Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid • Hacker News Board

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#301

Post by Groxx » Sat, Jul 13, 2019, 1:35 AM UTC

ivanhoe wrote: post #18

Animats wrote: post #7

$0.02/Kwh for the solar part is pretty good. A reasonable short-term goal: get 100% of US peak air conditioning load south of 37° N on solar. That's the line from the Virginia/North Carolina border west to central California. Peak solar power output and peak air conditioning load line up pretty well, so that doesn't need storage. Storage is more of an issue for wind, which varies about 4:1 over a day over large areas…

There should be also more focus on proper thermal insulation of houses in warm climate, which is something that is not often mentioned. Lots of energy gets lost on AC simply because heat easily enters the houses.

I'll chuck in another "yes please" anecdote:

A house I was renting took about 50,000+ BTUs worth of two large AC units to maintain around 90F during the summer. Our electricity bill would get pretty close to $500/month if it was hot (and down to It was a house with a large, north/south-facing roof, with black roofing tiles, zero roofing insulation, and poor airflow (but lots of leaks) so we couldn't just open windows/doors. It was utterly absurd construction at even a glance (outside of fashion), and our utility costs were far more than it would've cost to improve. But the property owner lived elsewhere and had no interest in improving anything, only basic repairs.

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#302

Post by supportlocal4h » Sat, Jul 13, 2019, 1:53 AM UTC

rmuesi wrote: post #84

I’ve always wondered about something, yet have never found anyone discussing it online. So maybe some smart people can help me out: a lot of people install solar on their rooftops. Much of the time this is done with the assumption that it will pay off financially because energy prices are currently at a certain rate and will continue to rise. But here’s my question: If its financially advantageous to install solar on…

Drive across the southern tip of Nevada sometime. It's becoming wall to wall solar farms. PV, molten salt, and I don't know what else. Acres and acres of panels.

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#303

Post by girishso » Sat, Jul 13, 2019, 1:55 AM UTC

ivanhoe wrote: post #18

Animats wrote: post #7

$0.02/Kwh for the solar part is pretty good. A reasonable short-term goal: get 100% of US peak air conditioning load south of 37° N on solar. That's the line from the Virginia/North Carolina border west to central California. Peak solar power output and peak air conditioning load line up pretty well, so that doesn't need storage. Storage is more of an issue for wind, which varies about 4:1 over a day over large areas…

There should be also more focus on proper thermal insulation of houses in warm climate, which is something that is not often mentioned. Lots of energy gets lost on AC simply because heat easily enters the houses.

Very low cost and effective way for thermal insulation is to apply limestone powder on the roof, easily lowers room temperature by 2 degrees Celsius, even 2 degrees makes a big difference in hot summers. Did it at my native place home last summer, made heat a bit bearable with temperatures going beyond 45 degrees.

https://youtu.be/t4OET7b4ZgI

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#304

Post by basicplus2 » Sat, Jul 13, 2019, 1:56 AM UTC

colechristensen wrote: post #207

ourmandave wrote: post #81

Meanwhile in Iowa, Mid American Energy is well on their way to 100% renewal by 2021 with an endless array of wind farms. Their final phase of the project started in 2018 with a $922M investment. Iowa Public Radio toured one of the windmills back in January. https://www.iowapublicradio.org/post/skyscrapers-fields-wind...

I wonder how people would feel about ethanol plants fired by wind farms. The one built near my family home is coal fired and the idea of growing crops to be turned into car fuel is ... less appealing. But if you had electric or ethanol powered tractors growing biomass to ferment and distill into more ethanol with a plant fired with wind, maybe there are some different environmental considerations there. For one it wo…

Ethanol is highly corrosive, damages engines and fuel lines, is hydroscopic which exacerbates above and more problems, has even short term storage problems let alone long term, thats why its only ever used blended and is very toxic, in fact it is a nightmare fuel really.. bio diesel on the other hand has none of these problems.

https://www.government-fleet.com/157454/storing-dispensing-u...

https://www.cfact.org/2014/07/21/killing-marine-life-with-et...

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#305

Post by dkural » Sat, Jul 13, 2019, 2:02 AM UTC

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #178

litany wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the thing is the economics of rooftop solar are a lot different than power station solar. The DOE has public data on how much utilities pay for electricity. In a market like mine, Southern California Edison isn’t an electricity generator, they buy power at about $0.02/kWh but then they sell it to the residential consumer for up to $0.32. So clearly it’s a very different calculation. Regardless of that generators a…

Most research suggests that net metering is underpaying the households that deliver it. This seems very counteri tuitive to people, but remember you're paying an average cost. Gas peakers can cost thousands of times that when load is high. If you use AC then solar and high demand are correlated. At the extremes that means building a whole new powerstation that might only be used for literally hours per year.

