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

cleantechnica.com

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

#181

Post by s1artibartfast »

dylan604 wrote: post #107
s1artibartfast wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But an individual can't take action without the grid taking action to provide customers with the different pricing rates.

What? The entire premise was that it is cheaper at night. Thanks for jumping into the middle of the convo though and trying to jerk the wheel.

If you claim is that "An individual can take action now" by installing a battery to charge at lower rate, then the question of if they can actually purchase power at that lower rate is fundamental.

If household power purchase price doesnt change with time/generation cost, then there is not ability to act faster than the power company.

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

#182

Post by quickthrowman »

MostlyStable wrote: post #108
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…

Tangentially related gripe: My biggest issue in making this work reliably is that my "smart" thermostat is trying to be too smart. Our power gets cheap at 10pm. I can't just set my HVAC to turn on at 10 and go full blast until power gets expensive again at 6am. I have to program a set temperature at a time. if I set that at 10pm, my thermostat tries to make sure that it _reaches_ that temp at exactly the time. So it…

Just buy a 240v DPST 24 hr mechanical time switch and wire it into the electric furnace circuit (or furnace fan circuit if you have a gas-fired furnace). Intermatic makes them.

The ‘smart’ thermostat can call for heat all it wants, but nothing will happen if the time switch relay contacts are open.

I’ve seen 50 year old 24 hour mechanical time switches operating just fine, and you won’t need to replace your thermostat.

This one is $122 and comes inside a NEMA 1 enclosure:

https://www.intermatic.com/Product/T104?setcontextlanguageco...

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

#183

Post by s1artibartfast »

mcbishop wrote: post #158
dylan604 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? The entire premise was that it is cheaper at night. Thanks for jumping into the middle of the convo though and trying to jerk the wheel.

Settle down. A lot of the U.S. doesn't have time-differentiated rates.

And much of that does is nowhere near the real cost differences. I might see a difference on/off peak price difference of 0.05 on a $0.40/kwh, but wholesale prices fluctuate from negative prices at peak to much higher rates.

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

#184

Post by mcbishop »

dylan604 wrote: post #172
mcbishop wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Settle down. A lot of the U.S. doesn't have time-differentiated rates.

And that has precisely squat to do with my intrigue into looking at a system like this. If it didn't make sense, I wouldn't be interested. So what's your point exactly?

> If it didn't make sense, I wouldn't be interested.

It may or may not make sense depending on your location. Many utilities would prefer to make customer-owned solar a very poor financial choice thru rate design (e.g. very high minimum charges, per-kw-installed solar charges, low daytime rates relative to evening rates, wholesale-rate compensation for exported production, etc). Some succeed.

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

#185

Post by AnthonyMouse »

sheepybloke wrote: post #177
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is daytime energy supposed to get 100x cheaper and still allow solar, which only generates during the daytime, to recover its costs? Unless you mean for the nighttime price to increase by a huge factor, but then how would that out-compete existing technologies for generation at night?

You get a larger market share of the total energy consumption/payments to be during the day. E.g. because solar is cheaper, I shift my usage so that all of my energy costs are during the day, and if a majority of people do that, there will be enough money to keep the businesses afloat.

"Lose money on every kWh but make it up on volume" doesn't actually work.

The most electricity should cost at night is approximately what it does now, because you can get that from nuclear or hydro, and why wouldn't you unless you have an alternative that costs less than that?

The lowest sustainable daytime price has to pay for the panels, the labor to install them, the land, maintenance, loan interest etc. And a significant part of the consumer price for all sources is the distribution grid. The price difference is not going to be a factor of 100, and you'd be lucky to get a factor of 2 and still be able to pay back your costs, no matter how cheap the panels themselves get.

