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I just moved into a new construction house in Colorado with a substantial (23kW) solar installation. It’s been interesting to see how much, in the words of the

I just moved into a new construction house in Colorado with a substantial (23kW) solar installation. It’s been interesting to see how much, in the words of the author, ‘feeding bread to pigs’ I have ended up doing. The solar installation (which is probably larger than optimal) is dictated by the policy for the house to be “net zero”, which in turn is dictated by a policy based on the size of the house. (In practice, solar is the cheapest way for the builder to get all the way to ‘net zero’ after the usual decent insulation, windows, etc.) So that’s how I got solar, but now I want to turn it on. Well, this is not in the interest of the utility at all (they lose money), but they still by policy get to ‘approve it’. This required a many-month (and many phone call) process of reviews, approvals, etc. which concluded in the utility activating (installing a meter for) the installation. In total it was maybe 9 months from when the solar was all wired up and sitting in the sun until it was producing any electricity for the world! Now the utility gives me a choice of two billing options. At the end of each month, excess energy I’ve generated can either be put in a kWh bank and rolled over as credit, or it can be paid out. However, the payout is hilariously low (like $0.01/kWh) so of course everyone chooses the bank. But now incentives are all screwed up! Since I easily generate more electricity that I will ever use (see above for why policies drove us to an installation larger that necessary) my household has no incentive to conserve at all. E.g. I am heating my garage with an electric heater because it costs me zero. So the net effect of all of these policies intended to promote conservation are: 1) To drive up the price of housing in an area where that is already one of the big challenges the community is fighting 2) To completely disincentivize any actual conservation 3) To have new solar installations laying fallow for 6-9 months I don’t know what the solution is, but the problems are pretty easy to see.

