7 ms·

Fusion power you can install on your roof. Throw in a little storage and a decent climate and the power companies are on track to be thoroughly screwed.

by zaroth 5y ago

irrational 5y ago
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.
- makomk 5y ago
  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.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    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.” https://www.brookings.edu/research/rooftop-solar-net-metering-is-a-net-benefit/ https://www.brookings.edu/research/rooftop-solar-net-meterin...
    - mulmboy 5y ago
      The post didn't describe net metering edit: actually I think it did :) ignore me
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - bob29 5y ago
        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.
    - jjoonathan 5y ago
      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?
      - 5y ago
  - philips 5y ago
    In oregon you can also sign up for community solar, get a state sponsored discount on your bill, and not put up the capital costs to install yourself. https://www.energytrust.org/community-solar/ https://www.energytrust.org/community-solar/
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    Peak solar production is in the summer. Peak electricity demand is driven by AC, primarily when it’s hot... in the summer.
    - edoceo 5y ago
      cascadia summers hardly need AC too, it rarely gets over 35c
      - baumy 5y ago
        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.
        jdminhbg 5y ago
        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.
      - mjevans 5y ago
        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.
      - irrational 5y ago
        That's not true. At least not where I live in the Portland Metro Area. Mid July - early September is pretty much constantly 35+C.
  - irrational 5y ago
    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.
    - handol 5y ago
      > (10 million watts of electricity) 10 million watt-hours of electricity Your system would produce 10 million watts if it did 10 million watt-hours per hour.
      - irrational 5y ago
        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?
        philipkglass 5y ago
        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.
        phonon 5y ago
        You can say 36,000 Megajoules if you prefer :-)
    - seriousquestion 5y ago
      That sounds great. What kind of heating system?
      - irrational 5y ago
        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.
  - tzs 5y ago
    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.
    - neltnerb 5y ago
      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.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  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.
  - irrational 5y ago
    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.
- vostok 5y ago
  What is the ratio of solar panel area to floor area for your home?
  - irrational 5y ago
    The panels cover less than half the roof. The house is a 25x50 foot rectangle. So... Maybe 15 feet x 40 feet of panels?
    - vostok 5y ago
      Wow that's amazing. You've inspired me to look into this for my area even though I've never considered it before.
- graton 5y ago
  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.
  - irrational 5y ago
    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.
itsoktocry 5y ago
>power companies are on track to be thoroughly screwed. I have a hard time making sense of this. I log into HN and see comment after comment about how solar is taking over, then I read articles like this[0], that state that countries heavily invested in renewables, like wind a solar, are going backwards. They are now trying to label natural gas as "green investment" in Germany, otherwise they won't have energy capacity. They have to build more fossil fuel plants. Do you really think "power companies" are "screwed"? [0]https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/eu-indecision-over-gas-green-investment-imperils-supply-security-german-utilities https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/eu-indecision-over-gas-...
- philipkglass 5y ago
  The power-companies-are-screwed story is a bit oversold. The cheapest solar power comes from large solar farms, exactly the sort of thing power companies themselves build and operate. Smaller distributed solar units are a big financial winner in the following circumstances: - If retail electricity prices are moderate/high and excess solar power generation gets a net metering credit. I don't think that this will remain common as solar penetration increases, but some early adopters in different regions will be able to take advantage. - If the electrical companies invested too much in transmission and distribution infrastructure and are now making up for it with high prices per kilowatt hour. This describes the Australian rooftop solar boom and at least parts of California. Note that this can be a financial winner even without retail-priced net metering; you're just thrifting on how much overpriced electricity you buy from the power company. - If the location is far from the existing grid and you're expected to pay to build the intervening connection yourself. Solar plus batteries, even with today's relatively high battery prices, can beat the cost of building that connection. Mostly I expect power companies to survive the rise of solar power just fine. Most solar generation will come from large facilities owned by large companies, not household rooftop units. The over-representation of small rooftop solar units in Germany has contributed to the high cost of their energy transition. I see the German policy decisions favoring small solar units as a carrot used to ensure broad population support for solar power. Maybe it was politically necessary. But the generating costs would be lower had they favored fewer, larger installations.
- flgb 5y ago
concordDance 5y ago
I think you underestimate how complex the powergrid is and how hard the storage problem is. Try running the numbers on how much battery you'd need to run california off solar reliably.

