Visit the Boston Museum of Science. Their “Theater of Electricity” will gladly demonstrate why tesla towers wouldn’t be practical.
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That’s exactly right - moreover, in about 15-20 states, particularly in the northeast, power companies’ revenues are decoupled from consumption, with models that instead pay for maintaining the stability of the grid and encouraging efficiency - that’s why we get monthly bills that rank us with our neighbors (we’re 6 out of 100) and suggest ways to cut consumption.
So in those states, the companies actually want you to install solar.
The point is, legislation changed the utilities’ priorities. Legislation can change their priorities elsewhere in the country as well.
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And the “war” can be solved by simply redefining the battlefield so interests are aligned appropriately.
But that doesn’t create the kind of scare headline that BB has been moving toward.
A bit more labor? Install costs are the largest segment of the bill for rooftop solar.
If every rooftop in the country were to have rooftop solar installed, it would mean two things:
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All together, they still would not produce a significantly large proportion of the total amount of energy we will need as a nation once we stop using fossil fuels
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It would mean these rooftop arrays would be the most expensive way imaginable to generate solar power, and that the vast majority of them would be in areas without sufficient sunlight.
So, we would have just spent the maximal amount of money for the least return.
There is a better way to do solar. And that is to place the installations where the sun shines intensely every day of the year. That means the American Southwest. The fact is that, contrary to the opinion of many, electrical power can be efficiently transferred over large distances. We do not, as a nation, need to have the site of power generation, be anywhere close to where it will be used.
The only way renewable energy is going to succeed is if we make it a communal effort and a communal expense. There is no need for homeowners to shoulder the economic burden, nor is rooftop solar a particularly efficient or cost-effective way to proceed. Until we understand that, we are doomed.
-> The problem is magnitudes of order larger than what rooftop solar can address. <-
Youre’ correct, but by definition a 100kW plant makes about 100x as much electricity as a 10kW plant, so that is perhaps kind of trivial (in the way scientists use the word). But you’re right, the benefits of large scale are in the capital costs per kWhr over their lifetime rather than in operating costs. There are efficiencies in labour used to install them, in the manufacture of larger panels, as well as brackets, wiring and inverters.
It is just much cheaper to build these on a big scale. Of course, local systems have the advantage of low transmission losses, but industrial plants tend to be built in the right places that have lots of uninterrupted sunlight. A Mojave Desert system is going to kill my Vancouver rooftop system in terms of how many tonnes of CO2 emission it prevents per dollar of investment. Moving my investment to the desert is cheap. Me moving there, not so much. Rooftop systems admittedly have “free” land (otherwise unused rooftops) but the downside is that they have to be re-installed whenever the roof is renewed or the house re-constructed. They also have overhanging trees, sub-optimal alignment and small, expensive (per kW) inverters. They only make more sense than industrial plants for socio-political reasons. That is, when the feelgood factor of individual homeowners and subsidy levels coincide; along with finance companies willing to take a low, and well diversified risk secured by the underlying property to allow their mass installation.
The operating costs are of course small. Cleaning costs can often be zero on rooftop systems (as the owners just do it themselves - and provided they value their time at zero) but in any case are only a small operating cost per kWhr in industrial systems.
My thesis is really about the economic efficiency of tonnes of CO2 per dollar of investment, not just about the photovoltaic and electrical efficiency per se.
I have a feeling it would involve hydrogen.
I remember reading ages ago about a swedish or norwegian engineer who lived north of the arctic circle and had a small wind turbine, solar cells and solar collectors. He used that to generate all he electicity, heat and hot water he (and his family) needed in his house and used the surplus juice to make hydrogen on which his Volvo ran. Must have been early or mid 1980ies. But I can’t find anything about this on the search engines, dammit. Maybe I have an old magazine clipping at home, but probably not, and anyway I’m on holiday.
Bottom line: it can be done, but it ain’t easy per se and really complicated in the city, what with the oxyhydrogen (lots of fun, but …) and stuff.
