> "lots of self-generated power will ultimately be wasted."
This is sunlight falling on a roof. If you convert it into electricity but then don't use that electricity, is it really a waste? It's like saying that the overflow from my water tank that collects rain water off the roof is 'wasting' water.
It could be argued that it's a waste in the sense that the generated electricity could have gone to someone else if there was a grid, but if the grid operator isn't allowing excess to be put back into the grid (e.g. because there's no demand at that time because it's sunny and everyone is using solar), then the grid operator needs to solve that with some form of energy storage (e.g. batteries).
The hubris in this article is unreal: it's posing that privately owned utilities are a good thing and that bypassing them is some crime that's done by ratepayers. I hope that business model dies in a fire.
Instead the entire paradigm of centralized generation may need to be called into question and we should instead be focusing on a hybrid centralized baseline + local generation and storage. Places like China do fine with promoting residential solar where nearly half the solar was on residential rooftops (2023) [1].
You are reading that very narrowly. The paragraph is simply pointing out that solar power is cheaper when built out in a centralised way because of:
* economies of scale for construction and maintenance
* higher utilisation. They don't spell it out exactly, but it is pretty clear fro m the context that, "lots of self-generated power will ultimately be wasted", is eluding to a wider geographic area needing more panels to satisfy all demand when each house has an independent system, rather than being grid tied.
Solar panels use energy to create, and have a finite lifespan. If energy is generated but not used, it makes the average lifetime efficiency decrease. This does result in wasted energy.
The other grid operators have to lower their production during the day. That itself can be expensive, but more importantly they run their same equipment to power fewer hours of the day; when solar is not available, which is expensive since they have significant fixed costs. Batteries are not a grid scale solution any time soon, but maybe one day.
It was an infrastructure investment with the idea that it returns an expected amount of energy over an expected life and an assumption that that energy has a value that makes it pay for itself in X years.. If its not worth using a lot of that energy that's a first slide.. A much further slide is when the energy to produce it is never paid back in what it produces, which can be considered true for the enormously over provisioned.
Unlike the economist I know something about accounting. If there is excess power at zero marginal cost someone cunning is already planning on making some coin off it. As it is utilities with excess solar and wind are rapidly adding battery storage.
I think there are three stages of renewable development. The first stage renewables partly offset traditional suppliers. The second stage is you actually have excess part of the time. And the third stage you have a lot of season excess. China and Texas are in the first stage but California is in the second stage already.
Exactly. This statement quite really does not make sense as this is literally how electricity works with grid too, since you need to have a reserve margin
I do find the rest of the article more or less balanced in the discussion of the issue, even though it tries very hard not to actually squarely put blame where it lies
I think the end game is that people that realize they have to live on this planet will disconnect from the grid (because it is cheaper) and use that waste electricity for direct atmospheric carbon capture (because terraforming is our only remaining viable path forward).
If that means the grids go bankrupt and default on payments to the fossil fuel industry, then I will try to pretend to be very sad for at least 60 seconds.
The group of people that will ultimately benefit from this includes just about everyone except the octogenarian plutocrats that are actively accelerating climate change.
Maybe once they die off there will be some financial incentives to help repair the atmosphere (assuming life extension technology doesn’t doom all of us to living with their immortality).
Over-produced electricity can be stored by the private party in a local vehicle/wall battery.
Through a grid it may be sent to a plant which will produce green hydrogen, or to a dam (pumped-storage hydroelectricity)... or sent to another region (even quite remote, via some (U)HVDC line) which will use/store it.
The solution is obvious and cheap. You don't need powerwalls in 2025 all the major backup battery manufacturers now make $3-4k models which you can wheel around and can take your excess with zero conf off the shelf.
Yes, because the solar cells aren't free. They have an environmental and monetary impact while not lasting forever. If you don't use them, you are wasting them.
Hopefully what's dying is the concept of privately owned utilities. Everyone knows that, unless they're properly regulated, these eventually turn into a rent-seeking behemoths that corrupt the government (or vice-versa).
However, what will likely happen is that these private utilities will see the writing on the wall and instead do what PG&E is doing in CA and just start charging "transmission fees" to keep their rates even higher despite massive daytime solar abundance.
Everywhere there is state/municipal owned utilities it's almost always considerable cheaper than private.
> Everywhere there is state/municipal owned utilities it's almost always considerable cheaper than private.
Not everywhere, it's really the regulation that matters, not just the ownership - here in Alberta we've got a market where we get municipally-owned utilities where we still get high rates comprising of energy fees + transmission fees + distribution fees.
Yeah, I'm fine with there being a market where private generators can sell power to the grid, but the poles and wires need to be publicly owned.
