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Rooftop solar power may be flooding the grid

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Re: Rooftop solar power may be flooding the grid

#61

Post by probably_wrong »

gregoriol wrote: post #37

Renewable energy is quite predictable: there is sun during the day, and no sun during the night. Wind is a bit less but could be too. Why not organise accordingly? First, there are batteries: solar roofs should come with batteries, than will power the house during the night. Authorities could enforce that, and could also build larger energy storages with batteries at a region level (see recent examples from Tesla). T…

This is the part where someone points out why I'm completely wrong:

> solar roofs should come with batteries

The way I understand it, batteries tend to be bad for the environment if/when they need to be replaced, because often they are improperly recycled and/or there are no adequate facilities for that.

If this is correct, do we really want to have more of them around? Wouldn't an environmentally-friendly(ish) central plant be better in the long run?

Re: Rooftop solar power may be flooding the grid

#62

Post by gregoriol »

js8 wrote: post #56
slavik81 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the inevitable?

I would think move to renewables and more decentralization (more choices for individual consumers, as it happened with almost any other industry).

Decentralized is not really the problem here: it's more about the links between each installation and the surplus. It's harder to see it with electricity, but think as if it was water for example: if people were pumping water at home and pushing it into pipes to others, and not that many water was actually needed, where would it go?

Re: Rooftop solar power may be flooding the grid

#63

Post by stephen_g »

stephen_g wrote: post #10
boyter wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Australia is in the unique position of having abundant reserves of gas, coal and uranium but through what is probably blatant corruption the most expensive power prices in the world. The gas is exported at a fixed cost to Japan and other countries where it can be resold to Australians at a profit. Other issues are that no power company in Australia is willing to build a new coal power plant because the current coal s…

Australia does not need any more coal stations. Wanting to build new ones has weirdly become a strange infatuation by the conservatives, but there is absolutly no need in Australia for more baseline capacity. It's all in the peaks, which is all gas (which mostly of sets the benchmark price given where it sits in the AEMO stack). So most of our price problems are just the price of gas, and the introduced reservation p…

Sorry, should be 'baseload capacity' in the first bit.

Re: Rooftop solar power may be flooding the grid

#64

Post by stephen_g »

John_KZ wrote: post #53

Why don't Australians use Solar water heaters? It's the best ROI you can get from solar, Mediterranean countries and the sunny parts of China have absolutely massive capacities installed. It's direct thermal, so it's not a cool high-tech gadget, but if you're worried about the environment, it's "better" than solar panels when applicable. It also essentially includes on-site thermal storage, so no grid instabilities.

Lots of them around (especially in my state, Queensland, which has hot summers and mostly fairly warm days in winter), but you need to use a gas or electric booster to have hot water all the time. So in a lot of places it actually turns out to be fairly similar energy use to put in a high-efficiency heat-pump hot water heater.

I've just evaluated this because I want to replace the hot water system at my house, and I was initially thinking of solar because my parents have had one for years and it generally works well but the heat pump will be cheaper and I'll eventually get some PV anyway. So all in all it should be a bit cheaper and more efficient per square metre of roof space.

Re: Rooftop solar power may be flooding the grid

#66

Post by nabla9 »

The same thing is happening in Europe. Energy markets need large reorganization for the transition and energy grid and storage technology needs to catch up big time. This takes lots of money.

Wind and solar turn spot prices negative when it's sunny and windy. Existing nuclear, coal can't be easily turned off for just a part of day. In free spot energy markets, the price of electricity must jump sky-high during low supply to pay for the rest of the time.

What is needed is load following power plants and large scale energy storage (flywheels and lithium ion are only solutions for very short fluctuations). In the North Europe there is possibility of using Norvegian hydropower to compensate for wind power as long as the grid capacity keeps up.

Re: Rooftop solar power may be flooding the grid

#67

Post by adrianN »

probably_wrong wrote: post #61
gregoriol wrote: post #37

Renewable energy is quite predictable: there is sun during the day, and no sun during the night. Wind is a bit less but could be too. Why not organise accordingly? First, there are batteries: solar roofs should come with batteries, than will power the house during the night. Authorities could enforce that, and could also build larger energy storages with batteries at a region level (see recent examples from Tesla). T…

This is the part where someone points out why I'm completely wrong: > solar roofs should come with batteries The way I understand it, batteries tend to be bad for the environment if/when they need to be replaced, because often they are improperly recycled and/or there are no adequate facilities for that. If this is correct, do we really want to have more of them around? Wouldn't an environmentally-friendly(ish) centr…

Lead acid batteries are pretty easy to recycle. We already do this for car batteries. Lithium batteries are currently not as easily recycled, but that seems to be because there is little demand for recycled Lithium and they're not very toxic in landfills.

Re: Rooftop solar power may be flooding the grid

#69

Post by cesis »

nabla9 wrote: post #66

The same thing is happening in Europe. Energy markets need large reorganization for the transition and energy grid and storage technology needs to catch up big time. This takes lots of money. Wind and solar turn spot prices negative when it's sunny and windy. Existing nuclear, coal can't be easily turned off for just a part of day. In free spot energy markets, the price of electricity must jump sky-high during low su…

Just pass those negative prices to customers and they will solve the problem.

Re: Rooftop solar power may be flooding the grid

#70

Post by usrusr »

t0liman wrote: post #22
jlebrech wrote: post #20

home appliances should be aware of the home's solar panels somehow. you could fill a washing machine and have it wait a few days and turn on if the solar panels are at full usage. other things could operate at peak hours (dishwasher) you could also pump water into a silo when it's bright outside.

>home appliances should be aware You mean IoT installed into wallplugs and whitegoods appliances, pool pumps, heaters, washers, heat pumps/air conditioners, hot water systems, etc. Yeah. If there was only an IoT standard that worked to allow for usage to be monitored and devices to be switched on/off in a standard way ... sure. There are "appliances" like HomeAssistant.io and OpenHAB and Domoticz out there to micro-m…

As long as feed-in tariffs are artificially high (e.g. anything not noticeably below 1:1), neither xkcd:927 nor total absence of standards are what is keeping solar-aware consumption from happening.

PS: I absolutely don't want the subsidies to go away, I want them restructured into better subsidies that do not nullify other important incentives.

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