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How should net metering affect your electric bill?

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Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

#321

Post by fulafel »

oldsecondhand wrote: post #276
paulmd wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is true if you're not connected to the grid. However if you use power on those cold winter cloudy days you need all that infrastructure still. Cold winter days don't represent peak consumption for the grid, there is no capacity being built specifically for cold winter days. In contrast there is capacity being built to offset everyone turning on the A/C during summer heatwaves, and solar has high power output d…

> Cold winter days don't represent peak consumption for the grid, there is no capacity being built specifically for cold winter days. That might be true in California, but in Europe that's where the peak demand was before AC got popular. And it can easily go back to that with the spread of heat pumps.

Europe runs from Siberia to Spain, there's lots of variation in winter heating systems. In colder quarters people mostly burn stuff instead of using electricity, but also houses are well insulated (because you need to heat all the time and you can't afford not to insulate).

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

#322

Post by danans »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #318
danans wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having recently installed a battery, I'd say they are definitely not cheaper. There is no way that residential battery storage can match the cost per kWh of utility scale storage.

$10k or so per house vs digging up endless amount of streets?

At much less per house you can build massive utility scale storage, like pumped hydro.

However, these are complementary technologies, serving different time and scale of energy storage and duration. Home batteries aren't realistically going to solve storage on the weeks to season timeframe. They function on the order of hours to a couple days, and during local distribution outages.

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

#323

Post by pphysch »

hbarka wrote: post #291
pphysch wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certainly increasing the availability of power but I fail to see how it makes a "more resilient grid". Who is gonna fix a power line that goes down?

A downed power line is minor compared to Hurricane Sandy or the Great Texas Freeze. Who demonstrated resiliency during that time? The ones with Powerwalls and microgrids powered by gas/alternate storage systems kept the lights on in many places. The lesson is that reliance on a centralized grid can quickly turn into a big problem. Distributed and localized energy generation and storage is where the incentives should…

I see, that makes sense.

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

#324

Post by zbrozek »

ketzo wrote: post #192
m463 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Punative pricing in california is really a disservice to customers/consumers. In just about every other business, if you use a lot of something, you get a discount. For california electricity, it's the opposite.

It's a matter of tradeoffs. California electric companies – and PG&E in particular – desperately need to decrease load during fire season so that they have more flexibility in the grid. It's important for them to try and disincentivize power usage pretty much however they can. Plus, using less power is better for the environment.

Is using less power really better? People are going to use energy and this is driving loads to other sources of energy, typically gas. Most (but not all) people I know are avoiding electrification on economic grounds.

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

#325

Post by zbrozek »

hedora wrote: post #295
GravitasFailure wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California requires[0] new construction to have solar now, so while you might not have to worry about installing it you very well may be stuck with a system if you move. I'm not sure I agree with your assertion that increased solar installs will leave less money for grid infrastructure. With the moves away from gas for heating and cooking and the proliferation of electric cars, it seems that demand for residential po…

Yes, but the proposed interconnect rates include a monthly fee if you connect to the grid. The fee is approximately 100% the price of the panels, spread out over 30 years. I'll hopefully be grandfathered in for 20 years, but after that, I plan to just stop paying my electric bill. I imagine such "cord cutting" for new installs will become more common. As a middle ground, I might just opt out of net metering, and pay…

I have no idea if you're allowed to push the energy back on the grid. You may be better off with batteries to store your excess and use it yourself later. I did that, but I got the batteries for free and did the install myself for less than a hundred dollars.

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

#326

Post by zbrozek »

Panzer04 wrote: post #304
zbrozek wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current system in PG&E territory encourages me to prefer gas to electricity everywhere I'm able to make the choice. That's surely worse.

Only if it means you’d prefer resistive heaters to heat pumps. In home gas is more efficient than a resistance heater.

False; the heat pump is still more expensive. You need COP of >=4 with baseline rates, and it only gets worse from there (the baselines are tiny, and TOU is also bad). Heat pump water heaters only barely scratch 4 under ideal conditions, so you'll generally do worse with a HPWH than with a condensing gas one. Arithmetic is about the same for home heating systems.

Basically around here (PG&E) you should only electrify if you can also get your electrons from not-the-grid.

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

#327

Post by qqqwerty »

novok wrote: post #312
qqqwerty wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The markets and incentives are pretty screwy right now, but overbuilding solar is probably one of our best strategies at preparing for the future in the current moment. There are a number of reasons for this, in no particular order: Batteries still need to come down in cost before they are economical for residential energy storage. But once they become cost effective, they are fairly easy to add to existing installat…

Solar panels have a ~20 year life and are also getting cheaper as time goes on. Maybe building mounting capacity for them is smart, but it's not necessarily smart to more panels than you will properly use. You can buy more panels later if it actually becomes smart to use them and you have a use case.

The panels are dirt cheap compared to the other costs (installation, permitting, inverters, etc...). I suspect that the installation costs and any permit modifications required during the expansion would greatly extend the ROI timeline vs just including the panels in the initial install. If you were really trying to save costs, maybe you could significantly undersize the inverter, as those tend to only last 7-8 years, and you would only suffer losses during the peak hours in the summer months when you are likely to have way more energy than needed.

More generally, overbuilding is not really going to be economical right now. We do not have the proper incentives in place for that. But from what I can tell it is our quickest/cheapest path to a sustainable grid, and that likely means we will need to adjust our consumption patterns to account for the absurd amount of excessive power we will have in peak solar months (usually late spring). This means we will need to start developing power intensive applications that can take advantage of free (and possibly negatively priced) power. So if you want to get ahead of the curve, put a massive solar system on your roof and start thinking up interesting ways to use that excess power.

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

#328

Post by _ea1k »

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 think a middleground is more realistic. Having solar and enough batteries to never need to send power back to the grid might ultimately similar in cost to selling it back. And on the plus column, you have backup power when the grid fails.

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

#329

Post by seb1204 »

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,…

Rather than wasting it and never consuming what you have in the kWh bank why not just feed it into the grid? Feed in prices will change as the world moved to more solar. If you are concerned you can buys a battery to ensure you never take from the grid.

Re: How should net metering affect your electric bill?

#330

Post by dzhiurgis »

danans wrote: post #322
dzhiurgis wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$10k or so per house vs digging up endless amount of streets?

At much less per house you can build massive utility scale storage, like pumped hydro. However, these are complementary technologies, serving different time and scale of energy storage and duration. Home batteries aren't realistically going to solve storage on the weeks to season timeframe. They function on the order of hours to a couple days, and during local distribution outages.

Batteries normalise the peaks.

Building grid scale storage still means grid itself needs to be updated for the increasing loads and spikes.

And I'm talking here smart batteries - controlled by grid owner. How it's not default (including solar, cars and other high load devices) it's a bit of a puzzler. Sure it's like 5 minutes of inconvenience for the owner, but saves trillions of dollars.

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