home battery

So, what's your utility bill? I use propane for cooking and electric for everything else. My electric bill is 279kwH at 11 cents a kwH or $30.69 a month. 5 gallons of propane lasts 6 months at maybe $5 a gallon. So, my total energy cost is $31.52 a month. In summer it's cheaper since I don't have A/C.

--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: snipped-for-privacy@netfront.net ---

The solar was put in when the house was staged for sale, to increase the selling price. The neighbors are very non-techy (two MDs) and I doubt they know what a KWH is.

Yikes, there were two months of essentially zero output. Keep those turbines spinning!

I have no desire to have a mess of solar panels on my roof. My PG&E gas+electric bill runs around $130 a month.

Why waste perfectly good parking spaces that nobody uses?

Gas+electric, maybe $130 per month. We're into the upper pricing tier, which is over 30 cents per KWH.

Must be a rather expensive house. These daze, solar systems run about $4.00/kw installed. For a typical 6 kw system, that's $24,000. That's quite a bit just for staging.

Yep. It's not quite that bad. Diving back into the numbers, I find the monthly production for 2014-2015 at: kw-hrs June 597 (partial month) July 923 Aug 866 Sept 625 Oct 404 Nov 261 Dec 190 Jan 284 Feb 116 (partial month)

Total production = 4,270 kw-hrs At roughly $0.15/kw-hr, that a "savings" of $640.50 over an 8 month span.

Yes, the Nov and Dec production numbers were lousy. High year round production is not going to happen in the middle of the forest thanks to the trees. Even if there were no clouds to ruin the day, the sun is sufficiently low on the horizon to insure lousy production. The house was relying heavily on PG&E power even the sky had been clear.

My PG&E averages about $42/month, mostly due to electric bathroom heat and the electric water heater. No gas and I use wood heating using about $500/year for 2 cords of super dry firewood. The total is about $1000/year or about $83/month: Notice that the average price curve is essentially flat, while my consumption curve is dropping thanks to various conservation measures. That proves that the more I conserve, the more PG&E raises their prices, proving the conservation doesn't work.

There's a charging station at the local Walgreen's that has the cord cut off. Guess someone was farming copper. I never saw any car parked there charging up.

In terms of cost, any savings are completely illusory, and caused by a market distorted by cross subsidies.

To achieve a real saving, the cost of solar power has to be below the marginal cost of operating a large generator. The marginal cost of operating a nuclear or coal powered generator is not very high at all. The marginal cost of operating a natural gas powered generator is still only a fraction of the retail price of electricity, with the rest of the retail price being capital costs of the generator and distribution infrastructure (and billing, profit, tax).

What happens when people use solar panels to reduce their utility bills is that they end up paying less than their fair share of the cost of the power generation and delivery infrastructure, and other people pay more than their fair share. It should be noted that the cost of that infrastructure is largely dictated by peak loads which those with solar panels will be happy to contribute to if their panels are not producing power.

If utilities were allowed to allocate the cost of the infrastructure in an equitable way, those with solar panels would find that all they done was to increase their cost of energy.

The above doesn't apply, of course, to people who go completely off grid, but as you've noted, that requires extra equipment which comes at a significant cost.

and

I don't think space is that big an issue. What really kills these schemes is cost.

Sylvia.

Quote:

If it's not used, it should be reallocated. Until then, it should be left vacant if not used for its designated purpose. Otherwise it just encourages antisocial behaviour.

Sylvia.

...

Depends on how much IR and UV passes through the solar cell enclosure. A naked solar cell sometimes runs near full power even when clouds are blocking a lot of visible light.

On a sunny day (Fri, 13 Feb 2015 15:50:50 -0800) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

Must be terrible then on sunny days :-)

I have an about 100 W panel installed, and on cloudy days the power is maybe enough to charge a cellphone, slowly. I agree with James Arthur.

On a sunny day (Fri, 13 Feb 2015 16:17:23 -0800) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

I will tell you something, what "I" think about that.

First, in school, we learned that oil came from plants that died etc etc. I never believed that, but to speak up was not a good idea.

I always wondered...

Then, some years ago, I found an article by NASA about the Pluto spacecraft (it is almost there now), It said" "We hope to be at Pluto before the atmosphere condenses".

---------------------------------^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Now that hit me, ! OF COURSE !

Earth was once a glowing molten stone mass with hydrocarbons forming its atmosphere. As it cooled of, stones solidified, and later the hydrocarbons became fluids, and condensated on the surface,. THE WHOLE ATMOSPHERE. That is why you see oil in sands, under the water in sands, some places still at the surfece, etc.

There is plenty oil, the rest is marketing to get the price up.

It is as simple as that.

But you will not see that simple theory published or even repeated in a simple 500 $ experiment..

On a sunny day (Fri, 13 Feb 2015 18:12:40 -0800 (PST)) it happened Bill Sloman wrote in :

You are such a boring twit. If you cared you stopped posting (uses energy) and stopped breathing, and eating.

You REALLY got to get out of your minor thinking frame (denkraam in Dutch),

The whole UNIVERSE is destructive, stars are born and burn up and die, you live on a piece of dirt near one, going round in circles on circles, not only in you mind.

By the time things get critical in your view of what it should evolve into, maybe this species will be an other one, or whatever, we can always go nuculear with what is it, Thorium, India and China are busy developing that. And if not who cares. Species adapt. No, not in your time frame.

loman

You are such an ignorant twit. Stuff you don't understand does strike you a s boring.

eating.

),

You need to get into the habit of thinking, but that needs a functioning br ain ...

