That setup is a dream for a lot of people, but it's not always easy to make happen depending on state regulations (and how powerful the utilities there are)...
Seems like the utilities aren't involved at all?
Cheap storage actually makes grid defection a possibility for a ton of people these days. Especially when you start considering the cost of upgrading 100 amp service to 200 amp or similar. Once you've added a bit of battery, might as well go a bit more, and use your vehicle for additional backup when necessary.
People having 70kWh or more of mobile battery in the garage is going to change the calculation for a lot of people. Many people who would never install solar unless it saves them money will also spend a tooooooon of money on a big truck for aesthetic reasons, and then find that it makes solar a cheaper propositon.
Since the local power company here is only paying 10 cents per kw for solar power (which they resell at greater profit), I decided to run a small crypo miner and I still have excess power on a 22kw system.
I don't know of anywhere where its not legal to be solar powered but there were several thousand in costs associated with engineer plans and permits.
We should be investing solar in lower income communities, as those people could really use cheaper utilities, and any saving they get would immediately go back into their communities.
Good news, these are called "community solar gardens" and they exist all around the USA, here's a large one based in Minneapolis: https://www.cooperativeenergyfutures.com/
Now let's add significantly reducing your own greenhouse gas impact for 20 or 30 years after you buy the demon solar panels (made from dead babies, some right thinking american might say), then putting your own excess electricity on the grid, further reducing fossil fuel generation. So in all thoses cases, that dastardly helpful socialism is for the public good.
Instead, PG&E let the grid fall apart, so now they’re charging crippling amounts of money to people that can’t afford solar.
On the one hand, with the help of subsidies, our house is off-grid capable, and our power bill is $0-50.
On the other hand, there’s a red-tagged neighborhood near by (they built homes despite not having power grid access), and they usually end up having a generator fire take out a few houses every couple of years.
Anyway, I really wish California had a second political party (not the GOP).
The socialist mantra "from those with the ability" includes GP who has the ability to pay for this so that other people's needs can be met.
OP doesn't have to pay the electric bill anymore, but the average residential solar install exceeds $30k before credits. Someone has to pay off that loan...
Not to mention the Chinese factory that manufactured the solar panels is probably dumping toxic waste chemicals into the local drinking water unabated. We're all too busy patting ourselves on the back for saving the world to consider the impact of the whole lifecycle.
They’re moving production of that model to Georgia, for what it’s worth.
Anyway, the lightning looks great. It’s definitely a tempting replacement for our ICE truck.
I think this is a common reason for disappointment in solar incentives. At least half of your power bill pays for transmission, and the half that pays for generation needs to be constructed such that the overall supply must meet the demand at all times, rather than simply supplying a number of kWh per day regardless of instantaneous demand. You can’t consider the “price” per kWh that you pay commercially to be the value of supplying a kWh to the grid, it’s much more likely that the utility is making a (subsidized) loss paying you 10c per solar kWh.
Some conservatives are really stuck on the $7500 rebate, they are so excited to maintain our existing industrial base. They are in extreme denial about the public subsidies of the oil industry industrial complex, when we offer something visible for an EV they lose all reason. All those other public goods were paid by everyone who pays taxes but many people don't benefit from them. Say an elderly retired person doesn't benefit from educating kids, because they are kicking the bucket in the next few years, burn it all down behind them, they might say, reduce my taxes now.
In order for large numbers of homes to go solar, individual homes need to go solar. Are you saying we just shouldn't bother with solar and EVs because not everyone is going to do it? May aswell just stop donating to charity too right?
> Someone has to pay off that loan...
I think the OP is probably paying for the loan themselves. The subsidies are just a small part of the total cost.
> probably dumping toxic waste chemicals...
Again, I think everyone would agree that it'd be better if the solar panel production process was totally clean, but the fact it isn't yet doesn't stop solar being a net win.
Electricity on the local distribution node has a value equal to the cost of generation plus the distribution. That's the value of it, what we pay. So by supplying the kWh locally to neighbors, the grid costs have been avoided. But the value is still the same.
