I wouldn't want my electric grid engineers (or any other kind of infrastructure) to be anything less than skeptical of change.
The same dichotomy exists in developer tools as opposed to recreational software. Yes, please rapidly innovate my Facebook and NetFlix UIs, and even pipe those changes to me automatically. On the other hand, please methodically roll out changes to XCode and Django, and let me take them when I have time.
Iterate services quickly, not the tools to build them.
Netflix down? Oh well. Latest Django build breaks thousands of sites. No thank you.
Something that would be interesting: a map estimating the areas in which a typical suburban home roof covered with PV panels would produce enough energy to power a typical suburban home's worth of electrical usage, assuming some level of battery technology. I'm not actually sure what it'd look like. Seems like there might be a tradeoff between hotter areas, which have both higher PV output and higher peak electricity…
I'm an electrical engineer and I've done these calculations for my own home. The roof area of a 1200 sq ft ranch home is much larger than the surface area of solar panels needed to power the home. (in other words, your map would show pretty much all of north America). But covering all of a roof with solar panels is very expensive. The biggest problem is that the "typical suburban home" is ridiculously inefficient. In…
The cheapest watt is the watt you never had to generate.
I doubt most people can afford enough solar and battery storage to power all the air conditioning needed for the longer, hotter summers we are having. We'll just use less coal which is a great thing, until the coal industry starts getting subsidies to stay alive in a few decades (which is certainly going to happen considering their political power). Grid-tie is a much better answer for people and utilities though. So…
Most people should be using geothermal instead of air conditioners, but the upfront cost is much higher ($20-30K).
We should be subsidizing geothermal installations because of how damn efficient it is compared to trying to push heat into the air.
Ironically widespread availability of solar power could lead to increased pollution. Purely hypothetically, if somehow it became popular for people to generate some, but not all, of the power they need from solar panels then perhaps people would pay less money to the power companies. Power production becomes less profitable and there's less demand for expanding supply. Meaning that the cheapest power production that…
That used to be coal. Now it's natural gas. The gap has grown large enough in some places that coal plants get converted to run on natural gas. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Coal_plant_conversion_p...
This is actually a huge deal. Coal advocates disparage environmentalists about the coal industry going down the tubes, when its really US fracking efforts that are driving down the cost of natural gas.
This piece overlooks the fact that utilities can install solar power cheaper than a residence can. This will always be the chase. Electricity will drop in price accordingly.
Generation and transmission are two different utility businesses. This article is about how people are not going to want to pay to be hooked to the utility "just in case".
Excuse my ignorance (I am a layperson and simply interested in this subject), but are you suggesting that the utility themselves would rollout distributed solar to their customers, and thus the utilities engineers are skeptical of the technology and how it would be rolled out? It seems to me that the whole point is that consumers will begin the rollout themselves, generating and storing power on their own and the onl…
I was not talking about the completely off grid case at all. Maybe I misunderstood the article. I was talking in terms of grid-connected solar installs, which I feel just make more sense. What happens if you get a cloudy week? You have no power until the sun shines again... or have to fire up your inefficient generator (the existence of which may in fact negate any savings anyway... because price and inefficiency at…
That sounds like the 60 train restrictions/governmental restrictions on closing branch lines/rate restrictions in Atlas Shrugged (Not looking for Ayn Rand discussion). So if you happen to have a system with high inertia (stacks of paper weighting it down), any change will break it, whether it's more demand (brown/blackout) or less demand (financing model collapses).
The chapter and verse of the grid utility economics as they are impacted by solar and wind is in http://smallisprofitable.org which was The Economist's Book of the Year 2003. (disclaimer: I helped edit this)
I doubt most people can afford enough solar and battery storage to power all the air conditioning needed for the longer, hotter summers we are having. We'll just use less coal which is a great thing, until the coal industry starts getting subsidies to stay alive in a few decades (which is certainly going to happen considering their political power). Grid-tie is a much better answer for people and utilities though. So…
Cooling in the summer requires much less energy compared to heating in the winter. It's also a lot more of an optional comfort than a critical survival need.
That obviously depends on where you live.
If you claim more energy is spent on heating overall I'd want a reference on that, since that goes against what I've heard. Especially since houses in cold climates tend to be a lot better insulated than houses in southern climates.
I work in this space. I think it is worth noting that, yes this is true for some players, particularly at middle management and executive levels. However it is equally work noting that some of the resistance is just conservative engineering. Would you just grab the latest 0.1 release of the hot new database and throw it up on your production systems because everyone keeps talking about the promise of it? This is a re…
I'm in the industry too. Your comments are spot on.
At an IEEE talk on this subject not long ago, the presenter said, "We've spent the last 100 years learning how to PREVENT the very type of electrical flow that distributed generation creates."