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Electricity transmission costs are really negligible. You will never be able to produce enough power just from solar panels on your roof, and the cost and compl

• ianschmitz 5y ago
  There are plenty of people making enough power just from solar panels on their roof. It doesn’t work everywhere of course and requires some form of storage or offsetting by powering the grid during the day.
  • tamaharbor 5y ago
    Unfortunately you wind up paying for your local system as well as the grid backup.
    • ikiris 5y ago
      Yes, how awful to support the logistical needs of society and modern infrastructure like power and running water. You don’t live on an island where food and potable water magically appear.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • Teever 5y ago
        Is it so unreasonable for a person to want to be able to reduce their dependency on other people in the name of saving money? Are people obliged to eat at restaurants because it supports the local economy as opposed to buying from the grocery store and preparing their own meals at home?
        • hellotomyrars 5y ago
          Unreasonable? No. But you’re going to pay either way. And you still benefit. That’s ok. If you can afford to have a fully self-sufficient power system you can probably afford the incidental costs associated with any other imposed utilities fees. There is a reason why people pay taxes for things they think they don’t need/use. Tax dollars (not enough) go to schools regardless of if you have children who use the schools or not. That’s okay too. While the connection may not be 100% A to B on your returned value for the school you still exist in the society which stands to benefit from them and it still impacts you. You are also still supporting your local economy (potentially to a lesser degree depending on where you buy the groceries) if you make food at home. It’s not an all-or-nothing proposition here.
    • kumarvvr 5y ago
      So?
      • tamaharbor 5y ago
        Apparently only the rich can afford solar at this point.
        • throwtheacctawy 5y ago
    • sumedh 5y ago
      So why dont the people who have solar cut their grid supply?
  • tehsauce 5y ago
    Not if they are using electric air/water heating and driving an electric car. Edit: I take this back. It depends at least on where you live
    • toomuchtodo 5y ago
      We own 3 Teslas, have a large 4 ton heat pump, heat pump water heater (50gal), a pool pump, and an electric induction stove. Our home is fully self sufficient using rooftop solar, and we consistently produce excess energy sold to our utility.
      • tehsauce 5y ago
        really no gas is being used for any heating? what’s your typical daily production/consumption in winter/summer?
        • toomuchtodo 5y ago
          No gas service. We produce roughly 50-60 kWh daily, depending on the season. 1:1 net metering. Would have to pull consumption from Grafana.
          • tehsauce 5y ago
            Interesting! Guessing you live somewhere fairly warm?
            • toomuchtodo 5y ago
              Sunbelt state. With that said, I have helped install rooftop solar on roofs as far north as Chicago where, when properly insulated, the house can still use a heat pump for heating needs even in the middle of winter (down to -30F) and supports one of the residents commuting 100 miles/day in their Model S. They still have gas backup though. Keep in mind, the top three states by population are California, Texas, and Florida. Heat pumps can meet the needs of housing in these climates, alongside rooftop solar. Produce where you consume when able.
• irrational 5y ago
  > You will never be able to produce enough power just from solar panels on your roof What do you mean by this? Our solar panels produce enough electricity that we never* draw from the local grid. We have a 4,000 sq foot home with 8 people living it. At least a few people are home all the time. We have 2 AC units and 2 furnaces. We have an electric water heater. * Well, we surely do at night, yet we generate so much more than we use that the credits from the overage feeding back into the grid more than compensates for whatever we use at night. Our monthly electric bill is never higher than the $12 hookup fee.
  • dboreham 5y ago
    Smoke + mirrors.
  • tomohawk 5y ago
    If you're grid tied, then that obviates the argument that you can exist on local solar generation. The grid is subsidizing your system. And is your solar on the roof? Do you get up their and clear it off after it snows so you can get power? And what happens when you need a new roof? Did you factor in that cost? When you add in the required extra panels (to account for charging and drawing power at the same time, and for overcast days), batteries, inverters, regulators, permitting, installation, and many other things, you start to realize that renewable power is a lot more expensive than just the panels. And if you have a system on your property, its a lot more hassle than just paying a bill.
    • irrational 5y ago
      Snow? It doesn’t snow here, but it does rain 9 months out of the year. We put on a 50 year roof just before installing the panels. The roof will outlive me.
    • jvvw 5y ago
      You can definitely generate a large percentage of the electricity you use - there are diminishing returns for the last portion because it isn't worth paying for extra panels etc that you will only need for a couple of months of the year. It's a significant percentage more expensive to be off-grid then to generate 90% of your electricity say. It is hard to estimate when a system will have paid for itself because any estimate depends on electricity prices but you are looking at about ten years. So you probably want to be fairly confident you plan to stay in the same place for that timespan. The advice given is to check that your roof isn't going to need repairs before you get them installed. But a roof usually lasts decades and decades so doesn't feel that is a big factor. Our panels definitely don't feel like hassle! There were lots of decisions getting them installed (no permitting where we are for they size of system we have), but now they are up there, they just do their thing.
