Earlier quoted context omitted.
Far from "civilization", but still surrounded by lawfulness so you don't have to deal with warlords taking your solar panels.
Don't hate the player, hate the game.
The game being?
Can solar costs keep shrinking?
491–500 of 632 posts
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#492> If we had stayed on the Adams curve, we would be consuming 2-5x more energy than we do today. For the US, that means that GDP per capita today would not be the current amount of $65k, but $100k-$200k. It is a catastrophe that we don’t have more energy: We should be much richer.
I'm sorry, what??? Correlation != causation. We have become more energy efficient, and it does not follow at all that cheaper energy will increase our GDP by 2-3x.
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#493Earlier quoted context omitted.
But there are many places where that would be two solid days of offroad driving, without seeing another person in the process.
Can you give me an example?I have explored a lot of remote places and never found anything nearly that remote
The California Sierras, Death Valley, the Mojave desert, and of course Baja (obv not in the lower 48) have remote trails that can take days to get to- not so much because they’re actually extremely far away but because the trails are slow going and difficult. There are trails where average speeds in a vehicle are slower than walking, but you can’t really hike them either - at least without pack animals- because there are no water sources.
Look at a map and see what is furthest from a highway, but technically accessible by some sort of old road or trail. Look at a mineral rights map and find the most remote gold rush era mining claims.
You won’t see people often in these places because your standard 4x4 lacks the fuel range to get there- gasoline engines have very poor range at low speeds. You need something capable but also fuel efficient- usually something with a small diesel engine, which are not very available in the US market. More remote places also tend to have a lot of cumulative water damage to trails so are very technical- requiring a lot of patience (e.g. stacking rocks for hours) and a lot of driving skill.
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#494Earlier quoted context omitted.
The further north you go, the larger the seasonal variation in sunlight. I've watched some video's of people living off grid in BC, they need a diesel generator for the winter months to get by.
This is also quite dependent on the microclimate: there's a number of places in the south of BC that get radically different levels of solar radiation. Kelowna for instance would be far better than North Vancouver for a solar setup. By and large most of BC wasn't economic enough to justify solar as a replacement for grid power, but I haven't checked those numbers in a while. We do have relatively cheap hydro power, s…
This was the guy I watched:
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#495Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup exactly. Why go through all that headache, which has existed with Nuclear since day 1, when we could just mass produce solar and plop it down on the infinite empty desert land out west.
1) There isn't infinite desert land that can be used. 2) You still need firm, dispatchable power. Batteries are a bridge, not the only solution.
1) yes there is
2) nuclear also needs dispatchable power, it doesn't work well if it needs to constantly ramp up and down. Batteries are vital to full nuclear for this exact reason.
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#496Earlier quoted context omitted.
The attack on net metering isn't unfortunate; what's unfortunate is that people thought net metering ever made any sense. It's free riding on services provided by the grid, forcing others (who don't have PV) to pay for cost of providing those services. As PV rolled out, the craziness of net metering became impossible to ignore. Of course, those feeding at this trough objected loudly, and some naively fell for those o…
It would be nice if this cost was actually all broken out; the grid operator should charge for connectivity, the various energy providers should charge for the energy itself. Net metering could still make sense; your residential solar installation might make enough to cover the gap.
This is exactly what happened in California recently with Net Metering 3.0 -- the utilities cut the value of the electrons you export back onto the grid, and they even broke that value out into a supply chunk and a transmission & distribution (which effectively cuts the total export value even more because they argued that the marginal electron is worth a tiny amount as far as the t&d line items go).
What's happening in California is new rooftop solar doesn't pencil out unless you pair it with batteries (ie you self-consume all your excess), and even then it gets iffy.
There's also the trend where operators charge fixed costs for connectivity. So even if you self-consume everything, you still pay $15-$50/mo just for the connection. That gets trickier because it punishes low-usage users like apartment dwellers and small households because that looks the same as a solar house that self-consumes most of their electricity.
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#497Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be nice if this cost was actually all broken out; the grid operator should charge for connectivity, the various energy providers should charge for the energy itself. Net metering could still make sense; your residential solar installation might make enough to cover the gap.
I'm sure it varies by locality, but if I look at my electric bill, I see charges for energy, transmission, and maintaining a connection to the grid. Transmission and generation are variable, connection is fixed. I doubt the $8.50/month is the "right" charge for maintaining a grid connection, but it's what MidAmerican Energy has gotten approved in Iowa. Presumably their charges for transmission and energy cover everyt…
It's not just maintaining a connection to the grid, it's maintaining the generating assets on the grid that you sometimes use.
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#498Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the utilities are moving very early with their flat rate charges but I don't think they're wrong in the long term that a flat rate will be required to fund the grid in the future. I'm thinking about the point where a large majority of customers have sufficient solar generation to cover their entire energy usage for the day on average, those people still need generation or storage of power during the night whe…
So as I mentioned in my previous comment, public utilities commissions across the country have all run their own independent studies of the value of bringing solar on the grid measured against its costs and generally found it to be a net positive rather than a negative. Those studies encompass things that you're talking about such time base rates, cost of mobilizing peaking and base load production, efficiencies from…
I'm not talking about now. I thought I made that clear enough but I'm talking about in the future with extremely high levels of solar self sufficient customers. All of those need power during the night so absent huge grid storage you'll need nuclear or hydro to provide reliable night time power all of which costs money.
I'm all for massive solar investments it's a great path forward but there are issues we'll have to address.
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#499Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're looking for some inexpensive land that can be fairly remote you might do worse than Cochise county AZ. The county has an opt out permit program as long as you have at least 4 rural acres. You can build whatever you want, no permits, no inspections. There are some restrictions. No bank will give you a mortgage, can't sell or rent it out within 2 years. You can live in your RV while you build, for 2 years I t…
> I did the full time RV bit in a class A. Hated it. What were you a fan of instead?
Aegis mentions a "small schoolie", so maybe https://www.skoolielivin.com/skoolie-vs-rv/
Re: Can solar costs keep shrinking?
#500Solar + LFP batteries, Energy Combo for the future
LFP might lose out to sodium batteries, long-term. Sodium is dirt cheap - salt mines make lithium-salt extraction look like a joke, and the middle east has an abundance of desalination plants that end up dumping their ultra-concentrated brine back into the water because they have way more than they can do anything with.