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Comment by oconnore | Hacker News Reader

I was with you until you said that distributed energy is more efficient than large scale energy.

A large scale hydroelectric, battery, or wind plant will be far more efficient than distributed energy in the home. Solar may benefit from capitalizing on under utilized residential real estate, but absent that incentive, a large solar plant will also be more efficient than a distributed per home grid due to standardized install and maintenance, larger inverters, and optimized layout (most home systems are non tracking).

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You're not counting transmission loss, something that distributed systems avoid.

Central systems are more efficient but also must lose efficiency to transmit the power over distance.

As a naive layman, I'd be very curious to see numbers on inefficiencies of non-tracking panels vs. typical transmission loss.

25-35% more efficient for single axis tracking panels vs. non tracking. Distribution losses are ~6%.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_tracker#Basic_concept

http://energyinformative.org/solar-panel-tracking-systems

I'm ignoring it because it's mostly irrelevant (6% total, ~1% for transmission). If it weren't, we would not have an electric grid.

http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=105&t=3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#Lo...

You are also missing the cost of the distribution and transmission infrastructure, which distributed generation avoids in addition to the transmission losses

Distributed generation using solar or wind without distributed storage actually needs more transmission infrastructure than centralized generation.

That's because of unpredictability of these power sources.

With centralized generation you can do hierarchical network, with smaller capacity further "downstream".

With distributed you need P2P network, and when some part of country has no sun and no wind - you need to be able to get that energy from other sources.

Distributed storage changes the game, but it depends on the costs.

You are missing anything that I said or linked to.

6% includes ALL losses for the entire distribution infrastructure. I am explicitly not missing that.

You also have not cited any evidence supporting your claim, so I don't know why I bother.

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