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How is it crooked? The utility company pays to builds and maintains the grid infrastructure with the expectation they can use the infrastructure to sell power t

by elago 9y ago

How is it crooked? The utility company pays to builds and maintains the grid infrastructure with the expectation they can use the infrastructure to sell power to consumers. One person selling back some unspecified amount of solar with questionable reliability, without the utility company having any say when the power is provided, isn't exactly a very useful thing for a utility company, so it's surprising they even pay the same wholesale rate. Why not get a basic battery system and use that to power some loads in your house, instead of buying power from the utility company for those loads?

jfoutz 9y ago
You're not allowed to use the electricity you generate. _All_ power you produce is sold to the utility at wholesale. _All_ power you consume is purchased from the utility at retail. Two separate meters.
- elago 9y ago
  Wait what? How? Is this a Tennessee specific thing? This seems absurd and impossible to enforce. If I hypothetically spend a couple hundred bucks on a solar panel, 12v lead acid battery, and basic 12VDC -> 120VAC inverter, put those items on a wagon, and drag it across my yard to use power tools where an extension cord won't reach is the power company going to arrest/fine me? Is it only illegal once I use the batteries/inverter under my own roof?
  - jfoutz 9y ago
    If i understand the article correctly, it's illegal when you wire it to the grid. So, powertools and a battery will be fine. i suppose you could have a big switch outside your house that lets you pick local generation or grid generation, ala a datacenter failover switch. But nobody wants that. Really, i don't think many people care about selling the power back either. But they've made it already, why waste it? What people want is i'll make the first 5 kwh, and i want to buy any extra from the grid. And i don't want a big switch system for each light in my house. Which seems very normal and sane.
    - elago 9y ago
      >But nobody wants that. Oh, that's exactly what I want, and have been researching for myself. I'm taking it even further and planning on being able to switch individual circuits between battery and grid. If that idea is dumb somehow I'd love to know more resources about why. From my perspective it's a better solution than grid tie, but I value resiliency and reliability as well as pure cost alone. If I still lived in a city where the power literally never went out for years at a time, then having a local backup would not be really attractive. And considering the regulations, it seems like the system I'm considering would also be able to basically satisfy the desire for "i'll make the first 5khw". Select a circuit that draws at least 5 kwh/day, run it off batteries until the battery bank voltage drops below a threshold, and then switch over to the grid.
      - jfoutz 9y ago
        > Oh, that's exactly what I want Hah. Existential quantifiers are hard. I’m not an electrician, and that’s who you should talk with. However, it’s way easier to just trip a breaker when the power goes out. The whole neighborhood is drawing from your battery, breaker flips and you are done. A single meter tie is simple. You use what you generate. Any extra makes the meter run backwards. You draw more, you pay for it. The infrastructure probably can’t handle whole neighborhoods doing this. IMHO, they should charge a flat monthly fee for the option to connect.
  - notriddle 9y ago
    If there's an electrical link between your system and the public grid, you're playing by the grid's rules. If you don't want to play by the grid's rules, you can't connect to the grid in any way. p.s. Even if buy-all-sell-all doesn't make sense, requiring your electrical setup to meet grid standards does make sense. It's be surprisingly easy to cause a blackout, or to kill yourself, by messing it up.

by elago 9y ago

jfoutz 9y ago

You're not allowed to use the electricity you generate. _All_ power you produce is sold to the utility at wholesale. _All_ power you consume is purchased from the utility at retail. Two separate meters.

elago 9y ago
Wait what? How? Is this a Tennessee specific thing? This seems absurd and impossible to enforce. If I hypothetically spend a couple hundred bucks on a solar panel, 12v lead acid battery, and basic 12VDC -> 120VAC inverter, put those items on a wagon, and drag it across my yard to use power tools where an extension cord won't reach is the power company going to arrest/fine me? Is it only illegal once I use the batteries/inverter under my own roof?
- jfoutz 9y ago
  If i understand the article correctly, it's illegal when you wire it to the grid. So, powertools and a battery will be fine. i suppose you could have a big switch outside your house that lets you pick local generation or grid generation, ala a datacenter failover switch. But nobody wants that. Really, i don't think many people care about selling the power back either. But they've made it already, why waste it? What people want is i'll make the first 5 kwh, and i want to buy any extra from the grid. And i don't want a big switch system for each light in my house. Which seems very normal and sane.
  - elago 9y ago
    >But nobody wants that. Oh, that's exactly what I want, and have been researching for myself. I'm taking it even further and planning on being able to switch individual circuits between battery and grid. If that idea is dumb somehow I'd love to know more resources about why. From my perspective it's a better solution than grid tie, but I value resiliency and reliability as well as pure cost alone. If I still lived in a city where the power literally never went out for years at a time, then having a local backup would not be really attractive. And considering the regulations, it seems like the system I'm considering would also be able to basically satisfy the desire for "i'll make the first 5khw". Select a circuit that draws at least 5 kwh/day, run it off batteries until the battery bank voltage drops below a threshold, and then switch over to the grid.
    - jfoutz 9y ago
      > Oh, that's exactly what I want Hah. Existential quantifiers are hard. I’m not an electrician, and that’s who you should talk with. However, it’s way easier to just trip a breaker when the power goes out. The whole neighborhood is drawing from your battery, breaker flips and you are done. A single meter tie is simple. You use what you generate. Any extra makes the meter run backwards. You draw more, you pay for it. The infrastructure probably can’t handle whole neighborhoods doing this. IMHO, they should charge a flat monthly fee for the option to connect.
- notriddle 9y ago
  If there's an electrical link between your system and the public grid, you're playing by the grid's rules. If you don't want to play by the grid's rules, you can't connect to the grid in any way. p.s. Even if buy-all-sell-all doesn't make sense, requiring your electrical setup to meet grid standards does make sense. It's be surprisingly easy to cause a blackout, or to kill yourself, by messing it up.