I don't know how there are still some that haven't worked out that a privatised natural monopoly is one of the worst ownership structures for anything important - as if multiple other companies could ever build a other electricity transmission networks on top of each other in the same area (or water and sewer systems, etc.) and provide actual competition! It's impossible and ludicrous.
>Pakistan's energy shortfall refuses to abate amid scorching heat, load-shedding...Pakistan's urban centres are now suffering up to six hours of load shedding...Calling it a "crisis of leadership and coordination", a former PEPCO head criticised... https://energy.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/oil-and-gas...
Not sure you can blame solar for that. The rest of the world seems to manage solar without death spirals.
Lots of threads lately about power utilities making bad decisions and barriers to starting public utilities, indirectly which can lead to fires and home loss.
If the privately owned utilities are left to their own devices when solar comes in and eats their lunch, expect more "climate change driven disasters," right?
Don't forget about regulatory capture too. If Idaho Power (e.g. because they're in a republican state with a bunch of wildfires lately) fails or is culpable for billions caused by fires by their lax equipment, someone will bail them out -- probably the tax payer.
If the tax payer is ultimately on the hook, then the tax payers should own the utility.
This reminds me that utilities can limit the size of your rooftop solar system, which locks you into whatever your usage you had at install time. Because of that it's difficult for me to actually achieve net zero electric usage and it's more cost effective for me to remain on a gas furnace instead of upgrading to a heat pump. This is such a shame. I wish I could just get 2 more KWh.
I assume you mean 2kW not 2kWh.
And you can; look up "Non-export addition". These are solar panels that are set to zero-export; they will either charge a battery or the current house loads, but never backfeed into the grid.
If you get more can't you disconnect from the grid? Then they can't stop you. You need batteries of course. Or stay connected with existing system and have more solar that is only connected to batteries separately, no grid.
Not sure if your utility allowed for planned usage changes (ie, planning to buy an(other) EV, planning to install heat pump). This is what my installer submitted to justify my 180% over-specced solar install. This is PG&E in CA.
The existing comments here already capture most of my thoughts on the subject: users reap benefit + shareholder loose revenue = disaster!
Disaster for who? Not the users that's for sure.
Another aspect of this in the US electric utility context is that if more power is genrated locally, and exxcess is distributed as locally as possible, then long distance distribution is reduced. THere aren't as many needs, and certainly this reduces planned expansion of long distance distribution.
However, this is also a "disaster" as defined above, since construction of those long distance transmission facilities are also payed for with public bonds and therefore direct taxpayer funding.
The economist never ceases to amaze in this twisted logic...
Weird how when the rapacious whims of capitalists destroy things people value the economists posit that "those things weren't viable in the market, we have to be realistic" but when business models that capital finds valuable are under threat from technological commodification the line is "disaster, death spiral"
I have to say, my days of not taking economics seriously as a science are certainly coming to a middle
I built a garage with a flat roof to accommodate a solar system. I assumed it would make sense. However between the city rules on setback and the extra cost of a grid-connected system, it didn't make sense. Since then I've been strongly considering an off-grid setup. I'd like to see those get more uptake because there are so many fewer dependencies and regulations.
One Jack Rickard, RIP, who was quite an opinionated jerk imho, coined the concept of "selfish solar." The idea was that solar was on its way to becoming so cheap that one should just install enough panels and batteries such that you basically never use the grid, it's just a backup for uncommon events. Basically grid use drops to that 1 or 10% of the time the sun doesn't shine for days. I think we are there on the panel side, and will be there soon on the battery side. Selfish solar could make sense but it would change the economics of solar and electric grids substantially. If everyone went selfish solar, grid electricity and infrastructure would become prohibitively expensive. We are decades away from that or at least one decade (IMHO), but we need thoughtful regulation on this point. Will we get it? I suppose time will tell.
That might work in southern latitudes where the seasonal change in solar irradiation isn't much different. In the North, like in Canada, there's just not enough solar in the winter. We really need a way to store excess solar from the summer into the winter. Like on the scale of a 500 gallon propane tank.
I mean, what power grid provider makes it easy to work with them to sell solar back to the grid? Bogus fees, negative rate metering, and lobbying against the consumer drives consumers to ever-cheaper solar and storage options.
This is self inflicted behavior from monopolies that ignore user research.
What's wrong with negative electricity pricing? Are utilities meant to let consumers overvolt the grid and use their industrial customers and utility-scale generators to counteract it without any compensation or disincentive?
We are going through the same thing in Australia. In fact I suspect it's happening everywhere with solar.
The current solutions look to be market based, which boils down to getting rid of "one fixed price per kWh" and moving to something closer to paying whatever the wholesale market is charging. Not exactly that as the wholesale market is wild. It can varying by over a factor of 1000 during the year. What has happened is time of use charging which boils down to different fix rates for different times of the day. Controlled loads, which translates to the supplier being able to forcibly turn off things in your house. If you agree to that for your car charger for example, you get to pay about USD $0.05/kWh to charge your car. And there are demand charges, which means you don't pay per kW/h used but rather your peak draw in kW over a 3 month period.
