Tesla homes

[ender]

Tesla recently previewed solar shingles, basically, which they claim will be cost-comparable to regular shingles (based presumably on their return?). This would be nice for us since our best solar roof faces the street and we have a stupid ordinance where you can only have obvious solar on rear facing roofs.

https://www.tesla.com/energy

They also now have a better battery pack for inhome use.

It's a few years off before I'd be in a place to use this technology, but it seems that the longer term "off the grid" vision for MMM folks is getting more and more feasible.

Didn't see a thread here discussing this. It's exciting to see things like this become more popular.

[NESailor]

I, for one, am pumped about this.  Any sort of clean energy advancement is A-OK in my book.  We probably won't wait for this since our orientation isn't ideal and we have a rather large property with lots of room for standalone tracking panels anyway.  We haven't made the jump to those yet but I expect to start the process in a few years after some other more important improvements are finished (actually roof being one of them).

[accolay]

I wonder if it would be more cost effective to have them installed only on the best solar part of your roof? Maybe I could have installed on only the south facing roof of my house and leave the north side a less expensive shingle?

I always wonder how those with solar panels maintain the roof under those panels

[nereo]

Hmm.... not sure where you live, ender, but just FYI many states have passed "Solar Access Rights" which supercede any HOA rules which prohibit solar installation.  Might be worth checking out if this applies to you in your state.

otherwise, I'm interested in Solar Shingles as well :-) integration of PVs into the actual roof (and possibly vertical clading) seems like the direction we'll eventually end up, anyway.

[sol]

I always wonder how those with solar panels maintain the roof under those panels

I asked the same question, before I installed my solar panels.

Basically, roofs under solar panels tend to last longer than exposed roofs because they are shielded from wind and hail and such, but when the time comes to replace them the solar panels need to be removed.  This is basically a day's labor for a few dudes from a solar installation company, if you don't do it yourself.  The racks that support the panels can be left in place if you're just adding a new roof, but they would need to come down if you were to do any structural repairs.

Fortunately, my solar panels generate a healthy profit which will more than offset any additional cost associated with reroofing my house, someday.  And that day should be postponed for a while due to having solar panels up there, too.

[ender]

Hmm.... not sure where you live, ender, but just FYI many states have passed "Solar Access Rights" which supercede any HOA rules which prohibit solar installation.  Might be worth checking out if this applies to you in your state.

It's a city law unfortunately :/

[boarder42]

Hmm.... not sure where you live, ender, but just FYI many states have passed "Solar Access Rights" which supercede any HOA rules which prohibit solar installation.  Might be worth checking out if this applies to you in your state.

It's a city law unfortunately :/

That's a shitty law. But yes this is coming faster then most think there will be an entirely different power grid and at the distribution level. Youll pay to use the conductor to transmit the power to your neighbor who can't invest in their own or doesn't have an efficient roof for solar.

[sol]

It's a city law unfortunately :/

In what state?  Most places now have state legislation making the prohibition of visible solar panels illegal.

Details about which states have guaranteed access, and which have easements:  http://www.solarresourceguide.org/solar-laws/

Way more detail on this topic than you could possible want:  http://www.solarabcs.org/about/publications/reports/solar-access/pdfs/Solaraccess-full.pdf

[Radagast]

otherwise, I'm interested in Solar Shingles as well :-) integration of PVs into the actual roof (and possibly vertical clading) seems like the direction we'll eventually end up, anyway.

I totally agree. Way back in 2006 I had an energy policy class where I said that in the future, most energy would come from distributed solar. The only thing missing was a cheap, pretty looking solar panel. In my mind I had a picture that looked exactly like these tiles. Ten years later here it is :). Within 100 years virtually every building on the planet will have these for roofing, and people will look at 2016 people as ignorant savages for not having them. These will be a landmark change in the way humans acquire energy. Future archeologists, anthropologists, and historians will note the change in global human habits pre-solar vs. post-solar.

[sol]

Within 100 years virtually every building on the planet will have these for roofing, and people will look at 2016 people as ignorant savages for not having them.

I think that's a relatively safe prediction.  You mean people used to spend thousands of dollars to cover their roofs in tar?  They just wasted all that energy naturally falling on their homes, and then burned even more fossil fuel to air condition their homes to remove all the heat that tar soaked up?  It does seem ludicrous, when you think about it.

I'm trying to think of an analogous historical technology, where the revolution seems so obvious after the fact that we struggle to understand how people went so long without seeing it.  Leeches, maybe?

Solar roofing just makes so much sense to me.  It costs more up front to build, but then again asphalt shingles cost more than thatched roofs, too, but are superior in virtually every way so even the poorest among us don't use thatched roofs anymore.  And solar shingles pay you back every year for their entire lifetime, with free electricity.

