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 ...
“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.”
Sounds like Social Security.
My electric company breaks those charges out.
“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.”
I’m in Florida and some neighbors have them. They do make the electric bill attractive. But the price to put them on and the leaks make them not worth it in my book. Some neighbors got rid of them. Leaks were the main culprit.
Anyone remember about forty years ago when scammers were selling rooftop wind generators saying you could power your house and sell your excess power back to the power company!
Earlier wind generators were often used in isolated locations to give a minimum of power for a a light bulb. I saw one not long ago that has not been used in at least fifty-sixty years.
I would seriously consider a solar system if I were to build a new house, especially if that new house was remote, in fact I would go off grid as much as possible.
I live in Florida and I’ve done some research on this issue, I could be mistaken because it’s been awhile since I did doing the research.
If you build a new home in Florida, the law says you must be hooked up to the electric grid, but you can sell excess electricity back to the utility.
A number of years ago Florida passed a constitutional amendment that required utility companies to purchase excess solar power generated by consumer solar systems at the same rate they charge you for power....at the time it was 10.5 cents per Kwh....
If you were going to do a complete system, you would need a battery bank to store the power and have a generator to charge the batteries if case of bad weather, natural disaster, etc....
The other advantage is having power when no one else does, like during a hurricane, especially if you live remote....
It’s a lifestyle that requires a lot of study to know what you are getting into...
No mention of battery technology improvements. That would be a game changer. Problem is who you ask. A Tesla employee would say the solution is here now or around the corner.
Leaks as in rainwater getting into the house where the solar was attached to the roof?
What leaks?
Not a particularly good article, he paints with a broad brush and doesn’t account for the variety of solar systems on the market. Solar systems often include battery systems to store excess power for use during cloudy or at night. Most houses are connected to utilities, including electric power when built, so the infrastructure cost is included in construction costs.
Further, the financial relationship between utilities and homeowners varies by company and individual state legal requirements.
Solar isn’t for everyone, should not be subsidied with tax dollars, but can be a wise feature for a lot of homes.
“The bank is imaginary, an accounting fiction, because it is not easy to store electricity.”
This is a very misleading article. The excess solar energy is not being “banked”, rather it is saving whatever other fuel would have been used to generate what is being fed to the grid by solar.
It’s a bit sad that we have to be just as careful about propaganda spewed by our side as well as the other.
Last year’s rolling black-outs were a real learning experience for Californians with solar panels. While you know that the capabilities of a solar installation were specified in the contracts, it was not surprising when many such owners were stunned when, in bright daylight, they had no power, neither from their expensive roof panels nor the electric lines!
The simple answer was that without a rather expensive add-on battery ‘farm’ and switchable inverter, the power from the panels was wasted when the power company ‘blacks out’ from the substation. Gee whiz, Buck Rodgers, the future is not what they said it would be!
Oh, and one more thing for California in its trip to the future; As of the beginning of this year of 2020, all new residential homes must be equipped with a solar electric system sufficient to offset 100% of the home’s electricity usage. Solar Panel size may be reduced if other energy efficiency improvements are made elsewhere.
Remember the popular meme for the California CITIZENS; “What did California Socialists use for lighting before candles? Electricity!” (Reference to kerosene forgets that kerosene is a fossil fuel!)
Watching
I am all for alternative energy sources IF they pay for themselves and they are not subsidized by others. To date, I am not aware of any that survive without heavy subsidizing by government and utilities (i.e. - customers).
Everyone would support “green and free energy”. Who wouldn’t? We do not have that now. The green energy market is a failure and it is full of corruption given the amount of public money that has been injected into the market.
Will we have it at some point in the future? I think so. Technology is improving dramatically and our ability to store electricity is improving as well. However, we are not there now (not even close) and forcing reliance on alternative energy production has distorted the market, raised prices for all of us, and it has made the corruptocrats and issue advocacy groups wealthy.
The market is distorted and corrupt. Current technologies have been oversold to politicians and utilities by issue advocacy groups with a wink and a nod (and bags of cash).
In other words.... the “green energy” market is like most of our markets. It is dominated by a few and the rest of us pay more for it.
I’m a go...but only if I can get my home “Mr Fusion” or a nice hydrogen fuel cell.
I live in southern Arizona, so there’s plenty of sun most of the time. I might look into solar someday, probably a ground-level setup rather than rooftop since there’s plenty of room for that.
People I’ve known who relied heavily on solar power (especially those off the grid) had lots of problems.
We did solar when we were in California...it did make some sense there, but made it harder to sell the house when we escaped California. Now in Texas where it makes no sense to do solar but still got salesmen coming by our neighborhood trying to sell it.
“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.”
Well there’s the solution. Stop doing that.
“same rate they charge you for power”
Power company should pay you only the cost of the fuel they didn’t have to burn.
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