We need to be fair to poor people by blocking them from profit

[Paratus]

With an appropriately sized solar array and battery bank, sure.

Obviously captialism and the free market is working well in this regard.

A side note,is it possible to entirely be so self sufficient with solar that you can completely disconnect from the utility grid entirely?

The main issue is sizing your array and storage appropriately.

You don't just need arrays that can deliver your average power need. You need ones that can deliver your maximum power needs. Then you also need enough cells to generate that maximum and re charge your batteries.

The battery system also has to be sized to your maximum needs and still be able to provide enough power to not only see you through night time but night followed by cloudy skies or the time it takes to recover a failed solar array. This increase the size of the array again.

Storage sizing is dependent on your needs. Can you tolerate low power for long periods occasionally due to weather or failures? Or do you have critical equipment (medical perhaps) that must always have power?

There's a fair amount of art in sizing and operating a solar array and battery system for critical applications.

 

[Double Trouble]

No, that's not the "real" reason. That's the superficially-given one. But, it is true that rich people revolting against your policy changes is not something many politicians/elites tend to favor.

Wrong. Getting rid of net metering at all is changing the rules, including 20 year extensions or whatever it is that people arbitrarily decide to add or not add.

There is no federal law that requires that net metering policies be maintained. People can change the rules of the game after the fact. That's one of the worst aspects of buying into solar now. In fact, this uncertainty is part of the game — the game being trying to keep the profit-making opportunity away from the unwashed masses.

Of course it does. All money has to do with class.

Alrighty, if you want to jettison all reason and go with your rant without any evidence to support your claims go right ahead. I choose to take a rational approach.

 

[K1052]

Utilities need to be able to provide at peak demand, typically evening, when solar can't. That doesn't change no matter how much solar there is. More solar means they sell less power at reduced revenues during peak solar hours for maintaining the same infrastructure.

Where all that balances out I don't know.

I think the long term answer is going to be more complex than just installing less solar and maintaining enough peaker capacity to ramp, which utilities are sometimes motivated to do. Load shifting and storage will surely become larger pieces of the picture going forward as renewable penetration increases.

 

[K1052]

Storage sizing is dependent on your needs. Can you tolerate low power for long periods occasionally due to weather or failures? Or do you have critical equipment (medical perhaps) that must always have power?

Off grid residential systems will still usually have a backup generator for unusual circumstances or to protect critical loads.

 

[interchange]

This is an interesting economic scenario that I'm inadequately educated on, but basically I see this:

Free-market is not always the best way increase value to the consumer. High barriers to entry and infrastructure-dependence undermine the competitive advantage of providing the best service for the customer.

On the flip side, limited competition removes the impetus for monopolies to improve their quality, and the difference in resources they have as compared to the public gives them tons of mechanisms to resist change.

You could imagine acting in the public interest by moving these things to the public sector as to strip away the motivation for profit. But that doesn't really work. Funneling resources into the public sector without market pressure to produce something from those resources simply results in myriad redundancies and inefficiencies to sustain the need for those resources.

Circling back to the OP, of course power companies will do the maximum they can to protect their profit, especially when it comes from systems that took a ton of capital to build. It's not "fair" to the consumer.

How we solve this economic pickle -- I don't know the answer.

 

[realibrad]

Yes. A typical charge is safety insurance so that if one of their workers gets zapped on your property your insurance policy will pay damages to them. Reality is, of course, that if they are competent at working with electricity they won't be zapped but it's a disincentive utilities use for people wanting to have private solar.

Well, if the utility is obligated to fix your connection, then why would insurance be their fault? To say that they should not get hurt is kinda a dummy argument because by that logic, you should not have any insurance because only dumb people get hurt. If the utility is obligated to fix your connection, they are doing work and taking a risk. What if the utilities had to break their charges into 3 categories. First is a connection fee, to hook a house up to the grid. 2nd is an insurance assessment where they look at your house and figure out a reasonable rate. 3rd would be the cost of power consumed. That way people with solar pay the same first two charges as someone without solar, and the savings they get is in reduced consumption. If people with solar dont have to pay for the first two then it would seem unfair because they get the benefit of being connected and maintenance but dont have to pay for it.

