Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Solar will supply almost all growth in U.S. electricity generation through 2025

cleantechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 231 posts

Re: Solar will supply almost all growth in U.S. electricity generation through 2025

#161

Post by Symbiote »

Scoundreller wrote: post #153
soco wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My (Swiss, small) provider just got rid of differentiated pricing "for simplicity sake". On the other hand they continuously increase the solar installations, so I really don't get their point. But I'm not an economist so...

My jurisdiction went all-in on residential smart meters for all to do time of use billing. Even apartments where hvac, hot water and laundry are central, and the builder/owner chooses the big appliances. But it turns out people don’t care and didn’t bother with enough load shifting to cover the cost. “Smart Metering Costs to Date Exceed Projected Costs and Benefits” says it all. They did get/build a $249m centre to m…

What are the relative costs?

It depends very much on the weather, but in Denmark the cost can vary from around 1DKK/kWh (€0.14) to 5kr/kWh (€0.67), or a few hours a year even more.

Recent and future prices are shown here: https://andelenergi.dk/kundeservice/aftaler-og-priser/timepr...

I don't know of any studies done here, but anecdotally I do know people who have the app version of that webpage and will schedule their laundry/dishwasher accordingly. (And of course EV owners will configure their car to charge at the cheapest period.)

Personally, the saving isn't worth thinking about for me. I run the dishwasher overnight anyway and sometimes the washing machine, but that's to avoid the noise during the evening rather than any economic or environmental reason.

Re: Solar will supply almost all growth in U.S. electricity generation through 2025

#162

Post by jakewins »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #136
jakewins wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recall your entire house is a thermal battery too! In fact, all the four major energy loads in a house - Heating/Cooling, Water heating, EV Charging, House Battery - are extremely flexible. But we're still lacking good standards for reliable control. Today we do stuff like tell your HVAC to stop via vendor X's cloud API. What happens if your router dies after we send a "stop" command in the middle of the winter? For…

> In fact, all the four major energy loads in a house - Heating/Cooling, Water heating, EV Charging, House Battery - are extremely flexible. The dominant energy load in existing houses is heating. EV charging is 100% new generation capacity and doesn't take any of the existing load off the power grid. House Battery isn't a load, it's the expensive thing you suffer when the actual loads are inflexible. Heating is slig…

> EV charging is 100% new generation capacity and doesn't take any of the existing load off the power grid.

All the more important to ensure this additional demand is flexible. Shaping it to match renewable production and low-usage hours in the distribution grid means higher capacity factors across the board and less new transmission+distribution need.

> Converting to electricity is going to require more electricity

Yes.

Re: Solar will supply almost all growth in U.S. electricity generation through 2025

#163

Post by Scoundreller »

Symbiote wrote: post #161
Scoundreller wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My jurisdiction went all-in on residential smart meters for all to do time of use billing. Even apartments where hvac, hot water and laundry are central, and the builder/owner chooses the big appliances. But it turns out people don’t care and didn’t bother with enough load shifting to cover the cost. “Smart Metering Costs to Date Exceed Projected Costs and Benefits” says it all. They did get/build a $249m centre to m…

What are the relative costs? It depends very much on the weather, but in Denmark the cost can vary from around 1DKK/kWh (€0.14) to 5kr/kWh (€0.67), or a few hours a year even more. Recent and future prices are shown here: https://andelenergi.dk/kundeservice/aftaler-og-priser/timepr... I don't know of any studies done here, but anecdotally I do know people who have the app version of that webpage and will schedule the…

For the power price, in winter, it’s 8.7 cents/kwh at off peak, 12.2 mid peak and 18.2 peak. (Canadian prices, about CAD$1.35:US$1.00).

There are other charges that don’t vary by time of day or kWh, so those numbers are only good for absolute, not relative comparisons.

https://www.oeb.ca/consumer-information-and-protection/elect...

Re: Solar will supply almost all growth in U.S. electricity generation through 2025

#164

Post by tshaddox »

DennisP wrote: post #124
bilsbie wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve always said this! Make daytime energy 100x cheaper and the market will respond. Appliances will start building in batteries, behaviors will change , and who knows what else the market will come up with.

That's just externalizing costs though. Instead of building a large battery at the power station, you're building lots of little batteries everywhere else. Even demand management can be an externalized cost. If a factory shuts down half the time, then you need twice as many factories to produce the same stuff.

I'm not sure I would call it "externalizing costs" if the only change was making daytime energy significantly cheaper (and not increasing off-peak energy prices). You could simply not add any batteries and your costs would still go down. You would presumably only decide to add batteries if the cost of doing so was less than the money you'd save by shifting energy usage to cheaper times.

Re: Solar will supply almost all growth in U.S. electricity generation through 2025

#165

Post by AnthonyMouse »

jakewins wrote: post #162
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In fact, all the four major energy loads in a house - Heating/Cooling, Water heating, EV Charging, House Battery - are extremely flexible. The dominant energy load in existing houses is heating. EV charging is 100% new generation capacity and doesn't take any of the existing load off the power grid. House Battery isn't a load, it's the expensive thing you suffer when the actual loads are inflexible. Heating is slig…

> EV charging is 100% new generation capacity and doesn't take any of the existing load off the power grid. All the more important to ensure this additional demand is flexible. Shaping it to match renewable production and low-usage hours in the distribution grid means higher capacity factors across the board and less new transmission+distribution need. > Converting to electricity is going to require more electricity…

> All the more important to ensure this additional demand is flexible.