Perfectly correct - as far as it goes, which isn't quite far enough.

o,

Adopting a new technology doesn't require the evolution of a new species. T horium does look more practical than uranium, but nobody has put it into pr actice yet.

Obviously not. My life expectancy is 85 years. We've been around for perhap s 200,000 years, and typical species last about 10,000,000 years (but we ar en't a typical species).

As a species we are really weird - we now live in big conurbations at densi ties only the social insects can match. We are obviously adapting furiously to a new and completely novel environment for mammals. Where we will end u p is anybody's guess, but your guess-work is less knowledge-based than most .

For that particular location. Geographical averaging means that the back-up actually required is rather less than the potential maximum output of that particular set of solar cells.

Not entirely. Shipping power across the grid involves losses and costs mone y.

If some of the power being generated is generated close to where it's being used, distribution costs go down.

This ignores losses in the distribution network and the cost of a distribut ion network sized to handle power distribution from a few large generators.

But higher than the marginal cost of exposing solar panels to sunlight.

So use solar panels to generate a lot of the power closer to where it's bei ng consumed.

But in Australia, at lot of the peak load is air-conditioning systems that draw most power when the sun is at its brightest.

Some of what they had done. Solar power generation is distributed, and copi ng with the shortfalls involves distributing less power than has to be dist ributed from a few central power stations.

Not so much significant as prohibitive. If it wasn't the electricity genera ting companies would use it to spread out their peak loads

ly

There's a lot of rural space close to every urban centre.

If you want a scheme that makes money today, yes. If you want a scheme that 's going to look good when the price of burning fossil-carbon has doubled p er kilowatt hour, the situation is more complex. Digging up fossil carbon i s getting progressively more expensive, and burning it and dumping the CO2 produced in the atmosphere isn't going to be free for much longer either.

Some is lost, but all that does is create a moderate increase in the marginal cost.

The cost of distribution consists almost entirely of capital, so the distribution infrastructure costs the same whether it's being used or not.

It has to be sized that way to handle the loads when solar isn't delivering.

It's the wrong comparison. The generating plant and distribution infrastructure need to be there anyway, to cope with the absence of solar power when solar isn't delivering, so its capital cost is unavoidable. So the only cost that can be avoided by installing solar panels is the marginal cost of generating. But the cost that can be avoided by *not* installing solar panels is their capital cost. So the correct comparison is between the capital cost of the solar panels and the marginal cost of the generating plant.

That would be fine, if solar panels could be relied on to deliver power. They can't.

There is some benefit to the system, but it's not enough to justify the cost of the solar panels. It's now been realised that panels have been installed so as to maximise their energy output, but the greatest benefit to the system occurs if the panels face west, so maximise their output in the afternoon. There's even talk about requiring that they be moved.

If the backup capacity were colocated with the solar power generation, that would be true. But it's not, and nor is it practical to do so.

Quite so.

Not so very much. At the moment, coal fired electricity in Australia costs about 4 cents per kilowatt hour before it enters the grid. That's out of the 25 cents or so we pay. Double the 4 to 8, and it would hardly be noticed in the scheme of things.

the situation is more

In Australia, we have plenty of uranium. At the moment, it's all shipped abroad (pretty much in its raw state - which is typical of Australia - no value adding before export). None is used locally, but it could be used to produce electricity for not that much more than coal currently costs.

Sylvia.

The big plunge around the beginning of Feb 2015 is from a 3 days

There are two issue with geographical averaging. One is simply that it's hard to define an upper limit to the area that can be adversely affected at the same time. Some weather systems are very big.

The other is that the larger the area you're using for the averaging, the greater the distances that power potentially needs to be moved to cover shortfalls, and the greater the power involved. The distribution capacity required is extra capacity, because it wouldn't otherwise be required, so the cost of it needs to be included in the cost of solar power.

Sylvia.

You're an abject idiot. This is further substantiation.

Ever seen a peat bed?

ng.

You miss the point. Solar power generation isn't there all day and it's not there at all at night. The variation within daylight hours depends on the weather, but it is statistically predictable, and if the solar generating p lant is spread out the weather variations tend to average out.

The night-load has to be carried by the back-up generators but you can fudg e the tariffs to keep it a lot lower than the peak daylight load.

The back-up generation is centralised, but it isn't going to supplying the peak load, or anything like it if the generation system is competently run, so the capital cost of the distribution system big enough to balance subst antial distributed solar generation is a lot less than the cost of the dist ribution system required to handle the same power centrally generated.

That's not the only cost of burning coal. Climate change is already costing Australia quite a bit in extreme weather, longer bush-fire seasons and so on.

And if doubling the coast of coal wouldn't matter, what's the objection to paying 5.9 cents per kilowatt hour for solar power?

Burning more coal is really bad idea, and burning a good deal less would be a step in the right direction. The Chinese and the Americans have to see t he light before we have any hope of slowing down climate change, but the Ch inese have actually got the message, though it's going to take a while befo re they ramp up their renewable generation to the point where it will make a difference.

The Americans are a bigger problem, but enough extreme weather will eventua lly get through even their problems with the people who own the country run ning the country for their own short term benefit.

Sadly, getting rid of the waste from nuclear reactors is one of those negle cted areas, much like the CO2 injected into the atmosphere by burning fossi l carbon.

There are technically adequate solutions - Synroc comes to mind

but nobody is willing to tolerate even the most safely packed nuclear waste in their own back yard. We've had fifty years to find a solution, and ther e's nothing workable in sight.