Meanwhile PV costs keep going down.
Second solar has the problem that it creates a tragedy of the commons. This has been obvious in several European markets now. Once built, the electricity is free, but not continuous. That means that for the majority of the time, traditional utilities have no hope whatsoever of competing with solar prices ... and then comes the 10% not covered by solar or wind (it's easily more than 20%, but I get a feeling we'd get into an argument).
At that point electricity is needed from traditional sources. Of course, because of this they need to be ready at a moment's notice. Capacity needs at that point might vary from 10% of total to 100% of total, so you still need the same fossil fuel capacity you have right now. It doesn't have to run at full speed anymore, of course. It can't be turned off, because when renewables fail, they don't give you much warning (we're talking minutes at most).
Note that means that large scale renewable plants cannot be used to power homes, because of economics. The more of this you have, the less efficient the market becomes (because the smaller ones maintained "for free" by individuals can't be beaten on price).
It has other pros and cons. In the case of plant failure, the system is much more resilient. And in the case that something disables most small plants (say, an earthquake), the system is much more affected than today (because rooftop solar just isn't built to power plant standards). Double this effect for comparison against nuclear (which is built to withstand ridiculous stress for obvious reasons, and that means it can almost always simply remain operational during a disaster)
Here's the kicker :
Disconnecting from the grid is not realistic for most people, Chung said. The current state of battery technology means they have to be replaced after a few years, he said. And putting a system with batteries on a typical house would cost $40,000 versus $25,000 for one without the storage component, he said. Moreover, the battery portion isn't eligible for the tax credits.
So we're stuck upgrading the grid ... Or making solar installations 2x or 3x more expensive than the currently are, and not just in money : you need battery chargers, space (batteries aren't small), maintenance, ...
So there's 2 things we "can" do:
1) do what greens suggest, and make the rates reflect the new cost structure. Of course that means effectively raising the rates on traditional electricity by a factor of 10 or 100. This will mean that anyone who doesn't have solar right before this happens is so thoroughly screwed it's not funny.
It will also disproportionately affect the poor. For two reasons. First, they can't pay for their own little renewable plant, and can't get the loan. Second they usually live in highrises that cannot be powered using renewables, except for the penthouse. If you think this is wrong, call up a picture of residential highrises in Hong Kong, you'll see what I mean.
It will also reduce the size of the economy. Energy is one of those non-negotiable things, with almost zero price elasticity. It's effectively a tax. Even more so because the government usually controls the other side.
Oh and, in toto (everything taken together), it's less efficient than centralized production. It's attractiveness (to non-believers) comes entirely from the front-loading of the cost. You invest once and you have 99.99% predictable costs over the entire period. Given that we're running out of oil, for things like Google's datacenters, that's a deal that just can't be beat. It also means that it's now actually possible to give Factories their "dream" electrical contracts : 20-30 year long contracts with fixed prices. You take out a bank loan, build a plant in a place with 100% predictable power usage, and deliver the power over dedicated infrastructure, not connected to the public grid at all.
In short, option 1) will have a lot of victims, and few beneficiaries.
2) We could take the industry's arguments. They do have merit. Electricity is not an optional thing, and taking it away from at least some people is not a reasonable thing to do. So relegating the public grid, and power plants to backup status at 10x or 100x the price per kilowatt is not a reasonable thing to do (for starters, do this anywhere north of New York and you will have the poor in cities freeze to death in large numbers like we had 70 years ago).
Furthermore, allowing people to upload power in the grid really does require modifications. Downward-only plants are much simpler than bidirectional plants. They're also smaller, so in many cases new land must be bought by the utility company.
Who must pay for this ? The industry's argument is simple : if they're forced to accept power from solar, then the people actually doing the feeding in must pay for the modifications, and the loss of ROI in the plants. That's only reasonable, as their solar investment is worth much less without the ability to feed it into the grid, and those power plants.
So ...
So we're back to where we were 10 years ago. Many people want small solar (and in some industrial cases, small-scale wind plants). Who pays for the real cost, in the massive grid modifications, the new market equilibrium (that requires a much higher electricity price), and the necessity of keeping tons of plants spinning idle ?
