Understanding Solar Energy

Great article. Unfortunately his California duck curve graph only shows 2023. A graph including 2024 shows how batteries are dramatically flattening the duck curve:

https://cdn-ilcjnih.nitrocdn.com/BVTDJPZTUnfCKRkDQJDEvQcUwtA...

https://reneweconomy.com.au/battery-storage-is-dramatically-...

Hot water tank heated by electricity and powering on at noon is flattening curve. You can say hot water tanks are cheapest, simplest and fastest deployed energy storage device.

Solar + hot water tank can provide any house in US with 100% solar hot water (from PV!) for 80% of time, remaining 20 % of time you can have 10-99% solar heated water.

So we should focus on saying to people that if they buy solar and add electric heating element to hot water tank, then PV system will pay itself much sooner and their batteries will last longer. Becasue it is known and predictable load, you need hot water every day. And hot water is order of magnitude more energy then TV, lighting...

By lowering household usage like this we can make energy transition faster, cheaper.

Also proper construction - house heated only 10 days in a year - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KHScgjTJtE

Converting a gas water heater to electric and/or solar is one of the best bang for the buck on decarbonization too. Something that should be done before buying an electric car or swapping out your gas furnace for a heat pump. Though I'm terrible at following my own advice, I still have a gas water heater, just because I needed to replace my car and furnace before I needed to replace my water heater. That said, the sunk cost fallacy applies to carbon emissions just as hard as it does to dollars so I have little excuse for not replacing it except laziness (and space on the breaker panel...)

Problem being that electric water heating is a lot more expensive in e.g. Germany where gas prices are lower than electricity prices per kWh delivered. (~12 vs. 39 eurocent per kWh)

So blindly converting a gas water heater to electric will roughly quadruple your water heating cost.

solar pv heating.

my PV system is paid after 6 years of use. if i use current prices for energy. last two years market/spot prices were even higher than that. so in reality it was paid even sooner.

and pv system does not disappear as soon as it is paid, it continues to work. so i have next 4-10 years remaining of lifetime of a inverter.

so for next 4-10 years i am having 100% REALLY REALLY FREE hot water, again for 80% of time... etc vis original comment.

when inverter ends its life in next 4-10 years then i will buy new one, without changing panels. so payback time will be even quicker.

calculations/models of biggest engineers, experts, etc. do not involve thinking about using pv system after it is paid... ( not insult, just exposing state of things )