Complicated

Post #442,002 by scoenye 9/2/22 7:02:10 PM 9/2/22 7:02:10 PM Reply	Complicated Residential arrays are sized to cover annual consumption, but production is rather lopsided. Ours produces about 1.25 MWh in July, but barely registers in January and December (including snow removal.) A battery helps to keep more power off the grid, but from May - September, the grid will have to absorb the excess.
Post #442,004 by a6l6e6x 9/2/22 10:57:34 PM 9/2/22 10:57:34 PM Reply	Yep, similar problem with wind generators. But, if the price of electric power from power companies varied during the day and was used to charge up home batteries when it was cheapest it would help. Also when the solar power at home exceeded the power needs at home, the power companies should accept and credit you for power you feed back to them. Alex "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." -- Isaac Asimov
Post #442,006 by scoenye 9/2/22 11:42:25 PM 9/2/22 11:42:25 PM Reply	Pretty much how self-consumption works here But it is lopsided too: they "accept" power at $0.04/KWh and "feed back" at $0.11/KWh :-/ [OT: and soon to get worse. Our CEO already has managed to double the service charge and wants the credit down to $0.02/KWh. That'll make residential solar here a non-starter for anyone not already locked in.] But Cali's immediate problem is an overloaded grid in the hot months. It may not be able to deal with added solar installations unless they're undersized (i.e. just enough to power the home during the summer months). But then it becomes a toss-up between the installation costs, being able to run the airco in summer, and paying the regular bill October to March.
Post #442,007 by Another Scott 9/3/22 12:59:36 PM 9/3/22 12:59:36 PM Reply	Interesting A guy who goes by Martin on Balloon-Juice talks about solar and electrics a lot. He's a retired CA university administrator of some sort. He thinks, IIRC, that'll the price of electricity will fall to almost $0 for the reasons you cite, but the connection and delivery charges will keep going up, especially if they bury power lines, as they should. He also said that CA has a current pricing structure kinda the opposite of TX. Namely, that the nominal kWh price is high to encourage availability of supply and to encourage conservation, but the net price to small users is low because of rebates and offsets. Lots of complexity in this stuff, but incentives still work and have to be thought about carefully. (He's down on electric car incentives and wants more electric bikes and transit.) Thanks. Cheers, Scott.
Post #442,008 by drook 9/3/22 2:41:21 PM 9/3/22 2:41:21 PM Reply	Re: cars vs bikes Short term we need to encourage EV cars as much as possible. Phase out ICEs and build the charging infrastructure. Bikes are a better future, but they'll require wholesale urban and especially suburban redesign. -- Drew
Post #442,009 by Another Scott 9/3/22 3:15:00 PM 9/3/22 3:15:00 PM Reply	+1 He walks the talk, but lives in SoCal... We know that electric cars are not a panacea - around here about 70% of electricity is from natural gas, so CO2 is still an issue unless we go rooftop solar along with an EV, and rooftop solar goes farther on a bike... But we've got to build the electric infrastructure and get off fossil fuels where we can. Cheers, Scott.
Post #442,013 by boxley 9/3/22 10:48:13 PM 9/3/22 10:48:13 PM Reply	nukes are the answer to coal and gas for electricity but fear and loathing interferes it doesnt help that the russians are deliberately going to let the ukraine plant melt down just for shits and giggles "Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman
Post #442,015 by drook 9/4/22 8:37:46 AM 9/4/22 8:37:46 AM Reply	Greenpeace screwed all the pooches on that I read an interview with one of the founders who said conflating nuclear power with nuclear weapons had kept us on fossil fuels for decades past where we should have been off of them. -- Drew
Post #442,017 by Another Scott 9/4/22 12:44:03 PM 9/4/22 12:44:03 PM Reply	Dunno. I'm against expanding nuclear. Maybe keep existing plants going past their original decommissioning date if it can be done safely, maybe. Look at Vogtle in Georgia: The NRC’s decision takes Vogtle Unit 3 “out of the construction reactor oversight program and moves it into the operating reactor oversight process,” the commission said. Vogtle Unit 4 remains under construction. Vogtle units 3 and 4 are years behind schedule and billions of dollars over their initial budget. The total cost estimate for the two units is now more than $30 billion. Major construction on Vogtle began in 2012 with a $14 billion price tag and expected startup dates of 2016 and 2017. A series of contractor delays, a litany of rework, problems with finishing individual tasks on time and the bankruptcy of reactor designer Westinghouse Electric Co. LLC have doubled the project’s costs. Nuclear has all kinds of problems. It has always been more expensive than promised, even before Westinghouse went under. Plus, there's the perpetual issue of what do you do with the waste? DW - Fact Check - Is Nuclear Energy Good for the Climate? The Alta Wind Energy Center in California has 1550 MW installed capacity and cost $2.9B. $1.9M/MW. Vogtle 3 and 4 each have 1250 MW gross capacity. $12M/MW. We could buy a *lot* of wind and solar for the cost of these nuclear plants. TANSTAAFL, there's no One Weird Trick, and something, something clear, simple, and wrong. My $0.02. Cheers, Scott.
Post #442,041 by CRConrad 9/9/22 5:20:26 AM 9/9/22 5:20:26 AM Reply	"Something, something": No matter the problem, there is always a solution that is... - H. L. Mencken IIRC.
Post #442,043 by drook 9/9/22 9:57:36 AM 9/9/22 9:57:36 AM Reply	Wind and solar still need storage tech, or other baseline generation There are still calm nights where wind and solar won't provide enough. We need either industrial-scale short-term storage, or baseline generation that you can spin up. Smaller nukes would do that. It's likely that if we hadn't demonized nuclear power in the 60s that wind and solar wouldn't be as advanced as they are now. But now that they are maturing, it's time to talk about a reasonable end state. Which I think is wind and solar for primary generation, and increased storage (large scale or distributed, or both), and nuclear that can spin up when needed. And since we're going to need nuclear, we should standardize on one small, repeatable design so we don't have to re-do all the design and inspection and certification work from scratch every time. -- Drew
Post #442,047 by Andrew Grygus 9/9/22 12:41:05 PM 9/9/22 12:41:05 PM Reply	Of course, the real solution is fusion power . . . . . but nobody's gotten it to work yet.
Post #442,051 by drook 9/9/22 8:22:04 PM 9/9/22 8:22:04 PM Reply	Govt knows dilithium is the solution but their fossil fuel lobbyists won't let them talk about it -- Drew

Welcome to IWETHEY!