4 ms·

I'm not sure what the subsidies story looks like for rooftop solar vs grid solar, so I'm not sure if that is distorting the distribution atm. In some places th

by Eridrus 11y ago

I'm not sure what the subsidies story looks like for rooftop solar vs grid solar, so I'm not sure if that is distorting the distribution atm. In some places the cost of maintaining a distribution network may be higher than maintaining a distributed installation/maintenance network (eg Hawaii seems about right), but I don't see that being the case in urban areas. So I feel like it's more likely that (well run) utilities will pick up solar+storage when it becomes cost competitive, and prices should fall, causing the "savings" obtained from rooftop solar to disappear. Particularly, if storage tech does fall as this article predicts, I don't see why it wouldn't just replace peaker plants directly.

toomuchtodo 11y ago
> Particularly, if storage tech does fall as this article predicts, I don't see why it wouldn't just replace peaker plants directly. This is the first target market of stationary utility scale storage (MW class), as current peakers are usually inefficient natural gas combustion facilities that only run ~100 hours/year (versus an efficient, more expensive combined cycle generator).