Net metering was never a thing here, but now they can forcibly turn off the feed-in. In return they where used to set the maximum feed-in very conservatively based on how much the grid could absorb form every panel in the suburb at the worst possible time, now they will take the maximum your wiring supports.
Finally they now allow households to form themselves into power plants, that sell the power they generate / store directly on the wholesale market.
Meanwhile, the story is talking about grids disallowing net metering as a big step. It ain't a big step. It wasn't even a first step for Australia, as the distortions it caused were obvious so it was never allowed.
It looks to me like Australia has largely solved the day to day "grid instability" problem the article talks about. We do have places whose yearly average is 70% renewable, and they are fine. I'm not so sure about how them solving the "sun hasn't shined and the wind hasn't blown" for a week issue. It's not insurmountable as even on cloudy days, solar outputs 20% of peak. However, right now the solution in that 70% state is gas peakers.
It depends on the utility company. Some are better than others.
The grid is a utility. They weren't originally built with the idea of customers sending power back at a small scale. So it's tricky to maintain power fluctuations when you have all these extra data points. Plus considerations for the quality of consumer hardware. So naturally companies would prefer to have solar installations at scale as opposed to by residential basis.
ComEd, the main electrical provider in northern Illinois, actively encourages homes and businesses to install solar power and offers net metering to solar-equipped customers.
Just make roof solar panels with tiltable shades that limit the incoming sunlight for this kind of situations. This is when there is no battery storage involved.
If the solar-roofed house can involve home batteries, problem solved.
You don't need to. If you don't draw the energy from the panels, nothing happens. It's not like a turbine where you'd have to dump the energy into a dummy load. Solar power not used is simply not produced.
You can't run a grid with maxed out cheap renewables. It's like having a society where the police and prisons staff closes shop and goes home when the sun sets and still expect law and order to persist.
PlunderBunny|1 year ago
This is sunlight falling on a roof. If you convert it into electricity but then don't use that electricity, is it really a waste? It's like saying that the overflow from my water tank that collects rain water off the roof is 'wasting' water.
It could be argued that it's a waste in the sense that the generated electricity could have gone to someone else if there was a grid, but if the grid operator isn't allowing excess to be put back into the grid (e.g. because there's no demand at that time because it's sunny and everyone is using solar), then the grid operator needs to solve that with some form of energy storage (e.g. batteries).
r00fus|1 year ago
Instead the entire paradigm of centralized generation may need to be called into question and we should instead be focusing on a hybrid centralized baseline + local generation and storage. Places like China do fine with promoting residential solar where nearly half the solar was on residential rooftops (2023) [1].
[1] https://globalenergymonitor.org/report/china-continues-to-le...
richardc323|1 year ago
YurgenJurgensen|1 year ago
daedrdev|1 year ago
snailmailstare|1 year ago
Gibbon1|1 year ago
I think there are three stages of renewable development. The first stage renewables partly offset traditional suppliers. The second stage is you actually have excess part of the time. And the third stage you have a lot of season excess. China and Texas are in the first stage but California is in the second stage already.
chironjit|1 year ago
I do find the rest of the article more or less balanced in the discussion of the issue, even though it tries very hard not to actually squarely put blame where it lies
m3kw9|1 year ago
L-four|1 year ago
hedora|1 year ago
If that means the grids go bankrupt and default on payments to the fossil fuel industry, then I will try to pretend to be very sad for at least 60 seconds.
The group of people that will ultimately benefit from this includes just about everyone except the octogenarian plutocrats that are actively accelerating climate change.
Maybe once they die off there will be some financial incentives to help repair the atmosphere (assuming life extension technology doesn’t doom all of us to living with their immortality).
natmaka|1 year ago
Through a grid it may be sent to a plant which will produce green hydrogen, or to a dam (pumped-storage hydroelectricity)... or sent to another region (even quite remote, via some (U)HVDC line) which will use/store it.
elif|1 year ago
The solution is obvious and cheap. You don't need powerwalls in 2025 all the major backup battery manufacturers now make $3-4k models which you can wheel around and can take your excess with zero conf off the shelf.
wodenokoto|1 year ago
jsbisviewtiful|1 year ago
Takes like this are why corporations will plunge humanity into a painful end through climate change.
pstuart|1 year ago
ashoeafoot|1 year ago
cyanydeez|1 year ago
If wed had invested to in socialism,we would build out batteries.
What a selfish techno dystopia
r00fus|1 year ago
However, what will likely happen is that these private utilities will see the writing on the wall and instead do what PG&E is doing in CA and just start charging "transmission fees" to keep their rates even higher despite massive daytime solar abundance.
