Tesla

Don't worry. He'll come out of it with the shirt off our back.

You mean that power companies are trying to recover their costs? Horrors!

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Another of James Arthur's straw men. The utility - which James Arthur caref ully doesn't identify - won't be getting all its power from it's hydro-elec tric facility, even if that is the only generating plant it owns.

Hydro-electric power has an additional virtue beyond being zero-emission. I t's also easy to ramp up and ramp down. This means that anybody who control s a hydro-electric generating plant is going to run it below full capacity most of the time, so that it can sell the reserve capacity - at a relativel y high price per kilowatt hour - whenever the spot price for power on the C alifornian network goes through the roof.

Those old enough to remember ENRON and the way it manipulated the Californi an whole-sale electricity market will understand how this works.

James Arthur will - of course - have quite a different understanding.

The bottom line is that solar cells on the roof will mean less water drawn from the hydroelectric reservoirs when power is cheap, and more water avail able to cover the general shortfall when the network is under stress. The o ther major source of quickly dispatchable power is gas-turbine operated gen erators - these burn natural gas rather than coal, and emit about half as m uch CO2 per kilowatt-hour as coal, but infinitely more than hydro-power sta tions and solar cells, so having them doing less and the hydro-electric pow er stations covering more of the load peaks would seem to be greener.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Google is full of it.

sized house will end up in the top tier each month.

There are some cities that don't use PG&E or SCE and run their own

you don't eventually use. So there's no upside in sizing a solar system larger than what you'll use on average.

The problem for solar and other renewables is that they only make sense financially when you're using the retail cost of electricity as a basi for comparison.

Don't take anything that "The Daily Caller" publishes too seriously. It's a right-wing political rag and everything they publish reflects their agenda. There are so many glaring and intentional errors in that article that it's clear that it is a political piece, not a scientific or economic piece.

For example, the author writes "So far, most solar panel users have opted not to use Tesla?s batteries because they can sell their solar power to utilities for money." Totally false on several levels. First, the Tesla batteries just became available, so even if solar panel user wanted them, they would not yet have them. Second, few home solar users generate more electricity, on average, than they use. In fact the utility has to approve plans for new installations and doesn't allow users to put in systems that generate more electricity, on average, than the home uses. Third, the amount that the utility pays if you end up generating slightly more electricity than you use is very small, about

buy power from them.

The fact is that home solar installation are using the utility as storage, storing KWH for later use, but not selling power to the utility for money. The utility likes this because peak production of solar power occurs when electricity demand is the highest.

Having your own storage batteries might make sense if the utility's time-of-day metering doesn't work for you and if electricity rates are very high in your area. Utilities are also trying to adjust their rates to charge solar users higher fees for using the utility for storage. Since the mark-up on KWH is so high for utilities like PG&E it hurts them a lot to be selling so much less power to solar users, even though they like the KWH being put into the grid at peak times.

What the high rates for electricity have done in my area is to cause it to make sense for consumer to install the maximum size solar system allowable by the utility, offsetting nearly all of their annual usage. In the past, consumers would just offset their top couple of tiers because the lower tiers were so inexpensive that it was uneconomical to offset 100% of use. When I was putting in solar, and talking to several companies, the ones just desperate to make a sale were trying to push lower capacity, lower cost systems, using less efficient panels. Only one company was honest enough to explain why it made sense to use higher-efficiency panels and to offset most usage, because of the changes in tier pricing that was coming. The lower tier will go up in price and the higher tier will come down slightly. A few thousand dollars extra cost for higher efficiency panels was well worth it to me to take that last $50/month off the bill.

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So how do you buy electricity wholesale? In fact about half the cost of the electricity I buy is in the infra-structure that gets it from the generati ng station to me, and if lots of roof-top solar meant that the generation a nd distribution companies could get by with a cheaper grid, sized to fill i n local shortfalls, rather than carrying everything from a couple of centra l generating stations out to the periphery, then that portion of my electri city charge could go down.

The advantage of solar and other renewables is that they can be spread out to be close to the people consuming the power they generate. They don't sup ply power consistently enough to let you get away without a grid, but that grid doesn't see anything like the peak current loads that you get with a f ew central generating stations supply a distributed population of users..

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

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It's a special deal they cut with the Danish tax office. There's transfer f unds to the site i denmark, since the Tax does not allow just a gaping hole (negative tax). It's the same for the coca cola etc, they just invent a nu mber for the formula used in the drink, which is pretty much the same as th e revenue in denmark (that's the way they transport the money to a Swiss ac count)

Cheers

Klaus

And of course being harder for the feds to touch is a plus.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

Yup that would be my concern. How many cycles? George H.

Grin... Water and electricity. I get a lot of rain, and I've got a decent vertical drop to the stream out back. ~50+ feet. I've only got 30 acres of land, but a lot of uphill drainage flows across my land, down my gullies and into stream. And I've always had "pond dreams".

