Posted on 10/14/2019 9:30:10 AM PDT by rktman
Solar power in California means waiting for the sun to come up and heat the ground.
In other words, it's a total scam being perpetrated on the people by the socialists in government.
We installed solar panels and they made it clear that we would not be generating our own energy. The only thing we actually own is the debt that pays for the panels themselves. We actually bought not enough to meet our own needs so that we wouldn’t be selling our surplus electricity at the wholesale rate which is what happens if you make too much. What does happen is that we can run our air conditioning during the hottest part of the day when the rates are highest. I suspect that if the power went off our panels would be idled for that time but we are not connected to PG&E.
Had the salesman over the house a few years ago, thinking in terms of prepping and having my own source of electricity.
They told me that it wouldn't work if the power went out - Huh?
How much you want to bet that this so-called solar power collected at home doesn't really get transmitted or used anywhere at all? Complete and total scam coming and going.
I know there are solar panels that supply direct power. I see them on the shows where people live in the wilderness and use them as their only source of power. Are these illegal in California? Are California consumers not told the panels they buy and install don’t supply direct power?
Those panels and inverter would have gotten disconnected from the grid and hot wired so that I had at least minimal power while the sun was shining.
Mine run the house all night till sunup. Some grid-tied systems can be switched for power to the house during sunshine.
Butt, butt, butt...........they said............ LOL! Kind of suspected that would be the case. Charging the old Tesla? Not today bucko.
How long do the backup generators and batteries last if there is a blackout and the battery is drained?
Surely they were offered a deal akin to municipal water vs private wells in many jurisdictions: if you want on-grid service, you either forego independent sourcing or route that into the grid and get equivalent credits back. Municipal sources don’t want the competition: if enough homes can go off-grid sufficiently, customer base collapses; corollary is if enough homes accept the deal, they’re beholden to the grid working.
I expect many CA residents will do exactly what environmentalists [claim they] want: go 100% renewables (a la “at least if my power system fails, it’s my own d@mn fault”).
A curious thing about supply-and-demand: when elasticity hits a brick wall, demand instantly becomes acute. Negotiating over high power costs is one thing; having no power is very different, as suddenly homeowners decide $50,000 for a 100% off-grid system is cheap.
Tangent...
Russian scene:
Customer: “How much are pork chops?”
Butcher: “5 rubles.”
C: “Other butcher, he sells pork chops for 2 rubles!”
B: “So buy from him.”
C: “He has none!”
B: “When I have none, I will sell for 2 rubles too.”
I’d be retrofitting that bad boy with a valve.
As for solar, you might as well drop a battery bank in and do wind too. In doing that you can put a shunt on the solar plant and divert the power during an outage.
They will never know. As soon as the power comes on the shunt opens back up and diverts the power back to the grid.
How long do the backup generators and batteries last if there is a blackout and the battery is drained?
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A VERY long time if your backup generator is powered by piped in natural gas.
I know there are solar panels that supply direct power. I see them on the shows where people live in the wilderness and use them as their only source of power. Are these illegal in California? Are California consumers not told the panels they buy and install don’t supply direct power?
Not sure if illegal, but the State offers financial benefits to customers who install the solar panels to (supposedly) provide power to power grid...Loans, rebates, reduced rates, etc.
What a scam. Oh well, a fool and his money.....
Wait until CA starts taxing the rain whether it falls or not.
By the time the batteries are drained the earth will be a little bit of iron-silica gas in the sun’s outer envelope.
That brings up a major undiscussed problem with renewables:
Installing batteries to supply during frequent source outages (i.e.: night) is obvious. That’s a given when installing a system.
The issue comes with statistical fluctuations: how many standard deviations of source outage do you want to cover ... when additional battery capacity, used with diminishing frequency, is no less expensive than the baseline.
16 hours of backup battery is a given (charged during a practical 8 hours of sun).
24 hours is a no-brainer while you’re at it.
48 hours is pretty much a given, covering cloudy days.
72 hours, yeah, storms may hang out for 3 days.
5 days of backup is getting pretty expensive.
A week of storage is expensive.
You probably won’t need more than a week of batteries ... but 1 hour past that and everything shuts down, so do you keep adding on the same blasted per-day battery cost for additional days of coverage which you probably won’t need but still may happen and will seem cheap when you do need it after all?
A homeowner running his own system can make the cogent decision support X days of battery backup, accepting cost of blackout vs cost of forestalling it.
A municipality faces a MUCH harder decision, what with 1 day of additional full-capacity battery storage costing enormous sums and yet being rarely used, vs increasing odds of prolonged blackout by not buying more storage even less used.
There’s also the issue of how long it takes to recharge those batteries on top of normal usage. Basically need to install an additional full day of solar panels just to get each day of battery storage filled in time for the next prolonged cloud cover.
I’m watching my favorite solar gear company (GoalZero.com) and noting that they’re sold out of mid-range batteries (around 1kWh). Wondering if they’ll sell out of more soon...
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