4 ms·
This is the original claim I'm asking about: "a peer-to-peer setup where your house is powering your neighbor down the street doesn't work without some substant
by mwint 4y ago
This is the original claim I'm asking about: "a peer-to-peer setup where your house is powering your neighbor down the street doesn't work without some substantial investment."
Wouldn't it be less current, in general? If your neighborhood gets 20% of its power from solar panels on your neighbor's houses, it seems clear that power lines inbound to the neighborhood would need to carry 20% less load, and lines inside your neighborhood would also carry somewhat less on average (your power consumption has not changed, and presumably your neighbor is powering his house off his own power before exporting the rest to you).
I understand there are probably some topological hot spots, like if one dude has a 1MW solar installation in his backyard, but as a general principle I don't understand what big upgrades need to be done to the grid to support P2P.
- falcolas 4y agoHonestly, I'm not qualified to answer this specific usecase. But here's a few numbers to chew on: An average home consumes just a little over 1kW on average, and its connection to the grid will be built to that tolerance. Solar generation is generally peaks around 5kW for an average house installation; individual panels measure between 250 and 400 watts. An electric car's battery pack can, pretty easily, provide in excess of 100kW (based on their charging rates, and the fact that batteries charge more slowly than they can discharge - about 4.6x slower for Tesla battery packs).
- mwint 4y agoHuh, this is interesting to me. My house has 400A service (or at least that's the main panel breaker size). 400A at 240V is somewhere in the ballpark of 80kW possible draw. Does something bad happen if I actually use my home's full service for an extended period? I understand bad things would happen if everyone on my block did. As a thought experiment, would anything bad happen if a magic wand was waved over a neighborhood, and each individual house now supplied power to the grid in the same amount it would usually be consuming it? A whole neighborhood with normal electric flow, just reversed. Are there components of the grid that are unable to deal with reverse power in the exact same quantity and load distribution as forward power?
- jandrese 4y agoYou would have to spread that load across multiple circuits in your house to avoid tripping breakers/blowing fuses. You might not have enough capacity to absorb all 400A if the original installer oversized the main breaker to allow for additional capacity later. The bad thing is you would get a huge power bill at the end of the month.
- falcolas 4y agoI think the thing I'd be worried about first is the transformers. Would they handle that much power flowing in reverse without overheating/catching on fire? They're already one of the weaker parts of our system; they don't handle overcurrents well (they're largely what folks are concerned would fail due to a solar flare). The second thing would be all the sensors attached to the grid. Would they identify a sudden and dramatic change in flow as a fault, and throw their switches? Also, where would that supply of energy flow? If there's not enough of a sink for that electricity, what happens to the generators? If the sink is outside the local area, what would happen to those transmission lines?