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> Decentralized solar plus batteries is already cheaper than electricity + transmission for me at my home in the US. The only thing stopping me is the permittin

> Decentralized solar plus batteries is already cheaper than electricity + transmission for me at my home in the US. The only thing stopping me is the permitting hassle or the contractor hassle. Does decentralized solar plus batteries give you same amount of reliability? How many days without sunny weather can you survive without having to change your energy use habits? Each 9 of reliability for infrastructure is EXTREMELY expensive. And grid has a lot of 9s.

roywiggins 1y ago
The grid has a lot of 9s, but in a lot of places losing power for a day or two after a storm is not unusual at all. The grid per se being fine but your actual neighborhood being dark for a couple days is a pretty common experience in some places.
- tekchip 1y ago
  Can confirm. I live in a US city and the only 9 involved is maybe the very first number. I've lived here just over a year and we've had 1 full day without power and probably 8 to 10 short outages between a few seconds and several 10s of minutes. I'm adding batteries and solar permitting be damned.
  - sethherr 1y ago
    Wild! I’ve lived in Chicago and San Francisco and have never lost power for more than an hour. And can’t remember the last time it went out at all, maybe 2 years ago? What city do you live in?
    - daemonologist 1y ago
      I'm (not GP) in the Chicago burbs and expect to lose power 1-3 times a year. Usually it's for less than twelve hours but last year it was out for three days straight. Most recent outage was ~10 minutes long a couple weeks ago - I still haven't set the oven clock. The cause around here is usually storm + trees + above ground power lines, plus a low enough population density that you're not top priority for the utility company.
      - sethherr 1y ago
        Checks out - you aren’t in a city. I was surprised that the original comment said they were in a city
- ryandrake 1y ago
  If you have ever lost power for just 12 hours in an entire year, you're already down to only two 9's: 99.863% I've never lived anywhere where the power didn't go down for at least a few (cumulative) days a year.
  - abakker 1y ago
    And, for a refrigerator and a lot of loads, being down for 2 days straight is way worse than a few hours a year. losing 48 hours of supply a year if broken into 2 hour chunks is not nearly as bad as losing 48 consecutive hours.
    - matthewfcarlson 1y ago
      I get your point, but I personally would be grumpy if I lost power for two hours twice a month. I realize that is rich considering this article is about people who are lucky to get any amount of power reliably
      - jaggederest 1y ago
        When I lived in a city proper, the grid was doing well to maintain 98% uptime. Multiple day long outages were the rule, not uncommon to lose power 3-5 days in a row. Now I live in a rural area and it's uncommon to avoid outages more than a month. We have an automatic transfer switch and fuel generator from previous owners and it saves hundreds of dollars in frozen food. This is in the US by the way. If you're investing in a transfer switch and generator now, the cost is going to quickly approach a modest solar + battery set up with a whole house inverter, and of course, you save money all year that way, not just in outages.
  - ben_w 1y ago
    Last time my building lost power was about 19 years ago, when I was living in a Welsh valley halfway between the two nearest villages. Since then, none of the extended Portsmouth conurbation, Sheffield, Cambridge, rural Cambridgeshire or Berlin have had any problems big enough to even notice while I've lived in them. I have seen at least two circuit breakers trip in that time though.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
zahlman 1y ago
> And grid has a lot of 9s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 Not as many as you might think.
manoDev 1y ago
A grid in a remote place in Africa would have less 9's than self reliance on solar.
noosphr 1y ago
It absolutely does not. But having electricity 13 days every two weeks is much better than not having it at all. This isn't about China building out their grid with an over capacity factor of 200% so they can keep everything running even if rain, sun and wind all fail for months on end. This is a developing county getting to the point they can charge mobile phones consistently.
- badpun 1y ago
  Sounds good until you try to run a business. Having businesses randomly out of commission is not a way to bring country from developing to developed status.
  - o11c 1y ago
    Better make sure they don't depend on AWS, then.
  - jchanimal 1y ago
    If that’s your first thought, then you’ll hate this influential perspective: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
  - epistasis 1y ago
    Even if you have an under-provisioned solar+storage solution and don't want to splurge for a generator, even on cloudy days you still get power, just less. Generally businesses are really great at balancing costs, and for highly-cost-constrained businesses if you give them 95% uptime at half the cost, the equation becomes clear. And in Africa, if the option is 95% uptime or 0% uptime, the choice is even clearer.
- pfdietz 1y ago
  When I go to https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/ and ask it to solve for providing steady output in China from 100% renewable energy (wind/solar/battery/hydrogen) at minimum cost using 2030 cost assumptions and 2011 weather data, the solar curtailment is just 7.3% (and most of the energy is coming from solar, not wind). If I remove hydrogen and solve again, solar curtailment increases to 16.7%. "200% overcapacity" is completely bogus.
rsynnott 1y ago
> And grid has a lot of 9s. I mean, it very much depends on where you are. Three 9s would be no more than about 8 hours downtime per year. A lot of rural locations would do worse than that, realistically.
andyferris 1y ago
Distributed can do redundancy. It’s relatively cheap. Consider a family with two cars instead of one. How often do they have zero working cars? The correlated failure rate squares while the cost doubles. My home now has a grid connection, house battery and solar, a caravan with mounted solar/battery/fridge/inverter beside it, and I also have a portable “powerstation” and portable solar panel which is basically a UPS. My fridge contents and phone charging needs have a several extra 9’s now for costs that have scaled very well. These systems are tech that is improving rapidly. In some years these African farmers with their increased yields will likely add a bigger, second solar & battery system. In a village you can run a cable next door. Etc.
aydyn 1y ago
