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Solar generates more energy in US than coal for first time

theguardian.com

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Re: Solar generates more energy in US than coal for first time

#131

Post by harmmonica »

davidw wrote: post #98
harmmonica wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting on Utah. Re Oregon, was the fire Marshall acting in good faith in that scenario? Recently reading about fire-truck size in the US I start wondering what the motivation is for some views about things around fire safety (amongst a million other things). Maybe good faith is too cynical. Maybe just hard-to-change attitudes.

Hah - I was going to mention all the other types of things the fire people seem to be blocking, but decided to stay focused. But yeah, it seemed like 'aversion to change'. "Firefighters might trip over solar panels on balconies" or something kind of far-fetched sounding.

This is funny. You might notice that I write insanely-long comments because these types of things pop into my head every time on HN (better get ahead of it because people will pick apart my quick comment if I don't cover as many bases as possible in the original comment!). Your method is better! I have to learn how to be more "focused" and let folks just do their thing and then reply succinctly like you did here.

Re: Solar generates more energy in US than coal for first time

#132

Post by harmmonica »

colechristensen wrote: post #92
harmmonica wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apologies if my reply here is not understanding you, but this is counter to my experience. Plenty of people still want to handle their own energy production even if they have grid access. I've built off-grid houses. Most of the utility production is already renewable. Many people still choose to live off grid even though that's the case. It would be epic if there was a plug and play, house-scale option because the co…

If you want grid tie-in, a certified professional needs to be in the loop to verify all of the rules are being followed because incorrect setups are dangerous to other people. Also insurance probably doesn't want to insure your home if someone with questionable knowledge is setting up wiring and energy production. Outside of cities, outside of grid tie, setting up your own micro-grid often can be done without any ext…

What you say is true, but do you not think there's a way to make it so that the risk is taken out of it so you can expand the number of people who are capable of doing the install? I mean, I personally think there is, but I respect you don't feel the same. I just end up with a $10,000 bill, for the labor, to do what seems to me like a very straightforward problem to solve.

Re: Solar generates more energy in US than coal for first time

#133

Post by ssl-3 »

Paradigma11 wrote: post #127
ssl-3 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If demand upon infrastructure decreases, then the infrastructure itself can also decrease. We don't need to solve that problem in advance.

But then you have that week or 3 when you need all the infrastructure.`

Sure. Shit happens.

The system we have now is imperfect. The system we will have in 10 or 20 or 100 years surely will be imperfect, as well.

We must not let perfect be the enemy of good: If we do, then we'll never get anything done at all.

Re: Solar generates more energy in US than coal for first time

#134

Post by davidw »

harmmonica wrote: post #131
davidw wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah - I was going to mention all the other types of things the fire people seem to be blocking, but decided to stay focused. But yeah, it seemed like 'aversion to change'. "Firefighters might trip over solar panels on balconies" or something kind of far-fetched sounding.

This is funny. You might notice that I write insanely-long comments because these types of things pop into my head every time on HN (better get ahead of it because people will pick apart my quick comment if I don't cover as many bases as possible in the original comment!). Your method is better! I have to learn how to be more "focused" and let folks just do their thing and then reply succinctly like you did here.

Good plan.

Re: Solar generates more energy in US than coal for first time

#135

Post by Broken_Hippo »

pdq wrote: post #18
hyperhello wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main load is during the day when the sun shines anyway, and then the seasonally changing periods before and after, basically ramping when people are getting up, then dropping off while people are going to bed. On the west side of a continent, the power for the ramp can come from the east because the sun shines earlier there; on the west the sun shines later and the east can get power. At night, there are still nu…

High load in the day during sunlight is mostly true for summer heat, but in the winter you have cold evenings which requires base load or storage, combined with solar angle/efficiency being worse in the winter.

Actually, the US uses more power during the day in the summer - there is a dropoff in the night for both summer and winter. Night time use is somewhat similar. [1]

Cooling takes more energy than warming, so the summer daytime use is higher. Summer = warm evenings. I'm from Indiana - it was almost always cooler at 10am than 7pm, even in the winter. It takes time to heat up or cool down. I'll also mention that nights and weekends use less power because business and industry tend to shut down during these times.

Which would somewhat logically mean that despite the efficiency being worse during winter, it isn't as much of a strain because power demands are less.

[1]https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915

Re: Solar generates more energy in US than coal for first time

#136

Post by harmmonica »

mrDmrTmrJ wrote: post #77
harmmonica wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That definitely sounds reasonable for balcony, but I was trying to ask if you were able to generate the lion's share of your usage from a DIY or plug and play system would the utilities be against that ? I would think so because that would eat into their profits. If enough people were knocking several cents per kWh off their bills, would they just end up charging more for the infrastructure to make up for the loss? I…

Yes. The utilities want every household to pay them every month. Here in California, PG&E has a "base service fee" of $24/month. That you owe even if they sell you no (as in ZERO) electricity: https://www.pge.com/en/account/billing-and-assistance/base-s...