[Dicey]

Ooh, interesting. Our property is ringed by redwoods which limit our solar exposure and our roof is only ten years old, but this looks like something to plan for in the future. Just curious, how would one walk on them? Seems like DH is always up there doing something or other.

[Monkey Uncle]

Within 100 years virtually every building on the planet will have these for roofing, and people will look at 2016 people as ignorant savages for not having them.

I think that's a relatively safe prediction.  You mean people used to spend thousands of dollars to cover their roofs in tar?  They just wasted all that energy naturally falling on their homes, and then burned even more fossil fuel to air condition their homes to remove all the heat that tar soaked up?  It does seem ludicrous, when you think about it.

I'm trying to think of an analogous historical technology, where the revolution seems so obvious after the fact that we struggle to understand how people went so long without seeing it.  Leeches, maybe?

Solar roofing just makes so much sense to me.  It costs more up front to build, but then again asphalt shingles cost more than thatched roofs, too, but are superior in virtually every way so even the poorest among us don't use thatched roofs anymore.  And solar shingles pay you back every year for their entire lifetime, with free electricity.

The leech purveyors provided a vital service to society, so in the interest of keeping the leech supply stable, they were granted a regulated monopoly.  The government regulatory board had to approve the price of leeches to protect the public from gouging, but they always allowed a generous and stable profit to make sure the leech people stayed in business and could pay their investors a steady 6% dividend.  Whenever they wanted to install a new leech-raising facility, the regulatory board would grant them a permit and then allow them to raise the price of leeches to recover the entire cost of the facility from their customers (plus a government-sanctioned 12% profit).  No one else was allowed to enter the blood-letting market, so there was no incentive for the purveyors of leeches to develop newer, safer technologies.

[nereo]

Within 100 years virtually every building on the planet will have these for roofing, and people will look at 2016 people as ignorant savages for not having them.

I think that's a relatively safe prediction.  You mean people used to spend thousands of dollars to cover their roofs in tar?  They just wasted all that energy naturally falling on their homes, and then burned even more fossil fuel to air condition their homes to remove all the heat that tar soaked up?  It does seem ludicrous, when you think about it.

I'm trying to think of an analogous historical technology, where the revolution seems so obvious after the fact that we struggle to understand how people went so long without seeing it.  Leeches, maybe?

Solar roofing just makes so much sense to me.  It costs more up front to build, but then again asphalt shingles cost more than thatched roofs, too, but are superior in virtually every way so even the poorest among us don't use thatched roofs anymore.  And solar shingles pay you back every year for their entire lifetime, with free electricity.

The leech purveyors provided a vital service to society, so in the interest of keeping the leech supply stable, they were granted a regulated monopoly.  The government regulatory board had to approve the price of leeches to protect the public from gouging, but they always allowed a generous and stable profit to make sure the leech people stayed in business and could pay their investors a steady 6% dividend.  Whenever they wanted to install a new leech-raising facility, the regulatory board would grant them a permit and then allow them to raise the price of leeches to recover the entire cost of the facility from their customers (plus a government-sanctioned 12% profit).  No one else was allowed to enter the blood-letting market, so there was no incentive for the purveyors of leeches to develop newer, safer technologies.

Well at least I got a chuckle out of that

For an historical example about technological advances that wound up making the previous practice seem absurd, what about whale oil? As recently as the early 1900s most modern nations, including the US, hunted whales primarily for their oil. We already had petroleum (still a problematic idea) and the basics for hydropower and even the lightbulb but we pushed into the southern ocean hunting whale to near extinction until WWI because so many hadn't made the switch and clung to Whale oil because it produced (as adverts at the time claimed) "the most pure, natural light with a neutral odor."

[Syonyk]

...but it seems that the longer term "off the grid" vision for MMM folks is getting more and more feasible.

Do you like generator maintenance and repair?  Or do you live somewhere that's magically sunny year round, without ever seeing a few days straight of heavy clouds?

Solar for energy is certainly convenient, but going fully off grid without either an insanely huge battery bank is utterly infeasible for most homes.  If you have a home that's designed for sustained off grid use, it looks totally and completely different from normal box homes that rely on brute force heating/cooling.

I run a small off grid office and even with 3kW of solar hung, I struggle to pull 1kWh out of the sky on cloudy days.  Summer?  No problem, 15 kWh, I blow off the excess with Folding@Home and BOINC.  Winter?  Yesterday, I didn't even make up my base load of around 1.5kWh/day for radios/inverter standby/etc.  Today isn't looking much better, so I'll probably be cranking the generator in an hour and running that for a few hours this morning to top off the battery bank.  Admittedly, it's lead acid, so a bit toucher than lithium, but nobody would sell me a fancy lithium battery setup...