JaimeThompson 5y ago
>To completely disincentivize any actual conservation If you are running off of 100% solar that isn't a net negative impact to the environment to use more power in nearly every case.
- aftbit 5y ago
  Don't forget the embodied energy of the overbuilt solar system!
  - JaimeThompson 5y ago
    I had, thanks for reminding me.
- mediaman 5y ago
  There are two environmental costs to this setup. The first is that if he weren't frivolously moving electrons through his heater, there would be more to feed to the grid for other people. So there is an opportunity cost of reducing CO2-generating energy production elsewhere. The second is that he installed a much bigger array than optimal, due to regulatory requirements, and that too has up-front environmental consequence. Since he's burning off that excess electricity rather than feeding it to the grid, there's really no redeeming value to an array that's too big.
  - JaimeThompson 5y ago
    True. Thanks for that.
  - nebula8804 5y ago
    Well one thing you can do is try to figure out the approx. carbon output of those extra panels and buy trees to help remove an equivalent amount from the atmosphere so you can offset the carbon output. Of course you are spending money doing this and one must consider the carbon emitted in the process of earning that money. Depending on his circumstances this could be very little or none.
  - KerrAvon 5y ago
    I don’t understand this attitude at all. Your first “cost“ is like saying there’s an opportunity cost to my purchasing bubble gum and putting it on a shelf because other people can’t chew that bubble gum and I’m not chewing it yet.
oogali 5y ago
> I don’t know what the solution is, but the problems are pretty easy to see. In theory, if you were dealing with one entity, it could be pretty easy. But you are actually dealing with multiple entities: - your utility’s transmission subsidiary - your utility’s generation subsidiary - your applicable regulatory entities - your regional grid operator/planning organization > Well, this is not in the interest of the utility at all (they lose money), but they still by policy get to ‘approve it’. This required a many-month (and many phone call) process of reviews, approvals, etc. which concluded in the utility activating (installing a meter for) the installation. Your utility would much rather just say no and be done with it. They similarly have no financial interests in operating a Kafka-esque bureaucracy that requires them to staff entire departments that are a net drain on their revenue. But they are obligated by the state regulator to have a uniform framework and process for electricity generators (which you are now) to interconnect with their transmission network (you to their lines). This pulls you into the category of safety, reliability, and financial requirements which are typically only applied to commercial generators. The primary things the utility (both transmission and generation) wants to avoid is backfeeding and islanding — the former is dangerous to linemen, the latter is dangerous to your neighbors’ equipment. > However, the payout is hilariously low (like $0.01/kWh) so of course everyone chooses the bank. The payout for generation is negotiated by three entities: the regional grid operator which is committing to purchasing capacity, the utility’s transmission operator which charges to interconnect and deliver your power, and the state regulator who has the FINAL say on rates. Additionally, your utility along with every other utility in America is engaged in demand management programs. The TL;DR version is utilities pay tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to vendors over the span of a multi-year contract to REDUCE electric demand. This typically manifests itself to retail customers the form of free Nest thermostats, time of use programs, and subsidized appliance efficiency upgrades (or rebates). If they could redirect this money to small generators like yourself and have the same impact, they would drop their demand management programs in a heartbeat (and the regulatory obligations that come with it). I wrote this on my phone, so I can’t easily list references, but I did use a number of searchable terms that will lead you in the right direction.
- SilasX 5y ago
  Maybe it's just me, but I don't get how any of that translates to a defense of the utilities' overall behavior. (Though I appreciate the context -- thanks!) Why can't they like, suggest to the relevant authorities, that it be refactored along more logical lines, where solar power generators have the appropriate checks for safety (before feeding into the grid), and are paid a significant fraction of the value their power adds to the network? I don't expect them to be Remy-Danton-grade workaholic lobbyist heroes. But if they recognize that there are perverse incentives, why aren't they pushing, however gently and tepidly, for natural fixes to the misalignment of incentives? If you were in a startup that had fundamentally screwed up incentives that prevented the optimal solution, you (like most here) would probably at least start writing the document that outlines what the system should look like, and push a little towards its implementation. So where is that document? Why is their first reaction to create this passive-aggressive Kafkaesque barrier to integrating solar, knowing that it slows down solar roll-out and our efforts to decarbonize? Why can't they answer the criticisms as, "oh, yeah -- you're preaching to the choir here. This is how we'd prefer it work, but we can't get the others to agree." If they actually do that, then I accept that they may be operating in the least bad option. If not, they are making the problem worse, and do merit the criticisms levied at them here.
FabHK 5y ago
This frightful story reminds me of Dan Luu's recent piece on Cocktail Party Theories [1], among other things about the "error of taking a high-level view and incorrectly assuming that things are simple". As so often, the devil lies in the details. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30185229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30185229
nostromo 5y ago
> Since I easily generate more electricity that I will ever use (see above for why policies drove us to an installation larger that necessary) my household has no incentive to conserve at all. ... so? You're generating energy from the sun. Feel free to use it all. We don't conserve energy for fun, we conserve it to protect the environment.
- Dave_Rosenthal 5y ago
  You comment makes sense if I was not hooked up to the grid. But I am. So, if my family conserves, that energy we save offsets someone else’s coal-generated energy and helps the environment. But I have zero incentive to so do because of layers of bad policies.
  - warble 5y ago
    Yeah, in the current market you're correct, but we should be concentrating on creating an excess of cheap power (carbon free of course) rather than conserving.
    - bryceacc 5y ago
      why not both? they literally ALREADY HAVE the excess of cheap power AND can conserve. This is a push for action on policy and incentives
      - halpert 5y ago
        But why conserve? If they find a use for that excess power then they could better their life or the lives of others.
        nitrogen 5y ago
        Yes, exactly this. Iff there is more than enough free solar (or nuclear) energy, then our goal should be to maximize energy used per capita and minimize energy only for specific activities, because energy is a proxy for utility.
Syonyk 5y ago
> E.g. I am heating my garage with an electric heater because it costs me zero. There's very few situations in which pushing electrons through a resistor is the best use of the electrons. Why not build a BOINC farm for the winter or something? You put 1000W through a heater, you get 1000W thermal. You push 1000W through a collection of computers that are old and more or less free, you get... still 1000W thermal, plus compute. If you ask in the right places, you can get some older computers that don't work for people anymore nearly free - think about 1st-5th gen Intel Core stuff, random spinning hard drives, inefficient old 80+ Bronze PSUs, etc. For heat, they all work just fine, and do something productive in the process. If I have surplus electricity, I heat my (solar, off-grid) office in the winter exactly this way - on some random old 4th/5th/6th gen Intel stuff I got cheap to use in this way. I used to run climateprediction.net stuff, but they're out of work, so I mostly throw cycles at World Community Grid during daylight hours.
- fomine3 5y ago
  Heating is not just room temperature. For who prefer radiant heating, resistor heater is easier option. Possibly heat pump based radiant heater is available but temperature is not high as resistor.
  - Syonyk 5y ago
    I assume one heating their garage on "I have more power than I know what to do with!" resistive heating isn't bothering with radiant heat.
qqqwerty 5y ago
The markets and incentives are pretty screwy right now, but overbuilding solar is probably one of our best strategies at preparing for the future in the current moment. There are a number of reasons for this, in no particular order: Batteries still need to come down in cost before they are economical for residential energy storage. But once they become cost effective, they are fairly easy to add to existing installations, where as adding additional panels is much more difficult. EV adoption is going to mean much more demand in the future. And the nice thing about EV's is they are great for flex demand, i.e. we can charge them when the sun is out. Electrification of homes means we need to provide enough capacity to meet demand in both the summer and winter months. Due to solar output being much lower in winter, and because solar is so cheap, it makes sense to build a large enough system to cover winter demand (it might not be the most economical decision right now for the individual, but this is the best path forward for getting to a 100% carbon free grid). Basically, our best strategy in the current moment, with current incentives is to just massively overbuild solar. As you have discovered, this is a bit wonky in practice, especially thanks to utilities pushing back heavily on residential solar (see PG&E). In the meantime, maybe consider taking the $0.01 payout, or get a bitcoin miner, or better yet use your excess electricity to power a DIY algae farm and help remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
- novok 5y ago
  Solar panels have a ~20 year life and are also getting cheaper as time goes on. Maybe building mounting capacity for them is smart, but it's not necessarily smart to more panels than you will properly use. You can buy more panels later if it actually becomes smart to use them and you have a use case.
  - qqqwerty 5y ago
    The panels are dirt cheap compared to the other costs (installation, permitting, inverters, etc...). I suspect that the installation costs and any permit modifications required during the expansion would greatly extend the ROI timeline vs just including the panels in the initial install. If you were really trying to save costs, maybe you could significantly undersize the inverter, as those tend to only last 7-8 years, and you would only suffer losses during the peak hours in the summer months when you are likely to have way more energy than needed. More generally, overbuilding is not really going to be economical right now. We do not have the proper incentives in place for that. But from what I can tell it is our quickest/cheapest path to a sustainable grid, and that likely means we will need to adjust our consumption patterns to account for the absurd amount of excessive power we will have in peak solar months (usually late spring). This means we will need to start developing power intensive applications that can take advantage of free (and possibly negatively priced) power. So if you want to get ahead of the curve, put a massive solar system on your roof and start thinking up interesting ways to use that excess power.
thehappypm 5y ago
Seems like the obvious move is to get an electric car
gwbas1c 5y ago
> I don’t know what the solution is, but the problems are pretty easy to see. In part, you should only be able to get net metering if you have a battery that the power company can control. Thus you benefit from cheaper electricity, and the power company benefits because they can control when the electricity enters the grid.
seb1204 5y ago
Rather than wasting it and never consuming what you have in the kWh bank why not just feed it into the grid? Feed in prices will change as the world moved to more solar. If you are concerned you can buys a battery to ensure you never take from the grid.