• livueta 5y ago
  Per unit or amortized? My impression was that long-distance high-voltage transmission lines can be expensive and logistically challenging to get built, e.g. NY/Quebec line thing, even if it eventually evens out. That's less relevant if we're talking the greening of already-established infrastructure, but the hyper-local nature of some forms of renewable generation could be a big advantage in physically isolated areas with rapidly growing populations, like right now in much of the mountain west. Maybe it'd let you get away with something like two high-cap long-distance lines instead of four, even if total grid isolation is unrealistic (and probably undesired) - i.e. if we're stuck building new infra anyway, may as well take advantage of new technologies to minimize the expense and impact of that new infra while maximizing effectiveness.
• cjsplat 5y ago
  In other news, PG&E in California is asking for $3.75 million per mile to underground 10k miles of power lines to avoid fires and that whole manslaughter problem. There is more to power delivery than V=IR
• giantrobot 5y ago
  > Electricity transmission costs are really negligible. Transmission losses are not negligible. Power goes from generator through transmission lines through multiple substations before it reaches a customer. There's a lot of loss that just gets rolled into the retail price of that power.
  • pfdietz 5y ago
    Total transmission loss in the US is about 6%.
• kumarvvr 5y ago
  In US and developed countries, it is about 5 - 8%, but in India, it is about 20%, so the transmission costs form a considerable portion of emissions.
• flgb 5y ago
  Electricity transmission and distribution can be about half the delivered cost of electricity. You can add to this energy losses from centrally generated electricity, which are on average around 10%, but can be as high as 25%. There are already places where locally generated energy is cheaper than utility-supplied energy, and this will only increase over time as the costs of solar and storage continue to decline. Where I live in Western Australia the local utility is trying to get ahead of this trend by cutting the network and deploying stand-alone power systems to customers on the edge of the power grid.
• hnarn 5y ago
  > You will never be able to produce enough power just from solar panels on your roof These types of statements are meaningless, not only because you assume the future of solar power but because they are completely subjective and variable. Since there are already people who live this way, we know for a fact it’s “enough”, for some people. Regarding transmission loss I’m sure you’re correct that it’s not a sensible solution when you’re already on the grid.
• edent 5y ago
  You are wrong. Here is the data from my solar panels on our house in London, UK. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/03/1-year-of-edent_solar-we-are-100-offset/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/03/1-year-of-edent_solar-we-ar... Over the whole year, we generate more electricity than we use. The panels need no maintenance. I guess we could wash them - but the English rain does that just fine. The inverter and panels all have long guarantees so, while they might break, there's no significant cost installed.
• kkfx 5y ago
  It's a bit more complicated than that, actually I produce (far) more energy than I consume from solar (200m² home, 5kWp domestic plant) BUT I produce it just during sunny days witch are many here (south France) but not all and in all case not in the evening/night. Having a reasonably big water heater I heat water from electricity [1] during the day and get it hot enough in the evening and next morning without extra energy needs, so actually the time-limited daily production for hot water can be shifted enough to cover 24h, actually if I do not use that much or install something bigger even around two days. Something similar is valid for some other energy needs, for instance cooking, washing cloves, dishes when the Sun shine means full self-consumption witch does not cover the total, but heavily reduce grid usage. In the summer, at least here, I run air con almost full-power without consumption from the grid, in the evening and night temperature drop far more than enough to not need extra energy. Being on mounting in absence of sunlight I do not normally needs air con also during the day. The real issue is another: grid stability. While I can easily produce enough energy in most days of the year when a load start solar inverter react slowly, when a load drop there is an excess of energy for a little time. ALL kind of generators do like static or slowly changing loads and do NOT like spikes. That's the real issue. In a large enough, but not too large, grid loads tend to remain stable enough, changes are more like "background noise changes". On a microgrid things are far different. until we found a way to waste excess energy, for instance to heat water, with something that can be feed with any amount of power p.v. and eolic generate stability issues and alone can't work enough in a microgrid. Smart grid AND devices that are able to slowly load and unload would be of help, but we do not have many. In infrastructure cost IMVHO if/when we can solve the stability/load issue costs are still lower because any issue is still local and can easily have local backups. Cutting the need of quick restore cut the costs enormously enough to compensate. [1] yes, is LESS efficient than classic solar BUT I still need electricity for other things and since production is enough during the day it's a nonsense for my needs have two kind of plant just for hot water.