3 ms·

I'm running on partial "utility solar". Cost varies wildly over the year, from 1x to >3x vs regular electric; average is 1.5x ... but that's with a reliable ins

I'm running on partial "utility solar". Cost varies wildly over the year, from 1x to >3x vs regular electric; average is 1.5x ... but that's with a reliable instant backup supply for every second solar supply is insufficient vs demand. During summer, I run my office 100% solar. It's a fun exercise, but it's deeply reliant on batteries. Storage capacity is a cliff: run out of stored power, you're done. This "brick wall effect" is grossly under-appreciated by solar proponents. There's a funny thing about supply-and-demand: so long as supply is sufficient, costs are reasonable; when supply actually hits zero, and demand isn't zero, economic badness follows. Solar hits zero daily; batteries have a hard limit of a few hours/days.

jillesvangurp 7y ago
You can solve that by installing more solar. Also, if you have an EV, it comes with a (typically 60kwh) battery. If you have the right systems installed, you could power your house from that for a few days. For reference, e.g. a tesla powerwall would come in at only 13.5 kwh (i.e. less than 25%) and you could buy a more expensive EV with 75kwh or even more. So, you could power your house using your car for a while. If you have the square meters, you could install enough solar to charge that battery capacity. It's just a matter of what still makes sense in terms of cost. Doing stuff like this is currently expensive but will eventually drop in price to the point where it stops being a cost reducing supporting technology and can actually become your main source of energy together with maybe a more expensive option as an emergency fallback based on some grid level solution (wind, more solar, tidal power, nuclear even, gas, etc). It's just a matter of $/kwh of battery & solar panels. Both are still coming down in price. The reason people are putting this stuff in their homes is that they are already on the right side of that price compared to the grid.

jillesvangurp 7y ago

You can solve that by installing more solar. Also, if you have an EV, it comes with a (typically 60kwh) battery. If you have the right systems installed, you could power your house from that for a few days. For reference, e.g. a tesla powerwall would come in at only 13.5 kwh (i.e. less than 25%) and you could buy a more expensive EV with 75kwh or even more. So, you could power your house using your car for a while. If you have the square meters, you could install enough solar to charge that battery capacity. It's just a matter of what still makes sense in terms of cost. Doing stuff like this is currently expensive but will eventually drop in price to the point where it stops being a cost reducing supporting technology and can actually become your main source of energy together with maybe a more expensive option as an emergency fallback based on some grid level solution (wind, more solar, tidal power, nuclear even, gas, etc). It's just a matter of $/kwh of battery & solar panels. Both are still coming down in price. The reason people are putting this stuff in their homes is that they are already on the right side of that price compared to the grid.