 

[Sunburn74]

Well, if the utility is obligated to fix your connection, then why would insurance be their fault? To say that they should not get hurt is kinda a dummy argument because by that logic, you should not have any insurance because only dumb people get hurt. If the utility is obligated to fix your connection, they are doing work and taking a risk. What if the utilities had to break their charges into 3 categories. First is a connection fee, to hook a house up to the grid. 2nd is an insurance assessment where they look at your house and figure out a reasonable rate. 3rd would be the cost of power consumed. That way people with solar pay the same first two charges as someone without solar, and the savings they get is in reduced consumption. If people with solar dont have to pay for the first two then it would seem unfair because they get the benefit of being connected and maintenance but dont have to pay for it.

Connection fee is a one time charge
Each time an assessment is needed is a one time charge

Maintenance fees should be paid by people who actively use the system. You can argue well they would have to pay so much more because less people are paying maintenance fees. But at the same time, more solar use means cheaper energy fees for all since solar generates essentially free power to the grid.

 

[Paratus]

Off grid residential systems will still usually have a backup generator for unusual circumstances or to protect critical loads.

Yes, that was the point I was taking the long road to get to. While it's possible to go completely solar and battery you have to oversize the system so much that being attached to the grid or having a backup generator is normally required.

 

[superstition]

Free-market is not always the best way increase value to the consumer. High barriers to entry and infrastructure-dependence undermine the competitive advantage of providing the best service for the customer.

How we solve this economic pickle -- I don't know the answer.

1) Remember that businesses and consumers are able to purchase solar panels from China. Chinese panels are very cheap, whether they're disguised with fake names like "Canadian Solar" or something less disingenuous like "Trina". Because China exists the so-called "free market" rhetoric needs a reality check. China is perfectly willing to murder and maim huge numbers of people to flood the markets with cheap-to-buy products. (Don't think the USA is so innocent. We have our own doings, like being the world's largest arms dealer, the world's highest imprisoner per-capita, and leaning on the Haitian president to exempt our companies from a tiny minimum wage increase.)

2) Because cheap Chinese panels and other parts exist, and because of the economics of scale (due to the increasing consumption of solar products), the cost of entry barrier has dropped drastically. This is why it's so important for elites to protect themselves from competition from the great unwashed, anointed owners of debt.

The solar dumping is not unique. Japanese DRAM makers forced US companies out of business by dumping in the early 80s, driving the price of DRAM through the roof later. (This is, incidentally, a big reason why Apple had to cut RAM from 1 MB in the Lisa to 128K in the Mac — and why Jobs actually used a 512K Mac that wasn't available for sale to demo the first Macintosh for the tech press so he could run speech synthesis to impress them.) Asian DRAM makers were also found guilty of collusion much more recently. I think these were mostly South Korean companies but I didn't follow it closely.

 

[shortylickens]

we also need to bail out the rich screw-ups.

 

[superstition]

we also need to bail out the rich screw-ups.

That's not a handout, it's a freedom pass.

 

[Darwin333]

With an appropriately sized solar array and battery bank, sure.

It's possible but not practical in the least except under extreme circumstances like not having access to the grid. Enough batteries to run your house for an average house for an extended period of time, enough time to guarantee no loss of power during adverse conditions, is extremely expensive. Then add in the fact that batteries have a much shorter lifespan than the rest of the system and it almost never makes economic sense to disconnect from the grid.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

Utilities charge solar owners insurance?

Not in my State

 

[Fanatical Meat]

It's possible but not practical in the least except under extreme circumstances like not having access to the grid. Enough batteries to run your house for an average house for an extended period of time, enough time to guarantee no loss of power during adverse conditions, is extremely expensive. Then add in the fact that batteries have a much shorter lifespan than the rest of the system and it almost never makes economic sense to disconnect from the grid.

