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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

For those kinds of prices, it almost makes sense to lay your own power cable between a group of 5-10 neighbours to exchange power whenever one person has excess solar generation and another needs power for their water heater.

Only when the whole group needs power take from the grid.

Technically, this would simply involve a ~200 amp cable down the street and one electricity meter for the group. No smartness is needed at all - electricity will always flow naturally in whatever direction saves the group the most money.

Bureaucratically, moving power from one house to another requires so much paperwork the incumbent provider will never let you do it.

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Sure, just multi-hundred amp capable infrastructure run in the middle of the street, installed to withstand weather and seismic events, with someone on call to fix it when it fails, liable for injury or other harm...

PG&E might be shite, but the hand-wavy dismissal of modern electric infrastructure is overlooking something that is a real benefit to society, and that infrastructure has real costs to keep it running.

> Sure, just multi-hundred amp capable infrastructure run in the middle of the street, installed to withstand weather and seismic events, with someone on call to fix it when it fails, liable for injury or other harm...

You can pay people to install cables, and you can get insurance. We're talking about a lot of money to save and pay for it.

> PG&E might be shite, but the hand-wavy dismissal of modern electric infrastructure is overlooking something that is a real benefit to society, and that infrastructure has real costs to keep it running.

The real point here is that if you moved the meter slightly there could be a huge change in price, and that seems weird!

There's quite a lot of buried conduit across america. A lot of high end neighborhoods have it to avoid having telephone poles up and down the street and in their nice manicured lawns. LA has an absolutely massive cable that runs from some power plant right to downtown that's over 50 years old, soaked in a paper and mineral oil bath about 20 feet underground.

For smaller conduit (like, 200 amp) you just need a standard conduit, with the cable running through it, and a couple inches of slack on either end. How do you think they run power to detached garages, sheds, ADUs etc in people's backyards?

I can totally see rich neighborhoods putting in additional solar, a private battery + diesel backup and disconnecting from the grid, just like they probably already have their own well and sometimes even septic. If the payback is anywhere near 10 years that is a no-brainer.

very good story about repairs of above mentioned LA cable https://www.jwz.org/blog/2002/11/engineering-pornography/

damn, I actually wanted to read about that cable

edit: I just checked archive.is and it's...there? under what circumstances do I get redirected to that nsfw meme?

i guess JWZ doesn't like things linked from HN

jwz is one of the original developers of Netscape Navigator, an old man by these forums standards. That is the modern equivalent of "Get off my Lawn"

Here’s a similar story from 1998 in Auckland, New Zealand where everything failed for 5 weeks: https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/misc/mercury.txt

I'm a bit skeptical, on average people generally use similar appliances at similar time, ain't noboody using that water heater in middle of the day where they are at their job.

There are certainly some savings to be had but I don't see it being that much unless some kind of battery is involved.

Maybe the future model is a small substation with battery for the whole community using some cheap-at-scale battery tech to store local community's solar and wind.

Then some net-billing system where you pay market price of electricity only if you use more than you store, with any profit from that going towards maintenance

Not everyone works 9-5, M to F.

Except solar generation and load are extremely correlated between houses, especially in the same neighborhood.

For your specific example, the straightforward thing would be to rejigger your water heater to use a variable amount of power, rather than the on-off of 5.5kW or nothing.

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