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From the article: ...said Ellen Hayes, a PG&E spokeswoman. “Having a solar panel that isn’t connected to the grid is like having a computer that’s not connecte

From the article: ...said Ellen Hayes, a PG&E spokeswoman. “Having a solar panel that isn’t connected to the grid is like having a computer that’s not connected to the Internet.” Patently false. It's a great way for them to rationalize their continued existence. But as rooftop solar takes off and the "smart grid" fails to materialize I suspect that you're going to start to see federated neighborhood grids running at 48VDC. Anything less than 50V isn't regulated by the NEC which is why you're supposed to hire an electrician for new or major upgrades to your house wiring but nobody cares if you put in low voltage pathway lighting, doorbells, networking, etc. That means that although you'll have to buy thick copper wires, people can wire themselves up with their neighbors LEGALLY to share power. That's a big deal. It doesn't take all that many people to be connected to substantially smooth out fluctuations. Most A/C doesn't run all the time, it's only supposed to be about 15 minutes out of every hour. So if I and four neighbors team up then we might need 5kW of solar panels between us instead of 5kW each. At least if it's somewhere sort-of temperate where A/C isn't crucial at night. The power electronics to make this happen are getting cheaper by the day. Sure it means having to talk to your neighbors and some retrofitting, but that's doable. And with a lot of new equipment having VFDs in them from the factory (refrigerators, mini splits, even a lot of A/C compressors) it means that the cost of converting them drops even more.

