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How should net metering affect your electric bill?

climateer.substack.com

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Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

#161

Post by sfteus »

hunterb123 wrote: post #125
Bilal_io wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's accurate. We're in constant fear of losing power whenever there is a freeze warning (we're on that today and tomorrow at least), rain or heat. That's all thanks to the greedy for-profit system enabled by "conservative" politicians.

That's not really accurate. I've lost power 4 times total in 30 years here. Usually big Texas thunderstorms, never heat. The 100 year winter freeze I lost power for two days, that was the longest ever. Haven't lost power since then, didn't lose power for a couple years before that. We have the cheapest rates because of the way distribution and providers are setup. The problem with big user bills were SV companies lik…

That's great that your power has been mostly reliable, but it is not the case for a lot of the people here.

In my family alone, my brother and his wife lost power at the apartment they had then for 3 days during the ~2014 winter storm, during which our apartment lost power for around a day. My parents lost their power for all 4 days of the storm last year, and had to travel 15 miles or so to my brothers house after their inside temperature dropped below freezing on day 3. They just let us know their power is out again this afternoon. My wife and I are lucky enough to have since purchased a house close to some critical infrastructure so we've rarely lost power comparatively, but we still lose power several times throughout each summer during heat waves.

I also want to reiterate: this happened in 2011, again in 2014, again in 2021, and again in 2022. The storm in 2021 was objectively the worst of the bunch, but 2011 was similar. It is _not_ a 100 year freeze. It is happening more regularly, and our government has ignored recommendations to better prepare for it going on over a decade now.

EDIT: Just to round this out, a federal report was provided in the wake of the last "100 year" storm that occurred in 2011[1]. In it, there are several dozen recommendations, many of which were at least in part the cause of the 2021 outages as well.

-----

[1]: https://www.ferc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-04/08-16-11-re...

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

#162

Post by [deleted] »

andi999 wrote: post #129
jrockway wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a thing in the US. If you're ever walking around Manhattan and see steam coming out of a traffic cone, that's the side effect of district heating (groundwater hitting the very hot steam pipes and vaporizing).

Which should not happen, I mean do you not insulate the pipes?

[deleted]

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

#163

Post by FabHK »

jeppesen-io wrote: post #123
epistasis wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they are still orders of magnitude too expensive This isn't right as of today, stored energy charged by solar is about $0.20/kWh ($200/MWh) which is within spitting distance of the cost of new nuclear. And when you average this cost with the cost of solar/wind delivered directly, it's a huge cost winner. https://www.lazard.com/media/451566/lazards-levelized-cost-o... This is just the cost today, batteries are dropp…

Thank you for saying this. I find in technical circles, like HN, it's often underappreciated how dramatically solar, wind and stored energy are becoming cheaper year by year while production capacity continues to grow

Question is whether batteries are getting better fast enough. Cost per energy stored might be coming down relatively quickly, but energy density (energy per volume) or specific energy (energy per mass) are improving only very slowly. As a consequence, I think long-range electric passenger jets, for example, are many decades off.

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

#164

Post by zbrozek »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #133
14 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People need to be off the grid completely and when that happens what will these power companies do? If we ever get the affordable battery system that are always just around the corner that will allow this to happen. I look forward to the day. Our electric company has been raising rates and the system is not fair. It is tiered so the more you use the more you pay in hopes to reduce usage. Fair enough. But in my house…

> People need to be off the grid completely I thought that when I was 16. Now that I'm 58, there is no way in hell I am in favor of every household having energy storage systems sufficient to see them through every night and season of high energy use. I'm all for some level of distributed power generation, and some level of distributed energy storage, but "people need to be off the grid completely" is, IMO, a step to…

I'm 34 and am working towards being grid-independent because the cost exceeds the value.

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

#165

Post by hunterb123 »

sfteus wrote: post #161
hunterb123 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really accurate. I've lost power 4 times total in 30 years here. Usually big Texas thunderstorms, never heat. The 100 year winter freeze I lost power for two days, that was the longest ever. Haven't lost power since then, didn't lose power for a couple years before that. We have the cheapest rates because of the way distribution and providers are setup. The problem with big user bills were SV companies lik…

That's great that your power has been mostly reliable, but it is not the case for a lot of the people here. In my family alone, my brother and his wife lost power at the apartment they had then for 3 days during the ~2014 winter storm, during which our apartment lost power for around a day. My parents lost their power for all 4 days of the storm last year, and had to travel 15 miles or so to my brothers house after t…

Just replying to other anecdotes with my own.