I'm trying to think of an analogous historical technology, where the revolution seems so obvious after the fact that we struggle to understand how people went so long without seeing it.  Leeches, maybe?

Solar roofing just makes so much sense to me.  It costs more up front to build, but then again asphalt shingles cost more than thatched roofs, too, but are superior in virtually every way so even the poorest among us don't use thatched roofs anymore.  And solar shingles pay you back every year for their entire lifetime, with free electricity.

Go look at the state of solar PV technology from even 20 years ago, and you'll see why it wasn't done.  The cost-per-watt was painfully high.

Go read some old Home Power magazines if you want to see what an off grid system looked like in the 80s.

We didn't do it because it wasn't feasible at the time.  Only recently has solar panel technology come down enough in cost that it can be considered at a wide scale.

And, yeah, I do think 100 or so years of stable power grid is pretty neat.  Even if it did require utility companies.

[Metric Mouse]

Tesla recently previewed solar shingles, basically, which they claim will be cost-comparable to regular shingles (based presumably on their return?). This would be nice for us since our best solar roof faces the street and we have a stupid ordinance where you can only have obvious solar on rear facing roofs.

https://www.tesla.com/energy

They also now have a better battery pack for inhome use.

It's a few years off before I'd be in a place to use this technology, but it seems that the longer term "off the grid" vision for MMM folks is getting more and more feasible.

Didn't see a thread here discussing this. It's exciting to see things like this become more popular.

I'd love to see the full mustache math on the cost-comparable. Unfortunately, much of the country lives in places that have weather and so would not achieve maximum benefit from such a system. They look great though, and will be interesting to see how the technology progresses. A couple decades too late to blunt the worst of agw, but every step forward is good!

[nereo]

My wild prediction: utility companies over the next 25 years will shift from power generation to grid distribution and storage.

For a century the trend has been for longer and more centralized power companies.  Huge plants that cranked out 500 - 2,000 Mw. Now we are seeing a decentralizing of powder generation. >50% of new power is coming from renewables, and per capital use has been falling as we build more efficiently.  Big businesses and homes alike are now finding it cost effective to put up solar and wind turbines are popping up both in huge wind far,s but also in small clusters on ridge tops. In many places it's easy for a new home to provide 100% of its net energy needs.  The big challenge is power on demand.

Hence why I think 25 years from now we will look at power companies as utilities that store and redistribute power. They will continue to generate some power, most likely with natural gas plants hat can be quickly spun up to meet demand. They already manage miles and miles of power line infrastructure... that won't chxange much at all.  Storage will be the tricky puzzle.  There isn't enough heavy metals in he world (lead, lithium, nickel) to build enough batteries to store multiple days worth of power for the entire country, but mechanical (aka kenetic) storage is coming along nicely.
Instead of a $3B plan to build a new power plant we will see companies spend similar sums on energy storage.  Revenue will come more from monthly "hook up charges" than total kw used, and the buying and selling of power will become much more regulated.

Just my predictions.

[sol]

Revenue will come more from monthly "hook up charges" than total kw used, and the buying and selling of power will become much more regulated.

This trend is already underway.  Shortly after I installed my grid-connected residential rooftop solar array, my utility changed their rate structure to lower the per kWh cost of electricity, but raised the per month connection fee.  The net results was very little change for most people, but a huge hit to people with solar panels. 

As an unfortunate side effect, this new model does nothing to encourage conservation.  It's actually more logical to waste electricity, if you're (in the extreme case) paying a flat fee for unlimited use of it.

[Chris22]

Half of my electric and gas bills now are "delivery fees", and another XX% is taxes.  Isn't this basically paying for the "hook up"?

I love the solar shingle idea, but I do have to ask, what about the days/weeks at a time where my roof is covered with snow here in Chicagoland?  And in Northern WI (and presumably other areas), the roof might get covered in December and you might not see it again until April. 

[Slee_stack]

I'm also optimistic on this news.

Unless you live in a solar promo area, its still hard to cost justify solar yet.  Upstate NY?  Go for it, the state will basically pay you to install.  GA?  Enjoy the ~20 year ROI.

Besides house orientation, one has to be careful about breakage too.  If you live on a clear lot with little hail, you're probably golden.   

Ton of trees or golf ball size hail?  Better factor the inevitable panel replacement costs in.

[nereo]

Revenue will come more from monthly "hook up charges" than total kw used, and the buying and selling of power will become much more regulated.