Now, the T&D infrastructure has already been built, and the utility wants to get paid no matter what, but if they were a private company and not a monopoly, they wouldn't have a right to get compensated for their investment no matter what, because every company buys capital at risk. And that's for the good of the economy.
There needs to be some sort of forcing function to incentivize this cheaper form of power delivery, that avoids a lot of transmission and distribution costs. And that forcing function is the price that we pay those who generate the electricity.
The utility of course loses on every kWh they don't generate, because they want to sell more electricity. However, since they have a monopoly, we need other regulation to ensure that innovation that results in lower overall costs actually results in lower prices for consumers.
So far, the utilities have snowed the public and the PUCs such that they get away with murder on this transition. We need a grid, but we do not need the utility. And if the utility can not come up with a business model that works as a regulated monopoly when we have local generation, then we need to change the regulatory model, most likely eliminating the monopoly.
There's a lot to learn from Texas here for the rest of the country.
As an EV6 owner I strongly considered the EV9 - which apparently fixes some of the annoyances of the EV6 and other eGMP vehicles.
Those who are most able to pay for it are those who are paying for the highest initial costs, lowering the costs for everyone else by improvements in the technology, and making it easier for others to adopt later. Early adopters take lots of risk on things not working out well, and learning what things can go wrong and how to fix them (at additional expense, too.)
This is much better than those who are least able to pay being made to shoulder the cost and risks of being early adopters.
Instead of him saying "for net zero cost, I've reduced my carbon footprint, which is great!" he's crowing about "I don't pay anything any more!" That is a private benefit that he loves, that we paid for, and we do not benefit from.
So you are in favour of taking taxes from the poor to give to the rich. Good to know.
Wealthy people's impact disproportionately comes from plane travel. That is highly polluting but nothing is being done about that.
liberals should be stuck on the $7500 rebate, read my separate response about achieving even more climate benefit.
So when I use greed, it's not meant as an insult. Only people who use it as an insult (frequently socialists), as if they themselves are not greedy, need to hear it hurled at them, simply as a proof of "hey, you're a human too, stop thinking you're better than other people".
and we're talking about fiscal policy here, not monetary.
It's just straight up amusing how much you lose your mind over like absolute economic trivialities, because evil renewable energy is a symbol of the liberals.
I’ve been charged for things that should be under warranty. They refused to do a permanent fix for a recall after they did a temporary fix. Dealing with corporate is an exercise in being gaslit and living in a Kafkaesque nightmare.
Kia and possibly Hyundai are in purgatory right now: they’re innovating and making cars that no one else is. Their dealer network, however, can have some sleazy used car sales personalities and make for a terrible experience that can ruin your week.
Pick your poison.
I've been to the US a few times, seen AC hanging out of the windows all over the place.
If you can do that, and Germany can do this, why can't you also do this?
Now sure, it won't cover 100% of demand, but it will help many of the poorest.
That being said, the costs panels themselves make up ~12% of that cost: https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-analysis/solar-in...
Also worth pointing out, in 13 years the cost of panels dropped by almost 90%.
Assuming that SFH remain the standard. Even with ADUs, that changes. (Idea: subsidize only based on the presence of multifamily on a lot?)
>I think the OP is probably paying for the loan themselves.
Hm. Knock-on effect. That homeowner now has to command the income to pay for the loan. That changes his job choice, consumption habits. Maybe his boss feels that he has to pay him more to keep him happy (and not another worker). If he has to sell, price has to be higher in order to break even/get a return. Solar is probably a good thing for municipal expenses, re: less strain on the power grid, but you also get a better turn in that regard converting multi-family or non-residential buildings.
That money should have been spent to fund R&D/capital expenditures to make cheaper electric vehicles and solar cells for everyone, TBH.
The infrastructure has not “already been built” - it is constantly under expansion and maintenance, and the bonds used to fund construction also need to be repaid.
