in energy storage and moderated consumption allows customers to disengage from the grid entirely.
If you're in the business of making electricity by burning stuff, or you sell oil, or cable TV, or internet, or 50 other good examples, you had better start reinventing your business now.
Those business make very rich people richer, so they're going to fight it tooth and nail, which is a shame when they could be putting that effort into reinvention.
I doubt that will change. If you want companies to have enormous amounts of idle capacity waiting around for a cloudy day then you have to make sure they can make money.
i.e. when the massive majority of houses and business have their own solar and storage, we don't need to pour billions into coal plants and the grid to have it sitting around waiting for... nothing.
If so many people install solar in Southern California or Arizona that the local utility has more power coming in during the day than it can use or store, it can sell the excess via the national grid to someplace that can use it.
As far as I've been able to determine from the internet, there is no connection between Hawaii power grids and the mainland. In fact, it looks like the grids of each island might be isolated from the others.
This is the low end of the scale with other estimates ranging from $553 Million to $1.24 Billion (page 9).
Note that this does not connect the Big Island to the grid either.
The preliminary proposed route can be seen on page 84 of the report.
In the long run though it is all downhill. Battery tech is getting better at around 8% per year. Solar efficiency isn't far behind. What cost $20,000 now to add solar or $40,000 to get off-grid completely, will cost half that in about 10 to 15 years. If the trend lines continue then in 20 to 30 years years its a done deal. No house will ever be built again without it's own power generation system.
Any way you cut it high availability costs money. If you expect the grid to handle backup for you then you should expect to pay them to do so. TANSTAAFL
It's based mostly on a recent paper in nature that estimates "that EV batteries in 2014 cost between $310 and $400 per kwh", but anticipates "It’s now in the realm of possibility that we’ll see $100 / kwh lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles by 2020, with some speculating that Tesla’s ‘gigafactory’ will push into sufficient scale to achieve that."
His numbers roughly agree with yours:
So we’d estimate that at the following battery prices we’d
get the following effective LCOEs (Levelized Cost of Electricity):
- $300 / kwh battery : 33 cent / kwh electricity storage
- $200 / kwh battery : 22 cent / kwh electricity storage
- $150 / kwh battery : 17 cent / kwh electricity storage
- $100 / kwh battery : 11 cent / kwh electricity storage
All of those battery costs, by the way, are functions of
what the ultimate buyer pays, including installation and maintenance.We live in south western ohio and said person took their bill from $300-400/mo to $30/mo (at 13 cents per kWh) with $11k of solar panels. They have a payoff period of about 3 years not including the $4k rebate they got which reduces the payoff cost to a little under 2 years.
Keep in mind this is a place that doesn't get nearly as much sun as much more southern areas/Hawaii.
I do agree that batteries still have a payoff period that is too long to be economical. Here's rooting for Mr. Musk.
An alternative could be to avoid simultaneous usage of the major appliances (A/C, electric oven, vacuum, washer/dryer, tea kettle, etc.), of course. That would probably require a mixture of behavioral changes and changes to the A/C system. For example a house with multiple A/C units (window units or upstairs/downstairs) could have them wired so they don't kick on simultaneously.
The typical worries about solar are:
+Power intermittency (rapid, uncontrolled changes in power can push the voltage and frequency outside acceptable levels. This reduces reliability and can destroy electronics.)
+Voltage regulation (also, on a local level, PV can mess with voltage compensators, pushing voltage outside of acceptable levels at the end of voltage regulation zones)
+Morning power surplus (lots of solar power will drop the baseline demand from ~4AM to noon, reducing the amount of cheap baseline power you can run)
+Harmonics (crummy inverters can inject unwanted sine wave harmonics into the grid, again bad for electronics)
+Fault current danger (if a tree takes down a power line, both sides can be remain live if power is being pushed onto the grid by PV on both sides)
+Inverter tripping (the main way to fix the fault current problem is to mandate that inverters passively follow the grid's voltage/frequency and then disconnect if they detect problems. However, with high PV penetration this has its own problem: a transient fluctuation can cause a domino chain reaction where all the inverters turn off, taking the grid down with them.)
+Power factor/vars (one important function for the grid is to keep current and voltage in phase, but today's PV inverters are dumb and blindly produce power with a power factor of 1, which can mess with automatic capacitor banks meant to help counteract the inductive load of the grid)
Now, some of these problems are more real than others, and many don't become an issue until PV penetration reaches like 30%.