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

#186

Post by [deleted] »

gizmo686 wrote: post #69
tallowen wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the implication is that we'll see a further split around pricing. One thing that stood out to me is that in the case of thermal loads (perhaps your dishwasher but more realistically a hotwater heater). It will become more worthwhile for that system to know when high and low electricity prices are and store more heat (i.e. hotwater) at low electricity prices and wait until prices fall again to refill it. In th…

My energy provider (BGE) used to offer a program where you could get a rebate in exchange for letting them control your hot water heater and/or thermostat. The HVAC portion is still running, but only for people who signed up prior to 2020. The water heater program has been completely stopped since 2021. The good thing with both approaches is you don't need the appliance built to support it. For HVAC, the control syst…

[deleted]

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

#187

Post by AnthonyMouse »

dylan604 wrote: post #176
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large minimum monthly fee + required to buy service seems like the kind of thing that would piss off voters.

Ah, I see where you strayed from reality. Your comment seems to be based on a premise that voters are rational.

The rational thing for voters to do is to mostly ignore what the government does unless it directly impacts them in a way they can understand well enough to rally around and get it changed. Which, it turns out, is mostly what they do.

That just has terrible results most of the time, because it means that people generally ignore or otherwise don't understand what the government is doing, which leads to all kinds of inefficiency and corruption.

But "law requires you to buy this expensive thing you don't want" is simple enough for people to understand and get mad about, and affects enough people to make politicians care.

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

#188

Post by Scoundreller »

JohnFen wrote: post #175
Scoundreller wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 equipme…

I checked my electric provider and although I said in an earlier comment that they don't do this sort of differential pricing, I was incorrect. They've been doing it for years now -- but it's optional and you have to opt in to it. They say that the percentage of users who actually do this is somewhere around 10%. Personally, I value having electric prices being stable very highly. I'd prefer pay higher rates (up to a…

if you have the choice, you'd have to run the numbers, but then you create adverse selection issues.

(Technically you can choose a tiered pay X for first kWh and then X+Y above that in my system, but if you're in a building, the building gets to decide which of the two every user is put on)

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

#189

Post by matthewdgreen »

Retric wrote: post #151
matthewdgreen wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking to the US to be on the cutting edge of the energy transition is like looking to the US to be on the cutting edge of steam engine development during the early Industrial Revolution. In a global sense, prices are going to change rapidly and huge amounts of industry will adapt to intermittent sources. The US will catch up a decade later, adopting whatever ideas worked overseas.

The US close to average in terms of solar with most countries are on a similar curve +/- a few years. However, I used the US because our electricity demand is fairly static. The US is only up 13% since 2000 unlike Africa’s electricity demand which doubled, or China’s 600% increase over that period.

China is where energy things are happening, both on the generation side and on the industrial consumption side. The US feels like a quiet backwater in comparison.

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

#190

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

dylan604 wrote: post #174
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As they say, "location location location". In a Texas summer, it is easily 3x that per month for 4 months out of the year for a house. So, that's 12 months in one quarter based on your math. The vast majority of that is just running the A/C. So again, this makes much more sense when you look at the nuances vs just some lame internet posting of using averages. If it makes no sense for you, that's too bad, but to come…

I guess you could further insult me or provide your own napkin math.

Sure, let's say the summer months bump the Texas electric bill to $167/month (8$100 + 4$300). The previous model was assuming free electricity. My quick search is revealing that using differential pricing in Texas, the difference from the normal rate (~$.16) and the low rate (~$.08) saves ~$.08/kwh. Assuming you could perfectly offset all usage onto the cheap rate, that would yield a monthly savings of $83.5. Which yields a $10000/$83.5 = 120 month or 10 year payback period.

Then again, we forgot to right size the battery system. This site[0] claims an AC is going to use 16kwh/8 hours. A Tesla Powerwall is 13.5kwh. If you want the battery to fully cover your AC needs alone, you will need at least one additional battery system.

Naturally, we are missing out on maintenance, opportunity costs, grid connection fees, potential rebates, etc, but I think we have indeed landed on a more nuanced model.

[0] https://learnmetrics.com/how-much-electricity-kwh-do-air-con...

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