Interesting article:
Solar panels are flooding California’s grid. That’s a problem.


I don’t know a lot about solar power, but our new house doesn’t have a lot of trees shading the roof (unlike our old house), so I have been thinking that solar roof panels would probably be pretty productive. (I don’t see a lot of them around town and I don’t know what the electric company policies here are)

I guess I didn’t realize the battery issue, and this article doesn’t really explain it. But I assume it means that not all houses with panels also have solar batteries to store the power they generate? In other words, if you don’t have batteries, you either use (in real time) the energy you generate, you send it to the power company, or that energy is lost?

You’re correct about the batteries.

Just before we left, the Edison company was pushing us to sign up for time-of-use metering. You could pick from several plans but at that time the cheapest time to use power was after 9 PM.

I wonder if they’ve changed that.

The other thing I take away from this article is that it may be hard to predict the economic benefits to solar panels. If you expect to be selling your unused energy to the power company, but then the number of people doing that suddenly rockets up, well, you may not get that financial benefit. And if that was part of how you planned to pay for the panels, that could be problematic.

Also, I'm curious about how long solar panels last, or how often they need to be replaced.

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time-of-use metering

I always wondered about this. I guess maybe you run your dryer at night and things that you can choose, but there are other things you're not likely to be able to choose...

We represented a battery company that did installations in connection with solar panels. The battery could also draw power from the grid when power was cheap and store it for later use.

As far as the panels, when they wear out, they get tossed in a landfill, and they leach cadmium into the groundwater. An issue being addressed by another of my clients …

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Originally posted by ShiroKuro:

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time-of-use metering

I always wondered about this. I guess maybe you run your dryer at night and things that you can choose, but there are other things you're not likely to be able to choose...

The largest savings will be moving around larger electric loads - heating, cooling, laundry equipment, electric kitchen equipment, electric water heaters, car chargers. If your heating, cooking and water heating is gas it doesn’t make much difference when you use them.

This house has a smart meter so TOU billing is possible but First Energy dies ‘t offer it. In fact they don’t even use the remote reading feature and send a guy around every month to read it.

An odd custom here is that heating and cooking are gas, dryers and water heaters are electric in pretty much every house. If First Energy starts offering TOU I’ll put a programmable timer on the water heater and pre-cool the house a few degrees lower during periods of lower cost.

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As far as the panels, when they wear out, they get tossed in a landfill, and they leach cadmium into the groundwater.

Yeah, I don't really see this being talked about here. It's starting to be talked about in Japan though.

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This house has a smart meter so TOU billing is possible but First Energy dies ‘t offer it.

Oh wow, that's kind of surprising. I don't know what the options are here yet (since we've been renting thus far) but I will be learning soon.

The whole renewable energy issue is much more complex than most people realize. Electricity has historically been generated in response to demand because there were few ways to store significant amounts of power outside of some pumped hydro systems that pumped water uphill when demand was lower and ran it back down, recovering the potential energy stored in the elevated reservoir to generate additional power. This was done mainly to keep nuclear power plants operating at peak output around the clock because of the high capital costs of building them and low operating costs for fuel.

The increasing proportion of renewable energy resources (wind and solar) carries with it that issue of storing electricity when more can be generated than used and then supplying energy when demand exceeds active supply. This is compounded by the intermittent nature of these sources due to time of day, lack of wind, and weather. The primary mechanism for storage is batteries, but they aren't cheap. TOU metering attempts to address the supply versus demand issue by encouraging reduced demand when power demand is high and greater demand at low times. This once was during certain times of day, but renewable energy has shifted parts of this equation - for example, there is no solar available at night.

Another complication of newer sources like wind and solar is their impact on stability of the electrical grid. The alternating current grid requires the connected sources to be in synchronism for stability and controlled power flow over the system. The large rotating mass of conventional electrical generators is effectively short term energy storage that allows the grid operators and the automatic systems to react to upsets like short circuits. Renewables don't have this natural inertia although efforts are underway to make the inverter systems that connect them to the grid behave more like synchronous generators. This is a major problem as renewables become a larger and larger part of the supply side.

The major winter blackout in Texas a few years ago was largely a problem of natural gas-fueled generation not being sufficiently winterized, but problems with renewable sources also aggravated the problem. Once a grid shuts down in a blackout, restoring normal operation is far from a simple procedure.

Big Al

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Originally posted by ShiroKuro:

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This house has a smart meter so TOU billing is possible but First Energy dies ‘t offer it.

Oh wow, that's kind of surprising. I don't know what the options are here yet (since we've been renting thus far) but I will be learning soon.

One thing to look at is you’re allowed to chose your energy supplier. Wasn’t available in CA.

But Ohio has a setup called “Nopec” which is about the most Ohio name for a program I’ve ever heard. First Energy provides the delivery but you can pick your generator from a list of about 50 options.

FE mostly generates power via two ancient coal plants in WV. The charge isn’t bad but I was able to switch to a supplier in Texas that’s 50 renewable for about half what FE charges. There’s a similar program for natural gas but I didn’t see enough saving to mess with it.

Maybe your state has a program like this?

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Maybe yiur state has a program like this?

I don't think we have options like that, but I'll make sure I'm not missing something!

Big Al, thanks for that post, yes, I think most people don't realize all the challenges, and drawbacks, of newly created or proposed energy sources. There's clearly no magic bullet.

A lot of places only had one utility supplying gas and one utility supplying electricity. Illinois deregulated gas utilities quite a while ago, which allowed companies other than the default (only) supplier to come in and look for your business. Turned out for natural gas deregulation, consumers ended up paying a lot more for their gas in the long run, and usually ended up with the original supplier. In our case, it's Nicor Gas; we always stayed with them and never swtiched.

Electric utility deregulation happened later and went more smoothly after the lessons learned with natural gas. There was something called municipal aggregation, which allowed communities to negotiate contracts with electricity suppliers and get a discouted rate. You could always opt out and go with whatever supplier you wanted, maybe someone who provides green energy. There were two or three year contracts for these, and after a few cycles, most towns got out of municipal aggregation because rates sort of settled out and there wasn't much savings to be found.

We have the Citizens Utility Board (CUB) that outlines how things work here. Maybe you have something similar.

https://www.citizensutilityboard.org/electric/

https://www.citizensutilityboard.org/gas/