The utilities often don't want to buy this power - if they felt that they were underpaying, they'd want to buy it. Could you cite the "most research" you speak of? In fact I've read the exact opposite - that solar rooftop is economically possible only because the utility is often forced to buy it back at retail rates.

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#306

Post by foxhop » Sat, Jul 13, 2019, 2:03 AM UTC

rmuesi wrote: post #84

I’ve always wondered about something, yet have never found anyone discussing it online. So maybe some smart people can help me out: a lot of people install solar on their rooftops. Much of the time this is done with the assumption that it will pay off financially because energy prices are currently at a certain rate and will continue to rise. But here’s my question: If its financially advantageous to install solar on…

There is risk in any investment.

I bet that for the next 10 years, the price of energy will continue to sky rocket.

https://russell.ballestrini.net/fulfilling-childhood-dreams-...

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#307

Post by invaliddata » Sat, Jul 13, 2019, 2:13 AM UTC

rmuesi wrote: post #84

I’ve always wondered about something, yet have never found anyone discussing it online. So maybe some smart people can help me out: a lot of people install solar on their rooftops. Much of the time this is done with the assumption that it will pay off financially because energy prices are currently at a certain rate and will continue to rise. But here’s my question: If its financially advantageous to install solar on…

The cost for generating electricity is much cheaper at utility scale, but electrical generation costs are only a part of what it costs to provide electrical service. A similarly large cost goes to electricity distribution. By generating where it's used, the electrical distribution system is less taxes (provided it doesn't have to absorb a lot of surplus electricity). So to a certain extent, rooftop generation still makes sense as an efficient allocation of resources.

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#308

Post by jussij » Sat, Jul 13, 2019, 2:23 AM UTC

rmuesi wrote: post #84

I’ve always wondered about something, yet have never found anyone discussing it online. So maybe some smart people can help me out: a lot of people install solar on their rooftops. Much of the time this is done with the assumption that it will pay off financially because energy prices are currently at a certain rate and will continue to rise. But here’s my question: If its financially advantageous to install solar on…

> but that’s only if the energy prices don’t fall.

You also need to consider what happens if prices keep rising, because if that happens the investment is paid back sooner.

I can only speak for what I see happening here in Australia.

Energy prices in Australia have been rising rapidly for a very long time and for several reason and don't look like falling any time soon.

From here: https://finance.nine.com.au/personal-finance/residential-ene...

Residential prices increased 63 per cent since 2007 and the average household bill was about $1524 plus GST.

It is this very sharp rise in electricity price that has driven the boom in rooftop solar here in Australia.

At those prices rooftop becomes very attractive.

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#309

Post by closeparen » Sat, Jul 13, 2019, 2:27 AM UTC

opencl wrote: post #79

jstsch wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was wondering about this the other day. In NL, insulation has been part of the building code for ages. With stronger requirements every decade or so. Insulated windows have been required since the 80ies for new houses. Now it’s triple pane krypton glass. Is this not the case for the USA.

The US has insulation requirements, it varies a lot state to state but new housing generally has at least decent-ish insulation. The main issue is that there is a lot of very old housing stock in the US. As of 2015 the median house was 37 years old and 40% were over 45 years old. In the area I live the vast majority of the houses were built in the 40s or 50s, though most people have done some amount of insulation ret…

Prewar houses in cold climates are insulated just fine. It seems a lot of 1980s and 1990s structures in San Francisco basically cardboard boxes, because with mild weather you get away with it.

Re: Giant batteries and cheap solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid

#310

Post by zaroth » Sat, Jul 13, 2019, 2:30 AM UTC

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #281

zaroth wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not say that they are an alternative to natural gas peaker plants. I said that in markets where the spot price can spike to $8,000 per MWh, grid scale batteries are being deployed in order to serve those load spikes more economically. There is about ~1GWh of grid scale battery storage already deployed in the US alone. 150MW was deployed in 2019 Q1 - which represents 232% growth YoY . ~5 GWh is projected to be i…

I agree, proven and delayed, when and where it makes sense to do so. It remains to be seen if this will become a common deployment generally speaking, though with more grid scale wind and solar being built it does seem likely, in my opinion.

Minimum US national load is ~400GWh and peak is ~675GWh, [1] so there’s a tremendous amount of storage which could be used to smooth out the curve.

Perfectly smoothing the curve would require something like 2TWh (charging at 150GW for 12 hours and then discharging at 150GW for 12 hours), which would be total overkill, but every little bit can help stabilize the grid—and spot prices—that much more.

The fact that 10 years from now we could have 100GWh of storage, and adding maybe 50GWh per year is pretty awesome. Global Li-Ion battery production is forecast to be ~1TWh by then.

Between electric cars, home storage, and grid storage, chemical battery production seems like it’s turning into a trillion dollar market. Eventually we’ll add airplanes to that list!

[1] - https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=27192