You don't even need a decent climate. I live in Portland Oregon where it is cloudy for 9 months out of the year. In Portland, anything we generate beyond what we can use is fed back into the grid and given to us as a credit. We generate enough solar power credits that we don't pay anything for electricity year round other than a $12 monthly fee to be tied into the grid.
If they're crediting you for that energy at anything close to the retail electricity rate you're effectively getting a really generous subsidy. Because solar is so cheap but only produces electricity sometimes and at pretty much the same time everywhere in the region, the actual cost of electricity when your solar panels are producing heavily and feeding back into the grid is much, much lower than when they're not producing and you're a net consumer of grid power. Not only that, but it's a subsidy that's likely paid to wealthy people who can afford to install solar by poorer people who can't.
These fallacies against net metering have been disproven. See the linked citation for details.
“Nevertheless, by the end of 2015, regulators in at least 10 states had conducted studies to develop methodologies to value distributed generation and net metering, while other states conducted less formal inquiries, ranging from direct rate design or net-metering policy changes to general education of decisionmakers and the public. And there is a degree of consensus. What do the commission-sponsored analyses show? A growing number show that net metering benefits all utility customers.”
That link of yours states again and again and again that net metering doesn't cost shift as if this were a general principle, but if you look at its sub resources you see support for very different conclusions, namely:
* Solar doesn't yet have enough market penetration for the duck curve to be a problem. We're still in the early days where cutting peak usage benefits everyone.
* Social good rationalizes the cost shifting
"It hasn't happened yet" and "it's for the best" are VERY different arguments from "it won't happen." Why the deception? Shifting the grid's role from generation to storage is not impossible. Barring that, distributed storage is not impossible. Making PV panels cheap was a huge but tractable step that is now behind us. Figuring out storage is the second huge but tractable step and it's well on the way to being solved. In the meantime, it absolutely makes sense to deploy PV at least until it starts cutting into base load, and from that point the economic case for storage becomes clear and obvious. The facts are on our side, so why lie?
I’m satisfied with the data and contents of the post to substantiate my assertion. You are free to cite your own sources if you disagree. I believe the Brookings Institute to be a reportable source.
My intent in no way is to deceive or put forth bad data.
Your source doesn't support your assertion, but I suppose you're free to ignore that little problem if you want to.
In the meantime, we should be talking about how best to make storage happen, because anyone who isn't busy playing semantics games can see that storage (critically: paying for storage) is going to dominate the back half of this transition.
IMO, the solution isn't storage. It's ways to use cheap energy. As solar energy becomes an increasingly large part of the grid, there are huge incentives to re-structure electricity demand around when solar is producing heavily. One possible way this plays out is that we start doing things like water desalinization to produce fresh water, and electrolysis to produce hydrogen during the day when electricity is free, and getting heavy energy industry like aluminum smelting to shut off in periods where demand is higher. Some amount of grid storage will be necessary, but I'm guessing a lot of the solution will be shifting demand rather than supply, since it's a lot easier to turn off machines than to store enough electricity to keep them on.
The claims were being made that net metering currently has a set of issues that makes the referenced policy a generous policy. The link provides seems plenty to refute that claim to me. You seem to be moving the goals posts here.
If you combine net metering with time based pricing, it seems like there is plenty of incentive for smart people like you to build energy storage and make money off of arbitrage.
There is, but storage isn't cheap enough yet. Tesla powerwalls are still pretty expensive, at around $8k each, from what I hear. If they can get the cost down by another factor of 5-10, I think you'll see a huge acceleration in adoption and possible arbitrage.
Why isn't it net metering? It seems to be net metering whether you count in kilowatt hours or dollars.
They are selling back to the grid, with a smart meter that counts power in both direction. Theres many types of policies in net metering like details about what rate you buy and sell power to the utility. In some less favorable places, the grid sells you power at retail prices but buys it back from you at wholesale. In these places, to achieve a $0 utility bill you would be generating more during the day than you consume at night. If your net metering deal paid back at retail rates you may get a credit, but as far as i understand each utility can offer totally different net metering deals, if they offer it at all.
Our system generates about 10 MWh per year (10 million watts of electricity). Our house isn't that big (1800 sq feet) and we have all LED lights and the highest energy saving appliances. We don't use anywhere near that many watts in a year. Our surplus credits easily cover our energy costs during Winter.
Yeah, I don’t know the right way to write it. When I look at the app the reports our solar panel output and say I just want the output for all of 2020, it reports a figure just shy of 10 MWh. The previous years were close to the same figure. How do you say what the total output from a system was over an entire year?
10 megawatt hours is fine. 10 megawatts is incorrect. It's a mistake of units. A MWh is an energy measure while a MW is a power measure. That's what the parent was correcting.
Natural gas furnace. I probably would have gone electric if we had installed the furnace after the solar panels went in. But, our natural gas bill is so small that I don’t really worry about it.
If that furnace is "smart" enough, you could add electric heater as additional external heat source. My wood pellet furnace has such options, but I think that if I simply added some electric heater into main loop, it would just work less (it can change it's output power from 24kW down to 7kW or just turn off burner if main loop is hot enough).
