Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022 • Hacker News Board

Re: Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022

#361

Post by secabeen » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 10:20 PM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #184

secabeen wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What we need is a fundamental change in electricity billing. The value in a grid connection is in its reliability, availability and demand response (you can demand anything from 1 Amp to 200 Amps at any time, with no notice). The current usage-only billing model is broken. What we should do is pay a large flat monthly fee for the grid connection, then a lower rate for generation/usage, rather than bundling the delive…

I think you’re missing a different piece of the puzzle here which is that if I pay $10 for the first gallon of water and next to nothing for the next 500, I have an incentive to use more water and not less. I’ve paid for it anyway. When you’re trying to solve public policy problems especially where conservation is concerned the notion of math gets complicated very quickly.

Perhaps, but if we want to dis-incentivize usage as a political policy, we can just increase the usage charge above from "next to nothing". For power, generation costs in California run from $150/MWh to -$150/MWh: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/prices.aspx

$0.15/kWh seems like enough to begin the dis-incentivizing of usage, and that can certainly be pushed up more.

Re: Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022

#362

Post by beembeem » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 10:24 PM UTC

AlexandrB wrote: post #125

hbarka wrote: post #109

Assuming you are grid-tied, the reduction of electric bills is predicated on net metering, where the utility company gives you (ideally) 1-for-1 credit for the electricity you produce. In California, this was called NEM 1.0 and NEM 2.0. Every few years the California utilities lobby the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) to chip away at the NEM program. This year the PUC voted unanimously to cut net energy metering an…

Was the California grid always private or was it run by the state government at one point? To me it makes no sense to privatize services where no competition is possible. You just end up with perverse incentives to do stuff like the above.

A few data points as the picture is murky and mixed:

The wider "grid" is managed by CAISO - the independent system operator.

LA's utility is municipally run, in contrast to the big 3 IOUs in the state - PGE, SDGE, SCE.

SDGE had a 50 year exclusive franchise agreement with the city of San Diego that recently renewed under slightly different terms. Notably, and I'm paraphrasing: the city has the option after 10 years to terminate under certain conditions. [1]

Enron lobbied for, contributed to, and profited off of utility deregulation over 20 years ago. [2]

[1] https://www.kpbs.org/news/midday-edition/2020/07/27/sdges-50...

[2] https://www.consumerwatchdog.org/newsrelease/lesson-enron-el...

Re: Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022

#363

Post by lostlogin » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 10:26 PM UTC

encoderer wrote: post #182

lostlogin wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh? My crappy roof was installed in 1945 and has some life left. What sort of roofing lasts 25 years?

Asphalt singles

Is there a reason that corrugated iron, concrete tile or similar aren’t used? They last near indefinitely if looked after, and a hell of a long time if not looked after.

Re: Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022

#364

Post by ok_dad » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 10:32 PM UTC

secabeen wrote: post #358

ok_dad wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do power companies even buy back solar power in the first place? It seems like it's not in their interest to help their customers compete with them. Good question! The more power you generate locally, the less you need to transmit along expensive infrastructure, so it is actually in the interest of utilities to utilize and pay for all of the generation capacity they can as close to the consumer as possible. You…

> The more power you generate locally, the less you need to transmit along expensive infrastructure, This is true, but I don't think the savings on infrastructure scales linearly with the distributed power generated. For example, if you generate 1 MW of distributed power, that reduces the load on wires, transformers and towers across the grid, and may even mean you can eventually use cheaper gear at your next replace…

Eventually you will be able to break large grids into smaller ones and still be as reliable as previously, thus eliminating longer runs of transmission lines and reducing power over the lines you cannot eliminate, which will reduce the sizes and costs of the lines, but not eliminate them. Someday, I would hope that you could tie small neighborhoods together as the grid cells, with very little interconnections needed between them.

I work in the industry, and my vision for the future is less about realtime power transmission and more about pooling energy in smaller grid cells, predicting the usage of the pooled energy in the future, and moving energy to the pools which will need more energy sometime in the future at a trickle rate based on predictions. The ideal situation is to reduce energy transfer to zero over time by distributing the energy generation densely amongst the most dense users of the energy. I don't think the industry is ready for such a step-change in thought yet, but someday electricity will be treated more like water than like it is today.

