Posted on 04/22/2024 7:51:20 PM PDT by yesthatjallen
In sunny California, solar panels are everywhere. They sit in dry, desert landscapes in the Central Valley and are scattered over rooftops in Los Angeles’s urban center. By last count, the state had nearly 47 gigawatts of solar power installed — enough to power 13.9 million homes and provide over a quarter of the Golden State’s electricity.
But now, the state and its grid operator are grappling with a strange reality: There is so much solar on the grid that, on sunny spring days when there’s not as much demand, electricity prices go negative. Gigawatts of solar are “curtailed” — essentially, thrown away.
In response, California has cut back incentives for rooftop solar and slowed the pace of installing panels. But the diminishing economic returns may slow the development of solar in a state that has tried to move to renewable energy. And as other states build more and more solar plants of their own, they may soon face the same problems.
“These are not insurmountable challenges,” said Michelle Davis, head of global solar at the energy research and consulting firm Wood Mackenzie Power and Renewables. “But they are challenges that a lot of grid operators have never had to deal with.”
Solar power has many wonderful properties — once built, it costs almost nothing to run; it produces no air pollution and generates energy without burning fossil fuels. But it also has one major, obvious drawback: The sun doesn’t shine all the time.
SNIP
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Not to worry. Illegals will need electricity.
“Batteries?”
That is the simple answer. But Ca will not let folks set up battery systems with these grid tie solar systems.
They claim environmental and fire hazard reasons. So when the grid goes down so does your solar.
“This means that operators must build the same fossil fuel generating capacity as would be needed without any solar panels.”
It’s even worse, the type of fossil backup has to be less efficient. Combined cycle gas turbines (CCGT) are almost 60 percent efficient, single cycle are about 40 percent efficient. But combined cycle (exhaust gasses from the first cycle are used to boil water to spin another turbine) takes too long to get the water boiling, so fewer CCGTs are being built. Most of the “CO2 advantage” of solar and wind is lost because the entire system shifts to a less efficient fossil fuel backup.
“You just need about $80K to setup the system and buy the car.”
Powerwall is about 13kwh. At 15 cents per kilowatt hour, it stores $1.90 worth of electricity. If your electric bill is $200 a month, then it stores less than 1 percent of your monthly electricity. 30 days/100 is .3 days which is 7 hours. If it is cloudy or rainy you have no power. Back to the stone age. I have a 16kw piped natural gas generator, every hour it produces more than is stored in a Powerwall, and can run forever. But if Democrats want to freeze in the dark, fine.
“And since Deep State can’t tax it when collected and consumed by individual homeowners, it’s gotta go.”
The feds are pumping billions into it.
Store your own excess. Saline batts. But... who has that kind of loose change laying around.
Pie in the sky until reality bites.
Absolute genius you are! Everybody in California should be screaming this idea at the top of their lungs.
It's like putting a second hole in the boat so the water can run out.
Only different.
No need. Require builders of roof-top solar to also install storage. Plenty of systems available.
I have Sol-Ark inverters that produce 18kW of continuous AC power for my home. I lose about 5% when converting AC to DC. I also have 92kWh of Gyll battery storage. I lose about 10% in the round trip to store DC power to batteries, then later retrieve that power from the batteries as needed (i.e. at night, or rainy days).
The end result is that my 20kW of solar produces 80% of the power my all-electric, 2,300 sq ft home needs, including charging our Ioniq 5 for 16K miles per year (not counting the road-trip miles we drove it and charged away from home).
My inverters have a feature to power a separate electrical panel intermittently. I have one of my EV charger circuits on that panel. We usually need the EV charged only 50% for the next day's drive. So if we come home with more charge that than, we'll plug it into the intermittent charger and charge the EV beyond 50%, but only if the power is free. If we come home with less than 50%, or if we plan a lot of driving the next day, we plug it into the constantly powered charger (which will definitely charge up the EV, but may or may not be free power).