And I disagree with your assessment of our weather and government.

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

#166

Post by nostromo »

Dave_Rosenthal wrote: post #99

I just moved into a new construction house in Colorado with a substantial (23kW) solar installation. It’s been interesting to see how much, in the words of the author, ‘feeding bread to pigs’ I have ended up doing. The solar installation (which is probably larger than optimal) is dictated by the policy for the house to be “net zero”, which in turn is dictated by a policy based on the size of the house. (In practice,…

> Since I easily generate more electricity that I will ever use (see above for why policies drove us to an installation larger that necessary) my household has no incentive to conserve at all.

... so? You're generating energy from the sun. Feel free to use it all. We don't conserve energy for fun, we conserve it to protect the environment.

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

#167

Post by secabeen »

irrational wrote: post #157
secabeen wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a fair observation. Interestingly, what you describe (a system 3x larger than your average load) is essentially what the grid has to have. Looking at the California data, here in Winter, today's peak usage is about 28 Megawatts and the overnight low is about 20MW. However, the peak all time usage for California is over 50MW. Our entire electric grid has to handle that 100% delta in usage; it's not surprising…

But doesn’t California have rolling blackouts? That makes it seem like the grid needs to be larger than 3x.

Not usually. There are grid shutdowns in wildfire risk areas during high wind events, and there was a brief rolling blackout last year over two nights in a small area, but it's been almost 20 years since the broader blackouts that made national news:

https://www.marketplace.org/2021/07/22/a-california-fix-for-...

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

#168

Post by boringg »

FabHK wrote: post #153
boringg wrote: post #66

I'm not sure I even understand what the point of this substack article is and it is oversimplified. Is it him just examining what net-metering is then realizing that the utility provides more value than just electricity generation and that is eye opening to him? There's no conclusion and no cohesive argument just that the world is full of pricing distortions or that what you pay in prices isn't always exactly what yo…

I agree that the article is maybe not very clear in its conclusion. But one valuable thing I took from it is this pernicious tension I hadn't been aware of before between pricing electricity in accordance - to actual production costs: large fixed "standing charge" (per unit of time), small consumption charge (per unit of energy) - with environmental goals: small fixed standing charge, large consumption charge. You co…

You end up with a bunch of other challenges. The infrastructure costs of the grid are quite high to build and operationally expensive. That cost needs to be defrayed somehow.

The Time of Use (consumption charges) that aren't explained that well and differ quite significantly depending on the tariff structure you apply to. Consumption for commercial use is charged in two ways kwh that you require but also the peak kW that you need per month. This is in order to recoup the marginal cost of electricity produced at the "peak" of the month.

I'm not trying to just muddy up the waters but I think the underlying analysis is overly simplistic and inaccurate. I would hate for people to think that this substack article is an accurate portrayal of the complexities of the energy system and the pricing structures. Residential rates are only portion of the grid.

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

#169

Post by epistasis »

jeppesen-io wrote: post #123
epistasis wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they are still orders of magnitude too expensive This isn't right as of today, stored energy charged by solar is about $0.20/kWh ($200/MWh) which is within spitting distance of the cost of new nuclear. And when you average this cost with the cost of solar/wind delivered directly, it's a huge cost winner. https://www.lazard.com/media/451566/lazards-levelized-cost-o... This is just the cost today, batteries are dropp…

Thank you for saying this. I find in technical circles, like HN, it's often underappreciated how dramatically solar, wind and stored energy are becoming cheaper year by year while production capacity continues to grow

It's funny because the technical crowd should be best situated to understand the incredible tech curves of solar, wind, and storage, as they have experienced the advancement of computer tech. However, for other technical fields, such as civil engineering, they are not used to dramatic cost drops.

Nuclear has a surprising negative learning curve. This is obvious when comparing different reactor designs over time, with ever increasing costs. But the more surprising finding is that building the same reactor multiple times get more expensive, not less. This is true even during France's successful build in the 1970s, so regulatory changes can't be the sole reason for increasing costs:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

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