Agreed

*Solar owner

 

[Darwin333]

Yes. A typical charge is safety insurance so that if one of their workers gets zapped on your property your insurance policy will pay damages to them. Reality is, of course, that if they are competent at working with electricity they won't be zapped but it's a disincentive utilities use for people wanting to have private solar.

I own a business in the solar industry and have never heard of such a thing. All inverters hooked up to the grid must be UL tested and approved. In order to be a UL rated grid-tied inverter it will only work when it "sees" proper grid voltage. The moment that the grid goes down the inverter turns itself off within a second or two (maybe less, been a while since I tested on specific standards). This feature is solely to prevent the grid from being energized by the solar panels while utilities are working on it even though it stops the solar panels from powering the home during a blackout.

Unless done completely illegally and without the utilities knowledge it is impossible to hook up a non-UL certified inverter to the grid. People that have battery backups have a switch that automatically switches from grid power to battery power, completely separating the circuit from the grid, the moment grid power goes down which serves the exact same purpose. Granted most of my experience is from my own state, I go to a lot of national conventions and have never heard of the "insurance" you are talking about and any company implementing it would also have to charge it to anyone running any sort of backup generator.

The real danger comes from idiots with regular generators that hook them straight into their panel box during blackouts, not from people with UL certified equipment that is specifically designed NOT to energize the grid when it is down.

 

[Jhhnn]

I think the long term answer is going to be more complex than just installing less solar and maintaining enough peaker capacity to ramp, which utilities are sometimes motivated to do. Load shifting and storage will surely become larger pieces of the picture going forward as renewable penetration increases.

Practical storage at the capacities needed is over the horizon technology. It may never exist. Renewables will likely never fulfill all our needs. The only other way to move away from fossil fuels is nuclear power.

 

[realibrad]

Connection fee is a one time charge
Each time an assessment is needed is a one time charge

Maintenance fees should be paid by people who actively use the system. You can argue well they would have to pay so much more because less people are paying maintenance fees. But at the same time, more solar use means cheaper energy fees for all since solar generates essentially free power to the grid.

No. Maintenance fees are maintaining a grid. If nobody used the grid it would still need maintenance. You should help pay if you want to have a grid. The issue is that those that have solar give energy during the day but consume it at night.

 

[Jhhnn]

I own a business in the solar industry and have never heard of such a thing. All inverters hooked up to the grid must be UL tested and approved. In order to be a UL rated grid-tied inverter it will only work when it "sees" proper grid voltage. The moment that the grid goes down the inverter turns itself off within a second or two (maybe less, been a while since I tested on specific standards). This feature is solely to prevent the grid from being energized by the solar panels while utilities are working on it even though it stops the solar panels from powering the home during a blackout.

Unless done completely illegally and without the utilities knowledge it is impossible to hook up a non-UL certified inverter to the grid. People that have battery backups have a switch that automatically switches from grid power to battery power, completely separating the circuit from the grid, the moment grid power goes down which serves the exact same purpose. Granted most of my experience is from my own state, I go to a lot of national conventions and have never heard of the "insurance" you are talking about and any company implementing it would also have to charge it to anyone running any sort of backup generator.

The real danger comes from idiots with regular generators that hook them straight into their panel box during blackouts, not from people with UL certified equipment that is specifically designed NOT to energize the grid when it is down.

Why can't the inverter be made to power the home during an outage while being disconnected from the grid? If it can maintain voltage, why turn it off?

 

[Zorba]

Net metering was/is an incentive to increase the penetration of solar into the market and drive a high enough demand to get economies of scale. Now that we have gotten solar much closer to parity, we should start pulling back the incentives. This is a huge problem with all incentives, they are given generally with a specific goal in mind, buy then they are extended forever because people get upset about then being sunset.

Going forward I think solar should be treated like any other customer. You pay a minimum monthly charge ($18 here), then you pay for additional usage split fuel/transport cost. For power sold back to the grid, you should get the going spot wholesale price. Why should the power company have to pay you retail, which included generation and transport cost, when they can buy wholesale for much less and they don't have double cost for transport.

