121–130 of 143 posts
Say a little old lady wants solar panels but is in no way capable of installing them anymore than she can install plumbing.
Power utilities should offer solar panels, wind turbines, battery storage systems. Even electrical to hydrogen foe storage.
The power company should be like an ISP only instead of modems they service power generating devices.
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There are many different regulatory environments, but the utility I worked at, where I wrote programs to calculate the hourly price of electricity, the utility made zero dollars from usage by residential customers. Residential customers payed a fixed rate to be connected, and every penny the utility collected for energy was remitted to the market operator. The utility also made no money on energy by large users, but…
so where does the utility make their money?!
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Yes! But in that paradigm, where you generate 80%+ of your needed energy and rely on the grid for the rest, how does that affect the utility? The only difference to them is that you draw less power than you used to. Sure, it would benefit them to learn your habits so they can manage steady power delivery at scale, but they don't get a say in your solar rollout. They don't get to prevent it. They don't get to be skept…
> The only difference to them is that you draw less power than you used to. That is not the only difference; the pattern of your load changes too. With 100% grid-supplied power, changes in load are driven by slow-moving, predictable systems like sunrise/sunset, weather, and seasons. If you are running your own solar array, though, you will vary your grid load on much shorter time scales unless you invest in a big bat…
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Spinning reserve ought to be replaced with batteries. I bet some of it could be replaced with batteries today with the utilities' customers saving money, aside from the sunk costs not then providing the proper return on capital to their investors.
LOL talk to an EE about the orders of magnitude involved, you're not going to like the answers. The cheapest storage battery is simple lead acid figure a quarter per watthour installed. Or a KWh is $250. But with a 100% charge/discharge cycle the battery will be dead and need replacing in about 10 or so cycles. To get up to 1000 or so cycles (which is only 3 yrs daily cycles) means you only get to use about 10% of th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes! But in that paradigm, where you generate 80%+ of your needed energy and rely on the grid for the rest, how does that affect the utility? The only difference to them is that you draw less power than you used to. Sure, it would benefit them to learn your habits so they can manage steady power delivery at scale, but they don't get a say in your solar rollout. They don't get to prevent it. They don't get to be skept…
> The only difference to them is that you draw less power than you used to. That is not the only difference; the pattern of your load changes too. With 100% grid-supplied power, changes in load are driven by slow-moving, predictable systems like sunrise/sunset, weather, and seasons. If you are running your own solar array, though, you will vary your grid load on much shorter time scales unless you invest in a big bat…
If you are running your own solar array, though, you will vary your grid load on much shorter time scales
I'm not so sure that these latter variations are significantly less predictable than what you mention in the former paragraph. Isn't the output of a solar array dependent on the insolation? Isn't the insolation dependent on the cloud cover? Can't you predict the cloud cover in any single place simply by taking advantage of real-time meteo satellite data? A similar feedback could be established for wind power. Given enough data, I'm reasonably certain that models could be established that would allow you to predict how the solar and wind power generation distribution is going to change in the next hour(s) so that you could prepare for it.
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."
$HN_USERNAM @ gmail
If you want to chat tech and power.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spinning reserve ought to be replaced with batteries. I bet some of it could be replaced with batteries today with the utilities' customers saving money, aside from the sunk costs not then providing the proper return on capital to their investors.
LOL talk to an EE about the orders of magnitude involved, you're not going to like the answers. The cheapest storage battery is simple lead acid figure a quarter per watthour installed. Or a KWh is $250. But with a 100% charge/discharge cycle the battery will be dead and need replacing in about 10 or so cycles. To get up to 1000 or so cycles (which is only 3 yrs daily cycles) means you only get to use about 10% of th…
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".
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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.
http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=10271
In 2009, space heating was 40% of US home energy use, air conditioning was 6%.
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There are many different regulatory environments, but the utility I worked at, where I wrote programs to calculate the hourly price of electricity, the utility made zero dollars from usage by residential customers. Residential customers payed a fixed rate to be connected, and every penny the utility collected for energy was remitted to the market operator. The utility also made no money on energy by large users, but…
so where does the utility make their money?!