431–440 of 510 posts
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You would need batteries which are quite expensive at this time.
There are no sensible storage methods that would allow you to store enough energy from summer to make any reasonable contribution towards winter. Batteries a great for powering your house for a few days. Not really beyond that. Unless you buy a ridiculous amount of batteries.
I am surprised at these power bills, at least in my area the implied "savings" are 2-3 times what my bill is on any given month. Huge house maybe?
The electricity prices listed in the article are quite high, the US average is about half of that.
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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.
I might not have been clear enough. I am saying that it is incredibly wasteful for the government to directly subsidize consumer solar when installed and then later forcing less wealthy consumers to subsidize their wealthier neighbors. If the government wants to encourage the development of solar power, those subsidies should have gone to encouraging grid based solar which costs a small fraction of the cost of one off consumer solar panel installations. A dollar tied up in building a one-off consumer solar installation is exactly a dollar unavailable for building out utility grade solar.
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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…
Example from Boulder: big houses near open space at the "end of the line" as far as the dendritic distribution grid is concerned install solar. On a cold sunny day those houses produce more than they need and more than the network leading to them was sized to deliver. Who pays to upgrade the transformers and switchgear upgrades? Should it be subsidized by all ratepayers?
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I think the demand peak is in the evening. Whether that overlaps with daylight depends on the season. I suppose in areas where people use a lot of AC, peak demand might be earlier in the day, but I haven't seen any figures showing that. I have seen the evening peak.
It really depends on what you mean by peak demand. From the grid’s perspective a home with rooftop solar has zero demand during peak solar production. However, that’s ignoring the home actually uses electricity during that period it’s demand simply isn’t something the utility can make money from. Similarly, transmission losses increase as temperatures rise which requires more production to offset those losses. From t…
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>The car you drove to the restaurant in - the US Federal government subsidized your gas (ever wonder why US gas is cheaper than Canada/EU?) US gas is cheaper than elsewhere in the developed world because a) the US is self-sufficient in terms of supply and, more importantly, b) US fuel taxes are less. If you actually read the EESI paper you cited, you see that the "subsidies", whether direct or indirect, are actually…
Oh fun! I love when people Dunning-Kruger themselves on accounting (I literally just sat up straight in my chair!) Let's go through your argument (would you believe I did both read and understand the document I linked!?), but before we do that, let's look at some more traditional subsidies that O&G gets in America: [0] The GAO has reported extensively that taxpayers have not received a fair rate of return due to outd…
I have no problem with raising lease rates for Federal land to market rates.
>>US gas is cheaper than elsewhere in the developed world because a) the US is self-sufficient in terms of supply
>Oh, I was unaware that the cheap gas phenomenon started in 2008 when we started approaching energy independence. Thanks Obama, I guess.
Oh, come now. It is a fact that, both historically and today, part (not all, but part) of the reason why US gas prices are lower than in the rest of the developed world is because the US is relatively self-sufficient. (And before you bring up Canada, Canada significantly lacks domestic refining capability, as well as ability to deliver its own gas to the eastern half of the country.)
2008 to now isn't the first time the US reached energy independence; the US had this status into the 1960s, and if it really needed to it could have always reached this, especially when including Canadian supply. The Gulf War was fought to maintain oil supply to Europe, not to the US.
>>b) US fuel taxes are less.
>You're getting dangerously close to agreeing with me on the subsidy point, but I know we won't agree on the politics of pricing externalities, so I'll just move on.
You and I both know that when people here and on Reddit claim that "the US subsidizes gas and that's why it's so cheap", 99% of the time it's meant to convey the claim "US gas companies get zillions in handouts from the government" (in the sort of bags with dollar signs that Mayor Quimby receives his bribes in), as opposed to "gas is taxed less in the US than elsewhere" (much less "US gas isn't appropriately pricing in externalities"), and 99% of the time that's the message that's taken away by the reader.
We indeed would not agree on the politics of pricing externalities (more precisely, whether such counts as "subsidies"). Your statement, however, implies that other countries' gax taxes are higher because they are more appropriately pricing said externalities. We both know that Canada or Belgium or Portugal's gax taxes are not higher than in the US because their governments have duly, nobly, and wisely calculated the impact of climate change and have set the tax rates accordingly. (Maybe Norway.) Said taxes are higher because their governments believe they are acceptable to the public, and are spent accordingly as part of general funds as opposed to being all (or even part) sent to a "global warming lockbox", or somesuch.
>> the paper does not claim that tax revenue would rise more than about $40 billion over about a decade. $4 billion a year is a pittance for a federal government that collected $4.9 trillion in 2022.
>It's an amazing logical fallacy to say "one number is smaller than another unrelated number, so the smaller number is unimportant," but even ignoring that, its still a subsidy and that's my entire point.
First, both the degree and kind matter. Unless you rush to correct everyone who says that public schools/toll-less highways/police services are "free" with "Ackshually, they aren't free", you also agree.
Second, EIA says (https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=23&t=10>) that in 2021 135 billion gallons of gas were consumed in the US. We'll simplisticly say that every cent of of the $4 billion a year in "subsidies", which the EESI is presumably citing as a worst-case figure, can be assigned to gas. So each gallon is being "subsidized" by about $0.34. Not nothing (and, again, this is a worst-case figure), but relatively small versus the massive swing we saw in 2022 in the price per gallon (https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/29/energy/oil-gas-prices-2022/in...>). More importantly, said amount is absolutely not the explanation for the difference in price per gallon/liter between the US and other developed countries, either.
Assuming you are grid-tied, the reduction of electric bills is predicated on net metering, where the utility company gives you (ideally) 1-for-1 credit for the electricity you produce. In California, this was called NEM 1.0 and NEM 2.0. Every few years the California utilities lobby the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) to chip away at the NEM program. This year the PUC voted unanimously to cut net energy metering an…
Net metering just doesn't make sense though. Everyone who wants to rely on the grid for power availability ought to pay for grid upkeep costs. Net metering would make sense if it came on top of a baseline "connectivity fee" that covered grid maintenance, but that's not the current policy, would likely be politically infeasible, and would hurt rooftop solar customers financially anyway. Subsidizing solar is a perfectl…
I wonder what causes this high electricity use. Not because it's any of my business, it's just genuine curiosity. He never reveals actual use, only savings. Still, at 0.25$ per kwh charged and an average monthly saving of 210$, we can work out that 860 kwh/month was saved, which amounts to 10,320 kwh per year. Actual use may be (far) higher, but we don't know. Just these savings alone is triple my total electricity c…
Relating to our solar panel install (refer another comment of mine in this thread) we went through with one of those plug in power meters and identified about spot and average power draw for about 80 different devices, spreadsheeted those data up to try to get a feel for where our power was being consumed -- as often times we would hit 40-50kWh/ day consumption.
Predictably (in retrospect) the biggest culprit by far was the hot water system. While we couldn't conveniently plug a meter in-line, it was fortunately wired up on its own phase (we're on 3-phase), and with the solar system install came a smart meter, which then provided some hour-by-hour insights.
A timer in the circuit-breaker box for the HWS, along with an element change (replacing the 2k4 with a 1k8 element) massively reduced consumption there -- I expect very many people have inefficient, and/or poorly configured, and/or poorly serviced electric hot water systems that are chewing through vast quantities of power.
TFA seems pretty savvy, so you'd hope this kind of low-hanging fruit isn't their problem, but OTOH you're right that those figures are very high, and you'd expect someone looking in this much detail at their power profile would be off-peaking all the high-draw systems they could.
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> 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…
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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.