mrfusion 12y ago
I might be mistaken but I think 5KW can power your whole AC and a few other appliances, no?
- watty 12y ago
  Yes, most of the time. My small house routinely exceeds 5 kW though.
  - jessaustin 12y ago
    What appliances/devices are you using when that happens?
    - Roboprog 12y ago
      Think about anything with a heating element in it (if electric): * Water heater * Dryer * Oven/range * Microwave * Coffee pot * Toaster [oven] Those can get "spiky" depending on who is in the house.
    - watty 12y ago
      I just started monitoring my electricity but I believe any two of these would do it: AC (electric), Dryer, Dishwasher
    - DigitalJack 12y ago
      Air conditioning is my guess. Ours burns about 4kW by itself.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 12y ago
      It doesn't take much. A fan heater in a bedroom 2kW, a small heat pump / reverse cycle AC in another room 1kW, a couple of computers 0.5kW - 1kW, the fridge-freezer 0.5kW, hot water system 3kW - 6kW. A large AC could be 3 - 5 kW alone, not at all uncommon in Australia. Houses here are notoriously poorly insulated. I'm in a rental sharehouse, there's a 6kW electric heater fixed to the wall in the kitchen / dinning room / lounge area. I suggested to my housemates perhaps we don't want to pay to run that thing, followed by $1200 winter power bill. Maybe next winter they'll think twice about running it so much.
    - _delirium 12y ago
      My morning routine uses about 6-8 kW just in the kitchen for a small period of time: 1. Tea kettle, 2 kW 2. Microwave, 1 kW 3. Oven (cooking parbaked rolls for 8 minutes), 3-4 kW 4. The refrigerator may or may not go on during this period, ~0.5 kW if it does Of course if really necessary I could be more careful with staggering my appliance usage. But as it currently stands I don't worry about using those kinds of power loads for short periods of time.
    - ChuckMcM 12y ago
      Not the original poster here, but I've got 5kW on my roof and it can often out generate the house load but there are times when it cannot. There are interesting "moments" when my house spikes in power usage. One is a combination of 'freezer compressor' + 'refridgerator compressor' + heater fan + oven + microwave. (I don't have whole house AC but do have it in one room). I'm getting better at monitoring individual circuits in my house to understand exactly where power goes. Generally an 'average' day in Northern california my total usage for the day is 25kWh
kevin_thibedeau 12y ago
The NEC doesn't do any regulating nor do they have any authority. They write standards that states may or may not adopt and use for their own enforcement. That's why Romex is illegal in Illinois and New York has it's own code.
- msandford 12y ago
  You're right, of course. But given how many people/counties/cities/etc just accept NEC recommendations, it's functionally equivalent for a huge portion of the US.
jessaustin 12y ago
In a single building DC could work. Thick wires are expensive (and always will be), so in a neighborhood it's probably best to just go ahead and hire an electrician if you need one. EDIT: actually I believe the cutoff at 50V isn't because it's safe to be shocked by current below that, but because phone line voltage is 48V and the NEC doesn't want to step on the phone company's toes. I've done a fair amount of line-voltage house/business wiring myself, and I've never taken any electrician's tests, but then again this hasn't been in highly unionized/severe inspection locations.
- mey 12y ago
  You can kill yourself with a single 9 volts in theory http://www.darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1999-50.html http://www.darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1999-50.html
  - waps 12y ago
    I was told in introduction to electronica that sadly it's terribly easy, and the teacher claims he has seen it happen. If you manage to take a 9 volt battery and scratch yourself with it (very easy with the negative contact, not so easy with the positive one), and both sides contact blood directly, the current may flow through your hart and may stop it (CPR will restart it, but that of course assumes someone's there to do it, and that people realize what's happened in the first place). I can't believe someone actually stuck essentially needles connected to a power source into his blood. What. The. Fuck.
- bravo22 12y ago
  Correct. It is total power delivered. You can still short 48V wires and start a fire with high enough current.
  - jessaustin 12y ago
    Yes, most car-battery injuries are burns from inadvertent tool shorts. Always disconnect the negative post first, and connect it last. EDIT: yes I'm sure. As wtallis suggests, isolation is important. But while the battery is still connected, there is no isolation. In that configuration, if you have a tool on the positive terminal connector and it strikes any other conductive component of the car, that's a short, which could heat the tool and burn you (among other things). If instead you follow my advice and disconnect the negative terminal first, when striking e.g. a fan pulley your tool is simply an additional connection from the frame to ground, which has no effect. (After you've disconnected negative, a connection from positive to the frame is not a short.)
gambiting 12y ago
5kW at 48V is over 100 amperes - absolutely no offence to you personally, but anyone handling this without training and precautions is absolutely stupid, no matter how thick the cables are.
- Florin_Andrei 12y ago
  100 amps deserves to be treated with respect, yes. Just try and break the circuit and you'll see why. It's basically like a welder. I did some welding a couple weeks ago, right around 100 amps. The output voltage of that machine is probably less than 48 V. Still makes a very pretty arc. :)
- ddeck 12y ago
  While you are correct that 48V is definitely sufficient to cause injury/death in certain circumstances, it's not the current that matters here (e.g. a 1V/5000A supply would have a lower risk of shock). What will hurt/kill you is the amount of current passing through your body (in particular your heart) and that is determined by the resistance of your body and the potential difference of where it's flowing from/to (I = V/R). Interestingly, the current required for ill effects is significantly higher for DC vs AC (at lowish frequency) [1]: BODILY EFFECT DIRECT CURRENT (DC) 60 Hz AC 10 kHz AC --------------------------------------------------------------- Slight sensation Men = 1.0 mA 0.4 mA 7 mA felt at hand(s) Women = 0.6 mA 0.3 mA 5 mA --------------------------------------------------------------- Threshold of Men = 5.2 mA 1.1 mA 12 mA perception Women = 3.5 mA 0.7 mA 8 mA --------------------------------------------------------------- Painful, but Men = 62 mA 9 mA 55 mA voluntary muscle Women = 41 mA 6 mA 37 mA control maintained --------------------------------------------------------------- Painful, unable Men = 76 mA 16 mA 75 mA to let go of wires Women = 51 mA 10.5 mA 50 mA --------------------------------------------------------------- Severe pain, Men = 90 mA 23 mA 94 mA difficulty Women = 60 mA 15 mA 63 mA breathing --------------------------------------------------------------- Possible heart Men = 500 mA 100 mA fibrillation Women = 500 mA 100 mA after 3 seconds --------------------------------------------------------------- The linked article suggests an across the chest current of at little as 17 mA could potentially induce fibrillation. At 48V, this is equivalent to a hand to hand (assuming the second hand is the exit point) resistance of ~2,823 Ohms. While is this a very low resistance for the body, it's possible with wet hands and a large surface area in contact with the voltage source. [1] http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/vol_1/chpt_3/4.html http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/vol_1/chpt_3/4.html
