91–100 of 121 posts
> "lots of self-generated power will ultimately be wasted." This is sunlight falling on a roof. If you convert it into electricity but then don't use that electricity, is it really a waste? It's like saying that the overflow from my water tank that collects rain water off the roof is 'wasting' water. It could be argued that it's a waste in the sense that the generated electricity could have gone to someone else if th…
One Jack Rickard, RIP, who was quite an opinionated jerk imho, coined the concept of "selfish solar." The idea was that solar was on its way to becoming so cheap that one should just install enough panels and batteries such that you basically never use the grid, it's just a backup for uncommon events. Basically grid use drops to that 1 or 10% of the time the sun doesn't shine for days. I think we are there on the pan…
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Six months for "permanent industrial electric service" sounds pretty reasonable, actually.
Oh, yes, I misread. 6-18 weeks still is a high enough barrier to drive a lot of people away.
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You are reading that very narrowly. The paragraph is simply pointing out that solar power is cheaper when built out in a centralised way because of: * economies of scale for construction and maintenance * higher utilisation. They don't spell it out exactly, but it is pretty clear fro m the context that, "lots of self-generated power will ultimately be wasted", is eluding to a wider geographic area needing more panels…
Fair enough. I think this is true of a lot of things that are 'in our house' (or on our property). A fatuous hypothetical example might be a large central refrigerator shared between multiple properties. The apartment building I live in has large central boilers for the hot water, to save space in the apartments. This benefitted the property developer, and is probably more energy efficient (although, just like our so…
I've lived in buildings with this, and others (houses) without, and I much prefer the former. There's nothing I need to maintain, and the 'big' version seems to be more reliable than the single-house-sized heating equipment. The one time I remember the hot water being repaired, the janitor stuck up a note explaining that due to some sort of redundancy we'd still have hot water, but it would be less hot than it was supposed to be.
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The hubris in this article is unreal: it's posing that privately owned utilities are a good thing and that bypassing them is some crime that's done by ratepayers. I hope that business model dies in a fire. Instead the entire paradigm of centralized generation may need to be called into question and we should instead be focusing on a hybrid centralized baseline + local generation and storage. Places like China do fine…
> Instead the entire paradigm of centralized generation may need to be called into question and we should instead be focusing on a hybrid centralized baseline + local generation and storage I don't think that moving the generation around is really an "instead", because the problem at hand is that distribution is expensive and someone has to pay for it if you want a grid. And most of that cost is the local stuff. So h…
Wind and solar reduce fuel use, but they make for very little reduction in required infrastructure. Thus the value to the utility company is approximately the value of the fuel that's offset minus the costs of handling the situation.
Combine these and you see that the true value of wind and solar is pretty low other than from an environmental standpoint of reducing carbon emissions. (Now, if you have a use case of something that's power intensive but can freely be turned on and off then there could be some appreciable value.)
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The other grid operators have to lower their production during the day. That itself can be expensive, but more importantly they run their same equipment to power fewer hours of the day; when solar is not available, which is expensive since they have significant fixed costs. Batteries are not a grid scale solution any time soon, but maybe one day.
I guess you could say "batteries are not a grid scale solution" as long as you ignore ERCOT and CAISO...
What we see at grid scale are batteries being used for quick response power while other generators are being spun up. The thing is the grid very much doesn't like it when demand exceeds supply. Systems shut down to protect themselves and you either dump loads very quickly or suffer a cascade failure (see the 1965 blackout--and note that that only stopped growing when the operators were able to dump enough load.)
Since this is in disaster territory the utilities obviously try to avoid it and ensure there's always enough to cope with any surges--which means they must have more stuff spinning than they actually need. Enter facilities like the big batteries: keeping them hot costs almost nothing and they have a very fast response when called upon. This buys the utilities time in which to spin up other generators and thus allows them to operate with less waste.
> "lots of self-generated power will ultimately be wasted." This is sunlight falling on a roof. If you convert it into electricity but then don't use that electricity, is it really a waste? It's like saying that the overflow from my water tank that collects rain water off the roof is 'wasting' water. It could be argued that it's a waste in the sense that the generated electricity could have gone to someone else if th…
If wed had invested to in socialism,we would build out batteries.
What a selfish techno dystopia
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> they will either charge a battery or the current house loads, but never backfeed into the grid. I’m not sure I understand how this works unless you split off loads into a subpanel that is fed by a UPS which is fed by solar panels, and also isolated from your utility connected electrical service. As far as I understand it, you can’t have power generated by solar panels feeding loads in your grid-connected panel with…
> As far as I understand it, you can’t have power generated by solar panels feeding loads in your grid-connected panel without backfeeding the grid, same deal as a generator backfeeding a grid-connected panel. You have to kill the MCB or service disconnect to prevent backfeeding. An inverter can limit its output, right? So measure current at a few different points in the system, do some math, and use that to set the…
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> they will either charge a battery or the current house loads, but never backfeed into the grid. I’m not sure I understand how this works unless you split off loads into a subpanel that is fed by a UPS which is fed by solar panels, and also isolated from your utility connected electrical service. As far as I understand it, you can’t have power generated by solar panels feeding loads in your grid-connected panel with…
Zero export inverters are grid-tied but monitor the meter/CTs for load changes in order to curtail solar production/shift it to battery charging. I think they can technically backfeed a little bit if load is suddenly dumped depending on the inverter response time. Some have a secondary hard disconnect for additional protection. https://knowledge-center.solaredge.com/sites/kc/files/feed-i...