I think your mind frame is that the reason the grid is not smart enough to pay you what you think your excess unreliable power is worth (which you stated to be the entire retail cost of power, including transmission and distribution) is because of incompetence and corruption of the utility monopolies. I think that is a pretty uncharitable take. It’s a hard problem and people generally want reliable and cheap. You can’t make microgrids reliable and plentiful without a ton of diverse generation (which already exists on the macro-grid) OR a ton of storage, both of which are very expensive. It is a problem worth solving but it needs to be considered with a realistic view on what people are actually paying for when they pay their power bill.
1) TFA, with manufacturers using their limited production capacity to target the highest margin customers, the ones that overpay the most.
2) green energy subsidies, in the comment I'm replying to.
In the first case, the price insensitive customers are the ones paying for a build out of capacity, and taking on greater risk while doing it.
But in the comment that I'm replying to, the poster was commenting on "benefits" which is presumably the lower cost of electricity, and those with the least also have the greatest need for lower costs. Presumably this is about residential solar/storage, or at least I interpreted it to be. Lower costs in solar are not having much of an impact at the moment due to the high cost of the regulatory structure that we use in the US; Australia has a far far far lower solar installation cost, <5x per Watt. If there's disparity in the availability of our overpriced residential solar, it's due to those with less generally being renters rather than owners. So their landlord makes the decision about residential solar versus grid electricity.
And for green energy subsidies on utility solar/storage, the question gets even more complicated because falling electricity generation costs are not something that the utility wants to pass on, since most in the US are regulated monopolies and have no incentive to ever lower prices.
In any case, the existence of the subsidy is not the core problem, it's the mismatch between decision makers and beneficiaries.
That money that subsidizes purchases of more expensive products also incentivizes all those factories, the things that make them cheaper in the future.
> That money should have been spent to fund R&D/capital expenditures to make cheaper electric vehicles and solar cells for everyone, TBH
If you can convert this vague statement into a policy with real impacts, there would be tons of people that would love to hear it. Otherwise, it's just wishing the world were different, without a path to completion.
Should we all have free energy? Of course! But how do we do it. I'm all ears and hope that you have come up with a defensible policy. (Though ideally you should have shared it 4 years ago, because it's going to be a long time before we have another shot at setting policy, and everybody was begging for ideas like yours back then.)
It kinda was, it's just that it was spend in China and the US government got the money back by putting tariffs on the imports.
The tariffs are paid by the importer, whose customers also gets a government subsidy paid for by the tariffs that the electorate is told are paid by the exporter, so they get to feel like they're getting a good deal and the voters get to feel patriotic, and why isn't my MSCI China investment doing better…
Grids are sized for peak, and without solar that peak is midday in most places, meaning that distributed behind-the-meter solar makes the grid cheaper.
Utilities, when they argue that solar is worth less, are not arguing on the merits of the issue but only selectively advancing arguments that benefit them. They will never present the totality of the issue.
It is up to others to push back against utilities' narrow views with a more complete view of the picture and what's possible.
$16M for 700 homes = $22,857.14/home
That's not an investment, it's just charity by other means.
The other part is these solar gardens don't stop paying for your electric bill if you move, so it's especially equitable for renters.
Two of these would do more than that (10.5 kW), for (at current exchange rates) $5934, or just over a quarter that price:
https://www.kaufland.de/product/512021383/?search_value=sola...
And even at that price, it's overlapping in price range with the non-solar equivalents.
The funny thing is, I grew up (in the UK) with news stories about how the latest computers were so expensive in the UK that it was cheaper to fly to NYC, buy one, and fly back with it, than to buy local — and now the US is having the same problem in reverse with PV (you might well be able to fit some of the much smaller flexible PV systems I've seen around here in Berlin into oversized luggage).
(Sure, I get that big projects aren't exactly the same as small ones… but usually that makes big things cheaper, not more expensive, even for home PV vs. park PV).
Josh Shapiro's done a bang-up job actually properly allocating the funds we managed to get from the big infrastructure bill, but that's been a major change from how things have been for the last 30 years I've lived here.