Either the people installing solar do, or everybody does. My personal opinion is probably clear : we don't have a choice : we must make anybody who wishes to feed in power to the grid pay. And when solar grows large enough without feeding into the grid (which will be the obvious response), we will need to tax renewable installations. The alternatives have consequences that are simply not acceptable.
This is not an issue of crooks defending corporate profits (not that I'm saying that's not part of it). This is an issue of how powering a society gets financed.
If your country has a lot of hydro (which has ramp times measured in seconds) this doesn't matter.
Additionally, clouds don't magically appear and obscure an entire cities sunlight over the course of a few minutes. They pass over cities, so as one area loses solar generation another is regaining it. Or maybe it's an overcast day where the the solar generation is at a predictable low level all day. Neither of those cases pose any problem to hydro or any other plant that can ramp up and down over the course of a few minutes (and every nation has these - you can't run a grid without low-response time generators)
In the case of plant failure, the system is much more resilient. And in the case that something disables most small plants (say, an earthquake), the system is much more affected than today (because rooftop solar just isn't built to power plant standards)
I'm not really sure what you're saying here. That distributed generation gives you resiliency? In Australia and NZ, if the grid goes down then your solar inverters turn off too so it doesn't affect the grid's reliability at all. I believe most countries have this requirement.
How does not being "built to power plant standards" have any effect? Your inverters are still required to generate clean AC, and if they can't match the grid closely for any reason they stop generating.
Yes... and that's precisely the issues here. How do you know when the grid is down? You'd see a drop across your grid connection? Makes sense. But what if the grid went down, but because all the local houses were supplying greater than 100% of the local load requirements, it never looked like the grid was down?
That's the challenge. As I understand it, power utilities are considering "smart grid" as a distributed control mechanism to kill PV interconnects in such instances. However traditional grid control is normally built very stringently to allow fast detection of issues and fast isolation/resolution with redudant lines. If you have one rogue smart control point, you could end up electrocuting the engineer.
* sudden change in supply voltage * sudden change in frequency (and rate-of-change of frequency) * sudden change in phase angle
You can't mask these signals and they are particularly pronounced on the section of grid that was affected (i.e. the part that is now blacked out). These (and more) are the specific effects that inverters monitor for, and they will disconnect if they notice anything unusual. Inverters aren't checking for the presence of a grid supply, they're monitoring it's health. Your local lines company dictates the trip limits based on your address and size/type of installation.
As for safety, compare some scenarios that a lines worker could actually find himself in:
1) he has turned up to a fault and found that a HV line is on the ground and the auto-recloser is still trying to re-liven it at periodic intervals. The voltages are so high that walking anywhere near the fault could result in him being electrocuted due to a step voltage. The power levels involved are high enough to cause a major explosion. 2) he has to open or close a circuit breaker in a switch yard. He has no way to know whether the breaker is going to explode when he racks it in. At least he probably won't know about it if it does blow up. 3) he turns up to a fault on a 230V line, tests it and finds that there's still voltage present despite the earlier fault. He visits the houses connected to that part of the circuit who have a grid tied inverter and manually isolates them before investigating further.
That last one is hypothetical, since I've never heard of an inverter failing to turn off and even if one did stay on initially it would very quickly trip on overload after trying to supply your house and your neighbors all by itself.
Testing the safety of a circuit before you work on it is an everyday part of the job for electricians. Finding that a circuit is still live is very common, and having one re-liven unexpectedly happens too from time to time. You just take precautions, wear protective gear, and do your best to minimize the danger.
We're already at grid parity for solar on a kWh basis in places like Hawaii. What's more, solar supply matches A/C demand. Reducing and shifting most of the demand with home automation will cost less than buying batteries. Some people will just disconnect from the grid, maybe even connecting with their neighbours.
The maintenance costs for the grid won't go down as fast as people dropping out, so retail prices have to go up -- engendering a positive feedback loop.
As far as energy being non-negotiable with zero price elasticity: this is true in the short-term. We've seen the same thing with cars - eventually people switch away from gas guzzlers. More efficient appliances and architectures take a long time to show their effect, yet they have just as real an impact on total demand.
It's hard to argue that inefficiency is good for the economy. In fact, proponents of alternative macroeconomic metrics cite the GDP's bias against efficient renewable energy as one of its flaws [1].