This trend is already underway.  Shortly after I installed my grid-connected residential rooftop solar array, my utility changed their rate structure to lower the per kWh cost of electricity, but raised the per month connection fee.  The net results was very little change for most people, but a huge hit to people with solar panels. 

As an unfortunate side effect, this new model does nothing to encourage conservation.  It's actually more logical to waste electricity, if you're (in the extreme case) paying a flat fee for unlimited use of it.

It absolutely already is underway.  Most utility companies have increased their service charges/hook-up fees over the last few years. 
What I'm predicting is that this change will only accelerate, and quite possibly in the not-too-distant future your monthly utility bill will more closely resemble a cell-phone contract or cable subscription.  For example, you'll have the "basic residential plan" which might be $50/month and include up to 50 kW/day of total power delivered to your home.  'overages' may cost 20¢/kWh.  net surpluses will be granted credit depending on some complex formula involving peak demand, time of day, atmospheric conditions, etc. and will be a source of constant grumbling.  Other plans might include 'unlimited power' or low-cost options for people who barely use grid power during peak-demand times.

Likewise, I see actual power generation as becoming less important for utility companies, especially in certain regions.
We shall see.

[scottish]

On the youtube video, they showed various roof tiles under stress - they dropped a smallish (12 kg?) kettlebell on each tile.

The tesla solar tile was the only one that didn't shatter on impact.  So I imagine walking on the tiles is no problem as long as you're reasonably careful.

I'd like to know a little bit more about the electrical system with the solar tiles.   Do they use integrated contact points?   Where to you connect the converter/storage system to the roof?   And so on.

[Syonyk]

Storage will be the tricky puzzle.  There isn't enough heavy metals in he world (lead, lithium, nickel) to build enough batteries to store multiple days worth of power for the entire country, but mechanical (aka kenetic) storage is coming along nicely.

You don't need "days" of storage - you need "months" in some areas to get through winter.  That's going to be the tricky bit...

Or you need a good national power grid that can feed the midwest power from Arizona solar in the winter.

I love the solar shingle idea, but I do have to ask, what about the days/weeks at a time where my roof is covered with snow here in Chicagoland?  And in Northern WI (and presumably other areas), the roof might get covered in December and you might not see it again until April.

Hope you've got that national grid, or rely on power production from stored carbon in some form or another.

The tesla solar tile was the only one that didn't shatter on impact.  So I imagine walking on the tiles is no problem as long as you're reasonably careful.

Not shattering is fine.  How slick are they after being on a roof for a few years?  Metal roofs can be bad enough if they're a bit coated - they're basically a slip and slide with a long fall at the end.  Glass could easily be as bad.

I'd like to know a little bit more about the electrical system with the solar tiles.   Do they use integrated contact points?   Where to you connect the converter/storage system to the roof?   And so on.

They rely on "writing big checks to certified installers" as their installation process.

[nereo]

Storage will be the tricky puzzle.  There isn't enough heavy metals in he world (lead, lithium, nickel) to build enough batteries to store multiple days worth of power for the entire country, but mechanical (aka kenetic) storage is coming along nicely.

You don't need "days" of storage - you need "months" in some areas to get through winter.  That's going to be the tricky bit...

Or you need a good national power grid that can feed the midwest power from Arizona solar in the winter.

No, not months, just days. Here I'm not talking exclusively of solar generation. Wind turbines also generate electricity, and have the nice feature that (broadly speaking) there is more wind in the winter than summer. We see that in places like the new Grand Prairie wind farm in Nebraska.  Also, the efficiency of solar drops off in winter but excluding more severe northern latitudes like Alaska they still produce power. 
I don't envision municiple powerplants going away entirely either, as I said in my earlier post. I imagine we'll still have quite a few powerplants, mostly natural gas that can be ramped up quickly.  I'm just seeing more and more of the actual power production coming from homes and smaller businesses that aren't utilities.

As for providing months of storage - that's still possible once we start viewing energy storage on a similar cost-scale as building new power plants.

[nereo]

Sol - now i'm curious; what percentage of your power do you generate in December/January in the PNW?

[effigy98]

Half of my electric and gas bills now are "delivery fees", and another XX% is taxes.  Isn't this basically paying for the "hook up"?

I saw this delivery fee on natural gas we only use occasionally and I was very annoyed. Thinking about switching to all electric to be able to shut it off completely.

[nereo]

Half of my electric and gas bills now are "delivery fees", and another XX% is taxes.  Isn't this basically paying for the "hook up"?

I saw this delivery fee on natural gas we only use occasionally and I was very annoyed. Thinking about switching to all electric to be able to shut it off completely.

