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Comment by kylehotchkiss | Hacker News Reader

The amount of home generators is going to quickly increase, which will do wonders for air quality when the power lines are cut.

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Purchased by who, though? The cost of living is already so high that only the wealthy will be buying them.

You can buy a decent 'emergency' generator (aka high air pollution and noise) for ~ $500 sufficient to run most homes. Compared to cost of living in California, that is dirt cheap (a week or less of living expenses).

One problem with these emergency portable generators of course, is they lack safety components to stop them from catching fire. So we might end up with notable fires caused by generators used because PG&E shut off power to 'stop fires'. It shifts the liability to the consumer though, so PG&E is off the hook.

Few people really believed PG&E was going to do this, so a lot of people haven't purchased equipment yet. We'll see how it shapes up long term.

As people turn to home power generation, PG&E will lose revenue. So, PG&E will suffer in the longer term as they lose customers. Not very good business planning.

Keeping a gas or diesel generator fueled and running for days at a time is not super cheap. Plus if your whole city's power is cut and everybody else is running their generators, there's a risk of fuel price increases or even fuel shortages.

Solar & batteries are a solution but people won't adopt as a solution with this sort of timeline and current solar/battery prices. There'd need to be a slow but certain rise in PG&E prices and a some sort of tax rebate to really get people to convert over.

Reliability is what sells me on electric supply. Take that away, I will find something more reliable, and I will make the investment in local, personal generation if there isn't a source.

Local, personal generation is usually incredibly inefficient due to loading factors (you need to buy a generator that can handle most of your peak load, but they are only efficient at roughly half that - so your idle load is a huge waste, and when near peak you will be horribly inefficient).

Maintenance is also a huge pain - I've got an off grid cabin, and I can assure you, you will quickly tire of dealing with it if you are using it as your day to day power source.

Backup (propane or natural gas) generators that auto kick in aren't a bad option, but are much more expensive (about an order of magnitude higher).

And if that's still too much, you can walk away for a $350 one at harbor freight (whether it starts again the second time you need it to run is certainly questionable)

Or Tesla is going to sell heaps of Powerwalls and solar panels

Having looked at all of these options recently, I can say very few people would chose Powerwalls and solar over a standby generator. A whole house generator capable of running everything in your home, including HVAC, for many days on end will run ~$10-14k installed. A single Powerwall alone costs about that much and can't distribute nearly as much power as the generator.

How much fuel does the generator consume? What is the switch-over time?

Would it be useful for service interruptions or only full blackouts?

My uncle lives in a place that loses power often. His system is propane. When the power goes out you might notice the lights flicker. I don't know how much fuel it consumes.

The switch over time is around 30 seconds. When your power is restored from the grid, it switched back seamlessly.

Fuel is a great question. I have never looked at the consumption. Mine runs off the natural gas line, so I have no tank to fill. With this setup I feel I am in good shape for short and extended outages.

> Mine runs off the natural gas line

This has always felt risky to me. Sure, your setup will work for a garden-variety power outage, but not when it really matters like an earthquake or other natural disaster.

What state are you in?

My impression of wealthy Californians is that they'd rather not have a noisy stinky polluting generator running for days requiring fuel deliveries, and if there's a "green" option that requires zero fuel, makes no noise or pollution, and is within their means, they'll prefer it.

Not to mention generators are a bit of a maintenance and operational nuisance in my experience, at least the diesel piston motor kind I've used in the past as power backup in datacenters. Most households would rather not have yet another piston engine to keep in good working order.

The majority of solar panel systems that allow feeding excessive energy back into the grid won't work in a blackout to allow line workers to completely isolate a section for line maintenance, in addition to phase synchronization issues on some of the cheaper systems too. As 99% of home IC generators are designed to function only when whatever they are powering is completely disconnected from the grid they don't have this issue.

Isn't that the whole point of having the Powerwall in the system?

You're describing conventional battery-less residential grid-tied solar installations.

I specifically described Tesla Powerwall + solar.

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