Oregon's electricity is only 0.75% from solar, which should mean that variations in solar output have almost no effect on the price or production levels.
I would hope at such small levels of production, the proximity to the user would reduce power losses and be automatically corrected for by the timing generators so as to shift production closer to the user.
It does seem like close to retail rates aren't outrageous to believe are fair for small quantities. I think you'd need to get to the point where generation was a significant fraction of local usage before transmission was costly or inefficient... but by then you'd likely find batteries cheap enough to also just load shift by physically storing the electricity in small buildings around a city.
Maybe the retail rate should go down, but it does make some sense for a tiny generator right next to or even in the same building as a user should get closer to retail rates than generator rates. If enough people did it they could eliminate transmission lines entirely and just use batteries.
Peak solar production during the middlish periods of the day in summer.
Peak demand (if your grid is summer peaking - some peak in winter) is likely in the afternoon when people get home, right as solar output starts to taper off.
It all varies a bit by culture and climate, but I think this is largely true.
This pattern may have changed or be different in different states, but I did participate in a project (about 15 years ago) where we essentially agreed to offline a very significant facility including a datacenter at short notice in exchange for a rebate and capital funds.
In our case I definitely recall most of those outages happening midday as it screwed up lunch. There were other factors as well (I think transmission efficiency diminishes as you approach capacity, so localized issues are a thing)
You can easily offset that changing the angle the panels are installed at. People think in terms of maximum total output but tracking solar show significant power is available late in the day.
As solar keeps getting cheaper the question shifts further from how do I get maximum power to how do I maximize my investment. Which is a slightly different and far more complex optimization problem.
Yeah you're right. But, tracking solar (and solar with fixed positioning that maximises energy output later in the day) largely applies for more sophisticated sites such as commercial and industrial. I've seen such setups that forego around 20% of solar energy production to maximise production during more expensive time of use windows (including offsetting time of use demand charges).
Residential installations are usually setup to maximise the total output, and often the positioning is constrained by the geometry of the roof. Residential solar installers are really in a race to the bottom.
One up and coming trend which might have a significant impact on this is for residential retail tariffs to be directly linked, at 30min resolution, to the wholesale energy market prices.
> One up and coming trend which might have a significant impact on this is for residential retail tariffs to be directly linked, at 30min resolution, to the wholesale energy market prices.
I just signed up for amberelectric.com.au. They offer the wholesale power rate (set every 30m by the electricity market authority) and the wholesale solar power feed rate, for a $15/month flat fee.
They avoid the Texas problem by limiting the maximum rate to be no more than the government regulated "default power offer" over the entire year.
Planning on getting both solar power and a battery system in the next 12 months, changing my electric hot water to a heat pump and moving to hydronic heating and split system airconditioning.
I'm also going to install a second circuit back to my smart meter that will connect to my apartment garage space so that an EV charger can be installed in the future.
yeah - you shift the risk from the retailer onto the consumer.
Usually these deals will have some kind of faux-insurance arrangement baked in where the consumer will never have to pay more than something like $300/MWh
35 Celsius = 95 Fahrenheit for my fellow yanks. That seems like a pretty extreme line to draw for "when do I need AC".
I don't know about you, but the indoor temperature above which I start wanting AC is around 72-75F, or ~23C. Lots of the PNW gets over that for much of the summer. It didn't used to be this way, but I've wanted AC in Seattle for at least a few weeks a year, sometimes as much as 6 - 8 weeks, since 2013 or 2014. Particularly because the insulation in a lot of apartment buildings meant to make them more efficient in winter causes them to heat up like a furnace in a hot summer.
It can really depend on how much air circulation you can get. In a high rise, you will need AC, but if you’re in a house you can easily manage with open windows and ideally a fan in your roof that can pull air up and in. There are very few days even in Portland where the temps don’t fall into comfortable as soon as the sun sets.
At least by the sounds and oceans it's a rather humid heat.
AC sure is a quality of life if not a necessity of life... Though if our homes were built for this climate rather than by Californian companies using shoddily adapted designs it might be another story.
I still can't make the numbers work for me, when I try, it seems like I'm always better off keeping my money in stocks and paying PGE to build more renewable generation.
I responded to someone else, but my response also fits here:
At the time we had them installed, both the federal government and Oregon had very generous subsidies.
We do have a loan to pay off the balance not covered by those subsidies, but the monthly payment on the loan is about $40 cheaper per month than our electric bill was prior to having them installed. So, even with the interest on the loan, we are paying significantly less for our monthly electric usage. Once the panels are paid off, our bill will just be $12/month.
What is your expected payback time on the investment of solar? It seems like in Oregon it will take a long time with the amount of sunlight and the relatively cheap energy costs.
At the time we had them installed, both the federal government and Oregon had very generous subsidies.
We do have a loan to pay off the balance not covered by those subsidies, but the monthly payment on the loan is about $40 cheaper per month than our electric bill was prior to having them installed. So, even with the interest on the loan, we are paying significantly less for our monthly electric usage. Once the panels are paid off, our bill will just be $12/month.