That one simple charging habit works amazingly well at making most of our EV charging be done by homemade solar. We charge more on sunny days than we do on rainy days. And that feature wasn't available on Tesla Powerwalls back when I bought my much cheaper Sol-Ark inverters.
Switch the panels on only at night to even out the supply. 😋
I think solatubes is also a pretty good idea, because you can light up your basement for nothing during the daytime.
The project engineering I did to make my home and driving 80% energy self-reliant taught me that half of the battle is making the home not need as much energy to begin with. It'd be cost-prohibitive to make my current home already more efficient than I've made it. But I told me wife that if we downsize I'm having a house built with triple-paned windows, more insulation in the walls, before the insulation is added we go behind and make sure the builders caulked around the windows, our water heater closet would be closer to our HVAC, and a location to put our solar panels facing south that's easier to reach and clean twice per year.
A lot of utilities are changing their billing structure to include a flat fee for the infrastructure. The argument s you’re using the infrastructure that our customers underwrote to transport and receive power and we’re responsible to fix when there’s an issue.
Subsidies is not what grew the oil and gas markets and subsidies for solar and wind are producing industries that will always wax and wane between glut and insufficiency, because subsidies poison the environment for honest returns on investment.
...waiting for the plan on how to recycle all of these toxic panels in 5...4...3...
An energy generation system that provides too much power when sunny (in spring) only encourages lower power plant generation. Then the sun stops shining and you’re under powered. This creates volatility in continuity.
I’d argue that localized batteries might be a solution.
That said. Nuclear.
You store the excess power in batteries.
Then it can be used during peak usage and/or overnight.
MSN writing is some of the dumbest I have ever read.
Many companies are offering this solution, but the biggest is Tesla and nothing more than political reasons they are dumping on solar/battery and EVs.
Before some of you pop a gasket let me say this. I hate mandates an you have the right to buy whatever vehicle you want.i personally have nothing against gas/diesel except for the FACT that it is a political football. We can go from cheap & plentiful gas with one President to $7/gallon with another and much of the Inflation we are suffering thru is from fuel priced.
I’m a geek a heart and Elon figured out how to get a rocket to land on a barge in the middle of the ocean 7 years ago and the competition isn’t even close. In EVs he figured it out. A Teala is cheaper to operate than a gas car and it’s features far surpass even luxury brands. Does it solve everything? No, but people are buying them left & right regardless what all the FUD in the media are saying.
Back to solar/batteries. It works. It’s not for every case and it will need some sort of backup when weather blocks the power source for an extended period of time. It’s far more efficient & cheaper than wind which is a joke IMHO.
The big reason the left does not like about personal solar/battery residential & commercial systems is CONTROL. They lose control when the consumer owns the source, distribution of their own energy.
Here is a guy in New Jersey not California or the sun belt, Jersey who has a solar/battery & a Tesla EV. For the year his net electric bill is zero. Powers his house & appliances and his transportation for a net cost of $0.00 a year. OK, there was a minimum charge for having an account with his local utility.
The only drawback is the initial cost of the system but with utility rates rising as fast as gas/diesel it pays for itself pretty fast.
Sorry for the rant, but after reading the MSN article and seeing it for what it is. I felt compelled.
I think there are a few ways. Here, they’re building “pumped storage” where they pump water up to a high lake when power is cheap, then drop it back to the low lake via turbines to make electricity when power is in demand.
Buy low, sell high.
Correct; as with nearly everything else in the economy, the problem isn’t the market, it’s the government compelling behavior, and picking market winners and losers through policies and sometimes laws, that’s the problem.
As a bonus they take the wrongs they create and gin up a new generation of red diaper doper babies crying about “capitalism” as if capitalism is the cause of a government mandate here, a stopped energy source there, and a speck of your own money back if you just do What You’re Told.
There’s some word that used to mean “when government uses business as its pawn to effect unfreedom” but the dopes only know to use it to mean “anything the MSM tells me I’m supposed to disagree with.”
That means a lot, thank you.
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