Re: Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022

#365

Post by Jemaclus » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 10:35 PM UTC

brianbreslin wrote: post #205

Jemaclus wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could consider getting a solar roof! I have no particular expertise here, but a guy down the street from me got one, and he loves it so far (~1.5 years into it). Here's an article about it with a few vendors, including Tesla, that might help: https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/solar/solar-shingles...

from what I understand the tesla solar shingles aren't hurricane code compliant in Florida yet. So the thing would make the house uninsurable.

Ah, fair enough! I'm in California so that's not a problem. Dang. Hope you can find something good, then!

Re: Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022

#366

Post by maerF0x0 » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 10:37 PM UTC

throwaquestion5 wrote: post #309

maerF0x0 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is nothing unethical about this. I dont consider strong arming someone due to your now advantageous position against something you previously agreed upon and reasonably similarly delivered (7 months instead of 6, we're not talking about multiple years later here). A similar ethical framework would allow someone in marriage say "I quit my job, can get alimony from you, better do as I say or I'm filing for divo…

OP wasn't planning a devious plan here. The 6 month contract seems standard from the company side. They shoot themselves on the foot and the loan just got voided. OP would be paying the company for nothing without a new loan > (7 months instead of 6, we're not talking about multiple years later here) Maybe this is a disagreement based on past experiences, but the most infuriating thing when working with home contract…

> Let's not skip the company trying to swindle OP to pay without a proper contract by scaring him. Some of us may be used to this kind of threats. Doesn't mean they are ethical at all. They should have been upfront with the problem from the beginning, not bullying people with scary letters.

If I understand correctly those only came after OP refused to pay their bill.

Re: Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022

#367

Post by monkeydust » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 10:41 PM UTC

reacharavindh wrote: post #343

monkeydust wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He doesn't but few on the street do. Could hack something over the summer that provides some charge on my driveway when I am net producing. Not sure if any legal/tax issues with the setup though. An interesting community project.

It might even be a greater option to have a community battery booth(a bank of LFP or the upcoming Sodium ion batteries). Everyone throws their excess energy into it, and it can be a charging station for e-bikes, EVs etc. Absolutely no clue about legal issues though.

Interesting, getting close to a virtual power plant I think. Ideally you want to use the grid network for transmission to the bank of batteries.

Re: Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022

#368

Post by shawndrost » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 10:48 PM UTC

AndrewGaspar wrote: post #168

Can somebody explain where the return on investment comes from in residential solar? It just strikes me that if there was easy money to be had on solar installations, we'd just get tons of utility scale solar installs (which would likely by more capital efficient) and my utility bill would over time converge on the expected total utility bill for a home with residential solar. Is it just because we're in that transit…

Residential solar reduces retail power costs @ $0.30/kWh, whereas grid-scale solar supplies wholesale power @ $0.02/kWh. (Representative figures from California.) NEM (net energy metering) amplifies this effect.

If you look at a system-cost ROI analysis, the difference between residential and grid-scale is that the latter requires more transmission lines and provides fewer jobs (which is a key part of the political economics), but residential solar comes out looking very bad.

Explicit subsidies -- which pay a part of residential solar capital costs -- are a much smaller force.

Re: Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022

#369

Post by konschubert » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 10:48 PM UTC

dpierce9 wrote: post #350

praxulus wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Net metering just doesn't make sense though. Everyone who wants to rely on the grid for power availability ought to pay for grid upkeep costs. Net metering would make sense if it came on top of a baseline "connectivity fee" that covered grid maintenance, but that's not the current policy, would likely be politically infeasible, and would hurt rooftop solar customers financially anyway. Subsidizing solar is a perfectl…

Net metering means utilities sell the power your system produces at full price to your neighbor. They pocket the avoided cost of producing and delivering that power (and during price spikes the cost of fuel can be higher than the value of producing power). Net metering does create stranded assets if everyone does it. But not everyone does. Further, the idea that the utility gains NO benefit from net metering is wrong…

Your solar panels tend to produce power at times when power is cheap - because there is so much solar power.

When you do net metering, the utility has to pay on top: They have to sell the power that you produce on the spot market, but the price they get for it is less than what they have to pay to you.

It's not a scalable approach.

Re: Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022

#370

Post by kbob » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 10:48 PM UTC

gnicholas wrote: post #296

monkeydust wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just be glad your not in the UK. I pay 35p / kWh down and get only 5p / kWh for excess I sell to grid through Smart Export Guarantee. Price down has doubled in two years and way up has hardly moved. I joked with my neighbour that we should wire up our homes and sell my excess to him at mid point and we would both be better off.

Low-effort version, if he has an EV: get a long charging cable and charge him up when you're generating excess.

Or just let him park at your place.