While I agree with Sol that this pricing structure actually discourages energy efficiency, allow me to play devil's advocate for a while. There's a lot of infrastructure needed to keep houses "on-grid" - how should that get paid for when more homes are generating some or all of hteir electricity on site?

I hate paying the flat monthly fee on my home, but I do see the logic of it being there, even when I go away for weeks and use almost 0kWh.

[Bicycle_B]

I like this thread.  Hadn't put 2 and 2 together on the fee structures until now.  Thanks, gang.

[acroy]

sigh
this belongs in 'anti-mustachian wall of comedy' just like the Model S. A stylish and  expensive fulfillment of a want, not a need.

[seattlecyclone]

While I agree with Sol that this pricing structure actually discourages energy efficiency, allow me to play devil's advocate for a while. There's a lot of infrastructure needed to keep houses "on-grid" - how should that get paid for when more homes are generating some or all of hteir electricity on site?

Homes might generate all of their net electricity, but they still will pull from the grid at times...else why connect to the grid at all? The solution would then to be pay homeowners a lower rate for power pushed to the grid than the utility charges for power pulled from the grid, with the difference being high enough to pay for maintenance of the grid.

I do think that the fixed monthly charges put the incentives in the wrong place. In my perfect world there would be zero fixed charges on utility bills and costs would be 100% paid from usage-based billing, giving everyone the maximum amount of incentive to conserve resources.

[boarder42]

sigh
this belongs in 'anti-mustachian wall of comedy' just like the Model S. A stylish and  expensive fulfillment of a want, not a need.

I disagree it's a sustainable roof that will bring panels to people while keeping aesthetics

[nereo]

While I agree with Sol that this pricing structure actually discourages energy efficiency, allow me to play devil's advocate for a while. There's a lot of infrastructure needed to keep houses "on-grid" - how should that get paid for when more homes are generating some or all of hteir electricity on site?

Homes might generate all of their net electricity, but they still will pull from the grid at times...else why connect to the grid at all? The solution would then to be pay homeowners a lower rate for power pushed to the grid than the utility charges for power pulled from the grid, with the difference being high enough to pay for maintenance of the grid.

I do think that the fixed monthly charges put the incentives in the wrong place. In my perfect world there would be zero fixed charges on utility bills and costs would be 100% paid from usage-based billing, giving everyone the maximum amount of incentive to conserve resources.

But this solution is still problematic.  Energy production is cheap - like 10¢/kWh or less.  Maintaining the grid is expensive.  It isn't far fetched today for a family in a milder climate (or one with fuel oil or wood stove heating) to produce more net power than it consumes and with some behavioral modifications (laundry during the day) to pull only a couple kWh from the grid during the evening and nighttime. Even if the utility gives them absolutely nothing for excess power generated they might consume only 150 kWh from the grid.  So either they get a bill for $15 (not enough to pay for their share of the infrastructure) or the power company starts charging $0.50/kWh.  If they jack the rates so high it will create a feedback loop.

The math gets even worse if we assume the utility will buy back power at ~50% of what they charge room the grid.  Buy a solar array that can generate 200% of your power and never pay for anything yet have all the advantages of being grid tied.  actually, that's kind of where we are now in some regions, though it's still a rather minor percentage of customers. 

Somebody has to pay for the grid, and

[boarder42]

This system for deregulated power generation transmission and trading already exists at the transmission level all it has to be is applied at the distribution level. And the people who own grid assets will be paid wheeling fees for transmitting power across their assets. It becomes much more complex with many micro generators but the concept is the same. 

[seattlecyclone]

If they have to charge 50¢/kWh, that would mean most people aren't buying very many kWh from the grid anyway, so would that really be so bad?

Jacking up the fixed costs isn't a panacea either. At some point it becomes cheaper to cut yourself off from the grid and have a battery backup.

But really, the underlying question is whether it's better to have everyone pay the same for grid maintenance regardless of how much they use it, or if people who use it less should pay less. I think usage-based billing is both fairer and better for the environment.

[nereo]

But really, the underlying question is whether it's better to have everyone pay the same for grid maintenance regardless of how much they use it, or if people who use it less should pay less. I think usage-based billing is both fairer and better for the environment.

I don't disagree that usage-based billing is both fairer and better for the environment. I just think we have to realize that we are entering a stage that we never really anticipated.  Germany recently had a few sunny and windy hours where people were actually being paid to consume electricity because the generation price went negative. 

If we continue to see more homes and business that produce more net power than they consume the challenge for utilities will be to even those out and store power for later use. Right now utilities still generate >95% of all the power.  Elon Musk was talking about residential supplying about 33% in the near future, but that's assuming we all switch to electric cars and our total demand goes up.  I personally think we could soon (decade or so) see some regions generate 50% of total power from non utility sources.

