California residential solar requires that the inverters adhere to what's referred to as "California Rule 21". The inverters change their output as the frequency or voltage rises. This is to promote grid stability. So it is not quite as you say.
There are financial incentives to shift demand for EV charging to times of low grid utilization. (eg 12AM to 6AM). The grid is mainly limited by peak use, not overall consumption.
Not yet but it is a standard that has been adopted in other states and countries. Since newer installations will quickly exceed the older ones in the total capacity it(or something similar) will eventually become dominant.
The local utility is forcing all consumers onto a ToU tariff, regardless of whether they have solar.
Yes, definitely possible - that would possibly cost $5,000 or equivalent to one year's consumption without solar.
I run off batteries/solar during the peak time in summer.
On 6/12/25 5:47 PM, Don Y wrote: > On 6/12/2025 4:55 PM, KevinJ93 wrote: >> On 6/11/25 6:06 PM, Don Y wrote: >> >> My solar PV system has battery storage and I subscribe to Tesla's >> >> Virtual Power Plant. When the grid is under stress I allow up to 50% >> >> of the storage to be used by the grid for which I get paid $2 per >> kWh. >> >
Our usage is very similar (somewhat higher in peak summer - last July
4th we consumed ~70kWH).The peak AC output of my solar array is 8.1kW - you made a very good estimate.
Currently the pricing is static for these residential energy storage systems but commercial ones do use dynamic pricing.
Which is to say that I shared more of your delusions.
To your own satisfaction.
To the extent that books contribute to the climate of opinion they do have an effect, even if you'd prefer to deny it.
As it happens, I don't.
Publishers invest quite a lot in getting a book type-set, printed an distributed to book-shops. They have an interest in putting out a quality product. On-line videos are a lot cheaper.
What they actually learned from Nader is that this isn't a viable strategy. The point is more that occasionally exceptional books have a large effect. This doesn't mean that less exceptional books have zero effect.
Repeating vacuous assertions doesn't make them any less vacuous.
It gets seen as a predictable vacuous assertion. What the oil companies
- Exxon Mobile is the usual example - spend money on it lying climate change denial propaganda. At one point they claimed that had stopped subsidising the Heartlands Institute, but it turned out that they had found a way to do it that didn't show up in the public accounts.
You didn't have to bother. This point has been made here repeatedly/
The economics of lithium extraction are going to be influenced by the amount of collateral damage you can get away with.
But how much of the radiation emitted from nuclear reactor waste comes from transuranic isotope formed by incidental neutron capture?
What the reactor is there to do is to fission U-235 (or U-233) into isotopes of about half the atomic weight - the two peaks are between atomic masses 85 to 105 and 130 to 145. Lots of them are radioactive, and some of those are quite long-lived.
But not enough to let you go out an buy a molten salt reactor.
The HB11 crew think that they have scheme for doing it intermittently but rapidly, involving pulsed lasers.
It wasn't name-dropping. I would have been appreciably happier if I hadn't had to work with man, who was bright enough but neuro-diverse. It's more to make the point that I've known about the Lawson criterion for about fifty years now.
You can't be precise about when something might happen. It is likely to be a while until somebody finds a practical way of making nuclear fusion happen, but prediction is a imprecise art.
But you don't seem to appreciate that it will produce much the same volume of hard-to-deal with radioactive fission products as U-235 fission.
It's a rather different kind of error. We could find a practical way of doing nuclear fusion tomorrow. It's unlikely, but not impossible.
Imagining that we have to keep on burning fossil carbon until we can exploit nuclear fusion is simply wrong.
Imagining that ITER and NIF are the only viable routes to nuclear fusion in the short term is equally wrong. They may be the likeliest candidates, but they aren't the only ones.
I don't see why the power to the house would be affected. The Solar array can be completely isolated from power. In fact around here it is required that there be a well-marked accessible isolating switch on the exterior of the building accessible to emergency personnel. There is also a separate isolating switch for the battery system.
When I say "peak time" I mean the peak tariff time which you said is 3pm to 7pm - just four hours, during which there is probably a fair amount of solar as well so not completely off battery.