JaimeThompson 5y ago

>To completely disincentivize any actual conservation If you are running off of 100% solar that isn't a net negative impact to the environment to use more power in nearly every case.

aftbit 5y ago
Don't forget the embodied energy of the overbuilt solar system!
- JaimeThompson 5y ago
  I had, thanks for reminding me.
mediaman 5y ago
There are two environmental costs to this setup. The first is that if he weren't frivolously moving electrons through his heater, there would be more to feed to the grid for other people. So there is an opportunity cost of reducing CO2-generating energy production elsewhere. The second is that he installed a much bigger array than optimal, due to regulatory requirements, and that too has up-front environmental consequence. Since he's burning off that excess electricity rather than feeding it to the grid, there's really no redeeming value to an array that's too big.
- JaimeThompson 5y ago
  True. Thanks for that.
- nebula8804 5y ago
  Well one thing you can do is try to figure out the approx. carbon output of those extra panels and buy trees to help remove an equivalent amount from the atmosphere so you can offset the carbon output. Of course you are spending money doing this and one must consider the carbon emitted in the process of earning that money. Depending on his circumstances this could be very little or none.
- KerrAvon 5y ago
  I don’t understand this attitude at all. Your first “cost“ is like saying there’s an opportunity cost to my purchasing bubble gum and putting it on a shelf because other people can’t chew that bubble gum and I’m not chewing it yet.