Yep, totally, and I'd personally be overjoyed if I could pay PG&E (hypothetically; they're not my utility) $24/month to keep the grid afloat, but no more than that because I'm producing all I need locally (at the risk of repeating myself, I know this is possible today. Just hopeful that over time it becomes possible to do that install in a plug and play fashion just like you can do with the balcony solar, but at whole-house scale (or at least some material fraction of the whole house usage)).

Re: Solar generates more energy in US than coal for first time

#137

Post by jaggederest »

jwr wrote: post #114
Marsymars wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They typically generate 10-25% of their maximum output on the cloudiest of days. Most cloudy days are not maximally cloudy. If you're at higher latitudes, this is notably less of a drop-off than you see between high/low season. My friends with residential solar see <10% overall output in January vs July. (~60% drop from fewer sunshine hours, ~80% drop from decreased solar irradiance.)

This gets complex quickly, because temperature matters too: cells are more efficient when they are cold. These effects interact and the results are sometimes surprising. Many pure-numbers theoretical comparisons also make the assumption that you can consume all the power that the cells generate, which is not always the case. In an off-grid installation with a battery, for example, you might not be able to consume eve…

Curtailment and dump loads are pretty straightforward, though, so using all the power isn't as critical as people might imagine either.

It's better to overbuild the dc-to-ac ratio moderately and just accept that on a summer noon you'll be dumping or curtailing, and still get useful percentages in the winter. I'm in the fortunate position of having an essentially infinite dump load (water pumping and heating) that would effectively turn most of my solar into real usage, but even most people can preheat a hot water tank and things like that. With electric cars it's even better.

Re: Solar generates more energy in US than coal for first time

#138

Post by jaggederest »

Paradigma11 wrote: post #123
Retric wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite, current nighttime load is largely a function of cheaper nighttime rates. People don’t set their EV’s to charge from 11-5AM because that’s the only time their cars are plugged in. If rates crater at noon on Sunday, there’s many an EV happy to suck up power then. So yes batteries are going to continue to grow rapidly, but it’s a smaller role than it might seem.

Great, so now not only is power production nondeterministic, your cars tank also is. It was too expensive and the algorithm decided to wait charging, so no spontaneous road trip for you, sorry.

As an electric car owner, this is absolutely the biggest non-problem ever. If you're planning a long journey, you push one button at some point over the preceeding week and it charges to full regardless of price.

Re: Solar generates more energy in US than coal for first time

#139

Post by colechristensen »

harmmonica wrote: post #132
colechristensen wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want grid tie-in, a certified professional needs to be in the loop to verify all of the rules are being followed because incorrect setups are dangerous to other people. Also insurance probably doesn't want to insure your home if someone with questionable knowledge is setting up wiring and energy production. Outside of cities, outside of grid tie, setting up your own micro-grid often can be done without any ext…

What you say is true, but do you not think there's a way to make it so that the risk is taken out of it so you can expand the number of people who are capable of doing the install? I mean, I personally think there is, but I respect you don't feel the same. I just end up with a $10,000 bill, for the labor, to do what seems to me like a very straightforward problem to solve.

It's not straightforward. If you do it wrong you kill people. Your house burns down, you burn your neighborhood down, you electrocute utility workers doing maintenance, you contribute to grid instability which is already a tight balancing act.

Can you make plug and play possible? Sure but you're just shifting the verification to a different layer and then you have to make it illegal to posses or sell any thing but the safe engineered products and you have to spend a bunch on enforcement to make sure only the safe stuff gets put in practice (not to mention replacing all the existing hardware and making it illegal to maintain)...

Modern consumer products and safety rules insulate people so much from the dangerous parts of existence that people get bothered when everything isn't like that and then want to go pet the big stripey orange and black kitty... not realizing that guardrails and safety nets aren't everywhere in existence.

And putting up those guardrails is EXPENSIVE. You want those instead of professional installation costs? Sure but the solar system you bought just got 10x as expensive as a result saving you nothing.

A house costs what... $250-500k to build these days? $10k for a major update to the build is nothing. Requiring expertise to verify dangerous things are done correctly is appropriate.

Re: Solar generates more energy in US than coal for first time

#140

Post by bob1029 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #4

This is more from a lot of coal power plants being converted to gas over the past 20 years than solar overtaking the outputs of those power plants. Coal output shrinking, solar output rising, the lines have crossed. Coal is unpopular in all but a few areas where coal mining is still a part of the local econonmy. I used to work near a coal plant and every day I'd go out to my car and it would have little black particl…

Some of these plants are being retrofitted for dual firing. They can burn coal & natural gas at the same time. I wonder how that factors into these statistics.
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