Maintenance fees should be paid by people who actively use the system. You can argue well they would have to pay so much more because less people are paying maintenance fees. But at the same time, more solar use means cheaper energy fees for all since solar generates essentially free power to the grid.

With net metering, solar is the most expensive electricity on the grid and I'd sure not free. Selling that power back also uses the grid. Typically per companies buy electricity wholesale, then they incur the transport cost, then charge the customer retail for that power and transport. With net metering, the power company is paying the full retail price, then still incures transport cost on that power to it to someone else, but can't charge for that transportation. It would be equivalent of an OEM expecting Walmart to pay them full retail for a product to sell.

Now, I very much support distributed solar and wind, but net metering is not fair at all to the utility and is a give away to people that can afford private solar from people that can't.

 

[Jhhnn]

Net metering was/is an incentive to increase the penetration of solar into the market and drive a high enough demand to get economies of scale. Now that we have gotten solar much closer to parity, we should start pulling back the incentives. This is a huge problem with all incentives, they are given generally with a specific goal in mind, buy then they are extended forever because people get upset about then being sunset.

Going forward I think solar should be treated like any other customer. You pay a minimum monthly charge ($18 here), then you pay for additional usage split fuel/transport cost. For power sold back to the grid, you should get the going spot wholesale price. Why should the power company have to pay you retail, which included generation and transport cost, when they can buy wholesale for much less and they don't have double cost for transport.



With net metering, solar is the most expensive electricity on the grid and I'd sure not free. Selling that power back also uses the grid. Typically per companies buy electricity wholesale, then they incur the transport cost, then charge the customer retail for that power and transport. With net metering, the power company is paying the full retail price, then still incures transport cost on that power to it to someone else, but can't charge for that transportation. It would be equivalent of an OEM expecting Walmart to pay them full retail for a product to sell.

Now, I very much support distributed solar and wind, but net metering is not fair at all to the utility and is a give away to people that can afford private solar from people that can't.

If we want to encourage distributed solar then putting back to the grid has to pay better than spot pricing. Otherwise, the payback period is too long & people won't do it. It also needs to be understood that the transport price of that energy is a lot less than bringing it in from a remote facility because it just goes back into the neighborhood to people who don't have solar. No giant generators, transformer stations or high voltage lines, but they still have to be there for peak demand.

 

[Darwin333]

Why can't the inverter be made to power the home during an outage while being disconnected from the grid? If it can maintain voltage, why turn it off?

You need batteries to pull off any kind of useful constant electricity to power an entire house. The typical grid-tied solar power system simply can't provide the constant electrical load that modern houses require. That's one answer, but the real answer is that it's simply cheaper to grid-tie systems without any sort of battery backup and the solar power system isn't sized to run the entire household at any given time. You would have to seriously oversize a system in order to even come close and 99% of the time that is a money losing option.

If you have a battery bank that can provide a constant voltage then you use a different inverter that does simply switch off of grid power when it goes down. Battery banks are expensive as all hell and a huge maintenance issue and I don't ever recommend them except under extreme circumstances.

 

[Zorba]

If we want to encourage distributed solar then putting back to the grid has to pay better than spot pricing. Otherwise, the payback period is too long & people won't do it. It also needs to be understood that the transport price of that energy is a lot less than bringing it in from a remote facility because it just goes back into the neighborhood to people who don't have solar. No giant generators, transformer stations or high voltage lines, but they still have to be there for peak demand.

My point was, as solar starts being able to stand on its own, we need to start phasing out the large incentives. They have done their jobs. It is like in Oklahoma, they gave huge tax cuts for horizontally drilled wells to encourage investment in the technology. At the time there were only a handful of horizontal wells in the state, now almost every new well is horizontal, but those tax cuts are continually renewed even though they served their purpose and horizontal drilling now makes more economical sense than traditional drilling. Now they are just a give away because people would whine if they went away.