Having a residential power connection from the grid allows you to demand up to 200Amps of power, at any time of day or night, 365 days a year, with zero notice. The power company has to build the lines to support that potential demand, whether you use it or not. Over all of California, distributed solar probably has reduced the expenditures we would have need to have made on new transmission and generation facilities compared to a world without distributed solar, but that doesn't affect the baseline cost of a ubiquitous grid that serves from Crescent City to the border with Arizona at Yuma, and all points between.
No they haven't. The grid cost is to build and maintain the wires and equipment. Your solar output isn't reliable enough for them to downsize the grid, so even though selling to a neighbor bypasses the grid it doesn't reduce the cost of having a grid.
What you could do is split out the grid cost, make it be a fixed fee per location instead of per-kWh. That would drop the price of buying a kWh until it's much closer to the price of selling.
But if you do that, someone with a lot of solar panels would end up with even less money in their pocket, since their reduced kWh purchases used to let them skimp on grid fees, and now that no longer happens.
> Mrs. Wells changed her housework habits because for part of the year it costs her more than six times as much to use electricity from 8 A.M. to 11 A.M. and 5 P.M. to 9 P.M. as it costs during the rest of the day.
https://www.nytimes.com/1975/06/29/archives/experimenting-wi...
Current CAISO data shows that overall demand still peaks in the late afternoon to early evening. I picked a day in mid-august, and demand at 7pm is 40% higher (39GW) than at solar noon of 1pm (29GW).
In conclusion, the retail price of your electricity includes the engineering and infrastructure required to make your power delivery reliable most of the time, which is much more valuable than the raw kilowatts coming off of your solar panels.
The United States electric grid data is freely available and pretty neat: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr... Choose a grid or a state to get regional time and you can see that region's peak will usually be 4-7pm. You can even see that weekend peaks are a bit lower, and that there's a second peak at ~10am when people get to work.
Historically in Califorinia, peak load has been in the afternoon, which I count as midday. At least, it's when solar panels are still pumping out a ton of power:
https://www.caiso.com/Documents/CaliforniaISOPeakLoadHistory...
You're posting a random day in winter in California, where overall consumption is low even at its highest, because there's very little demand for cooling. True peak for the California grid is ~50GW, not 25GW like today. You're also omitting all the residential solar that never gets on the grid that drives down midday demand in that graph.
Texas also has midday peaks, here's today and you'll see that even though its winter and very little AC is needed, peak is midday:
https://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/loadForecastVsActualC...
My statement was qualified with "most places." There will undoubtedly be some places with other peaks for which solar will not shave the peak. But in most places distributed solar will shave the peak.
And if you didn't know that, and think that I'm too "us vs. them," then you should go look at the arguments made in regulatory proceedings and IRPs etc.
The utilities invoke preposterous technical arguments all the time. Yes, the grid should be reliable, but making it more decentralized and adding storage all over will make it far more reliable.
Industrial scale battery packs are quite often cheaper than new transmission lines. And we're going to need a lot more transmission or transmission alternatives in the future as more of our energy needs are electrified.
I don't dispute that some distribution might need to be upgraded to fully take advantage of the cost savings that distributed solar and storage present.
But you'll never find the utilities making the case for engineering a more reliable cheaper system, if that system is cheaper, because they will make less money. It would be financially irresponsible for them to make that case, and in fact they must try their hardest to increase the amount of money that is spent on fixed grid assets, that they can directly rate base.
This is not being overly "us vs. them" this is simple economics and incentives of regulated monopolies. Utilities are great at responding to the financial incentives put before them. Sometimes those financial incentives are making the grid reliable. But I don't know of a single regulated monopoly that has been financially incentivized to lower grid costs.
https://www.caiso.com/Documents/CaliforniaISOPeakLoadHistory...