Everywhere there is state/municipal owned utilities it's almost always considerable cheaper than private.
Marsymars|1 year ago
Not everywhere, it's really the regulation that matters, not just the ownership - here in Alberta we've got a market where we get municipally-owned utilities where we still get high rates comprising of energy fees + transmission fees + distribution fees.
stephen_g|1 year ago
I don't know how there are still some that haven't worked out that a privatised natural monopoly is one of the worst ownership structures for anything important - as if multiple other companies could ever build a other electricity transmission networks on top of each other in the same area (or water and sewer systems, etc.) and provide actual competition! It's impossible and ludicrous.
tim333|1 year ago
Eskom South Africa:
>CEO and the cyanide-laced coffee...dramatic example of how criminality has seeped into South Africa’s state...organised theft, mainly of copper, on an industrial scale https://www.ft.com/content/5fe8291d-9895-4272-9e0a-eefa27911...
Pakistan:
>Pakistan's energy shortfall refuses to abate amid scorching heat, load-shedding...Pakistan's urban centres are now suffering up to six hours of load shedding...Calling it a "crisis of leadership and coordination", a former PEPCO head criticised... https://energy.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/oil-and-gas...
Not sure you can blame solar for that. The rest of the world seems to manage solar without death spirals.
beyondcompute|1 year ago
xrd|1 year ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42971311
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42975492
If the privately owned utilities are left to their own devices when solar comes in and eats their lunch, expect more "climate change driven disasters," right?
bb88|1 year ago
If the tax payer is ultimately on the hook, then the tax payers should own the utility.
kylehotchkiss|1 year ago
hex4def6|1 year ago
killingtime74|1 year ago
r00fus|1 year ago
johnea|1 year ago
Disaster for who? Not the users that's for sure.
Another aspect of this in the US electric utility context is that if more power is genrated locally, and exxcess is distributed as locally as possible, then long distance distribution is reduced. THere aren't as many needs, and certainly this reduces planned expansion of long distance distribution.
However, this is also a "disaster" as defined above, since construction of those long distance transmission facilities are also payed for with public bonds and therefore direct taxpayer funding.
The economist never ceases to amaze in this twisted logic...
advael|1 year ago
I have to say, my days of not taking economics seriously as a science are certainly coming to a middle
bentt|1 year ago
hcknwscommenter|1 year ago
thijson|1 year ago
thedigitalone|1 year ago
4d4m|1 year ago
This is self inflicted behavior from monopolies that ignore user research.
strken|1 year ago
rstuart4133|1 year ago
The current solutions look to be market based, which boils down to getting rid of "one fixed price per kWh" and moving to something closer to paying whatever the wholesale market is charging. Not exactly that as the wholesale market is wild. It can varying by over a factor of 1000 during the year. What has happened is time of use charging which boils down to different fix rates for different times of the day. Controlled loads, which translates to the supplier being able to forcibly turn off things in your house. If you agree to that for your car charger for example, you get to pay about USD $0.05/kWh to charge your car. And there are demand charges, which means you don't pay per kW/h used but rather your peak draw in kW over a 3 month period.
Net metering was never a thing here, but now they can forcibly turn off the feed-in. In return they where used to set the maximum feed-in very conservatively based on how much the grid could absorb form every panel in the suburb at the worst possible time, now they will take the maximum your wiring supports.
Finally they now allow households to form themselves into power plants, that sell the power they generate / store directly on the wholesale market.
Meanwhile, the story is talking about grids disallowing net metering as a big step. It ain't a big step. It wasn't even a first step for Australia, as the distortions it caused were obvious so it was never allowed.
It looks to me like Australia has largely solved the day to day "grid instability" problem the article talks about. We do have places whose yearly average is 70% renewable, and they are fine. I'm not so sure about how them solving the "sun hasn't shined and the wind hasn't blown" for a week issue. It's not insurmountable as even on cloudy days, solar outputs 20% of peak. However, right now the solution in that 70% state is gas peakers.
DCH3416|1 year ago
The grid is a utility. They weren't originally built with the idea of customers sending power back at a small scale. So it's tricky to maintain power fluctuations when you have all these extra data points. Plus considerations for the quality of consumer hardware. So naturally companies would prefer to have solar installations at scale as opposed to by residential basis.
flyinghamster|1 year ago
https://www.comed.com/smart-energy/my-green-power-connection...
henearkr|1 year ago
If the solar-roofed house can involve home batteries, problem solved.
dgacmu|1 year ago
suraci|1 year ago
justlikereddit|1 year ago
You can't run a grid with maxed out cheap renewables. It's like having a society where the police and prisons staff closes shop and goes home when the sun sets and still expect law and order to persist.
Zigurd|1 year ago