411–420 of 448 posts
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$100 a month in the summer in Texas? You living in a shoe box in the panhandle or what? I spend $700 a month in August. Tell us your secret for real.
I live in TX and have never spent anywhere near $700/m on electric. Either you keep your AC at 65 or something is very wrong.
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> And that is why it is a huge problem for the power companies It is a problem, but not necessarily in the way you may be thinking. Peak residential power usage is in the evening when solar isn't available. Power companies therefore end up spinning down coal and natural gas during peak solar, then just spinning them back up again as the sun begins to set. [1] So you haven't replaced the coal and natural gas plants, y…
Can validate. The problem with electricity is that there is no large scale storage like there is for other forms of energy like NG and Crude. Until someone comes along and figures out how to store electricity, this will continue to cause grief to power companies. Power plants are really just options, if the price per kWh is at a certain point then it makes sense to spin up or take down a plant and generate power. Add…
Demand side response is already used in industry to regulate electricity demand and smooth peaks. Smart meter penetration will allow utilities to do this more and more in the residential sector too.
Supergrids are also starting to emerge and indeed, some large grid companies are pushing hard for international interconnects. (China wants a supergrid). Countries are building out more and more HVDC interconnects, both across borders and within countries. Once you have a network of utility scale renewable sources across multiple countries, meeting peak demand becomes more a matter of coordination between grids. Europe for example, is looking like a very interesting area for this right now with planned interconnects between North Africa and Southern Europe.
Since we're all citing employment, I work for a renewable energy company :)
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Solution: swimming pool on the roof. http://www.fastcodesign.com/1672202/you-deserve-a-house-with...
Seriously though has anyone crunched the numbers on rainwater storage for microgeneration in a domestic setting. Could I efficiently use excess solar to pump water in to a house roof storage area and generate electric from that?
The energy in one gallon of gasoline is equivalent to the potential energy stored in 13 tons of water one kilometer up
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Solution: swimming pool on the roof. http://www.fastcodesign.com/1672202/you-deserve-a-house-with...
The outflow from an Auckland homes storm water is not insignificant - an average roof would have something around 5 cubic metres of water come off it several times per year.
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> instant equity on our house. Depends. Solar doesnt necessarily add value. Depends on the appraisal. I only know because I tried to buy a home with solar panels. The homeowner had raised the price of the home to include his investment in the panels but the appraiser wouldnt include the panels in the appraisal.
Appraisals are not strictly tied to price of homes. Only the value for the loan. That's not to say you're not going to associate the two together (if you're buying a house with a loan), but the $30k one way or the other isn't a huge percentage of a 30 year loan.
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It'd take over 1 BILLION Powerwalls to store half the daily usage in the US (using old usage numbers off Wikipedia). I wonder if there's enough raw materials to make that realistic. And how to you manage recycling, repair, replacement, end-of-life concerns for all those batteries on that scale? Not asking a sarcastic hypothetical. Genuinely curious. It's hard to wrap my head around numbers that big. For reference I u…
Residential is only about 1/3 of consumption. I guess at least industrial won't be using Powerwalls to store backup power. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/topic/5?agg=0... It might not be possible to make all those batteries using lithium, but that doesn't really matter for stationary batteries.
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Really, I do not understand your reasoning since the S&P 500 has an annualized return of >10% since 1970. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%26P_500_Index#Annual_returns
Just because the S&P has seen such returns over the last 40 years, doesn't mean you'll see those returns over the next 40 years. The US economy is aging out, has stagnant wages, etc.
The aggressiveness of the price drops on solar is pretty amazing. I just lost one of the inverters on my grid-tie system after it had run trouble free for 13 years. So we're looking at the first "major" repair to the system I installed in 2003. And in 2003 my 5.2kW of panels on my roof cost $38,000 before subsidies and $19,000 after. 28 panels, two 2.5kW inverters, net about 4.2kW of generation. I priced out replacin…
Would you be able to share what company quoted you for $7k? I'm going to be getting quotes on a solar installation, and your quoted price seems rather good. Do you get to reuse parts of your old installation?
I would not expect a company to quote a new install for that price since they will have to add the mounting system and pay their installers for a day's labor getting everything set up.