Dishonest post. When you bought your system you were grandfathered into either NEM 1 or NEM 2. Please provide proof that your arrangement changed.
318 karma · joined November 26, 2022
Your statement about a wealth transfer is putting no value on climate change or good air quality which benefits all.
https://www.bluettipower.eu/products/balco-transfer-hub
Balcony solar without storage is actually pretty dumb when we already have integrated battery/inverter/solar mppt units available for a few hundred dollars.
All we need to do is have something like this hub inbetween to ensure grid isolation when an outage occurs.
For crticial loads you would just plug those directly into the all in one battery unit. Almost all of them these day also have a <20ms UPS pass through function as well. When the grid goes down it can isolate the battery from backfeeding the house but the solar will still function and the critical loads will still function.
With a solution like Pila is developing you could even use your homes wiring to transfer power (~1kW) around multiple small battery units (attached to independent circuits) each with some different critical loads and solar attached to them.
https://www.teslarati.com/apple-developing-missing-link-tesl...
Above I linked live ERCOT data which you can investigate. Another high penetration renewable to investigate is California ISO.
https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso
In both cases yes, I do see that Nuclear power is providing a steady baseload of roughly 10% of power generation throughout the day. But Nuclear power as we currently implement it is:
* Very inflexible. * Very expensive to build. * Very time consuming to build. * Still incurs significant downtime for refueling and ends up producing spent fuel which we don't have a great solution for.
I understand research is going into technologies which may address all of those things and that is interesting and exciting. However is it really a blocker for the future?
Just in Texas they have recently peaked at 32GW of solar generation, 47GW of solar+hydro+wind generation, 10GW of batteries discharging, and 79% of demand supported by renewables. In terms of battery storage they have grown from almost nothing 2 years ago: https://www.gridstatus.io/records/ercot?record=Maximum%20Tot...
Solar has tripled in 4 years: https://www.gridstatus.io/records/ercot?record=Maximum%20Sol...
So the question is, why not just build more solar, wind, hydro and batteries? Why is there so much attention on Nuclear power being the only answer?
I am not advocating stopping research on Nuclear power, or shutting down current plants. I actually think we should just naturally follow the technology cost curve and the market forces.
The Neo is enabled by the increasing capability of the phone chips and the pre-existing completed move to ARM for MacOS that happened over a 5 year span. Critically the entire app ecosystem quickly embraced the new architecture and there were some nice fallbacks for legacy apps. The sheer scale of the phone chips allows them to be priced to where the Neo becomes doable, especially when using the previous generation of chip.
Windows 8 and Surface RT had no such advantages. Windows was always going to stay primarily an x86 operating system at the time those products hit. There was no obvious chip that had a scale of the iPhone chips. Windows RT was without many apps (chicken/egg problem).
The peak renewables to load was also hit today at 83%. Throughout the entire day solar, wind and battery storage provided the majority share of power.
https://www.docanpower.com/panda-52v-942ah-48kwh-prebuilt-pa...
The root cause is that they wanted community solar customers to be able to opt-in and opt-out any time. As such it isn’t really what you describe which is owning panels offsite, you are more or less doing a short term rental on them. As such you don’t get the full benefit from them but simply a 15% discount on the current residential rate.
https://www.wabi.tv/2025/02/18/maine-public-advocate-claims-...
I very much think that proper community solar would be a larger upfront investment just like panels on your roof are. With a small monthly cost to maintain the grounds and pay taxes on the real estate where the panels exist. All power generated would be metered for the specific panels you own using microinverters.
I will have overproduction now with the 2nd array. We do have net metering at about 80% of the cost on NEM 2.0. Our bill is split by transmission, generation, distribution and fees. We get 100% on transmission and generation and 25% on distribution.
https://www.energy.nh.gov/sites/g/files/ehbemt551/files/inli...
Thier max output is only 9.6kW so it can’t do a whole home backup and the car can only run in backup mode when the grid is out.
The Lucid Gravity has a 450 mile range with a 123kWh pack. It’s the only other vehicle with a range close to the GM large packs.
I have a two complete solar systems on my house the first one was 10.98kW AC installed 4 years ago with the panels facing south. The second was just installed a few days ago and is a 9.9kW AC with the panels facing east/west. Combined the system will produce over 20MWh of power per year. Both systems are grid tied used EnPhase microinverters and are now combined together for monitoring in one site.
I have an EnPhase IQ EV Charger. This has a mode where it communicates with the solar system, understands how much power is being produced and consumed in the house and then adjusts the EV charger output to match the excess solar production.
I have an EV with the largest battery that is available. The Chevy Silverado EV truck has 24 battery modules with a total gross capacity of slightly over 200kWh. The efficiency on road trips at high speeds is about 2.1miles per kWh. I have verified this with a real world road trip of over 400 miles.
The cost of the solar is around 5 cents per kWh over the 25+ year lifespan of the system.
On the other hand they have recently done a layoff round every 1-2 years and if you are not a growing employee with a higher salary you could be at risk.
Gas and carbon emitting electricity sources should be a LOT more expensive than they are. That would then push more people to EVs and renewables even faster and if there is demand than economies of scale will be reached and the prices of EVs and renewables will fall even further.
Nuclear is extremely expensive so if you poll on the cost of energy you will also have a different outcome.
There are some next generation reactor designs that are worth investment but for immediate generation capacity wind and solar is much better.
You are right to point out the innovation coming out of China in the EV space. Every automaker is currently in a cycle of copying what they are doing for their next wave of products. To the extent that there is an EV “slowdown” right now is basically intentional until the next wave of BEVs starts coming out which are way more cost competitive.
As I pointed out in another comment the main driver is large format LFP prismatic cells in a cell-to-pack configuration. BYD blade and CATL qilin are examples to study.
The next generations of BEVs are getting faster and faster charging with longer ranges such that I don’t think this will be an issue.
https://insideevs.com/news/710508/li-auto-mega-fast-charging...
Most automakers are currently redesigning and retooling for the new reality of very cheap BEVs with lots of range and very fast charging. The largest shift currently underway is a major change over to LFP packs with cell-to-pack technology and large format prismatic cells like the BYD blade and CATL qilin. We also inch closer to solid state and sodium batteries which is likely the enablers for the next wave of innovative products at all price points in 5 years.
I don’t think 500-600 mile range BEVs with 500kW+ charging will be that rare in 11 years. We already have some current examples like the 2024 Zeeker 001. Based on those figures recharging is on par with refueling an ICE car.