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This whole machination thing will collapse as soon as the solar panel prices, along with the inverter and battery costs drop low enough to be part of every hous
by Annatar 10y ago
This whole machination thing will collapse as soon as the solar panel prices, along with the inverter and battery costs drop low enough to be part of every house.
Once everyone generates and stores their own electricity, the residential market will go away. This might be another 20 to 30 years off, but it is inevitable. And once factories start building Stirling engines and solar facilities into their designs, the industrial power market will collapse as well. It's a good thing.
- DrStalker 10y agoOnly for people that own their house; renters won't be able to take advantage of this because it's a lot of capital outlay that the home owner gets no benefit from. Same for anyone in an apartment. So the residential market for purchased electricity will never go away, but a significant reduction would still be a huge win.
- toomuchtodo 10y agoRenters can buy solar from those producing it via virtual net metering or community solar garden projects. Doesn't have to be on your own roof to opt in.
- euyyn 10y agoPlus if you offer me a place where I don't have to pay an electricity bill, I'm able to contribute that money towards a higher rent than otherwise.
- ekianjo 10y agoI dont know where you live but in 3 different countries where i have lived till now the electricity bill was never high enough for me to take it in account for the choice of a place.
- icebraining 10y agoIn Portugal you can get a 2 bedroom condo for 300€/month, but a family of three can easily pay 50€/month in electricity alone.
- toomuchtodo 10y agoWhere at in Portugal? Curious so I can take notes as part of my "places I'd like to live for a bit around the world" notebook.
- icebraining 10y agoAlmost anywhere! The only exceptions are the more touristic centres, like the Algarve coast or Lisbon itself, but even there you can find those prices right across the river.
- toomuchtodo 10y agoThank you!
- ekianjo 10y agoOK, then that's some very cheap accomodation. Never lived in a place where you could get such a good deal :)
- icebraining 10y agoIt's not that great of a deal when you earn a Portuguese salary :)
- toomuchtodo 10y agoIn Florida, your electric bill can be several hundred dollars a month in the summer.
- adiabatty 10y agoI'm not seeing a collapse of the market, but I'd expect summertime A/C costs to be less than they would otherwise. Here in California, that's a solid win.
- michaelbuckbee 10y agoThis is an interesting thought. Some apartment complexes already do some form of resold Internet or Cable access. I could see them doing a mass solar install similarly.
- _ph_ 10y agoIf rooftop solar is profitable it doesn't matter too much who owns the house. The owner still could sell the electricity to the renters.
- mseebach 10y agoIndeed, the landlord can probably get away with mandating that his tenants buy a certain minimum amount of power at a certain cost giving him a fixed income to finance the capital outlay against.
- crazy2be 10y agoThere's no way that's true, the benefits of the grid will ensure it always exists in cities. It guarantees 24/7 power for all citizens, smooths out regional hiccups (i.e. if it's cloudy in one region), and allows better allocation of excess resources (i.e. to smelt aluminium). It might, however, go away for cottages/cabins, or other rural buildings. Many people I know have generators at their cottages because the power is unreliable enough, and given the unreliability, the grid must be pretty expensive to maintain.
- ekianjo 10y agoMore and more people live in dense cities where they only rent a small place in a large building. Such places make solar irrelevant. For metropolitan spaces you need power plants anyway.
- visarga 10y ago> Once everyone generates and stores their own electricity, the residential market will go away I think solar panels will be organized in farms and electricity will be delivered by wire, mostly, even for the residential market.
- ajuc 10y agoEven when everybody has own storage and power - networking it makes it cheaper and more reliable. It can be done bottom-up, by building small grids between neighbors and connecting them. With a good automated system for calculating the net flows between people (maybe using bitcoin?) - it could develop into energy-network equivalent of internet. Only international and intercontinental links need support from big organizations and countries.
- porker 10y ago> Stirling engines I'd like to see these more widely used. I keep an eye on http://cyclonepower.com/ http://cyclonepower.com/ (who use the Rankine cycle) but nothing ever seems to come of it.
- pjc50 10y agoI don't think the grid is going away any time soon, but its pricing structure could well change to reflect the new realities.