111–120 of 355 posts
> I found three companies and gave them my PG&E usage for the past year (about 16,000 kwh) and got three quotes ranging from ~45 — 55k. Wow these rates are crazy. A 10kW setup costs you maybe €10.000 all-in here in the Netherlands. What's going on with these rates? Do they already include the ridiculous tarrifs? A new battery setup for a 20kWh LFP battery + 10 kW inverter + installation is €7000 now. And dropping, fa…
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Subsidy causing high prices? You're going to have to explain that.
- Subsidy starts: prices drop. - Greed kicks in because capitalism: prices rise again, maybe not back to pre-subsidy levels, but they rise. - Subsidy gets axed: prices rise to above pre-subsidy levels. (Note: I'm personally entirely pro "subsidize things you want more of". But that requires a stable, trustworthy government that plans on longer timescales.)
- Demand drops due to increased price to buyers.
- Prices drop so manufacturers can remain profitable.
Having done some work around net zero policy I am increasingly convinced that this is the way forward, and indeed that this will be the way things are done normally maybe 10-20 years from now. The concept is called "distributed generation" and in UK each distribution network keeps an "embedded capacity register" which is basically all the distributed energy resources that are connected to the grid at distribution lev…
Well problem in the UK is that in summer there is like a magnitude more power from PV then in winter.
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What do you do with that much electricity? Was it necessary to over-dimension for winter?
Of course it is a bit oversized. We’re living in a big river valley where we have fog from October until March. On some days in November the fog is so dense that the whole system does not produce any kind of energy. On the other days the produced kWh are enough to charge the battery. We have a heat pump (extrem efficient), servers, one electric car, etc which consumes all together around 13MWh per year. The solar sys…
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I was under the impression that small wind generators at the scale of suburban backyards are really uneconomical and don't produce sufficient energy for anything of practical use.
I wonder what studies may exist on this. Were they all funded by Big Wind?
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How many office parking lots would be covered in solar carports immediately if the corrupt PUC paid reasonable rates for generation? This solves the T&D problem too, as generation remains distributed. It’s the money.
Not so easy to reduce the grid load all the time, needs a big battery for every night and for multiple dark days you still need the grid a lot.
Even has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve
The solution of course is more batteries, but you can't really incentivize non-peak generation until you get the batteries. That's part of the NEM3 change that the blog mentions, to change the incentives from just solar to solar and battery.
I have a solar system in my house in london. 5kw, 13kwhr battery. I am self sufficient from end of march to october. I recently got a second hand electric car. I bought an EV plug (total fucking ripoff. its a fucking plug with a contactor, RCD and a CAN interface. no way is that worth fucking £600) It has some basic control to allow me to charge from excess solar. What is not easy to do is charge at night without dra…
If your electrical installation allows it: You can connect your ev plug before the battery so that it does not drain the battery. You can do this by placing the fuse/connection before the measurement clamps for the battery. Somewhere in between your mains connection and your battery/solar system. This way the battery does not see the load and does not provide power to your EV. That way you can still use excess solar…
I might ask to see if thats possible. I probably need more panels to cover the winter load.
"they have come out and said what we knew all along: they only care about profits." Not the detract from the rest of the article, but - it's a company, what did you expect?
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Customer is willing to pay 10k. Supplier will charge 10k. Customer is willing to pay 10k, state is willing to pay 5k. Supplier will charge 15k.
That applies with inelastic goods - land for example - where supply can't increase Assuming the base cost is 8k Supplier A and Supplier B charge 15k and have 100 customers between them, making 350k each Supplier B decides to undercut Supplier A, and charge 14k, and get all the customers, making 600k profit Customer might be willing to pay 10k, but if there's two identical quotes, one for 10k and one for 9k they'll go…
But you see the point. There's a comfortable cushion where everyone can make more money off the taxpayer and have an easier time of it. Spend a bit of it on better marketing to elevate yourself and justify the higher price in people's minds.
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Subsidy causing high prices? You're going to have to explain that.
- Subsidy starts: prices drop. - Greed kicks in because capitalism: prices rise again, maybe not back to pre-subsidy levels, but they rise. - Subsidy gets axed: prices rise to above pre-subsidy levels. (Note: I'm personally entirely pro "subsidize things you want more of". But that requires a stable, trustworthy government that plans on longer timescales.)
There were no greedy people before capitalism. Of that we can be sure.