> Each 9 of reliability for infrastructure is EXTREMELY expensive. And grid has a lot of 9s. Correction: should have a lot of 9s. But in a lot of places in the U.S., even rich states, it doesn't because a combination of regulatory capture, profiteering and straight corruption. I can see why solar and batteries are so attractive because at least its your prerogative when the power goes out.
- Iulioh 1y ago
  Have you heard how companies makes money on the US grid? Oh boy. They are incentivized to BULID but not to maintain or upgrade because that grants them guarantee rate of return. It was enlightening to see what caused the big blackout during a big snowfall in texas a few years ago
  - afiori 1y ago
    It is funny to me how fractally perverse systems gets when a centralised authority refuses to directly solve a problem but rather decide have it solved by third party uncooperative players by creating an endless stream of byzantine rules to force the solution to be a twisted copy of what the centralised authority could have done by itself. Of course there are failure modes in any approach but "oh no! Herding cats is hard. Who could have imagined!" is funny to me
- babypuncher 1y ago
  My concern is that it deflates any impetus to actually solve the problems of regulatory capture, profiteering, and other corruption. Not everybody can afford the up front costs of installing solar + battery storage, plus replacement when the PV cells and batteries inevitably reach EoL. These people will be left behind on a decaying grid nobody with political capital wants to fix or at the mercy of landlords. I really don't like this attitude we have in America where we realize "thing is broken" and advocate throwing it away instead of trying to fix it.
  - aydyn 1y ago
    > I really don't like this attitude we have in America where we realize "thing is broken" and advocate throwing it away instead of trying to fix it. Because people are too busy playing Team Politics instead of solving issues that everyone can get behind. Fixing the power grid is one of those things that everyone could get behind, and yeah I agree, it disproportionately affects the economically disadvantaged.
Gibbon1 1y ago
I read a decent essay about the difference between solar and wind reliability and fossil fuel reliability. Solar and wind tend to be regularly and predictably intermittent but not unreliable. That's something you can design around. Especially when you have cheap storage to handle critical loads. It's instructive to look at California's ISO website's supply graphs over the year. Renewables follow a reliable daily cycle. https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply
TYPE_FASTER 1y ago
PVWatts will help you figure this out: https://pvwatts.nrel.gov https://pvwatts.nrel.gov According to PVWatts, a 10kW solar system would get me very close to my average usage in December. I'd be way over in the summer, could probably get away with a 4kW system and dial back use during an outage. I can lease two Powerwall 3 batteries from my utility company for $55/mo. Or look at: https://www.franklinwh.com/products/apower2-home-battery-backup/ https://www.franklinwh.com/products/apower2-home-battery-bac... Edit: this also looks like a good option: https://www.santansolar.com/product/the-homesteady-kit/ https://www.santansolar.com/product/the-homesteady-kit/ We used to lose power 3-4 days a winter in our old house. It would have been really nice to have heat. A generator or smaller system could handle that.
- eldaisfish 1y ago
  keep in mind the limitations of these forecasting calculations. On an AVERAGE day, assuming AVERAGE weather, assuming AVERAGE load, you should be fine. The trouble with relying on the weather for your electricity is that it is entirely possible that you will go five days straight with cloud cover, limited to no solar generation and then be freezing. This is the problem that the electricity grid solves with varied sources of generation.
toast0 1y ago
> And grid has a lot of 9s. Where I live, I only get two 9s from the utility. And I'm within commuting distance of Seattle. With my generator, I still got three nines the one year where the battery tender failed and the generator didn't start when needed, but only because that outage was less than 8 hours and I replaced the battery tender before further outages (I could have jump started the generator, but the outage started overnight and waiting it out was easier). Most years, the number of brief outages adds up, and I probably only get five 9s. Solar + battery + generator for really bad weeks (but make sure you exercise it!) could pretty easily add up to the two nines I'd get from the utility here. For developing countries, solar + battery alone is likely be better than many grids which often are intermittent rather than 24/7 and many places don't have any access to utility power.
- brucehoult 1y ago
  Same here in rural far north New Zealand. I actually counted the number of outages after I got my battery unit in June -- it was six in five weeks, for anything from a couple of seconds to 30 minutes, which I noticed because the unit clicked over to running from the battery, and the clock on the oven (which is still only mains powered) flashes until I go over and hit a button. In April I had a 40 hour outage after a storm. That's what caused me to order the brand new Pecron E3600LFP, first New Zealand model shipment in "early" June (I received mine June 19). In February 2023 I had a 4 day outage during/after a storm. There are even, every 2 or 3 months, scheduled and notified 9 AM - 3 PM outages for equipment maintenance, tree trimming etc. Just those alone lower the grid reliability to around 99.5%. Six days outage in three years -- let's call it four -- drops grid reliability by another 0.4%. So, yeah, two 9s is about right. With the Pecron base unit (US$999 at the moment still on Halloween special, $1259 before that) I simply don't notice any outage under 4 hours, and that's even with a full winter heating load. In fact I deliberately turn the mains to it off from 7-9 AM and 5-9 PM every day. A 4 hour outage was a little close sometimes, so in August I added a 3kWh expansion battery ($699 on pecron.com right now). With 6kWh I can run my fridge, computers, Starlink, some LED lighting for 36 hours. Or 30 hours with typical kitchen appliance usage added (espresso machine, toaster, kettle, microwave, air fryer). Or virtually forever now I added 6x 440W solar panels (cost me US$400 total) to it, which still generates around 200W between them in even the worse overcast and rain. I'm running this stuff as a mini off-grid system, not connected to the house wiring at all -- except plugged into a standard socket to charge the battery if needed. I also have a $450 2kW petrol generator which I can use to charge the battery if needed, but needing that should be very rare. Total cost: under US$3k. More like $2.3k at the current Halloween special prices. https://x.com/BruceHoult/status/1984782313386099022 https://x.com/BruceHoult/status/1984782313386099022