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The Chinese have invested in thorium power plants. They are more expensive, but they extract energy at a much higher temperature. There are technical difficulties but they have overcome them relatively fast. There is one in the Gobi desert, and it is practical without requiring too much water.
Is there any way you could 'store cold' rather than electricity? Use a solar-powered heat pump during the hours of sunshine to cool a large tank of water, then reverse the the pump , which could be powered by a relatively small battery and inverter, to run water-cooled air conditioning during darkness. (A DC powered electric motor on the heat pump might be even more efficient - just remember to replace the brushes regularly.)
That way you could take your biggest load off-grid entirely.
Yes, thorium proponents keep saying that. The fact is that if you cool the condensers less, you'll get less electricity out.
It will be the economics of the process that will decide how much effort to put into that. Current PWRs divert a sizable river's worth of water. I expect thorium reactors to end up doing the same.
Jeroen Belleman
We leave the gas heat on all year... never touch the thermostat.
Most all the world wants a/c, and wants to keep the windows closed and the mosquitoes out. Air conditioning 9 billion people is going to take a lot of power.
Most of it generated locally by solar panels (and the occasional wind turbine) and backed up "power wall" style batteries.
Lenin's passion for rural electrification is so nineteenth century.
Why bother? Storing the power in a "power wall" style battery does exactly the same job, with fewer intermediate stages to waste power along the way.
The storage of energy (in this case below ambient) in a tank of water is a lot less environmentally damaging than batteries of any kind and water-cooled air conditioning is more efficient than air-cooled.
What's especially "environmentally damaging" about batteries?
And efficiency is all about the energy you have to put in to get the effect you want. How does using water as the heat transfer medium make the system any more "efficient"?
And there's the practical point that water-cooled radiators are going to be condensers, and you are going to have to deal with the water that is going to keep dripping off them. My air-conditioning system drips water out of the unit that cools the air that get circulated back into the flat. That's mounted on our balcony outside the flat (which also keeps the noise it makes out of ear-shot).
Aah, I read your previous statement as the power to the whole house was turned off, rather than just disabling solar.
Regarding the re-approval required, the US is renown for excessive red-tape in permitting. It seems to be that the US costs about twice as much as any other western country to install solar just because of the bureaucracy involved. The re-approval requirements will vary depending on your locality.
I have never done it here in California but I had heard some cities are a lot worse than others. They also add installation requirements locally that go beyond the statewide rules. I had to add a fire detector over the batteries that was tied into the house alarm system.
Water is great stuff. It's cheap and has a huge specific heat.
Imagine two tanks and a heat pump between. Heat one tank and cool the other.
Electricity will need to get more expensive to make things like that practical, but it will.
Probably the best long-term residential investment now is insulation and white roofs.
Maybe Sloman can describe his solar panels and batteries and his electric car with grid storage.
On Fri, 13 Jun 2025 16:23:27 +0200, Jeroen Belleman wrote: <clip>
True, but not pertinent. The issue is plant efficiency, limited by (Th- Tl)/Th. Leave Tl (condenser temperature) constant, increase Th (steam temperature) by a large amount (~2x), and the plant efficiency increases so that less heat needs to be rejected to the atmosphere for any given amount of electricity produced.
Fast Neutron Reactors like the thorium reactors have the potential for steam cycle efficiencies on a par with coal and oil fired plants. The current generation of thermal neutron reactors have much lower steam cycle efficiency due to much lower steam temperature, accounting for their excessive cooling water requirements.
If we use spent fuel from TNRs instead of thorium in our FNRs we have enough fuel on hand for more than a century of the entire planet electrical demand without any additional uranium mining. Thorium is co- deposited with (plentiful) rare earth minerals which the US is not currently mining because of restrictions on thorium, so there is significant benefit to either approach, as well as for dual fuel thorium and u238 fueled FNRs.
We will just have to wait and see what China comes up with.
Glen
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Huh. It is not cheap everywhere. It is scarce, thus expensive, precisely in hot places.
By my calculations, at 110v, it should be 4.033 ohms.
Needs a large water tank, and not a large temperature drop. Maybe converting the water to ice? That stores a lot of "energy" per kilogram.
If you have the space, why not?
The thing is that storing cold during the night could also be interesting.
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