Nice. The economics of renewables are really hard to beat. I hope we speed up the construction speed and at the same time electrify more sectors.
https://www.seia.org/solar-industry-research-data This article seems to suggest that the amount of installed solar has doubled in the last four years and that the pace is accelerating. Also it states that the solar market expanded by 40% last year.
Not disagreeing with your statement, just pointing out that there's many headwinds to a greener energy future.
And I can't imagine this being very popular with homeowners or the politicians that represent them, regardless of their political color. So, there might be some backlash against this as well at some point.
Tangentially, at scale, this is referred to as a utility death spiral.
https://eepower.com/news/71-of-u-s-utilities-see-the-utility...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-spain-politics-electricit...
That said, batteries help.
Since in most areas, utilities are monopolies that are not subject to competition, they should not be allowed to deny cost-saving tech advances just because it lowers overall system cost and their overall percentage of revenue and profit goes down.
Balancing a grid that relies on a few production plants is already a non-trivial endeavour. Changing the network is usually a slow process. Adding a new power line to fix some topologic issues can take years to plan and millions to build. Having a robust grid means grid operators have to know details of the network, and be able to know how to reroute power when a line becomes too close to its limits or (worse) when a circuit-breaker opens. Studying the current network takes time.
That's why adapting to frequent changes isn't realistic, purely from the carrier's perspective, without even looking into power production aspects.
Edit
So typical here: Your comment is being downvoted. It still stands an important point to consider.
with the right pricing incentives, rooftop solar ought to decrease the amount of transmission capacity required rather than increasing it, by generating the required power closer to the point of use
The point is that unless a residence can independently provide for their own electricity every hour of the day, then the generation and distribution will be sized for full load.
a residence that can provide some of its own power during peak hours does not need distribution, transmission, or (utility-scale) generation sized for full load; a neighborhood that can provide some of its own power during peak hours does not need transmission or (utility-scale) generation sized for full load, just distribution. this is a much less onerous requirement than the one you erroneously believe to be necessary
it's true that there's probably a load right at the rated load which will gradually cook the transformer over the course of 10 years or so, but that's a pretty narrow window
that's the kind of capacity that needs to be expanded
This may change in the future, but until some politician cares enough and passes the cost on to the taxpayer, there's going to be friction for these changes.
This sounds like a pretty good reason for utilities to be a public affair.
Going with Longi bifacial panels - does the US restrict or add huge duties on Chinese panels?
There was a recent experiment[0] where a company is going to start putting panels directly on the ground without any mounting hardware.
solarserver's photovoltaik preisindex makes it seem like that's about 10 percent pv modules and the rest is either retail markup (or tariffs) or balance of system; is that true?
Time of use billing. The battery is generating ROI if it can arbitrage energy over the day.
Net metering + solar. If net metering is not available, or sufficiently discounted, and your energy usage is not high enough during the day to use all your solar power, then batteries generate ROI.
Grid stability. A battery effectively is insurance against outages of a few hours. With sufficient solar and rationing, that may extend to week long outages (think natural disasters).
Do you have a source for that? It sounds kinda silly. The maintenance + OH&S aspects of solar panels are nontrivial and it doesn't make sense to mandate them on residential homes.
I've always assumed that once the economics make sense it'll be easier to build a massive solar farm and let people use the grid as usual. Much less risk of people falling off roofs,heavy objects falling off roofs, wiring being misconnected, weird maintenance problems, managing the ebb and flow of energy, etc. I don't want to have to look after my own panels.
Technically, there's also distribution losses (just because we can do HVDC, 5% losses per 1000km, doesn't mean we want to spend the money for it); but I think it's mainly to avoid politicians decrying prime farmland being used for a thing they don't think looks as pretty as sheep grazing on grassy rolling hills.
But it depends on the country. Some countries have a whole lot of "low use" fields, like natural or industrial deserts. Others don't.
Also, the interconnection queues for attaching your project to the grid are getting astronomically long now, and this is one of the biggest impediments to new renewable generation. One of the most valuable assets of a coal generation sites is its connection to the grid; all the rest of facility might have negative value, but the value of the connection can offset all that.
Utility scale solar is great, until you consider how to connect it up to load.
Are you working in an area with a low consumer density?
> Also, the interconnection queues for attaching your project to the grid are getting astronomically long now, and this is one of the biggest impediments to new renewable generation.
