Reimagining electric utilities • Hacker News Board

Re: Reimagining electric utilities

#11

Post by ap22213 » Mon, Feb 15, 2016, 2:43 AM UTC

I think the author may be missing out on some of the areas of the country where this is happening.

For instance, many places aleady have 'de-regulated' markets for energy. See FERC 888 & 889 [1]. And, states like Pennsylvania already allow consumers to choose between different distribution utilities.

Further, the Federal Gov't and DoE are pushing for things like microgrids and smart cities and smart buildings where local energy can be produced and stored and bought from and sold back to the grid [2] [3].

Traditional distribution utilities in many places are facing the 'renewable-storage death spiral'. That is, many customers can store and even generate energy cheaper than it costs to buy it from the utility. This causes the utility to raise rates, which then causes more customers to switch to local generation. Note that the residential market is just a small piece of the pie. You have to look at commercial and industrial, which normally get different rate structures, to see where things are happening.

Distribution utilities won't go away, but their model must change. Residential, Commercial, and Industrial will probably always need connection to the grid for safety reasons. Plus, distribution utilities are usually really good, and sometimes even efficient at laying copper and responding to outages.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_RTO [2]: https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/09/14/fact-... [3]: http://energy.gov/oe/services/technology-development/smart-g...

Re: Reimagining electric utilities

#12

Post by jqkeller » Mon, Feb 15, 2016, 5:38 AM UTC

barney54 wrote: post #6

jqkeller wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe at the 100MW scale it already operates like this, but not at smaller scale. Recently I had a discussion with a county level public utility district where we were exploring building a 1-10 MW Solar system on a closed landfill. The capability existed for us to wheel the power to a load that was interested in the energy, but the smallest chunk of capacity we could buy was 1MW and the cost to wheel the power would…

As I read your example, it sounds like the problem is solar's low capacity factor, not scale. But maybe I'm not understanding the example.

Under the current regulatory schemes and market rules the low capacity factor of solar is absolutely a problem. I guess I'm saying that more flexibility for smaller systems to play in the markets will be important to increase renewable energy production. The advent of cost effective storage will obviously make the whole discussion easier.

Re: Reimagining electric utilities

#13

Post by strommen » Mon, Feb 15, 2016, 6:23 AM UTC

ilaksh wrote: post #10

barney54 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could see some of this with solar, but not as much with wind. Wind does much better as large turbines--such a 1.5-2 megawatt turbines--not small scale stuff. One reason for this is that wind resources are much better at say 80 meters than close to the ground. Plus, for wind to work well you also need a wide geographic area to even out some of the intermittency. That requires a big high voltage grid.

Rooftop mounted VAWTs do a good job of supplementing solar. The best VAWT designs perform at relatively low wind speeds. They do not need to compete with large systems mounted high in the air. You do not need a big high voltage grid when you have batteries for each home or group of homes.

Maybe, but not until the distant future.

We do not have the battery technology to make micro-grids feasible for the USA at large (much less the world). In fact, we don't even have enough known lead and/or lithium to build batteries to do this with today's technology.

Here's a good read on the challenges: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-bat...

Re: Reimagining electric utilities

#14

Post by ilaksh » Mon, Feb 15, 2016, 7:18 AM UTC

strommen wrote: post #13

ilaksh wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rooftop mounted VAWTs do a good job of supplementing solar. The best VAWT designs perform at relatively low wind speeds. They do not need to compete with large systems mounted high in the air. You do not need a big high voltage grid when you have batteries for each home or group of homes.

Maybe, but not until the distant future. We do not have the battery technology to make micro-grids feasible for the USA at large (much less the world). In fact, we don't even have enough known lead and/or lithium to build batteries to do this with today's technology. Here's a good read on the challenges: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/nation-sized-bat...

That article is outdated. Its basing figures on an older technology in lead-acid versus Lithium and battery manufacturing has started exploding since then.

He also assumes the same level of inefficiency. With the technologies and policies in my plan, the U.S. can easily be 8 times more efficient.