(Note also in your visualisation that all times are Eastern and should be adjusted for different localities. And if you go to a summer week rather than a winter week, you'll find the true peak, which is much higher, and which has a pretty standard curve with a peak that overlaps sunlight hours.)
i didn't lose my mind, all of you have. i just "pointed out"
in terms of "the slightest clue about what you're pretending to know about", i was raised from the crib as a good liberal and socialist, i understand the perspective intimately, then I studied economics at MIT and realized I didn't need to change my morals/sensibilities at all, the free market achieves what socialism is trying to achieve, and then I studied more economics in grad school at MIT... please, tell me your background, and like you suggest, no "pretending to know about"...
Transmission savings are the big thing with distributed solar and storage. And transmission is the bottleneck for most projects looking to connect to the grid right now. Not only is it expensive, it's slow to build.
They have this summer's data too, though no way to link directly, and it still peaks at ~7pm: https://i.imgur.com/16mssuH.png . Using the 16th as an example, a peak demand of 44,008 megawatthours @ 20H PDT. Comparing that to their generation graphs, which you can separate into sources, like solar. On the 16th, peak solar generation is at 11 @ 13,201 megawatthours. By 6PM, it's down to 853 megawatthours. By peak time, it's nothing. My own residential solar matches that curve on that date.
It's not that they have sunk costs, it's that they have ongoing costs. The grid cost does not drop when you send excess solar to a neighbor. To actually avoid grid costs you need to reduce your max watts in a way that the power company can rely on.
> Transmission savings are the big thing with distributed solar and storage. And transmission is the bottleneck for most projects looking to connect to the grid right now. Not only is it expensive, it's slow to build.
Storage can save on transmissions but it has to be set up the right way. Solar and storage working together can do even better, but also have to be set up the right way. Solar by itself doesn't make a big difference in peak transmissions.
Or we could put that solar on the grid so everyone could benefit from it
One group has insufficiencies that need to be solved, the other, excesses. Lessening dependence on the grid for the ones for whom cost is not a barrier lowers costs for everyone.
Now, having some sort of solar community energy bank would eventually be novel, akin to the replaceable battery charge stations for electric scooters in the Pacific Islands. Take your high density 12VDC canisters up, slot them into the locking wells, and get a text when they're full. Dock them onto your appliance circuit when you're home, and enjoy grid-free power for your home or vehicle.
I don't even know what a soda or single roll of toilet tissue costs, but I'd probably be horrified by it because I can afford not to spend money.
The government gets my money on occasion, but they have a chunk of the nation on a subscription plan.
The percentage of energy going to my house which was generated by solar continues to go up every year. And yet I haven't installed a single solar panel. Strange huh?
The price for installed solar in the US isn't high because of the panels. Its high because of the labor costs.
Mid day is the middle of the day, as in noon. You might as well be arguing that you define three as five.
5PM is not "mid day". So you're cherry-picking time frames, making up definitions for things, and still not showing a mid day peak energy use, you're showing a late afternoon energy use.
Well, the USA is one of the few places left that still uses that, so you could…
But even without that, the linked product is the kind of thing two untrained people can do 95% of the installation in an afternoon, with the rest being a trained professional checking the wires and doing the final connection to the grid.
If this was done in a place that already has nearby grid access:
8 h * {$25/h unskilled labour} + 0.5 h * {$50/h electrician} = $225 per one of those, assuming you're doing enough of them to hire at full time rates not contractor rates.
And that's a car port, it isn't designed for optimal installation time.
If they need to also add their own connection to a more remote grid, well I've seen quotes of €10k for stuff like that around here, which is still cheap enough that you could do each of those on an entirely separate new not yet connected plot of clear land at domestic rates and still be cheaper than the quoted example in the USA.
And that's a car port kit, its a lot simpler to install than installing on a roof of a potentially multi-story house with a steep incline.
It is also completely excluding an inverter and all the additional wiring materials needed to connect it to your house or the labor of modifying your home's wiring. Its literally just the panels and a frame. So add another ~$2k to your prices here, at least. So really more like $8k for materials.
> If they need to also add their own connection to a more remote grid, well I've seen quotes of €10k for stuff like that around here
Yes, they'll need to tie into the grid, so you're really comparing $18k to $22k and continuing to ignore a lot of labor costs.