Yeah, that's unsurprising. Power Grids are not something that adapts fast to topological change.
With behind-the-meter solar, this peak is capped, and if the local solar is allowed to power the rest of the distribution nod with net metering, then that means less transmission too.
T&D must be sized for the peak, so lots of residential solar means a lower peak and lower T&D costs.
Of course, this goes agains the utility narrative, because they can't admit that or else their regulators might have to allow such residential net metering. Instead, utilities try to frame the argument that solar customers are taking away from their neighbors or somehow not paying their fair share.
But when evaluated as a whole system, using massive distributed solar along with utility scale is far cheaper than building it all utility scale due to the T&D savings.
I see many advantages, among them:
- You don't have to find new land; roofs are ideal for solar.
- No need for a huge project, financing, bureaucracy. Done in weeks.
- Costs are low and spread over tons of landowners instead of requiring fundraising and negotiations
- You can have literally thousands of workers busy creating solar power at the same time.
- You get geographic spread and will be less affected by clouds over your central solar plant.
- No single point of failure
- Less need for large and expensive long-distance powerlines
Rooftop solar puts the power to solve a problem in the hands of the people experiencing the problem and eliminates the need for a megaproject. This has turned out to be really powerful, rooftop solar has grown extremely quickly.
If the panels are in a field somewhere, an energy company gets the money.
If the panels are on my roof, I get the money.
By all means, it should be much cheaper to make large solar farm on some suitable place and buy the electricity from there. The fact that it isn't can't be explained by technical factors.
this is especially important in backwards countries like the usa with their so-called license raj preventing modernization
since most household energy is used for low-grade heating and cooling (refrigerator, air conditioner, oven, clothes dryer) i think thermal energy storage is likely to be a crucial enabling factor; mit's solar house used phase-change materials, but i suspect thermochemical energy storage is a better option
(why thermal energy storage instead of batteries? in the limit it's about three orders of magnitude higher capacity for a given price)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/859266/number-of-coal-po...
They generate something like 25% of greenhouse gases. When should be expect these to be replaced, and get the 25% drop in emissions?
Replacing over a billion ICE cars seems with EV’s is going to be so much more work, for example.
An immediate 25% drop in emissions might even buy us a few more years before we need to get to net zero emissions.
Instead we could replace ICE cars with no cars and get much more bang for our buck. A few changes to how we build so that you can walk/bike within 15 minutes for many daily needs would reduce energy consumption, save families money, still allow for a car, and everyone would be much happier and healthier.
Cars for all transit is a bad solution regardless of ICE or EV.
If we can’t replace a few thousand coal plants, we are unlikely to…
People wouldn’t even notice the difference if we replaced coal power plants.
For better or worse they’ll be forced out of their habits against their wishes because the economic physics just doesn’t work. Unless of course they are ready and willing to go to war and to exterminate populations for resources.
Ideally we avoid a lot of that by just building sidewalks and planning now, but to your point - can’t convince people. Who moved my cheese? Boomer central, etc.
It’s not a bad idea but let’s be realistic about the amount of work it would take
Too late to worry about electricity in that case!
I can understand why you might think that. But there is one place on the planet that's done the renewable transition now. And it proves you wrong.
Let me introduce the state of South Australia. It's an advanced OECD economy, situated at the base end of Australia so far from anywhere it has only 1 transmission line connecting to a neighbouring state, and it's renowned for going down. Unusually for Australia, South Australia also has no coal or gas, and is famous for wild storms taking down kilometres of it's 100kv power lines.
It's currently running at 80% renewables:
https://reneweconomy.com.au/south-australia-hits-stunning-ne...
No, the power does no go off at night.
The transition was expensive. SA already had the most expensive electricity in Australia, and during the transition prices did go up for years. But at 80% the transition is almost over (although they need to build more storage), and the price of electricity in SA has been dropping. In fact it's dropped below the pre-transition price, so it's often below the rest of Australia's coal fired generation:
https://www.aemc.gov.au/sites/default/files/2021-11/sa_fact_...
With that example to follow, the rest of the Australian states are gritting their teeth and following South Australia's lead. Teeth gritting is required because we are predicting a 50% jump in electricity prices, during the transition. It's already starting to bite: https://www.afr.com/companies/energy/power-bills-to-rise-by-... . But that price hike only lasted 5 years in SA, and the light at the end of the tunnel is lower prices than we have now.