oogali 5y ago

> I don’t know what the solution is, but the problems are pretty easy to see. In theory, if you were dealing with one entity, it could be pretty easy. But you are actually dealing with multiple entities: - your utility’s transmission subsidiary - your utility’s generation subsidiary - your applicable regulatory entities - your regional grid operator/planning organization > Well, this is not in the interest of the utility at all (they lose money), but they still by policy get to ‘approve it’. This required a many-month (and many phone call) process of reviews, approvals, etc. which concluded in the utility activating (installing a meter for) the installation. Your utility would much rather just say no and be done with it. They similarly have no financial interests in operating a Kafka-esque bureaucracy that requires them to staff entire departments that are a net drain on their revenue. But they are obligated by the state regulator to have a uniform framework and process for electricity generators (which you are now) to interconnect with their transmission network (you to their lines). This pulls you into the category of safety, reliability, and financial requirements which are typically only applied to commercial generators. The primary things the utility (both transmission and generation) wants to avoid is backfeeding and islanding — the former is dangerous to linemen, the latter is dangerous to your neighbors’ equipment. > However, the payout is hilariously low (like $0.01/kWh) so of course everyone chooses the bank. The payout for generation is negotiated by three entities: the regional grid operator which is committing to purchasing capacity, the utility’s transmission operator which charges to interconnect and deliver your power, and the state regulator who has the FINAL say on rates. Additionally, your utility along with every other utility in America is engaged in demand management programs. The TL;DR version is utilities pay tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to vendors over the span of a multi-year contract to REDUCE electric demand. This typically manifests itself to retail customers the form of free Nest thermostats, time of use programs, and subsidized appliance efficiency upgrades (or rebates). If they could redirect this money to small generators like yourself and have the same impact, they would drop their demand management programs in a heartbeat (and the regulatory obligations that come with it). I wrote this on my phone, so I can’t easily list references, but I did use a number of searchable terms that will lead you in the right direction.

SilasX 5y ago
Maybe it's just me, but I don't get how any of that translates to a defense of the utilities' overall behavior. (Though I appreciate the context -- thanks!) Why can't they like, suggest to the relevant authorities, that it be refactored along more logical lines, where solar power generators have the appropriate checks for safety (before feeding into the grid), and are paid a significant fraction of the value their power adds to the network? I don't expect them to be Remy-Danton-grade workaholic lobbyist heroes. But if they recognize that there are perverse incentives, why aren't they pushing, however gently and tepidly, for natural fixes to the misalignment of incentives? If you were in a startup that had fundamentally screwed up incentives that prevented the optimal solution, you (like most here) would probably at least start writing the document that outlines what the system should look like, and push a little towards its implementation. So where is that document? Why is their first reaction to create this passive-aggressive Kafkaesque barrier to integrating solar, knowing that it slows down solar roll-out and our efforts to decarbonize? Why can't they answer the criticisms as, "oh, yeah -- you're preaching to the choir here. This is how we'd prefer it work, but we can't get the others to agree." If they actually do that, then I accept that they may be operating in the least bad option. If not, they are making the problem worse, and do merit the criticisms levied at them here.

FabHK 5y ago

This frightful story reminds me of Dan Luu's recent piece on Cocktail Party Theories [1], among other things about the "error of taking a high-level view and incorrectly assuming that things are simple". As so often, the devil lies in the details. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30185229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30185229

nostromo 5y ago

> Since I easily generate more electricity that I will ever use (see above for why policies drove us to an installation larger that necessary) my household has no incentive to conserve at all. ... so? You're generating energy from the sun. Feel free to use it all. We don't conserve energy for fun, we conserve it to protect the environment.

Dave_Rosenthal 5y ago
You comment makes sense if I was not hooked up to the grid. But I am. So, if my family conserves, that energy we save offsets someone else’s coal-generated energy and helps the environment. But I have zero incentive to so do because of layers of bad policies.
- warble 5y ago
  Yeah, in the current market you're correct, but we should be concentrating on creating an excess of cheap power (carbon free of course) rather than conserving.
  - bryceacc 5y ago
    why not both? they literally ALREADY HAVE the excess of cheap power AND can conserve. This is a push for action on policy and incentives
    - halpert 5y ago
      But why conserve? If they find a use for that excess power then they could better their life or the lives of others.
      - nitrogen 5y ago
        Yes, exactly this. Iff there is more than enough free solar (or nuclear) energy, then our goal should be to maximize energy used per capita and minimize energy only for specific activities, because energy is a proxy for utility.