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That’s something this project incorporates:
http://www.bmvbs.de/DE/EffizienzhausPlus/Haus/effizienzhaus-plus-haus_node.html
(I’ll try to find something in english on this)
Research on zero energy buildings
http://www.enob.info/en/net-zero-energy-buildings/
A project in Freiburg (they started stuff like that in the 1980ies, lots of know-how in using solar power in buildings)
Wold map of zero energy buildings:
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We should see it as a victory that labor is now a large part of residential solar installation pricing - just a few years ago it was the modules themselves, which have gone from $4.50/watt to around $0.70/watt in just a few years.
“Solar is bad because it isn’t a silver bullet” is not a good argument - no source of renewable energy is. Why are people addicted to heroin? Because it is the BEST. Fossil fuels are the same way - they are awesome, so we are addicted. A comprehensive energy plan for the future requires a wide range of energy sources, not just one. Rooftop solar (onsite generation) won’t supply all our energy, but no single source will. It is a part of a complete breakfast however, due to its ease of deployment and reduced need to change the surrounding infrastructure.
I think you are underestimating the challenge of long-distance transmission. How many years has the High Plains Express been in the works? It will have to happen in the future, but I’ve never bought the idea that you shouldn’t make any improvements unless it is the perfect improvement.
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My system should pay for itself well before it becomes tired and/or obsolete enough to be worth replacing. Admittedly that’s with subsidies and a group buy, but the power company also gets what amount to subsidies so I consider it a fair comparison.
The triviality of the scaling equation is exactly what is unique - most energy sources don’t work that way - 1/10th the equipment results in much less than 1/10th the energy.
It is true that the incentives and the loads aren’t proportional to the local energy availability, which is a problem. But again I think you are underestimating the cost and challenges of long-distance transmission. Producing locally, even at an increased levelized cost of energy, may still be the cheaper long-term option, especially considering that you can do it today.
There are hybrid options - I’ve built several “solar gardens” for companies in CO. They build a 500kW plant, meter the energy, and then virtually sell it to customers who’ve bought a “share” in the garden. It is a good balance of gaining some economies of scale, while still working in a local or regional energy context without relying on hypothetical transmission lines that no one wants to own, pay for or build.
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I never said solar is bad. I want the country to build a whole shit pile of it. Just not not so much on rooftops or where sunlight is not optimal.
Everyone talks about rooftop solar. Hardly anyone talks about what we will actually need to go off fossil fuels, and we are going to need WAY WAY more solar than what rooftop solar could possibly provide. And of course, huge amounts of wind, etc. Which means it is going to be expensive.
We need to ask whether our energy future is going to be solved by the free market, or by public ownership. So far, most everyone is about a free market solution which doesn’t seem want it…
I am for public ownership.
If power companies were really concerned about maintaining sufficient supplies of electricity to meet fluctuating demand, you would think they would welcome solar panels, windmills or anything that boosts overall supply without adding any costs to the power company beyond what they have to pay to buy off the homeowner’s excess power. It’s a helluva lot cheaper than generating their own.
Of course, they are not interesting in meeting demand but in creating artificial shortages through market manipulation to drive up prices, and solar panels are a threat to that.
Yeah, but I’m not necessarily advocating long-distance transmission. The CO2 travels around the globe for free. A tonne saved here is the same as a tonne saved in India, China or anywhere. Use the most efficient solutions everywhere.
I looked at some capital cost data from Berkeley Lab and the DOE. Utility-scale installations are around $3.50 per installed watt and smaller residential systems around $5.50 per watt for bigger 2kw to 4kw systems and around $8.50 per kw for the less-than 1Kw systems. That isn’t even taking into account the fact that big solar is typically built in the sunniest places. On a lifetime capital per kwh the big plants would look even better.
I still maintain that my buck is better-off in a fund, building plants in AZ or the Mojave (and thus ultimately displacing coal-fired electricity and CO2eq from the PRB) than “invested” in my rooftop solar here in Vancouver that needs a LOT of subsidy to make it work for me. If I want to keep it local, I’m likely better-off by investing in insulation and energy efficiency.
It isn’t either/or, if you have the cash for the up-front investment.
Or even if you don’t. The folks I worked with would gladly set up an arrangement where they essentially leased your rooftop space. They take most of the profit on the deal that way, of course, but there’s essentially no up-front investment for the homeowner.
