4 ms·

Unless every home is completely off the grid, you’re going to need to pay for most or the majority of that transmission and distribution anyway. Peak winter and

Unless every home is completely off the grid, you’re going to need to pay for most or the majority of that transmission and distribution anyway. Peak winter and summer I also would imagine many or most residential deployments aren’t going to cover their own need, unless they’re incredibly over built with massive batteries. In any case, I should check out your Christopher Clack reference.

nerdbert 3y ago
You don't need as much grid capacity if houses have their own generation and storage.
- kalleboo 3y ago
  The grid still needs to be built for the worst case - houses aren't going to have days of storage for a week of cold weather with dark clouds
  - fragmede 3y ago
    Worst case is months. In the depths of winter you need energy captured from the sun during summer. That's a drastic rethinking of the scale of storage.
    - kalleboo 3y ago
      Absolutely. For the sake of the topic of discussion I was trying to think of Californian conditions but for places like Sweden you'll need completely different solutions (Sweden has been powered 100% on Hydro+Nuclear for decades now so that's one way)
epistasis 3y ago
The modeling is a few years old now, but here's a podcast episode diving into details: https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-146-why-local-solar-costs-less/ https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-146-why-local-sol... (And of course, perhaps one modeler can get it wrong. But over here in California where the majority of our sky high electricity cost is from T&D, it definitet feels very true. And last national stats I saw had T&D as higher than generation costs)
_aavaa_ 3y ago
As long as the houses are still connected to the grid you will indeed by paying for distribution costs. But I think that you should expect to see transmission savings since you'll have more of the demand met locally.
- XorNot 3y ago
  Why? If there's any possibility those homes will draw 100% of their power from the grid on any given day, then the cost of infrastructure will be pretty much the same since a grid failure is a disaster. And there is a 100% chance they will, like my home is today, because 11kW of solar is making about 800W due to cloud cover which has persisted most days of summer.

nerdbert 3y ago

You don't need as much grid capacity if houses have their own generation and storage.

kalleboo 3y ago
The grid still needs to be built for the worst case - houses aren't going to have days of storage for a week of cold weather with dark clouds
- fragmede 3y ago
  Worst case is months. In the depths of winter you need energy captured from the sun during summer. That's a drastic rethinking of the scale of storage.
  - kalleboo 3y ago
    Absolutely. For the sake of the topic of discussion I was trying to think of Californian conditions but for places like Sweden you'll need completely different solutions (Sweden has been powered 100% on Hydro+Nuclear for decades now so that's one way)

epistasis 3y ago

The modeling is a few years old now, but here's a podcast episode diving into details: https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-146-why-local-solar-costs-less/ https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-146-why-local-sol... (And of course, perhaps one modeler can get it wrong. But over here in California where the majority of our sky high electricity cost is from T&D, it definitet feels very true. And last national stats I saw had T&D as higher than generation costs)

_aavaa_ 3y ago

As long as the houses are still connected to the grid you will indeed by paying for distribution costs. But I think that you should expect to see transmission savings since you'll have more of the demand met locally.

XorNot 3y ago
Why? If there's any possibility those homes will draw 100% of their power from the grid on any given day, then the cost of infrastructure will be pretty much the same since a grid failure is a disaster. And there is a 100% chance they will, like my home is today, because 11kW of solar is making about 800W due to cloud cover which has persisted most days of summer.