The good news is that these are all solvable problems. Energy storage or additional natural gas peakers can fix the intermittency problem, and for the other problems the grid can be redesigned to allow better two-way power flow and inverters can be designed to produce higher quality power.
However, the bad news is that all of these fixes are expensive and all of them take years. Furthermore, many utilities do not have the expertise or confidence to make big changes to their grid and still guarantee reliable high quality power. Utilities are known for being slow and risk-averse, but they are risk-averse for a reason - blackouts are very costly to society.
Another issue for the utility is how to charge for power. Historically, utilities have tried to keep things simple for residential customers by charging only for power consumed. However, if residential PV becomes popular, utilities will have no choice but to change their pricing model so that they can be compensated for the non-kWh value they provide (e.g., reliability, stability, option value, power quality regulation).
The bottom line is that the problems from high PV penetration are real. Utilities are cautious, not evil, and they have good reasons to be. (Also, I think it's ridiculous when people claim that PV will kill utilities - barring a radical shift in technology/economics, wires and pooled power regulation and economies of scale make a grid hugely valuable, even if power generation becomes more distributed.)
That said, these are all solvable problems and I am hopeful and optimistic about the long-term future of solar power.
As a power electronics control engineer I strenuously disagree. The historical problems with massive renewable penetration aren't just solvable, they are well-solved already!
For example, grid-tied inverters and PFC rectifiers have been meeting IEEE-519 harmonics guidelines for many years already.
We even have virtual impedance methods which provide harmonic and reactive support for the grid available right now. The problem is that the utilities have actively blocked their implementation!
The grid accepted an almost total transformation from nonlinear RCD computer loads to PFC-corrected loads without difficulty at all, and there are far more switching power supplies on the line than there are active inverters. So I view the "problem" with unity power factor inverters as a red herring.
Anti-islanding has been in effect for many years already, which completely eliminates the "felled tree leaves live wires" problem. Again, another non-problem.
Consider very carefully what you get from the entrenched utilities, because they are coming to the table with a tremendous amount of preexisting bias.
I did not mean to imply that all of the typical worries were well-founded (as you say, harmonics has been solved for years), but now I realize that's how my comment read, so I apologize. My point was that there are factors other than intermittency that historically have stopped utilities from enthusiastically supporting residential solar.
Also, I wholeheartedly agree with you that the solutions to these problems already exist. When I said they'd take years, I meant it would take years to implement the solutions, not to invent them.
The issue is that the actual fuel charge for energy varies widely over the course of the day, and customers aren't exposed to that fluctuation. This leaves utilities to absorb the cost fluctuations, which turns them into finance companies as much as electric service providers.
Unless they're already started up (i.e., part of expensive spinning reserve) gas peaker plants can't respond fast enough to solar PV ramp rates, which can be hundreds of MW/minute when clouds blow over a utility scale plant like Topaz (550MW). They take 10-15 minutes to come online from a cold start and sync with the grid. Gas peaker cold starts are expensive - the plants I've looked at (GE, mainly) allow some number of cold starts before the plant has to be taken down for service. But keeping them hot (spinning reserve) is expensive, too.
The fix for rapid PV ramp rate is enough storage at the PV site to give ~ 15 minutes of continued nominal output when insolation drops out. This is enough time for classical grid management tools to be engaged.
One driver for the equipment upgrades needed to deal with reactive power compensation, etc., is the price premium paid for "ancillary services", or power supplied at short notice for grid stability/management needs. The multiple over normal, average power pricing can be 100x depending on the circumstances.
When residential inverters are smart and can respond to utility signals, then residents can participate in the ancillary services market. That will (or should, at least) pay much more than simple net metering schedules. The economics should accelerate deploying equipment that can do this, and that will mitigate the problems brought on by high grid penetration of PV generation.
Here's some of the things that solar has going for it:
1. The Governor of California recently set a mandate to reach 50% renewables by 2030[1]. We want to hit this target in ten years or less.
2. The Department of Energy's Sunshot initiative is funding solar technology and software development to drive the installed cost below $1 per watt by 2017[2]. So far, we are on track to hit these targets.
3. Batteries are getting super cheap, which will turn solar into a non-intermittent source and allow solar+storage to be just as cheap as grid prices[3]. In fact, there is actually quite a bit of worry about grid defection (we are starting to see this Hawaii)[4].