cmsmith 12y ago
It seems good to note that neighborhood power co-ops would smooth out demand fluctuations, but not necessarily supply fluctuations.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  Batteries for the supply slack, hot water heater elements to dump excess power into. Concerned about enough supply? Oversize your systems.
  - organsnyder 12y ago
    Oversizing doesn't help when it's cloudy or the wind stops. You need diversification, which isn't always possible over small (neighborhood-sized) areas.
  - cortesoft 12y ago
    Oversizing is expensive unless you have a large enough group to distribute the burden. Neighborhoods might not be big enough; they would have to expand to city or county size.... but we already have a system for spreading out the demand and supply balance to larger groups.. it is called the power company.
    - toomuchtodo 12y ago
      Depending on how much diversity you need, your neighborhood could add an on-site natural gas or propane generator to the mix. TL;DR You need to do the cost benefit on a case by case basis.
- jessaustin 12y ago
  There's only so much they can do about demand correlation. Electric stoves, for instance, are likely to be used at the same time by most households. That's one reason why really good batteries would be such a benefit.
ctdonath 12y ago
Having a Leaf EV, I'd very much like to have a 2kWh panel not connected to the grid. Selling power back is uninteresting relative to keeping a 30kWh buffer battery topped off, charged during the day while the car's away, and passing the charge to the car in the evening (ideally at 220V, charging the EV within 4 hours). Other than perhaps being physically located in the garage, it would have nothing to do with house wiring.
sfall 12y ago
the NEC does cover low voltage systems
infogulch 12y ago
Federated neighborhood grids could further smooth out large demand fluctuations by networking their cycling devices together so they take turns. The biggest power demands like heaters/AC units/refrigerators/water heaters all cycle on and off, and these cycles could be coordinated so that they wouldn't all be on throughout the neighborhood at the same time. Smart water heaters could also smooth out some excess supply. The water heater would mix cold water with its' stored hot water in different ratios (depending on how much excess electricity there was and therefore how hot the water is) to provide a constant temperature output.
- msandford 12y ago
  Yeah, at scale this kind of coordination is really, really difficult. With only 10 houses it's pretty easy.
  - manicdee 12y ago
    At scale it becomes easier, since with 10 houses each house represents 0.1 of maximum load, and with 100 houses each house represents 0.01 of maximum load, so there are more opportunities for any particular device to draw power from the grid since there will be more other devices ready to turn off at that time. Upgrading to city-scale means that the individual consumer will be less likely to have to wait for their electricity ration. The hard part is defining the system for such a "smart grid" to safely coordinate activities while being resistant to tampering, spoofing, or other cyber warfare. As an example, a smart grid will be able to deal with "time of use" charging, meaning that solar electricity produced during the early morning or late afternoon will be far more expensive than what is produced at noon/zenith. A malicious party might attempt to fake the production of electricity in order to get third parties to "buy" electricity that was never produced. This will lead to brown-outs as there is more demand than generation, while the fraudster "selling" the fake electricity will be quite hard to catch. Even worse, a fraudulent network company might decide to under-meter your production so they can make a profit from the extra electricity that you produced that they aren't paying you for. Starting at the "four neighbours build a DC network" level, how do you determine which of your three neighbours is not producing electricity when they claim they are?
sliverstorm 12y ago
At ~$5/foot for sufficient gauges, this sounds like a rather expensive project.
- fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
  Yes, on the third day, boost converters, buck converters, and wiring with a higher voltage rating would arrive via UPS and that would be the end of the "safe" low voltage neighborhood grid idea; replaced with the much more efficient high(er)-voltage neighborhood grid.
  - msandford 12y ago
    Actually that's a great point! If you're not grid connected I don't think you have to deal with inspections and the like anymore; the inspections are regulations are usually tied in (hur hur) with the idea of being allowed to hook up to the utility company. Welp, I guess I have to take my stupid idea back then huh?
    - hga 12y ago
      In some places that'll get your house condemned as "unfit for habitation" or the like.
      - msandford 12y ago
        That's really interesting. Not being connected to grid power means that your house gets condemned. A part of me wants to believe that there's a justification for most if not all of the laws on the books. I wonder what the justification for condemning an off-grid house is. There are places where it's sufficiently expensive to bring grid power in that people will have solar, wind and generators and that's cheaper at least for any given decade. Should those houses get condemned too? Or are you talking about in big cities where the house is already hooked up to the grid? Have you got any links? I'd be interested to read about it.
        deleted 12y ago
goatforce5 12y ago
> ...said Ellen Hayes, a PG&E spokeswoman. “Having a solar panel that isn’t connected to the grid is like having a computer that’s not connected to the Internet.” ... "still useful". Is that the rest of the quote?
- kstrauser 12y ago
  > "Having a solar panel that isn’t connected to the grid is like having a computer that’s not connected to the Internet." "...it keeps the NSA from spying on you." There is so much market segmentation potential in that one sentence.
- msandford 12y ago
  No, the quote ends. It's hilarious how wrong this lady is. Internet access multiplies the utility of a computer by what, infinity percent? I don't know, but it's a huge freaking number. How much extra utility do you get from having a solar panel grid connected? Maybe 20% to 200% more useful? Certainly not 10x as useful. http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-get-a-man-to-understand-something http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-get...
ap22213 12y ago
Extrapolating a bit, I'm guessing that she means that it doesn't make much sense for most individual homeowners to manage their own electricity production and storage. Instead what you'll see is more communities adopting Microgrids 'behind the meter'. It makes sense to be connected because any excess can be sold back to the distribution company at the feed-in-tariff rate. Plus, what happens when a local power system fails?