Similar prices can be found for just buying panels here in the US as your example link. As someone who has actually looked at solar proposals for an installation on my home, it's not the cost of the panels that's keeping me away from it. It's how much people are wanting to charge to put the panels on my roof, and the fact I don't want to be doing that labor myself at the moment.
Our government had the bright idea to bake those issues - particularly the strict rich/poor, white/black, good/bad dichotomy - into our housing policy, so now, any divergence from the local (affluent) norm isn't just a funny quirk; it conjures up anxieties associated with the Civil War, white flight, immigrant ghettos, eminent domain, urban decay, Superfund sites, etc.
People here are desperate not to be on the wrong side of the tracks, as it were, and so they'll submit themselves to no small amount of what looks like insanity to the rest of the world, in order to not live somewhere thought of as "sketch". Not entirely irrational, mind you, since these kinds of perceptions are often what determines whether or not a neighborhood receiving amenities like "parks" and "school funding" and "a place to buy food."
Circling back: window AC and PV signal to some people that folks in the neighborhood are too poor to afford central AC or roof panels (or to not "need" solar, budget-wise). These people (and the people who want to sell their homes to the first group) will fight you to prevent that perception from taking root. It wouldn't be as much of a problem if so much wealth wasn't tied up in real estate (the buildings, not just the land), but that's where we are.
I don't know anyone who bothers discharging their home batteries to the grid. The rates they get wouldn't cover the cost of the wear and tear to their batteries.
Also, I just checked my bills and my service fees are a flat amount independent of how much electricity I pull from the grid.
At contractor rates.
Hence me saying "assuming you're doing enough of them to hire at full time rates not contractor rates".
That said, I seem to have wildly over-estimated how much electricians get paid, at full-time rates the average in the USA is only $27.79 per hour: https://www.talent.com/salary?job=electrician
> And that's a car port kit, its a lot simpler to install than installing on a roof of a potentially multi-story house with a steep incline.
So do that then.
> So really more like $8k for materials.
You're being ripped off.
You all are.
> Yes, they'll need to tie into the grid, so you're really comparing $18k to $22k and continuing to ignore a lot of labor costs.
No, that's the price if you're putting each pair of these onto its own, new, grid connection.
If you've already got a house, you already have a grid connection.
If you're building a solar park, you share the same grid connection for all of them, you don't put a completely separate connection on each 10 kW because that is a pointless waste of money… but if you did, it would still be cheaper.
And if I'm talking about prices being paid by the company installing them, I'm still needing to do a lot more labor than 8 hours of unskilled labor and half an hour of an electrician and a pile of solar panels. I'm not going to make many deals if I don't have any salespeople, people aren't going to know to hire me if I don't have any advertising/referral business going on, I'm not going to have much continued business if nobody is answering the phone, people are probably going to sue me if I don't have people running support operations, I'll need a good bit of insurance & bonding for all of this, different sites have different needs so someone will have to actually design out the system, people need to handle all the permitting requirements and deal with those processes, I'll probably need to have accountants to help manage these cash flows, my costs for their labor is a good bit more than what they see on their paychecks, etc.
I swear it's like you've never actually looked at the costs of running a business.
Once again, the price of the panels isn't why it cost an average of $22k per home in that example.
> You're being ripped off
Please show me your $0 10kW inverter plus $0 for several hundred feet of decent gauge wire, enough for handling this 10kW plus plenty of safety margin.
You're just seeing the data for today. You can select any day you want.
Let's look at a really generous day for you, the peak annual usage from 2020: 47,121 MW on August 18 @ 15:57. On this day, the peak was indeed at 15:57. However, the demand remains high for hours past that. Demand is above 99% of peak until 5:30pm and above 90% of peak until almost 9pm. Solar production is down to under 1000MW by 6:45pm. Thus we have over 2 hours of near-peak demand when solar is not helping at all. No amount of additional solar (without batteries) will ever cover that 6:45-9pm period of high (if not peak, but it's close) demand.