roywiggins 1y ago

The grid has a lot of 9s, but in a lot of places losing power for a day or two after a storm is not unusual at all. The grid per se being fine but your actual neighborhood being dark for a couple days is a pretty common experience in some places.

tekchip 1y ago
Can confirm. I live in a US city and the only 9 involved is maybe the very first number. I've lived here just over a year and we've had 1 full day without power and probably 8 to 10 short outages between a few seconds and several 10s of minutes. I'm adding batteries and solar permitting be damned.
- sethherr 1y ago
  Wild! I’ve lived in Chicago and San Francisco and have never lost power for more than an hour. And can’t remember the last time it went out at all, maybe 2 years ago? What city do you live in?
  - daemonologist 1y ago
    I'm (not GP) in the Chicago burbs and expect to lose power 1-3 times a year. Usually it's for less than twelve hours but last year it was out for three days straight. Most recent outage was ~10 minutes long a couple weeks ago - I still haven't set the oven clock. The cause around here is usually storm + trees + above ground power lines, plus a low enough population density that you're not top priority for the utility company.
    - sethherr 1y ago
      Checks out - you aren’t in a city. I was surprised that the original comment said they were in a city
ryandrake 1y ago
If you have ever lost power for just 12 hours in an entire year, you're already down to only two 9's: 99.863% I've never lived anywhere where the power didn't go down for at least a few (cumulative) days a year.
- abakker 1y ago
  And, for a refrigerator and a lot of loads, being down for 2 days straight is way worse than a few hours a year. losing 48 hours of supply a year if broken into 2 hour chunks is not nearly as bad as losing 48 consecutive hours.
  - matthewfcarlson 1y ago
    I get your point, but I personally would be grumpy if I lost power for two hours twice a month. I realize that is rich considering this article is about people who are lucky to get any amount of power reliably
    - jaggederest 1y ago
      When I lived in a city proper, the grid was doing well to maintain 98% uptime. Multiple day long outages were the rule, not uncommon to lose power 3-5 days in a row. Now I live in a rural area and it's uncommon to avoid outages more than a month. We have an automatic transfer switch and fuel generator from previous owners and it saves hundreds of dollars in frozen food. This is in the US by the way. If you're investing in a transfer switch and generator now, the cost is going to quickly approach a modest solar + battery set up with a whole house inverter, and of course, you save money all year that way, not just in outages.
- ben_w 1y ago
  Last time my building lost power was about 19 years ago, when I was living in a Welsh valley halfway between the two nearest villages. Since then, none of the extended Portsmouth conurbation, Sheffield, Cambridge, rural Cambridgeshire or Berlin have had any problems big enough to even notice while I've lived in them. I have seen at least two circuit breakers trip in that time though.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