I have no idea if it's legal to put in your own small scale hydro plant.

Back to Tesla: Solar and Batteries are sexy. The unsexy truth is that we would save a lot more by upgrading the windows and insulation on older buildings and low income housing.

Here's a picture of the building I work in.

(search Trimain center, Buffalo NY) Floor to ceiling single pane windows. In the winter the heat is so high some production people have to open their windows.

George H.

I take anything seriously if it makes sense. Unfortunately, the New York Times is just as selective in what they will report as the Daily Caller. Nowadays, you have to read lefty rags and rightwing rags to find out what's going on.

I believe it's true that the Tesla enterprises are all losing money and living on government subsidies and investor enthusiasm. That's not a good longerm business model.

Having your own power plant makes about as much sense as having your own car factory. It's only being done because of massive governmant subsidies and greenie enthusiasm.

Just wait until the batteries die and the roof starts leaking.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
lunatic fringe electronics 

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Thanks James, Is there any data suggesting that the batteries can deliver the promised 3,650 * 7kWhr?

George H.

Are you in SF?

At our house, we are a bit into the upper tier, which is 30 cents per KWH. But our monthly gas+electric bill runs maybe $130, which is moderate by US standards.

Lots of people in this neighborhood have solar panels, which make no sense to me. The sun angle is low, it's foggy most of the time, NG is plentiful, and heating/cooling requirements are minimal.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
lunatic fringe electronics 

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

If a government is willing to give GiantCorpX tax concessions to encourage them to do business in a domain, wouldn't it make more sense to give all businesses that same concession?

Answer: yes.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
lunatic fringe electronics 

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

This is from the same guy who expects the FPGA companies to treat him like he is a multi-million dollar customer even though he will only ever buy a few hundred of their lower end products.

--

Rick

It makes sense because PV power generation does not have the same economy of scale that most industries have. So it is practical to use on the scale of individual homes or even smaller.

--

Rick

How many years did Amazon "not turn a profit"? Is it OK to live on

*investors'* money? Is there a reason the government can't "invest" (and reap its "returns" in other ways)? How many WARS have we "invested in" -- with dubious results?? Were those good, longterm business models?

Growing your own food, having your own well, etc. also make little sense. Why not simply trust The Police to protect you? Why have your own personal WEAPON(s)??

The utilities *want* solar installations to augment their generation capabilities (if the gummit subsidizes it, so much the better! No need to gather the funds from current customers via a rate increase!). What they *don't* want is to lose control of those "customers".

E.g., an argument is now made that solar installations aren't bearing their fair share of "Grid support costs" -- they have the grid to use for storage *and* auxillary power. So, add a monthly fee to those sites.

But, if I lived in a *shack* and only used a small amount of electricity at exactly the same time of day that the solar customer required the Grid, why shouldn't *I* also pay that fee?

If I use solar power to heat my swimming pool, why hasn't the natural gas company (or electric utility) used the same argument to charge me a "solar heat" factor (because I have the luxury of being able to fall back on that utility if it's a cloudy day and the pool is cold). Or, *passive* solar heat for a home.

I.e., it's a rationalization brought on to justify something that is intended to discourage competition. Oddly, it will probably only *encourage* the development of thinks like Musk batteries with the argument that you can now CUT THE CORD (*then* what rationale will the utility have to charge you, a NON CUSTOMER, a fee?)

Or the coal plant needs new environmental controls; or the nuke needs new control rods; or all the folks who *work* at those places 24/7 need to be paid...

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gas and power it off Hover Dam. But the people who control the budget are here in SF; so, we have to show them stuff here first. Production server w ould definitely be somewhere else.

Virtually, yes.

The customer's office in downtown SF is paying around $400 per month tiered at 0.22, 0.24 and 0.26. They were paying $300 before we put in the server . So, the server is costing $100 more for each office.

A little more info on our setup in the "Time to upgrade" thread, since it i s more appropriate for our planned "Time to Downgrade".

Yes, it makes more sense for their San Mateo office, since cooling bill wou ld be higher than San Francisco anyway. If only they can email the excess electricity from SM to SF.

A great many corporations in the U.S. take government money, both companies that would be losing money if not for the subsidies and companies that would be making less money if not for government subsidies. Ethanol producers, shale oil producers, farmers, airlines, other auto companies, even Apple are receiving public money.

It's not unreasonable for a company like Tesla, which has huge capital expenditures when starting up. to lose money at the beginning.

It can make sense if your utility gouges for electricity. The solar companies sell very very few systems in the city of Santa Clara or the city of Palo Alto because both cities have municipal power companies that charge low rates for electricity. PG&E customers pay exorbitant rates for electricity.

The beef I have with Tesla, and other pure electric vehicles, is that they are not paying any fuel taxes and fuel taxes fund road maintenance and construction. At least a Tesla owner is paying very high yearly vehicle license fees since in California these fees are based on a cars value, but a Leaf owner isn't paying high VLF fees.