At the same time the cost to generate electricity has been falling, but the grid costs haven't.
It's a similar problem to relying on gasoline taxes to fund road projects... as mpg increases and some people go electric (or in this analogy become net suppliers of energy, not net producers the road costs remain and the usage is still there number of people paying in and the amount they are paying has dropped.

[boarder42]

Negative generation happens at the transmission level in America as well.

It's a societal thing and constant delivery of power. In a distribution marketplace a middle man will take a cut and buy and sell your power for you as a fiduciary while taking a cut to make sure everyone's lights stay on. Some houses can't really have solar or wind and will always need to buy power.

[sol]

Sol - now i'm curious; what percentage of your power do you generate in December/January in the PNW?

Less than 100%, but how much less is somewhat uncertain.

I get billed bimonthly.  My January 2015 bill, covering mid-November to mid-December, was for 295 kWh.  So we bought boughly 150 kWh/month for the two darkest months of the year.  At 7.4 cents per kWh, I paid $21.87 for two months of electricity.  Then I paid another $21.00 for the $10.50/month connection fee.

For comparison purposes, my sunny July bill covered a two month period over which my panels generated 1878 kWh more than my household used, for a net credit of ~$118 after paying the $21 connection fee.  My water bill for that period was ~$200, so I paid $2 for water and power for those two months.

These number are for a family of five in a four bedroom house.  We're not exactly energy efficient, but my 7500W of installed panels generate about 10,000 kWh of electricity per year, which is much more than we use annually in the house, and slightly more than we use annually for our house and our electric car.  We also have a good roof for it, which faces due south and has no trees to shade it, so we probably get more power than average out of our panels.

[Syonyk]

I get billed bimonthly.  My January 2015 bill, covering mid-November to mid-December, was for 295 kWh.  So we bought boughly 150 kWh/month for the two darkest months of the year.  At 7.4 cents per kWh, I paid $21.87 for two months of electricity.  Then I paid another $21.00 for the $10.50/month connection fee.

For comparison purposes, my sunny July bill covered a two month period over which my panels generated 1878 kWh more than my household used, for a net credit of ~$118 after paying the $21 connection fee.  My water bill for that period was ~$200, so I paid $2 for water and power for those two months.

And "All the benefits of the grid while paying ~none of the costs" isn't a great way to keeping a power grid running. :/

[aspiringnomad]

I get billed bimonthly.  My January 2015 bill, covering mid-November to mid-December, was for 295 kWh.  So we bought boughly 150 kWh/month for the two darkest months of the year.  At 7.4 cents per kWh, I paid $21.87 for two months of electricity.  Then I paid another $21.00 for the $10.50/month connection fee.

For comparison purposes, my sunny July bill covered a two month period over which my panels generated 1878 kWh more than my household used, for a net credit of ~$118 after paying the $21 connection fee.  My water bill for that period was ~$200, so I paid $2 for water and power for those two months.

And "All the benefits of the grid while paying ~none of the costs" isn't a great way to keeping a power grid running. :/

But he's not getting "all the benefits of the grid," just some of them according to his much less than average usage. If eventually usage plus connection fees don't cover the fixed costs of the grid, the connection fees or something else will adjust. Why so ideologically cynical about solar?

[nereo]

I get billed bimonthly.  My January 2015 bill, covering mid-November to mid-December, was for 295 kWh.  So we bought boughly 150 kWh/month for the two darkest months of the year.  At 7.4 cents per kWh, I paid $21.87 for two months of electricity.  Then I paid another $21.00 for the $10.50/month connection fee.

For comparison purposes, my sunny July bill covered a two month period over which my panels generated 1878 kWh more than my household used, for a net credit of ~$118 after paying the $21 connection fee.  My water bill for that period was ~$200, so I paid $2 for water and power for those two months.

And "All the benefits of the grid while paying ~none of the costs" isn't a great way to keeping a power grid running. :/

But he's not getting "all the benefits of the grid," just some of them according to his much less than average usage. If eventually usage plus connection fees don't cover the fixed costs of the grid, the connection fees or something else will adjust. Why so ideologically cynical about solar?

I don't think either of us are ideologically cynical about solar. Syonyk built his own off-grid work studio powered by solar.
I'm also glad Sol did what he did, I appreciate his synopses, and if I were in a similar situation I'd probably do the same damn thing. I follow stories of peoples installations precisely because i plan on doing something similar in the next 1-2 years.

It's still a potential problem, though.  Due to his upfront investment Sol always has the grid available, which he needs during the winter when he doesn't generate quite enough power.  Presumably he also uses some power at night.  But most month he only pays the hookup fee and sells his excess power back for a net gain.   The cost of all those powerlines, transformers and powerplants are still there. As more people follow his lead the problem is going to get bigger. If there was no monthly connection fee Sol would b doing even better.

