271–280 of 352 posts
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Dinner is relevant. Lights… take a standard lightbulb form factor fill it with batteries and coat the outside with LEDs, and it can last most of the night.
Now you’re right back where this started - accounting for the cost of batteries. Oh, and my stomach says dinner is most definitely not irrelevant.
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And? I'm still connected to the grid.
You're replying to a comment about the true cost of solar being the battery + the panels, asking why anyone would think of buying a battery. That's why.
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> That gets you houses in the New Mexico desert that need no air conditioning (air cooling) and churches and office buildings in the northeast that need no additional heating. Do you have a source for your NM desert example? I'm doubtful you can keep a desert home cool with just airflow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship#Thermal_performance I've visited a couple of these places, they are pretty neat.
I'm surprised that architects don't propose passive heating/cooling on new builds and major renovations. I guess clients typically don't demand it.
I sometimes wonder- if you have a superconducting "pipeline" along the earths rotation direction could those countrys where the sun is still "up" power those where the sun already has set?
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I don't se how it includes the cost of a new system in 30 years. 2.3 * 30,000 = $69,000 and your cost listed is only ~$59k. 8% over 25 years is much better than I thought for the panels, but you still need to include about 10%/year depreciation on the inverters since you'll need to replace them every 10 years or so (at least that was about their lifetime last time I checked in Arizona, it may be different in cooler c…
I'm including the 30% tax rebate and assuming solar panel installations will be 50% cheaper in 30 years which is pretty conservative given their price history. Microinverters last 25 years.
2.3 * 30.000 * 0.7 = $48,300 (30% tax credit)
2.3 * 30.000 * 0.5 = $34,500 (50% cheaper)
Total = $82,800
Regardless, adding up the cost of the second one in 30 years doesn't make sense for calculating kWh prices, depreciation and cost of capital are the only factors that matter and you are only including one of those.
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You misunderstand the sense of "true" here. The point is not that the "true" price in the sense of what it ought to be. It is the "true" price in the sense of what the market is actually paying for the service. When people put out the number $23, they compare it with the cost of power and wonder why, if it is so much lower, it doesn't already swamp the current solution. So the purpose of the comment is to explain tha…
I've thought about adding solar to my home and can't see any reason why I should even consider a battery for storage. I'm in Texas and so I get plenty of sun and my peak energy demand happens to coincide with that sunlight (due to HVAC). Why should I worry about a complete solution?
We have a moderate sized portable generator, but running off that for weeks becomes a very unpleasant experience. Certainly far better than not having power, but unpleasant.
Driving 2 hours away to the nearest place we knew had unlimited fuel, turning my car into a rolling bomb on the trip back with dozens of gallons of fuel in gas cans, etc. And the endless droning of the thing running.
If those sorts of disasters are not a major concern for you, I don't think a battery makes much sense.
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You misunderstand the sense of "true" here. The point is not that the "true" price in the sense of what it ought to be. It is the "true" price in the sense of what the market is actually paying for the service. When people put out the number $23, they compare it with the cost of power and wonder why, if it is so much lower, it doesn't already swamp the current solution. So the purpose of the comment is to explain tha…
However the amount of storage (battery or otherwise) for a network of renewable electricity producers depends on the full diversity of the complete network. Which is to say, for example, that a grid supplied by solar and wind will need proportionally less storage per megawatt as the geographical size of the grid increases. A larger grid "averages out" the intermittent sources better as it gets bigger.
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I've thought about adding solar to my home and can't see any reason why I should even consider a battery for storage. I'm in Texas and so I get plenty of sun and my peak energy demand happens to coincide with that sunlight (due to HVAC). Why should I worry about a complete solution?
The main reason I would consider a battery is for disaster recovery purposes. Being from the suburban NYC metro area, we've had multiple, multi-week power outages in the past decade. We have a moderate sized portable generator, but running off that for weeks becomes a very unpleasant experience. Certainly far better than not having power, but unpleasant. Driving 2 hours away to the nearest place we knew had unlimited…
You can also store quite a lot of propane in a small footprint without some of the issues that come with gas or diesel.
The true price of solar is the price to produce reliable, continuous energy. That requires something to smooth out the signal and store the energy, most probably a battery. The solar + battery price is also going down, though not as fast as the solar only piece. But that's the metric we should be following. When that hits $30 per MWh, it'll be game over.
This comment gets made in every single solar article put on HN. The true price of solar is what the market is willing to pay for it. If the solar was ruining the grid or was way more expensive than what it seems, we would not keep seeing solar installed at this pace and at these costs. We need to get out of the mindset that all power generators need to produce a steady amount of power 24/7. A flexible grid made of ma…
This completely ignores the fact that the people buying solar get subsidies and they aren't the ones paying for the burdened grid.
In some states, distribution companies are paying retail prices back to solar producers. That means these people get to freeride on the grid and force the power company to deal with their unstable power supply for free.
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You misunderstand the sense of "true" here. The point is not that the "true" price in the sense of what it ought to be. It is the "true" price in the sense of what the market is actually paying for the service. When people put out the number $23, they compare it with the cost of power and wonder why, if it is so much lower, it doesn't already swamp the current solution. So the purpose of the comment is to explain tha…
I've thought about adding solar to my home and can't see any reason why I should even consider a battery for storage. I'm in Texas and so I get plenty of sun and my peak energy demand happens to coincide with that sunlight (due to HVAC). Why should I worry about a complete solution?
You can also size your panels such that you never produce excess energy but you will be leaving a lot of roof space that could be making energy to waste. A sunny winter day still makes a ton of energy.