Outside of bitcoin mining, is there any energy sink a residential user could engage to suck up the spare capacity? At the industrial scale - what processes can intermittently engage in production which is still cost effective if the equipment lays idle for a majority of the day?
Fuel synthesis? Desalination? SETI-like computations?
Solar gives lots of electricity in the summer. But you have light and warmth then. In the winter when you need the electricity, you get maybe 1/10 of whatever the solar array is capable of.
Wind is not generally viable, except in very windy locations.
Biogas (eg anaerobic digestors) seems much more possible - but even these need warmth to run well - so aren't as good in the winter.
And when you think that yes - you can pay several thousands for a battery to store your electricity (for a day or so), but that the battery will only last a few years - how people think the economics make sense is a mystery to me.
I'm fast coming to the conclusion that all renewable tech is about allowing the government to have deep control over your energy, and to put you in a situation where you are forced to buy very expensive gear from mega-corps.
PS - the battery thing also applies to cars. Old electric cars are basically not worth keeping after 10 years. Who would replace the old battery that costs as much as the car? Esp when the battery slots are incompatible with the latest advances - ie you can't upgrade to a better battery, but only install yesterday's tech.
Yes, but often too much of it, so lots of people use AC, which uses a LOT of power. Electricity is needed all the year.
"Wind is not generally viable, except in very windy locations."
And there is wind everywhere, but only if you build high enough. So yes, there are places where it makes no sense to build them, but there are a lot more other places, where it does.
"I'm fast coming to the conclusion that all renewable tech is about allowing the government to have deep control over your energy"
So a solar + battery powered off grid home is deep controlled by the government? May you explain how that works?
"And when you think that yes - you can pay several thousands for a battery to store your electricity (for a day or so),"
Have you looked up any actual numbers? Maybe do so. Also maybe that part, that tracks how the battery prices are changing. They are constantly getting cheaper.
Also maybe you are aware, that the whole industry that was and is fossil based needs to change. Your criticism comes from an angle, that assumes that should be for free?
Burning fossil fuels is cheap. But only if you ignore the external costs of climate change and air pollution.
The third phase of the energy transition will see massive overcapacity in the summer being turned into chemical energy, to be stored until winter. Hydrogen and synthetic methan will be burned, and the dissipating heat used for district heating. Efficiency is north of 70% for this. I don't see a fundamental problem.
We're not there yet. Currently, this setup is non-sensical since a lot of other measures should be implemented first, but even currently existing tech is pretty efficient, all things considered. And it only gets better from here.
That sounds like unfounded paranoia. It has literally never been easier to be an energy-independent anarchist living in a hut somewhere than today.
It's quite expensive to do now if you don't want a reasonably large shift in lifestyle in doing so.
But with multi-kw solar+battery kits selling everywhere for just a few $k, and 1000-lumen LED lights pulling only single-digit watts, it's getting affordable to have both
Edit: Tesla cars at 200k miles typically retain 80% of their total capacity. The 10 years you quote is the full warranty period. Additionally it costs about $10k to replace the batteries. House hold battery’s last about 20+ years, with 30+ possible without daily draw (quoted based on Tesla power wall specs).
I don’t know where you’re getting your battery facts from, but they’re essentially wrong. I suspect it’s not renewables that’s been captured but your biases.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...
Sure 100% solar powered homes might be harder to do in the colder hemispheres but in many parts of the world it is already possible. During spring, summer and autumn you can cover most of your electricity with a 3kW solar panel set up. Shift your dishwasher, washing machine and dryer to mid day, charge devices when the sun shines etc. Families in poorer countries are likely on a much smaller carbon footprint and it is therefore easier to replace their energy needs with solar or solar thermal. Small, medium as well as large scale island grids are already possible and in operation. https://reneweconomy.com.au/wa-off-grid-school-runs-100-on-s...
For colder climates the solar alone will not cut it, insulated homes, heat pumps and solar can however.
As opposed to government-sanctioned utility companies and petrol companies? Its pretty easy to make your own solar panel (not an efficient one, but something). It is very capital intensive to mine for natural gas and crude these days. Surely the solar panel + battery offers more independence (as evidenced by the fact that nearly every large RV owner is thinking about getting solar now).