Could the payback be better elsewhere? Sure. But it isn’t either/or there either. If you’d rather find a large project to invest in, go for it; that doesn’t invalidate my little 2kW system.
That is true to an extent, but there still needs to be a local market for that electricity, there is something to be said for maximizing the type of production each region is best at, but that isn’t the only strategy with value.
Your costs are still a bit high for the current market - residential fluctuates more, but tends to be in the $4.50/W range these days, with utility scale more in the $3.00/W range. Tiny systems (less than 1kW) are super expensive, of course, but don’t make up much of the market.
Large systems take a long time to bring online, and take up a lot of space. Onsite generation takes up no new space, and come online much faster. There is a real market benefit to working on the parts you can work on while the business and regulatory parts are assembled for the larger deployments. And this is coming from someone who designs very large PV systems.
Naturally you are always best off improving efficiency first. As the former head of the CO Governer’s Energy Office once said, “You have to eat your energy efficiency vegetables before you get your renewable energy dessert.”
It’s as if capitalism is standing in the way of progress!
How could such a thing be? Can the status quo survive such a revelation?
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I think that that is part of why the issue is comparatively stubbonrn: the value of having a grid connection is definitely nonzero (as is the cost of maintaining one), and the value of being able to sell electricity back to the grid when you run a surplus is nonzero, since electricity doesn’t store well (while the value of being sold that additional electricity can vary from sharply positive to sharply negative depending on grid, load, and alternative supply conditions).
When you have a situation where the details are brutally complex(pricing base-load generating capacity isn’t so bad, pricing capacity under shifting load and supply conditions is tricky; but grid management gets into the realms of black magic), it can be both difficult to justify totally reasonable claims and easy to advance completely absurd overinflated versions of claims with far smaller justifiable kernels.
That’s a good point, though my reasons would be to know that nobody’s compromising my food before I eat it. Which, possibly makes me even more smug?
Either way, no growing of vegetables allowed in my household’s yard, per the owner.
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There’s an aspect of this that I have seen skirted around, but that I think deserves to be called out more explicitly. Anyone is welcome to put solar cells on top of their home without the power company responding in any way. It’s only when you hook the solar cells up to the grid that the power company (in some cases) wants to charge a fee. So why are grid-tied solar cells so prevalent? Because, as a previous commenter points out, batteries suck. When you are grid-tied, you are essentially using the grid as a giant battery for the surplus of energy you produce in the middle of the day. And a damn good battery at that. In some cases, that is mutually beneficial for you and the power company, but in other cases, it isn’t, and the power company may be right to charge you for the privilege of using them as a huge battery. Look at the price of house-sized battery banks, and $120 a year will start to sound cheap, especially if you factor in the labor and attention-cost of maintaining the batteries.
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Yes - batteries. It’s very do-able, and a large part of the gripes in the article fall apart because of that. The issue isn’t just the power companies’ business model. It’s also the individuals’ business model, where they want to participate in the power companies’ business model instead of going off-grid altogether. And they would not have been tempted, but for the fact that solar equipment is STILL overpriced and so out of the reach of most people’s budgets. Considering how many people didn’t have a home within their budget at all the past few years, and this makes the overpricing even more pronounced.
So, it’s hard to feel sorry for the people selling solar but using the power companies to make their product marketable at all to homeowners. And, we don’t have this problem everywhere. For example, in FL, the power company is more than happy to tell you they’re converting to solar themselves. It’s simply even more efficient to use solar here than the testing generally claims, though that’s not the case in most places. The power company’ll do just fine without my help.
The other problem with the article is the lengths it goes to in order to bemoan the high cost of ‘necessary’ air-conditioning. Um. Hello. Do you think our grandparents and great-grandparents just curled up and died without A/C? No? Well, maybe that’s because they built for the climates they lived in. And maybe, that because they didn’t just insist on living in climates they couldn’t personally tolerate. I don’t live in the snow, and the snowbirds all go home in the summers, and then gripe about the ‘heat’ when they return here in the fall. Locals smile and nod - happens too often to eyeroll.
I find it truly annoying that people with such extremely First World Problems as the cost of air-conditioning whine about it, but at the same time want to talk carbon footprints and global warming? C’mon - you don’t get it both ways.
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