[Syonyk]

But he's not getting "all the benefits of the grid," just some of them according to his much less than average usage. If eventually usage plus connection fees don't cover the fixed costs of the grid, the connection fees or something else will adjust. Why so ideologically cynical about solar?

He always has power available, even if it's dark, cloudy, and is the 30th day of this - despite paying radically less.  My office gets to run a generator or make do with less in those conditions.  He can, on a whim, draw to the limit of his power panel (200A is pretty common, though if it's a larger house it might be a 300A panel) - so the transformers in his neighborhood can't be reduced in capacity.

He has, literally, all the advantages of the power grid (reliable, unlimited power, at any moment) without paying nearly as much into the costs of operating the grid.

Grid and plant costs and maintenance make up the bulk of the cost of residential power - power is around $0.02-$0.04/kWh in most areas, maybe a bit higher if you've got nukes.  I've been looking into doing a large scale solar deployment on some spare property (actual generator facility, not just residential net metering), so I've gone down this rabbit hole, and I'm far more familiar with grid stability issues like inertia for frequency stability and spinning reserve capacity than most people are because... I am.  You can emulate a lot of that behavior with inverters, but none of them used for residential use currently do.

I'm all for solar, but I'd rather see utility-scale deployments that can be centrally managed, and do things like curtail output (run at 80% or such) so they can increase output in response to a frequency drop on the grid.  Those large scale deployments are also easier to predict output from, and generally work within the constraints of our current power grid (mostly centralized production).

I think the power grid is pretty darn nifty, and I want to see it remain viable to keep around (and reliable).  "I'm going to stay connected to the grid but not pay much of anything anything for the privilege" doesn't seem a great way to do this.

I'm reasonably pro-solar (I make my living in a solar powered office), but residential solar, as commonly implemented, is harmful to the long term viability of the power grid - 100% of panel production at each instant, zero contribution to any sort of frequency or voltage stability, and an alarmingly narrow frequency/voltage window before things trip off (due to anti-islanding requirements on residential inverters).  It's not that hard to get a grid with heavy distributed energy resources to more or less simultaneously trip offline.  How do you restore it?  Enough generating capacity to energize the whole area from central plants, and then wait for the distributed resources to get around to turning back on.

I'm also not a big fan of putting solar panels in less-than-ideal locations.  They take a significant amount of energy and resources to produce, and it's reasonable to site them where they'll produce as much as possible over their life - so typically, desert locations, or at least places with good sun.  There are some substantial per-panel production gains to be had from trackers as well, which are more common on larger installations.  I think panels in, say, Seattle (with substantial shading from pine trees) are a bit silly.  I'm half tempted to start a line of "looks like real solar" panels for a fraction of the cost and embodied resources, so people who want the social signaling in shitty places for solar can do what they want, and the actual panels can go somewhere sunny.

That said, I do plan to put solar on my house next year, though I'll be going with a less-standard setup (string inverters with battery capability instead of micro inverters) as part of the value to me is the ability to run in a grid-down situation for an extended period of time, and potentially feed to other houses in the immediate area if I run my own lines.  I'm aware that I'll be taking advantage of the grid and paying less, but that is the way the rate schedules are currently written.  I understand why people do it, but I also expect things to change dramatically with how it's done in the next 5 years or so, as grid stability issues start showing up in more places.

[sol]

And "All the benefits of the grid while paying ~none of the costs" isn't a great way to keeping a power grid running. :/

To be fair about this, my utility company is receiving far more benefit from my solar production than I am receiving from them in grid stability.  At least as measured in dollars.

They get federal tax credits for meeting specific renewable energy requirements, and residential solar power helps them meet their target percentage with zero capital outlay out of pocket.  This is a huge win for them.  They can even sell my power as "renewable" to other customers at a new higher rate, if those customers opt in to their "green power" program.  MMM opted in to his.  (As a side note, electrons are all identical so I think "green power" programs are basically just bookkeeping shenanigans.)

The utility also saves on ongoing operational expenses because of my solar array, since they are not paying to generate the power at their power plants.   In this case, those plants are (mostly) hydropower dams that have to meet specific flow requirements for environmental reasons, so they receive additional benefits from the newly increased capacity to meet those regulations.

The utility saves more money because they are no longer paying to transfer that electricity from the power plant to homes.  All those existing transmission lines now operate at reduced capacity, and thus do not have to be upgraded as soon.