4. Wall Street is funding solar projects at a massive rate[5]. The bottleneck right now in solar is finding customers, not financiers.
5. The federal subsidy for solar is expiring in 2017, but the industry is on track to absorb the cost and continue to thrive without any subsidy[6]. This will make us much harder to kill off politically.
6. The advent of community solar will solve the renting problem, where renters be able to buy pieces of a remote solar farm since they don't own their roofs[7]. This opens up the solar market to serve the entire electricity-using population, not just the building owners.
What will be hard:
Stranded assets. Solar is growing so quickly that it will soon be able to replace the capacity of existing fossil-based generators that still have lifespan[8]. Investors in those assets will see them stranded. This will start with coal and natural gas plants over the next 10 years, but as batteries get cheaper and electric cars get more prevalent solar will start stranding oil assets[9].
This is where things get hard. Utilities are traditionally pretty bad competing (since they usually don't have to), but oil companies are another story. They are very used to ruthless competition and have a lot of experience bribing their way into governments. We are expecting very heavy push back from oil after 2025 because electric vehicles risk leaving already purchased oil in the ground.
I, for one, can't wait until we fight that fight. It is the fight that our generation will be remembered for.
P.S. The entire solar industry is hiring (including my startup).
[1]: http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-renewable-goal...
[2]: https://www1.eere.energy.gov/solar/sunshot/pdfs/dpw_white_pa...
[3]: http://rameznaam.com/2015/04/14/energy-storage-about-to-get-...
[4]: http://www.rmi.org/electricity_grid_defection
[5]: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/12/23/why-wall-st...
[6]: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/What-Happens-Wh...
[7]: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Solar-Summit-Sl...
[8]: http://www.utilitydive.com/news/jon-wellinghoff-utilities-ar... Disclosure: Jon is one of our advisors.
[9]: http://theenergycollective.com/energydeborah/2216626/podcast...
http://www.vox.com/2015/4/15/8420297/fossil-fuels-race-renewablesEdit: Bob Bruninga has written a bit about solar power in cars. Great content. http://www.aprs.org/APRS-SPHEV.html
There's nothing quite like "Oh, some home in this neighborhood is still powering this powerline, despite the fact that we've shut off all the other power sources". That's quite the real "shocker" to the poor worker.
Right now, short-term grid frequency and voltage stability (periods of seconds to a few min) is regulated automatically by the governor response of the various generators on the grid. These governors bid in advance to set their proportional gain for frequency stability. Basically, they promise to autonomously raise or lower their throttle in the future based on the observed grid frequency and voltage, and get paid later when they make good on their promise. Long-term stability (periods of 15 min or so) are regulated with market action in the spot market for power. Very long term stability is regulated by markets that clear 24 hours in advance of their estimated delivery.
However, some energy producers effectively have flat rate contracts that don't participate directly in grid stability. Wind and nuclear will negotiate a fixed power-purchase agreement (typical prices are about 50 USD/MW-hr or so in the US) that will be fixed for years at a time. Likewise, residential solar customers sell back their power under the same, basically fixed rate schedule that they use to buy power.
So, as the penetration of fixed-rate power increases into the market, the pricing volatility continues to increase as well. There are technologies that can help. In fact, it is trivially easy to get a grid-tied inverter to be sensitive to grid changes with controls that model virtual inertia, impedance, throttle, and so on. This is part of what I do as a controls engineer. The difficulty isn't in implementing such controls, it is in adjusting the markets such that all of the existing players are comfortable with the result.
Witness this in Hawaii - the retail price of power is so high that it makes obvious good sense to install your own generation. But instead of adjusting the rates to reflect the new availability of supply, the incumbent utility seeks to raise barriers to competition instead.
Incumbents elsewhere might find themselves in similar situations. If they react the same way, enough localized generation and storage will appear that they will find their business unworkable at any rate level.
serious question for Hawaiians: do people run the a/c round the clock there? Or is it something else?
That said, when I lived there, my bills never approached that figure, even with a/c.
That is one reason why my new house is off grid solar - cheap (compared to $.40/KWH), clean electricity.
The other is that the grid here is unreliable. I had 87 outage events last year for a total of 37 hours and that is not including the nine days with out power post hurricane.
Now don't get me started on internet quality!!!