zahlman 1y ago

> And grid has a lot of 9s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 Not as many as you might think.

manoDev 1y ago

A grid in a remote place in Africa would have less 9's than self reliance on solar.

noosphr 1y ago

It absolutely does not. But having electricity 13 days every two weeks is much better than not having it at all. This isn't about China building out their grid with an over capacity factor of 200% so they can keep everything running even if rain, sun and wind all fail for months on end. This is a developing county getting to the point they can charge mobile phones consistently.

badpun 1y ago
Sounds good until you try to run a business. Having businesses randomly out of commission is not a way to bring country from developing to developed status.
- o11c 1y ago
  Better make sure they don't depend on AWS, then.
- jchanimal 1y ago
  If that’s your first thought, then you’ll hate this influential perspective: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
- epistasis 1y ago
  Even if you have an under-provisioned solar+storage solution and don't want to splurge for a generator, even on cloudy days you still get power, just less. Generally businesses are really great at balancing costs, and for highly-cost-constrained businesses if you give them 95% uptime at half the cost, the equation becomes clear. And in Africa, if the option is 95% uptime or 0% uptime, the choice is even clearer.
pfdietz 1y ago
When I go to https://model.energy/ https://model.energy/ and ask it to solve for providing steady output in China from 100% renewable energy (wind/solar/battery/hydrogen) at minimum cost using 2030 cost assumptions and 2011 weather data, the solar curtailment is just 7.3% (and most of the energy is coming from solar, not wind). If I remove hydrogen and solve again, solar curtailment increases to 16.7%. "200% overcapacity" is completely bogus.

rsynnott 1y ago

> And grid has a lot of 9s. I mean, it very much depends on where you are. Three 9s would be no more than about 8 hours downtime per year. A lot of rural locations would do worse than that, realistically.

andyferris 1y ago

Distributed can do redundancy. It’s relatively cheap. Consider a family with two cars instead of one. How often do they have zero working cars? The correlated failure rate squares while the cost doubles. My home now has a grid connection, house battery and solar, a caravan with mounted solar/battery/fridge/inverter beside it, and I also have a portable “powerstation” and portable solar panel which is basically a UPS. My fridge contents and phone charging needs have a several extra 9’s now for costs that have scaled very well. These systems are tech that is improving rapidly. In some years these African farmers with their increased yields will likely add a bigger, second solar & battery system. In a village you can run a cable next door. Etc.

aydyn 1y ago

> Each 9 of reliability for infrastructure is EXTREMELY expensive. And grid has a lot of 9s. Correction: should have a lot of 9s. But in a lot of places in the U.S., even rich states, it doesn't because a combination of regulatory capture, profiteering and straight corruption. I can see why solar and batteries are so attractive because at least its your prerogative when the power goes out.

Iulioh 1y ago
Have you heard how companies makes money on the US grid? Oh boy. They are incentivized to BULID but not to maintain or upgrade because that grants them guarantee rate of return. It was enlightening to see what caused the big blackout during a big snowfall in texas a few years ago
- afiori 1y ago
  It is funny to me how fractally perverse systems gets when a centralised authority refuses to directly solve a problem but rather decide have it solved by third party uncooperative players by creating an endless stream of byzantine rules to force the solution to be a twisted copy of what the centralised authority could have done by itself. Of course there are failure modes in any approach but "oh no! Herding cats is hard. Who could have imagined!" is funny to me
babypuncher 1y ago
My concern is that it deflates any impetus to actually solve the problems of regulatory capture, profiteering, and other corruption. Not everybody can afford the up front costs of installing solar + battery storage, plus replacement when the PV cells and batteries inevitably reach EoL. These people will be left behind on a decaying grid nobody with political capital wants to fix or at the mercy of landlords. I really don't like this attitude we have in America where we realize "thing is broken" and advocate throwing it away instead of trying to fix it.
- aydyn 1y ago
  > I really don't like this attitude we have in America where we realize "thing is broken" and advocate throwing it away instead of trying to fix it. Because people are too busy playing Team Politics instead of solving issues that everyone can get behind. Fixing the power grid is one of those things that everyone could get behind, and yeah I agree, it disproportionately affects the economically disadvantaged.