Fusion power you can install on your roof. Throw in a little storage and a decent climate and the power companies are on track to be thoroughly screwed.

by zaroth 5y ago

Fusion power you can install on your roof. Throw in a little storage and a decent climate and the power companies are on track to be thoroughly screwed.

irrational 5y ago

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.

makomk 5y ago
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.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  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.” https://www.brookings.edu/research/rooftop-solar-net-metering-is-a-net-benefit/ https://www.brookings.edu/research/rooftop-solar-net-meterin...
  - mulmboy 5y ago
    The post didn't describe net metering edit: actually I think it did :) ignore me
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - bob29 5y ago
      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.
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    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?
    - 5y ago
- philips 5y ago
  In oregon you can also sign up for community solar, get a state sponsored discount on your bill, and not put up the capital costs to install yourself. https://www.energytrust.org/community-solar/ https://www.energytrust.org/community-solar/
- Spooky23 5y ago
  Peak solar production is in the summer. Peak electricity demand is driven by AC, primarily when it’s hot... in the summer.
  - edoceo 5y ago
    cascadia summers hardly need AC too, it rarely gets over 35c
    - baumy 5y ago
      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.
      - jdminhbg 5y ago
        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.
    - mjevans 5y ago
      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.
    - irrational 5y ago
      That's not true. At least not where I live in the Portland Metro Area. Mid July - early September is pretty much constantly 35+C.
- irrational 5y ago
  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.
  - handol 5y ago
    > (10 million watts of electricity) 10 million watt-hours of electricity Your system would produce 10 million watts if it did 10 million watt-hours per hour.
    - irrational 5y ago
      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?
      - philipkglass 5y ago
        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.
      - phonon 5y ago
        You can say 36,000 Megajoules if you prefer :-)
  - seriousquestion 5y ago
    That sounds great. What kind of heating system?
    - irrational 5y ago
      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.
- tzs 5y ago
  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.
  - neltnerb 5y ago
    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.
rootusrootus 5y ago
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.
- irrational 5y ago
  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.
vostok 5y ago
What is the ratio of solar panel area to floor area for your home?
- irrational 5y ago
  The panels cover less than half the roof. The house is a 25x50 foot rectangle. So... Maybe 15 feet x 40 feet of panels?
  - vostok 5y ago
    Wow that's amazing. You've inspired me to look into this for my area even though I've never considered it before.
graton 5y ago
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.
- irrational 5y ago
  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.

itsoktocry 5y ago

>power companies are on track to be thoroughly screwed. I have a hard time making sense of this. I log into HN and see comment after comment about how solar is taking over, then I read articles like this[0], that state that countries heavily invested in renewables, like wind a solar, are going backwards. They are now trying to label natural gas as "green investment" in Germany, otherwise they won't have energy capacity. They have to build more fossil fuel plants. Do you really think "power companies" are "screwed"? [0]https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/eu-indecision-over-gas-green-investment-imperils-supply-security-german-utilities https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/eu-indecision-over-gas-...

philipkglass 5y ago
The power-companies-are-screwed story is a bit oversold. The cheapest solar power comes from large solar farms, exactly the sort of thing power companies themselves build and operate. Smaller distributed solar units are a big financial winner in the following circumstances: - If retail electricity prices are moderate/high and excess solar power generation gets a net metering credit. I don't think that this will remain common as solar penetration increases, but some early adopters in different regions will be able to take advantage. - If the electrical companies invested too much in transmission and distribution infrastructure and are now making up for it with high prices per kilowatt hour. This describes the Australian rooftop solar boom and at least parts of California. Note that this can be a financial winner even without retail-priced net metering; you're just thrifting on how much overpriced electricity you buy from the power company. - If the location is far from the existing grid and you're expected to pay to build the intervening connection yourself. Solar plus batteries, even with today's relatively high battery prices, can beat the cost of building that connection. Mostly I expect power companies to survive the rise of solar power just fine. Most solar generation will come from large facilities owned by large companies, not household rooftop units. The over-representation of small rooftop solar units in Germany has contributed to the high cost of their energy transition. I see the German policy decisions favoring small solar units as a carrot used to ensure broad population support for solar power. Maybe it was politically necessary. But the generating costs would be lower had they favored fewer, larger installations.
flgb 5y ago

concordDance 5y ago

I think you underestimate how complex the powergrid is and how hard the storage problem is. Try running the numbers on how much battery you'd need to run california off solar reliably.