Syonyk 5y ago

> E.g. I am heating my garage with an electric heater because it costs me zero. There's very few situations in which pushing electrons through a resistor is the best use of the electrons. Why not build a BOINC farm for the winter or something? You put 1000W through a heater, you get 1000W thermal. You push 1000W through a collection of computers that are old and more or less free, you get... still 1000W thermal, plus compute. If you ask in the right places, you can get some older computers that don't work for people anymore nearly free - think about 1st-5th gen Intel Core stuff, random spinning hard drives, inefficient old 80+ Bronze PSUs, etc. For heat, they all work just fine, and do something productive in the process. If I have surplus electricity, I heat my (solar, off-grid) office in the winter exactly this way - on some random old 4th/5th/6th gen Intel stuff I got cheap to use in this way. I used to run climateprediction.net stuff, but they're out of work, so I mostly throw cycles at World Community Grid during daylight hours.

fomine3 5y ago
Heating is not just room temperature. For who prefer radiant heating, resistor heater is easier option. Possibly heat pump based radiant heater is available but temperature is not high as resistor.
- Syonyk 5y ago
  I assume one heating their garage on "I have more power than I know what to do with!" resistive heating isn't bothering with radiant heat.

qqqwerty 5y ago

The markets and incentives are pretty screwy right now, but overbuilding solar is probably one of our best strategies at preparing for the future in the current moment. There are a number of reasons for this, in no particular order: Batteries still need to come down in cost before they are economical for residential energy storage. But once they become cost effective, they are fairly easy to add to existing installations, where as adding additional panels is much more difficult. EV adoption is going to mean much more demand in the future. And the nice thing about EV's is they are great for flex demand, i.e. we can charge them when the sun is out. Electrification of homes means we need to provide enough capacity to meet demand in both the summer and winter months. Due to solar output being much lower in winter, and because solar is so cheap, it makes sense to build a large enough system to cover winter demand (it might not be the most economical decision right now for the individual, but this is the best path forward for getting to a 100% carbon free grid). Basically, our best strategy in the current moment, with current incentives is to just massively overbuild solar. As you have discovered, this is a bit wonky in practice, especially thanks to utilities pushing back heavily on residential solar (see PG&E). In the meantime, maybe consider taking the $0.01 payout, or get a bitcoin miner, or better yet use your excess electricity to power a DIY algae farm and help remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

novok 5y ago
Solar panels have a ~20 year life and are also getting cheaper as time goes on. Maybe building mounting capacity for them is smart, but it's not necessarily smart to more panels than you will properly use. You can buy more panels later if it actually becomes smart to use them and you have a use case.
- qqqwerty 5y ago
  The panels are dirt cheap compared to the other costs (installation, permitting, inverters, etc...). I suspect that the installation costs and any permit modifications required during the expansion would greatly extend the ROI timeline vs just including the panels in the initial install. If you were really trying to save costs, maybe you could significantly undersize the inverter, as those tend to only last 7-8 years, and you would only suffer losses during the peak hours in the summer months when you are likely to have way more energy than needed. More generally, overbuilding is not really going to be economical right now. We do not have the proper incentives in place for that. But from what I can tell it is our quickest/cheapest path to a sustainable grid, and that likely means we will need to adjust our consumption patterns to account for the absurd amount of excessive power we will have in peak solar months (usually late spring). This means we will need to start developing power intensive applications that can take advantage of free (and possibly negatively priced) power. So if you want to get ahead of the curve, put a massive solar system on your roof and start thinking up interesting ways to use that excess power.

thehappypm 5y ago

Seems like the obvious move is to get an electric car

gwbas1c 5y ago

> I don’t know what the solution is, but the problems are pretty easy to see. In part, you should only be able to get net metering if you have a battery that the power company can control. Thus you benefit from cheaper electricity, and the power company benefits because they can control when the electricity enters the grid.

seb1204 5y ago

Rather than wasting it and never consuming what you have in the kWh bank why not just feed it into the grid? Feed in prices will change as the world moved to more solar. If you are concerned you can buys a battery to ensure you never take from the grid.