Gibbon1 1y ago

I read a decent essay about the difference between solar and wind reliability and fossil fuel reliability. Solar and wind tend to be regularly and predictably intermittent but not unreliable. That's something you can design around. Especially when you have cheap storage to handle critical loads. It's instructive to look at California's ISO website's supply graphs over the year. Renewables follow a reliable daily cycle. https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply

TYPE_FASTER 1y ago

PVWatts will help you figure this out: https://pvwatts.nrel.gov https://pvwatts.nrel.gov According to PVWatts, a 10kW solar system would get me very close to my average usage in December. I'd be way over in the summer, could probably get away with a 4kW system and dial back use during an outage. I can lease two Powerwall 3 batteries from my utility company for $55/mo. Or look at: https://www.franklinwh.com/products/apower2-home-battery-backup/ https://www.franklinwh.com/products/apower2-home-battery-bac... Edit: this also looks like a good option: https://www.santansolar.com/product/the-homesteady-kit/ https://www.santansolar.com/product/the-homesteady-kit/ We used to lose power 3-4 days a winter in our old house. It would have been really nice to have heat. A generator or smaller system could handle that.

eldaisfish 1y ago
keep in mind the limitations of these forecasting calculations. On an AVERAGE day, assuming AVERAGE weather, assuming AVERAGE load, you should be fine. The trouble with relying on the weather for your electricity is that it is entirely possible that you will go five days straight with cloud cover, limited to no solar generation and then be freezing. This is the problem that the electricity grid solves with varied sources of generation.

toast0 1y ago

> And grid has a lot of 9s. Where I live, I only get two 9s from the utility. And I'm within commuting distance of Seattle. With my generator, I still got three nines the one year where the battery tender failed and the generator didn't start when needed, but only because that outage was less than 8 hours and I replaced the battery tender before further outages (I could have jump started the generator, but the outage started overnight and waiting it out was easier). Most years, the number of brief outages adds up, and I probably only get five 9s. Solar + battery + generator for really bad weeks (but make sure you exercise it!) could pretty easily add up to the two nines I'd get from the utility here. For developing countries, solar + battery alone is likely be better than many grids which often are intermittent rather than 24/7 and many places don't have any access to utility power.

brucehoult 1y ago
Same here in rural far north New Zealand. I actually counted the number of outages after I got my battery unit in June -- it was six in five weeks, for anything from a couple of seconds to 30 minutes, which I noticed because the unit clicked over to running from the battery, and the clock on the oven (which is still only mains powered) flashes until I go over and hit a button. In April I had a 40 hour outage after a storm. That's what caused me to order the brand new Pecron E3600LFP, first New Zealand model shipment in "early" June (I received mine June 19). In February 2023 I had a 4 day outage during/after a storm. There are even, every 2 or 3 months, scheduled and notified 9 AM - 3 PM outages for equipment maintenance, tree trimming etc. Just those alone lower the grid reliability to around 99.5%. Six days outage in three years -- let's call it four -- drops grid reliability by another 0.4%. So, yeah, two 9s is about right. With the Pecron base unit (US$999 at the moment still on Halloween special, $1259 before that) I simply don't notice any outage under 4 hours, and that's even with a full winter heating load. In fact I deliberately turn the mains to it off from 7-9 AM and 5-9 PM every day. A 4 hour outage was a little close sometimes, so in August I added a 3kWh expansion battery ($699 on pecron.com right now). With 6kWh I can run my fridge, computers, Starlink, some LED lighting for 36 hours. Or 30 hours with typical kitchen appliance usage added (espresso machine, toaster, kettle, microwave, air fryer). Or virtually forever now I added 6x 440W solar panels (cost me US$400 total) to it, which still generates around 200W between them in even the worse overcast and rain. I'm running this stuff as a mini off-grid system, not connected to the house wiring at all -- except plugged into a standard socket to charge the battery if needed. I also have a $450 2kW petrol generator which I can use to charge the battery if needed, but needing that should be very rare. Total cost: under US$3k. More like $2.3k at the current Halloween special prices. https://x.com/BruceHoult/status/1984782313386099022 https://x.com/BruceHoult/status/1984782313386099022