mrfusion 12y ago

I might be mistaken but I think 5KW can power your whole AC and a few other appliances, no?

watty 12y ago
Yes, most of the time. My small house routinely exceeds 5 kW though.
- jessaustin 12y ago
  What appliances/devices are you using when that happens?
  - Roboprog 12y ago
    Think about anything with a heating element in it (if electric): * Water heater * Dryer * Oven/range * Microwave * Coffee pot * Toaster [oven] Those can get "spiky" depending on who is in the house.
  - watty 12y ago
    I just started monitoring my electricity but I believe any two of these would do it: AC (electric), Dryer, Dishwasher
  - DigitalJack 12y ago
    Air conditioning is my guess. Ours burns about 4kW by itself.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 12y ago
    It doesn't take much. A fan heater in a bedroom 2kW, a small heat pump / reverse cycle AC in another room 1kW, a couple of computers 0.5kW - 1kW, the fridge-freezer 0.5kW, hot water system 3kW - 6kW. A large AC could be 3 - 5 kW alone, not at all uncommon in Australia. Houses here are notoriously poorly insulated. I'm in a rental sharehouse, there's a 6kW electric heater fixed to the wall in the kitchen / dinning room / lounge area. I suggested to my housemates perhaps we don't want to pay to run that thing, followed by $1200 winter power bill. Maybe next winter they'll think twice about running it so much.
  - _delirium 12y ago
    My morning routine uses about 6-8 kW just in the kitchen for a small period of time: 1. Tea kettle, 2 kW 2. Microwave, 1 kW 3. Oven (cooking parbaked rolls for 8 minutes), 3-4 kW 4. The refrigerator may or may not go on during this period, ~0.5 kW if it does Of course if really necessary I could be more careful with staggering my appliance usage. But as it currently stands I don't worry about using those kinds of power loads for short periods of time.
  - ChuckMcM 12y ago
    Not the original poster here, but I've got 5kW on my roof and it can often out generate the house load but there are times when it cannot. There are interesting "moments" when my house spikes in power usage. One is a combination of 'freezer compressor' + 'refridgerator compressor' + heater fan + oven + microwave. (I don't have whole house AC but do have it in one room). I'm getting better at monitoring individual circuits in my house to understand exactly where power goes. Generally an 'average' day in Northern california my total usage for the day is 25kWh

kevin_thibedeau 12y ago

The NEC doesn't do any regulating nor do they have any authority. They write standards that states may or may not adopt and use for their own enforcement. That's why Romex is illegal in Illinois and New York has it's own code.

msandford 12y ago
You're right, of course. But given how many people/counties/cities/etc just accept NEC recommendations, it's functionally equivalent for a huge portion of the US.

jessaustin 12y ago

In a single building DC could work. Thick wires are expensive (and always will be), so in a neighborhood it's probably best to just go ahead and hire an electrician if you need one. EDIT: actually I believe the cutoff at 50V isn't because it's safe to be shocked by current below that, but because phone line voltage is 48V and the NEC doesn't want to step on the phone company's toes. I've done a fair amount of line-voltage house/business wiring myself, and I've never taken any electrician's tests, but then again this hasn't been in highly unionized/severe inspection locations.

