Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022

mattbruenig.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 510 posts

Re: Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022

#391

Post by lanstin »

axus wrote: post #327
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…

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. I do agree there should be a connection fee, like an Internet connection, that covers fixed costs. Watts cost more than bytes, so a usage fee makes sense too.

They are a regulated monopoly as they have been granted rights by the public to use rights of way. So what hey can and cannot do is determined by politics not just what they think of.

Re: Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022

#392

Post by [deleted] »

konschubert wrote: post #369
dpierce9 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022

#393

Post by Armisael16 »

fleddr wrote: post #385
Armisael16 wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average New Englander uses between 567 kWh/month and 711 kWh/month (different values for different states - areas farther south generally use more). The answer is probably that you live 5-10 degrees north of him and don’t use as much air conditioning.

I don't use any AC at all, true. But would you say that explains triple the usage? New England isn't exactly in the desert.

Electric heating and cooling (instead of gas, which while still energy doesn’t go in the same bucket) and probably a larger house.

His usage is high by the standards of the region, so it probably is also something like an electric car or crypto mining.

(For what it’s worth, a swamp is far harder to cool than a desert - five of the top six states in the US by energy usage are on the Gulf coast. The average Floridian household uses ~13700 kWh/year whereas New Mexico is ~8000 kWh/year. On the other hand, the household average in Canada is higher than in the US, so…)

Re: Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022

#394

Post by UncleEntity »

hinkley wrote: post #277
birken wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Additionally, the worst strains on the grid are really measured by the peak loads, so if you change billing a way that makes the peak energy less expensive, and therefore disincentivize people to (a) reduce usage at peak times or (b) install solar panels/batteries to mitigate their peak usage, then it actually might make the grid more unreliable. Water is different in that we really only have usage concerns about wat…

I’m told that Industry gets charged not by how much current they draw but by how much it distorts the grid power waveforms. In fact there are experimental designs out there for power correction facilities that delay the waveforms by for instance 90% of a wavelength (so everything lines up again) and convert the delta to DC to store in batteries. The battery power can be used for their own purposes or to reinject in l…

I was watching this one video where they were talking about how they dropped their electric bill by changing how whatever machine they were demonstrating started up. Instead of off to full on they set it to ramp up slow enough to not push them into the higher peak pricing bracket. Electricity usage was the same overall but the bill was less.

Re: Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022

#395

Post by foogazi »

killjoywashere wrote: post #275
moffkalast wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are the leases so problematic? If you don't have the funds nor credit score to finance it, why not just rent out the roof space so to speak? Any return you get from it is better than nothing.

We got a house in San Diego near the bottom of the last market (2012) and I was a medical resident at the time with two school age children. The previous owner had installed electric everything (even had to get a larger trunk line run and breaker panel). So our electric bill was a little nuts, randomly hitting tier 3 pricing and landing $350+ electric bills. For a household with negligible marginal income, that was u…

> Even the lease is cheaper than paying PG&E

SDG&E provides electricity in San Diego

Re: Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022

#396

Post by UncleEntity »

axus wrote: post #327
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…

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. I do agree there should be a connection fee, like an Internet connection, that covers fixed costs. Watts cost more than bytes, so a usage fee makes sense too.

> Why do power companies even buy back solar power in the first place?

Increasing capacity is really expensive.

It’s cheaper for them to do stuff like buy every customer a more efficient refrigerator or insulate their attic than build a new power plant so they go for schemes like that.

Re: Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022

#397

Post by burnished »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #373
dpierce9 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Net metering doesn't make sense for a simple reason: - when you use power, the grid is forced to produce it for you at that specific moment. - on the other hand, solar panels produce energy at random times, regardless of whether it's needed or not. Net metering forces symmetric pricing into a fundamentally asymmetric situation, which is not scalable. You could think of similar asymmetries in other contexts where the…

Your analogy introduces factors that aren't present in the system, I dont think you need to use one here. Solar panels arent exactly random for one, pizzas arent fungible for two, and the grid is already composed of many producers and consumers for three.

Re: Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022

#398

Post by UncleEntity »

opo wrote: post #236
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…

Consumer rooftop solar is the most expensive way ever thought of to provide electrical power. Money is fungible. A dollar tied up in building a one-off consumer solar installation is exactly a dollar unavailable for building out utility grade solar which can be done at a fraction of the cost. With net metering, wealthier home owners are essentially paid the retail rate for the electricity they sell to the grid which…

> Money is fungible. A dollar tied up in building a one-off consumer solar installation is exactly a dollar unavailable for building out utility grade solar which can be done at a fraction of the cost.

This makes the false assumption that those “fungible” dollars are somehow earmarked for solar and the homeowners wouldn’t just spend them on some other, non-solar, goods.

Re: Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022

#399

Post by gofreddygo »

sedatk wrote: post #167

One side benefit of solar for me was reducing cooling requirements of the top floor, which I anticipated but didn't expect it to be this significant. Expectedly but interestingly, installing solar panels didn't make any difference, but starting energy production did. Physics is fascinating.

Aha! Did not think about this side effect at all. Interesting !

Re: Solar panels reduced my electric bill in 2022

#400

Post by micromacrofoot »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #32
micromacrofoot wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't produce much in the winter anyway, you can brush it off the panels with an extendable broom but it will naturally melt and slide off. Unless you have snow cover all winter you'd likely spend more on the extendable broom than you'd produce from the panels.

My brother-in-law's panels produce just as much electricity at noon in the winter time as they do in the summer time. Winter sun in the Canadian prairies is quite intense, and the panels are more efficient at -20C than they are at +20C.

sure but the sun is going down at 3pm, canada gets 1.5 hours of peak sunlight at best in the winter… on a lot of houses the cost of removing the snow is more than what’s gained during the short daily window of direct sunlight… eventually the sun solves the problem for free :)
Post reply on HN