Posted on 10/17/2020 8:11:09 AM PDT by Kaslin
According to the conventional wisdom, if you install solar panels on your roof you can zero out your electric bill and save pot loads of money. This is actually true if you live in certain states, particularly California. The catch is that everyone that does not have solar panels on their roof is paying for your benefits. For the homeowner that’s a not a problem. It’s a feature.
Solar only works during the day and best in the middle of the day. But residential electricity consumption tends to peak in the evening. A scheme called net metering fixes this problem by allowing the homeowner to “bank” excess midday electricity and then withdraw it from the bank later in the day. The bank is imaginary, an accounting fiction, because it is not easy to store electricity. The bank can even be used to store summer electricity for consumption in the winter, when solar works poorly. The excess solar electricity is fed back to the grid where it is immediately consumed by other customers. There is no bank except in the accounting books.
Residential solar is a disaster for the electric utility. Once the customer installs solar, the utility loses almost all its revenue but keeps nearly all its expenses. The expenses are maintaining a connection to the customer’s house including the distribution system that carries electricity from the generating plants to the customer. The generating plants still have to be ready to provide regular quantities of electricity to each solar homeowner as soon as the sun sets and whenever it is cloudy.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
I'm not against solar. I have about 16 panels although none are grid-tied.
Each. I have 10 of them, and that's barely enough to run a few appliances. The other thing you need to mention is whether the batteries are sealed. The $200 batteries are AGM and sealed. Auto batteries and many marine batteries are not. That means they need to be in a venitlated space.
You have it backwards. Your neighbors are being forced to buy your unreliable power for full retial price instead of wholesale power for 3 to 4 times less. In fact your 2-4 cents extra money (depending on location in California) is above and beyond the full retail price you are selling your excess power for.
The 2 cents applies to annual excess power. That's after annual net metering where you sell excess power at full retail price in the summer and buy needed power at full retail price in the winter using the summer credits.
That is about the worst false equivalency I have ever heard.
First the only way that roof top solar generation could ever reach “Critical Mass” is if you could have roof top units that circled the globe all supplying enough generation so that those on the sunny side of the world could supply enough generation for themselves and those on the dark side of the world (we won’t even get in to the complicated matter of transmission line losses).
Then let’s talk about the fact that the SETI at home project works because one they get to use you computing hardware for free, you also supply the power to run that hardware and it is completely voluntary. What the solar panel people do to the investor owned utilities is not voluntary. It is forced on them by law.
You should read this part again.
Residential solar is a disaster for the electric utility. Once the customer installs solar, the utility loses almost all its revenue but keeps nearly all its expenses. The expenses are maintaining a connection to the customer’s house including the distribution system that carries electricity from the generating plants to the customer. The generating plants still have to be ready to provide regular quantities of electricity to each solar homeowner as soon as the sun sets and whenever it is cloudy.
I don’t get to sell it at retail, only offset power used at night, as I called it, a free battery. The only power I can sell is excess generation at the end of the year true up. Sure, it’s a good deal. I added $120/mo to a 15 yr mortgage to replace $500+/mo electricity bill. $380+/mo in my pocket every month. I wouldn’t tell my tax preparer to “skip all the deductions, I want to pay more“. Nor would I bend over to the tune of $500+ every month when I don’t have to. Almost $25k in savings since installed.
Sure, it’s a good deal.
For you. Not for your neighbors. Often in the suburbs it's part of the "Stick it to the power company" attitude. In my rural cooperative we become informed and quickly lose that attitude.
You might as well generate your electricity from the LP.
Yup. Pretty much the same scam.
“ The other advantage is having power when no one else does,”
Except that’s not how it works. There’s no way to use that power directly in your home.
L
Absolutely there is, a decent sized solar system with a battery bank can provide power regardless of the electrical grid being up or down that’s the whole point of disaster preparation
There is a way to do it. But these solar companies doing it now don’t set them up in that manner. No batteries, just a direct feed into the grid.
I know because a friend of mine sells them. The way they’re configured and installed you can’t use the electricity generated in your own home. That’s one of the reasons I passed on it.
That and the ROI didn’t work.
L
And that set-up without battery bank backup is useless when needed the most, grid goes down for whatever reason so does the house....why bother.
That’s the conclusion I came to. Went the a whole house gen set powered by natural gas. Much cheaper.
L
Like I said in a couple of other posts, it’s a lifestyle not necessarily a ROI decision...
If you live in a rural remote location, you will have to provide most of your own public utilities, like water and sewage, but based on experience dealing with the aftermath of a hurricane, living remotely means you are the last to get power back....
Building a house with solar in mind from the beginning is the optimal way to go...because you can build a structure around the solar system....
If I were to build a new house, in Florida, so results will vary...but I would build the following...
A modest size home no more than 2000 to 2200 Sq. Ft...
The house would be built using Insulated Concrete Forms (ICF), energy efficient windows an doors, a Tin SIP paneled roof and finally to the extent possible Gas Appliances...the goal would be to make the house as energy efficient as possible to lessen to demand for electricity...for example, ICF construction is supposedly 70% more efficient than a traditionally framed house...
the other design I would use is mini-split AC units instead of central heat and air..
It is very hard to do at that scale. It still takes a couple of "D" batteries to power a simple flashlight or portable radio and those are very simple electrical devices. Scaling that up to store enough energy to run a household, with washing machines, dishwashers, etc., is a huge undertaking.
This is also the reason electric cars aren't totally viable yet. It just takes too long to charge the battery (and you need traditional electricity to do it) and the average range of just over 200 miles between charges makes it an option only for those with short commutes.
This is the holy grail and companies are spending billions trying to solve the problem.
But once that problem is solved, most homes will have the ability to be truly off the grid (the electrical grid).
Our farm house in Indiana is off grid with 360 watts of solar panels charging a 600 amp hour battery pack. The system is perfectly adequate for a retired farm couple; but it’s kind of a pain in the ass and wouldn’t be suitable for someone without a lot of time on their hands.
Technical engineering fiction.
Sounds like a solid design.
L
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