Under the scheme I laid out you would only pay for transportation costs on the power you use off the grid. I agree that the transportation cost for power from your house to your neighbor's is cheaper than from Arizonia to Texas, so maybe the correct price for solar would be spot+a %, where that % is basically the efficiency gain from local transport vs distance transport. But I would also bet that on a kW-hr basis, the last mile is probably the most expensive part of the transport.

Going to a true spot price might actually help the solar generators make more money. Spot Peaking power is very expensive and solar generates the most power near peak power times, so it is possible the spot price for wholesale would actually be higher than the non-time of day based retail price. In AZ it looks like they were going to use a 5 year average wholesale price, which IMHO is BS, because it would be massively diluted by non-peak times when power is dirt cheap but when solar also isn't adding anything to the grid.

 

[Zorba]

Practical storage at the capacities needed is over the horizon technology. It may never exist. Renewables will likely never fulfill all our needs. The only other way to move away from fossil fuels is nuclear power.

I think the more realistic solution is to not store the energy, but to get better at long distance transportation. Using extremely high voltage DC transmission it may be possible to setup a worldwide grid to share renewable power generation. Basically you could put huge solar farms in the Great Basin, Sierra and the Outback. Then huge wind farms in the midwest, coasts and other windy places. Then hook it all together, and probabilities would say there will always been wind/sun in one of the locations.

You will probably never fully get rid of chemical (fuel or battery) or hydro storage, but I don't think we will ever get to the point of storing 90% either.

High Voltage DC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current
Extremetech Article: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme...and-the-arrival-of-world-spanning-super-grids

 

[Jhhnn]

You need batteries to pull off any kind of useful constant electricity to power an entire house. The typical grid-tied solar power system simply can't provide the constant electrical load that modern houses require. That's one answer, but the real answer is that it's simply cheaper to grid-tie systems without any sort of battery backup and the solar power system isn't sized to run the entire household at any given time. You would have to seriously oversize a system in order to even come close and 99% of the time that is a money losing option.

If you have a battery bank that can provide a constant voltage then you use a different inverter that does simply switch off of grid power when it goes down. Battery banks are expensive as all hell and a huge maintenance issue and I don't ever recommend them except under extreme circumstances.

I didn't say constant. If the grid goes down during peak solar hours then anybody who's selling power back to the grid should be able to generate enough to run a lot of their own house while the grid is down. If the grid goes down then the house disconnects from the grid. If the solar array can't keep up with the house then the system shuts down. You don't need batteries to do that. Capiche?

 

[Fanatical Meat]

My point was, as solar starts being able to stand on its own, we need to start phasing out the large incentives. They have done their jobs. It is like in Oklahoma, they gave huge tax cuts for horizontally drilled wells to encourage investment in the technology. At the time there were only a handful of horizontal wells in the state, now almost every new well is horizontal, but those tax cuts are continually renewed even though they served their purpose and horizontal drilling now makes more economical sense than traditional drilling. Now they are just a give away because people would whine if they went away.

Under the scheme I laid out you would only pay for transportation costs on the power you use off the grid. I agree that the transportation cost for power from your house to your neighbor's is cheaper than from Arizonia to Texas, so maybe the correct price for solar would be spot+a %, where that % is basically the efficiency gain from local transport vs distance transport. But I would also bet that on a kW-hr basis, the last mile is probably the most expensive part of the transport.

Going to a true spot price might actually help the solar generators make more money. Spot Peaking power is very expensive and solar generates the most power near peak power times, so it is possible the spot price for wholesale would actually be higher than the non-time of day based retail price. In AZ it looks like they were going to use a 5 year average wholesale price, which IMHO is BS, because it would be massively diluted by non-peak times when power is dirt cheap but when solar also isn't adding anything to the grid.

That's what the sreq market is for. Systems from about 5 years ago produced more sreq's. I'd guess systems 5 years from now will produce fewer sreq's.

*an sreq is basically a unit for producing clean energy that can be sold on a market place to offset businesses carbon pollution.