mey 12y ago
You can kill yourself with a single 9 volts in theory http://www.darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1999-50.html http://www.darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1999-50.html
- waps 12y ago
  I was told in introduction to electronica that sadly it's terribly easy, and the teacher claims he has seen it happen. If you manage to take a 9 volt battery and scratch yourself with it (very easy with the negative contact, not so easy with the positive one), and both sides contact blood directly, the current may flow through your hart and may stop it (CPR will restart it, but that of course assumes someone's there to do it, and that people realize what's happened in the first place). I can't believe someone actually stuck essentially needles connected to a power source into his blood. What. The. Fuck.
bravo22 12y ago
Correct. It is total power delivered. You can still short 48V wires and start a fire with high enough current.
- jessaustin 12y ago
  Yes, most car-battery injuries are burns from inadvertent tool shorts. Always disconnect the negative post first, and connect it last. EDIT: yes I'm sure. As wtallis suggests, isolation is important. But while the battery is still connected, there is no isolation. In that configuration, if you have a tool on the positive terminal connector and it strikes any other conductive component of the car, that's a short, which could heat the tool and burn you (among other things). If instead you follow my advice and disconnect the negative terminal first, when striking e.g. a fan pulley your tool is simply an additional connection from the frame to ground, which has no effect. (After you've disconnected negative, a connection from positive to the frame is not a short.)

gambiting 12y ago

5kW at 48V is over 100 amperes - absolutely no offence to you personally, but anyone handling this without training and precautions is absolutely stupid, no matter how thick the cables are.

Florin_Andrei 12y ago
100 amps deserves to be treated with respect, yes. Just try and break the circuit and you'll see why. It's basically like a welder. I did some welding a couple weeks ago, right around 100 amps. The output voltage of that machine is probably less than 48 V. Still makes a very pretty arc. :)
ddeck 12y ago
While you are correct that 48V is definitely sufficient to cause injury/death in certain circumstances, it's not the current that matters here (e.g. a 1V/5000A supply would have a lower risk of shock). What will hurt/kill you is the amount of current passing through your body (in particular your heart) and that is determined by the resistance of your body and the potential difference of where it's flowing from/to (I = V/R). Interestingly, the current required for ill effects is significantly higher for DC vs AC (at lowish frequency) [1]: BODILY EFFECT DIRECT CURRENT (DC) 60 Hz AC 10 kHz AC --------------------------------------------------------------- Slight sensation Men = 1.0 mA 0.4 mA 7 mA felt at hand(s) Women = 0.6 mA 0.3 mA 5 mA --------------------------------------------------------------- Threshold of Men = 5.2 mA 1.1 mA 12 mA perception Women = 3.5 mA 0.7 mA 8 mA --------------------------------------------------------------- Painful, but Men = 62 mA 9 mA 55 mA voluntary muscle Women = 41 mA 6 mA 37 mA control maintained --------------------------------------------------------------- Painful, unable Men = 76 mA 16 mA 75 mA to let go of wires Women = 51 mA 10.5 mA 50 mA --------------------------------------------------------------- Severe pain, Men = 90 mA 23 mA 94 mA difficulty Women = 60 mA 15 mA 63 mA breathing --------------------------------------------------------------- Possible heart Men = 500 mA 100 mA fibrillation Women = 500 mA 100 mA after 3 seconds --------------------------------------------------------------- The linked article suggests an across the chest current of at little as 17 mA could potentially induce fibrillation. At 48V, this is equivalent to a hand to hand (assuming the second hand is the exit point) resistance of ~2,823 Ohms. While is this a very low resistance for the body, it's possible with wet hands and a large surface area in contact with the voltage source. [1] http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/vol_1/chpt_3/4.html http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/vol_1/chpt_3/4.html

cmsmith 12y ago

It seems good to note that neighborhood power co-ops would smooth out demand fluctuations, but not necessarily supply fluctuations.

toomuchtodo 12y ago
Batteries for the supply slack, hot water heater elements to dump excess power into. Concerned about enough supply? Oversize your systems.
- organsnyder 12y ago
  Oversizing doesn't help when it's cloudy or the wind stops. You need diversification, which isn't always possible over small (neighborhood-sized) areas.
- cortesoft 12y ago
  Oversizing is expensive unless you have a large enough group to distribute the burden. Neighborhoods might not be big enough; they would have to expand to city or county size.... but we already have a system for spreading out the demand and supply balance to larger groups.. it is called the power company.
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    Depending on how much diversity you need, your neighborhood could add an on-site natural gas or propane generator to the mix. TL;DR You need to do the cost benefit on a case by case basis.
jessaustin 12y ago
There's only so much they can do about demand correlation. Electric stoves, for instance, are likely to be used at the same time by most households. That's one reason why really good batteries would be such a benefit.

