Fossil fuel industry and utilities seek to slow down growth of home-based solar power

[DCal430]

What is very telling is how the publicly owned utilities (Municipal Utilities) are far more supportive of renewable and solar power than investor owned utility, who focus on profit before people.

 

[positivedoppler]

It is far more expensive to create solar panels, than the energy they will recover over their lives.

-John

I don't dispute that, but I would like to see some math and numbers please.

 

[Moonbeam]

I don't dispute that, but I would like to see some math and numbers please.

I dispute it. It's wrong.

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/april/pv-net-energy-040213.html

http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/energy/stories/do-solar-panels-use-more-energy-than-they-generate

Furthermore, the cost of fossil fuels may be the extinction of the human race, but is certainly predicted to be in the billions of dollars from weather events alone.

The whole purpose of the human race should be to find alternate energy sources and make them cheap via research and development. The sun is candidate number one. Cheap catalysts for cracking water using sunlight will provide local storage of energy in the form of home made hydrogen gas. A single setup can power your house and your car potentially. Such capacity is also terrorist and disaster safe by being fully distributed. It will also greatly reduce the problems of long distance power transmission.

 

[senseamp]

Solar cost is dropping exponentially. It will destroy everything else, as it should.
And we haven't even gotten into mainstream battery storage for the home yet. Solar will go from peak demand generation to main generation capacity.

 

[shira]

I believe in another thread about right to work laws would be called free loaders. People who want to sell their excess solar energy to the grid but dont want to pay for the infrastructure of the grid.

By all means let them pay for the proportional share of infrastructure. But $50 a month is absurd. I'm 100% certain that non-solar-powered homes don't pay $50 a month toward infrastructure.

 

[Ancalagon44]

Going off the grid is becoming big in South Africa, because our state owned electricity supply company, Eskom, is so inept. We have rolling blackouts from time to time, and electricity prices are rising.

What a lot of people are doing is buying solar panels and large batteries. The large batteries allow people to keep the lights on after sunset. They use gas for cooking and heating water, and solar for everything else, in combination with converting to LED lighting. I think the calculations generally show that the investment pays off in 3 years due to the cost savings.

I would be very surprised if anyone gets subsidies towards the purchase of solar panels or batteries in South Africa - our government is pretty inept.

EDIT: I should clarify - the guys that do this are no longer hooked up to the national grid. They don't sell excess power to the grid, because I don't think Eskom allows this or will pay for it. Rather, they get uninterrupted electricity supply and zero monthly fees.

 

[1prophet]

It is far more expensive to create solar panels, than the energy they will recover over their lives.

-John

Depends on your definition of expensive when it comes to alternative energy

 

[Londo_Jowo]

Not sure these battery storage banks can provide the power capacity/VARs required when starting large inductive loads or provide instantaneous power adjustments in the event of a power source going offline. Low enough voltage sags will cause equipment to go offline and shutdown major factories/essential equipment. Many power companies have spinning reserves to handle such events/situations.

 

[glenn1]

Here's the thing: people want the grid to fall back on for obvious reasons. That fallback is expensive because it has to cope with the continually-shifting production of power. The grid is expensive to maintain, and the more people go solar, the heavier the burden on those without. Guess who those are? The poor, and often in multifamily buildings (apartments, condos, etc.). It absolutely makes sense to levy a fee of some kind to solar owners.

Sounds like a variation of the concept to tax owners of hybrid cars since they don't pay as much gas tax, which in turn pays for road infrastructure. So the question becomes whether a use tax is an efficient and fair way to pay for common infrastructure in the go-forward. While "those who use it should pay" seemed to work well for a long time, we might be coming into a situation in multiple realms where there isn't a single universal thing to tax users on.

 

[K1052]

Not sure these battery storage banks can provide the power capacity/VARs required when starting large inductive loads or provide instantaneous power adjustments in the event of a power source going offline. Low enough voltage sags will cause equipment to go offline and shutdown major factories/essential equipment. Many power companies have spinning reserves to handle such events/situations.

Which will probably be supplanted by flywheel storage when fast response is required.

 

[Londo_Jowo]

Which will probably be supplanted by flywheel storage when fast response is required.

As of right now there's only one 20MW plant in the US in operation. The company that installed/operated went bankrupt. I wonder how much that cost the US government.

 

[K1052]

As of right now there's only one 20MW plant in the US in operation. The company that installed/operated went bankrupt. I wonder how much that cost the US government.

It has probably been too early for most storage solutions due to cost and a lack of need until recently. Some states however have storage mandates and the sector should grow rapidly along with more renewable deployments. I would generally expect flywheel storage to trail lithium ion and redox flow batteries for some time yet but since NG turbine plants aren't generally being retired I think this is less of a problem for the immediate future.

 

[trenchfoot]

Really great info being shared in this thread. :thumbsup:

Our local power utility has just recently relented on holding residential solar panel installs hostage as a bargaining chip for dealing with the local municipal commission that regulates their operation.

Unified public pressure, the utilities commission and the solar panel installation companies/industries combined to force the power utility to give up holding back installation requests.

This ability to stall installations was initially given to the power utility by the commission as a means to safely introduce solar to the grid. However, as soon as the commission realized that the utility was using that ability for the express purpose of increasing their profit margin via cost increase requests to the commission, as well as finding out that the grid could handle ~100% more installs without jeopardizing the integrity of the existing grid, the added pressure from the commission forced the utility to stop holding back installation requests.