It's inherently flexible. Shaping it to be that way isn't a particularly hard problem. The issue is that it's entirely new demand -- what you're really replacing is the petroleum burned in existing cars, not any part of the existing power grid. So how do you solve the demand currently served by coal and natural gas and home heating oil, rather than gasoline and diesel?

> Converting to electricity is going to require more electricity

I feel like editing out the "at night" part hasn't actually provided a mechanism for supplying that electricity at night when it's cold and you need heat.

Re: Solar will supply almost all growth in U.S. electricity generation through 2025

#166

Post by huytersd »

londons_explore wrote: post #57

The real question is will growth of solar push electricity prices down enough that fossil plants get decommissioned early because they are no longer sufficiently profitable?

It depends on what you mean by fossil fuels. With solar and wind you absolutely need gas peaker plants to come online quickly and provide power during downtime so that’s not going away anytime soon. Batteries may offer some replacement but we’re not there yet. Pumped hydro is probably the best bet if governments can work out the issues with it and start getting it right.

Re: Solar will supply almost all growth in U.S. electricity generation through 2025

#167

Post by JohnFen »

Scoundreller wrote: post #153
soco wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My (Swiss, small) provider just got rid of differentiated pricing "for simplicity sake". On the other hand they continuously increase the solar installations, so I really don't get their point. But I'm not an economist so...

My jurisdiction went all-in on residential smart meters for all to do time of use billing. Even apartments where hvac, hot water and laundry are central, and the builder/owner chooses the big appliances. But it turns out people don’t care and didn’t bother with enough load shifting to cover the cost. “Smart Metering Costs to Date Exceed Projected Costs and Benefits” says it all. They did get/build a $249m centre to m…

> But it turns out people don’t care and didn’t bother with enough load shifting to cover the cost.

This doesn't surprise me a great deal. Personally, the price difference would have to be very high in order for it to affect my usage patterns. It would have to exceed the cost of having yet another complication for me to keep track of.

Re: Solar will supply almost all growth in U.S. electricity generation through 2025

#168

Post by JohnFen »

dylan604 wrote: post #141
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One thing to consider is that if that's profitable to do at house scale, then it's probably even more profitable to do at grid scale and you'll likely be out-competed by utility companies. Utility companies have to pay for distribution networks, and generally pass that cost on in the price per kWh. Which you avoid the less you use the grid -- and which then become a higher proportion of the prices the utility has t…

In a lot of urban locations, it is not legal to have a residence that is not connected to the grid. If you have home generation capabilities and storage that means you take the least amount from the grid provider, you can be technically still connected to the grid without using any power. If this continues, I would not put it past the grid provider to come up with a minimum monthly bill so it is impossible to have a…

> In a lot of urban locations, it is not legal to have a residence that is not connected to the grid.

Woah, I didn't know this. In any case, surely it's legal to have grid service to the house and simply not use it.

> I would not put it past the grid provider to come up with a minimum monthly bill

My electric company (a community owned co-op) has done this for many years. You pay $15/mo no matter what. Your power usage is billed on top of that.

Re: Solar will supply almost all growth in U.S. electricity generation through 2025

#169

Post by Scoundreller »

JohnFen wrote: post #167
Scoundreller wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My jurisdiction went all-in on residential smart meters for all to do time of use billing. Even apartments where hvac, hot water and laundry are central, and the builder/owner chooses the big appliances. But it turns out people don’t care and didn’t bother with enough load shifting to cover the cost. “Smart Metering Costs to Date Exceed Projected Costs and Benefits” says it all. They did get/build a $249m centre to m…

> But it turns out people don’t care and didn’t bother with enough load shifting to cover the cost. This doesn't surprise me a great deal. Personally, the price difference would have to be very high in order for it to affect my usage patterns. It would have to exceed the cost of having yet another complication for me to keep track of.

Some of it is mispricing.

We’re getting the kids version of market pricing, but when you give people real market pricing without cross-subsidization, they tend to get confused/angry/bankrupt.

I still think they could do real-time pricing with some kind of cap that gets balanced out amongst all users, but the uptake still may not be there. It averages out for those that treat it as noise and still not a lot of equipment out there to take advantage of it at the personal residential level.

Re: Solar will supply almost all growth in U.S. electricity generation through 2025

#170

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

dylan604 wrote: post #137
itsoktocry wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you even actually save money, accounting for the financing and installation of the solar panels? A while back there was a thread on the SolarCity subreddit linked from HN where the OP discussed his savings thanks to nice weather, but still figured he had a 20 year payback period on his setup. That is crazy.

I never even suggested solar. I just want a battery pack that charges when grid prices are cheap, and powers off battery when grid prices are high. Complicating it with solar is beyond the scope of the original intent.

That seems like it would be hard to ever make a financial return.

Say a battery costs $10k and a home uses $100/ month electricity. If you assume electricity is free at night to fully charge the battery and meet energy demand, that’s 100 months (8 years) to break even. Real world costs are going to make it quite a bit worse than that.

Post reply on HN