ctdonath 12y ago

Having a Leaf EV, I'd very much like to have a 2kWh panel not connected to the grid. Selling power back is uninteresting relative to keeping a 30kWh buffer battery topped off, charged during the day while the car's away, and passing the charge to the car in the evening (ideally at 220V, charging the EV within 4 hours). Other than perhaps being physically located in the garage, it would have nothing to do with house wiring.

sfall 12y ago

the NEC does cover low voltage systems

infogulch 12y ago

Federated neighborhood grids could further smooth out large demand fluctuations by networking their cycling devices together so they take turns. The biggest power demands like heaters/AC units/refrigerators/water heaters all cycle on and off, and these cycles could be coordinated so that they wouldn't all be on throughout the neighborhood at the same time. Smart water heaters could also smooth out some excess supply. The water heater would mix cold water with its' stored hot water in different ratios (depending on how much excess electricity there was and therefore how hot the water is) to provide a constant temperature output.

msandford 12y ago
Yeah, at scale this kind of coordination is really, really difficult. With only 10 houses it's pretty easy.
- manicdee 12y ago
  At scale it becomes easier, since with 10 houses each house represents 0.1 of maximum load, and with 100 houses each house represents 0.01 of maximum load, so there are more opportunities for any particular device to draw power from the grid since there will be more other devices ready to turn off at that time. Upgrading to city-scale means that the individual consumer will be less likely to have to wait for their electricity ration. The hard part is defining the system for such a "smart grid" to safely coordinate activities while being resistant to tampering, spoofing, or other cyber warfare. As an example, a smart grid will be able to deal with "time of use" charging, meaning that solar electricity produced during the early morning or late afternoon will be far more expensive than what is produced at noon/zenith. A malicious party might attempt to fake the production of electricity in order to get third parties to "buy" electricity that was never produced. This will lead to brown-outs as there is more demand than generation, while the fraudster "selling" the fake electricity will be quite hard to catch. Even worse, a fraudulent network company might decide to under-meter your production so they can make a profit from the extra electricity that you produced that they aren't paying you for. Starting at the "four neighbours build a DC network" level, how do you determine which of your three neighbours is not producing electricity when they claim they are?

sliverstorm 12y ago

At ~$5/foot for sufficient gauges, this sounds like a rather expensive project.

fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
Yes, on the third day, boost converters, buck converters, and wiring with a higher voltage rating would arrive via UPS and that would be the end of the "safe" low voltage neighborhood grid idea; replaced with the much more efficient high(er)-voltage neighborhood grid.
- msandford 12y ago
  Actually that's a great point! If you're not grid connected I don't think you have to deal with inspections and the like anymore; the inspections are regulations are usually tied in (hur hur) with the idea of being allowed to hook up to the utility company. Welp, I guess I have to take my stupid idea back then huh?
  - hga 12y ago
    In some places that'll get your house condemned as "unfit for habitation" or the like.
    - msandford 12y ago
      That's really interesting. Not being connected to grid power means that your house gets condemned. A part of me wants to believe that there's a justification for most if not all of the laws on the books. I wonder what the justification for condemning an off-grid house is. There are places where it's sufficiently expensive to bring grid power in that people will have solar, wind and generators and that's cheaper at least for any given decade. Should those houses get condemned too? Or are you talking about in big cities where the house is already hooked up to the grid? Have you got any links? I'd be interested to read about it.
      - deleted 12y ago

goatforce5 12y ago

> ...said Ellen Hayes, a PG&E spokeswoman. “Having a solar panel that isn’t connected to the grid is like having a computer that’s not connected to the Internet.” ... "still useful". Is that the rest of the quote?

kstrauser 12y ago
> "Having a solar panel that isn’t connected to the grid is like having a computer that’s not connected to the Internet." "...it keeps the NSA from spying on you." There is so much market segmentation potential in that one sentence.
msandford 12y ago
No, the quote ends. It's hilarious how wrong this lady is. Internet access multiplies the utility of a computer by what, infinity percent? I don't know, but it's a huge freaking number. How much extra utility do you get from having a solar panel grid connected? Maybe 20% to 200% more useful? Certainly not 10x as useful. http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-get-a-man-to-understand-something http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-get...

ap22213 12y ago

Extrapolating a bit, I'm guessing that she means that it doesn't make much sense for most individual homeowners to manage their own electricity production and storage. Instead what you'll see is more communities adopting Microgrids 'behind the meter'. It makes sense to be connected because any excess can be sold back to the distribution company at the feed-in-tariff rate. Plus, what happens when a local power system fails?