If you pursue a bigger economy without considering efficiency and the societal benefits of other labor/capital allocations, you run the risk of prescribing bad policies. E.g., a government can grow GDP just by hiring idle workers to dig ditches one day and fill them back in the next.
[1] de Graaf and Batker. What's the Economy For, Anyway?
This may not matter for renewables, as there's no fuel burned ... but ... I doubt it will turn out that way. So a larger cost will be much more efficiently distributed amongst it's users.
"Disconnecting from the grid is not realistic for most people, Chung said. The current state of battery technology means they have to be replaced after a few years, he said. And putting a system with batteries on a typical house would cost $40,000 versus $25,000 for one without the storage component, he said. Moreover, the battery portion isn't eligible for the tax credits."
So population on the grid does not fall. What mostly falls is the revenue from them. 90% of the time they're not paying (or even paying negative amounts thanks to the laws the greens forced through). The company can't disconnect them, and if the greens have anything to say about it, can't charge them. They need to provide backup power though, because the solar installations can't do that (without tripling in cost).
It does in the point I was actually answering to though.
I was answering the question; "I like option 3. Why is it a bad outcome for the average electricity user?", where option 3 is "Solar people buy batteries and don't return power to the grid."
You are basically saying you think there is a low likelyhood of the topic of the question someone else asked becoming reality. But I didn't propose how likely it was one way or another, I was just answering the question that they asked about the downsides.
That combines with selling 50-60% less in the limited deployment case, 90-95% less.
That means prices will need to increase by a factor 3 in the limited deployment case, factor 10-20 in the green's "dream scenario" case.
Since electricity is so expensive[1] here many people could reclaim their investments in as little as 5 years. With the subsidies reduced, it may be 7 years. That's incredibly short if you compared Hawaii to the mainland.
[1]http://www.heco.com/heco/Residential/Electric-Rates/Average-...
Oil is useful because it can be used to produce value. That value production starts at the margin, and there's a lot more you can do with $10/bbl oil than you can with $100/bbl oil, and more with that than $1000/bbl oil (and in case you question that, it's about the production cost per barrel of canola-oil derived biodiesel). Which is to say: oil prices might not simply increase with scarcity.
But price drives what sources are feasible for extraction. Early oil didn't cost much to extract, and its price was low. As oil's become harder to find and pull from the ground, its extraction costs (and minimum market price) in crease. Much of the extraction at the margin is only feasible because of high oil prices.
Ultimately you may reach a level at which the global economy is caught between oil that's too expensive to buy, and a market price that's too low to support exploration, development, and extraction.
Gail Tverberg's explored this dynamic in some detail:
http://ourfiniteworld.com/2013/07/01/inflation-deflation-or-...
Her principle thesis is that it's going to be financial and economic effects rather than energy per se which will spell the endgame.
That was my thinking when I bought a bunch of oil ETFs a few years ago.
Oops.
http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=EE...
It's still rising faster than inflation, and on an island like Hawaii fuel oil is more expensive due to the shipping costs. Kind of surprised they don't use geothermal preferentially to solar, but I suppose that unlike Iceland they have a better mix of solar resources available there.
I have been to Hawaii and many natives would rather bite their own hand off than touch a haole.
I know that as enlightened individuals we're supposed to respect all creeds, beliefs, and faiths, but frankly, I doubt there is anything that anyone can say to me that will make me respect the people who have (apparently successfully) blocked alternative energy production efforts because it will drain the power of their lava god. If it's true that I share more DNA with these people than I do with a chimpanzee, it's strictly a fluke of evolution.
(Edit: To be fair, some Googling suggests there are some more tangible environmental concerns with geothermal energy in Hawaii, but propitiating Pele appears to be a very real part of their argument as well. If we laugh at and ignore their legitimate concerns because of the 'Pele' argument, that's just as unfortunate an outcome as one in which religious nutters stop a worthwhile project in its tracks.)
http://www.alibaba.com/showroom/price-per-watt-monocrystalli...
(Lots and lots of homes would probably meet most of their usage with less than 10,000 watts of panels, but they also aren't paying $3,000 a year in electric bills)
You might not notice them. Last time I took a plane, when landing I was surprised at the installations I didn't realise were there. Large rooftop installations are common on stores such as Walmart, Ikea and others.