On a sunny day my array powers a significant portion of my entire (43 home) development.  All of those homes run off of the same local transformer, which is now operating at a lower power than its rated capacity, and may last longer as a result.  So now the utility is not paying to make power, not paying to transport power, and even gets to save money on end-point hardware maintenance.

And I should point out that I'm still paying $21 every bill to the power company for the "connection fee" regardless of how much power my roof makes, or how much money they save as a result of me spending $30k out of my personal pocket to subsidize my utility company. 


One of the things I've learned from working with utility companies is that their business model is not transparent.  Unlike a normal business, they don't want to sell more of their product.  They have fixed overhead costs to maintain their infrastructure, and they want to sell every last bit of their product up to that limit, and then no more.  Adding any more means huge additional costs to upgrade the infrastructure.  This is why your water company wants you to put in a low-flow shower head even though they could charge you more if you used more water.  Eventually they'd have to replace all of those water pipes with bigger ones, so getting people to reduce their consumption keeps their total below the infrastructure overhead limit.  In effect, residential solar is just like low-flow shower heads.  It reduces or postpones their need to upgrade their infrastructure by reducing the endpoint user consumption rate.

And to bring this back on topic, Tesla's solar roof and power wall (and car battery) are designed to address the very issues that syonyk and nereo bring up.  Distributed energy generation really needs distributed energy storage to go with it, to make it work most efficiently, and the car battery and the power wall provide that storage.  Elon Musk has made a strong case that the economics of this system are still workable, despite the dire warnings from utility companies, and he's betting his personal dollars that it will be profitable to figure this problem out.

[Syonyk]

To be fair about this, my utility company is receiving far more benefit from my solar production than I am receiving from them in grid stability.  At least as measured in dollars.

Assuming you're referring to VA on the wire, perhaps.  You're not contributing anything in terms of power factor correction or frequency stability/power reserves, because residential solar just belts out what it can, 100%, and lacks storage for even basic ramp control.

They get federal tax credits for meeting specific renewable energy requirements, and residential solar power helps them meet their target percentage with zero capital outlay out of pocket.  This is a huge win for them.  They can even sell my power as "renewable" to other customers at a new higher rate, if those customers opt in to their "green power" program.  MMM opted in to his.  (As a side note, electrons are all identical so I think "green power" programs are basically just bookkeeping shenanigans.)

I won't argue there.  I'm not that familiar with the tax credit/incentive side of things.  I spend my time around people who are on the grid side of things and worry about the loss of inertia on the grid and muck with inverters to try and make them provide that kind of support for stability.

The utility also saves on ongoing operational expenses because of my solar array, since they are not paying to generate the power at their power plants.

True.  They save on fuel and wear, but they still have to have the same power plant capacity in case it's a dark day and people want power.  So the capital costs are the same, but are amortized across less power generated.  Short term, it's fine, long term... we'll see.

The utility saves more money because they are no longer paying to transfer that electricity from the power plant to homes.  All those existing transmission lines now operate at reduced capacity, and thus do not have to be upgraded as soon.

Except when those lines have to run at rated capacity, because you can't say to an area, "Sorry, cloudy, we didn't bother to upgrade the lines, so you've got a blackout going until the sun comes back out, and... oh, shoot, those inverters won't come back on without grid.  We'll bring a diesel genset out to kickstart you."

There's some reduction in stress from lower transmission loads, but most of the costs are aging related, as I understand it - a power line running at 50% of rated vs 75% of rated will last around the same time.

On a sunny day my array powers a significant portion of my entire (43 home) development.  All of those homes run off of the same local transformer, which is now operating at a lower power than its rated capacity, and may last longer as a result.  So now the utility is not paying to make power, not paying to transport power, and even gets to save money on end-point hardware maintenance.

And your array is a random power source with very rapid ramping - so the power system has to be ready and able to power your whole subdivision from remote spinning reserves if your panels are shaded - with no warning.

Put a few more panels in your subdivision, and you might be net power producing sometimes, and go from net power production to net power draw in a hurry as clouds come past.  Residential solar doesn't have any of the storage that would be useful to control ramp up/ramp down rates - it's just there or not.

Not a big deal at a small scale, but that type of thing causes problems when you've got a lot of solar and have to keep more and more generators spinning and online but not generating much, just in case.  Residential inverters are, by regulation requirements, not going to help maintain stability, and they're seriously susceptible to cascading failures in sections of the grid.  Power goes out of spec?  Uh oh, *trip out* - so you can get very, very rapid voltage and frequency collapse if a system is substantially powered by them, as they all shut down at once.

[/quote]And to bring this back on topic, Tesla's solar roof and power wall (and car battery) are designed to address the very issues that syonyk and nereo bring up.  Distributed energy generation really needs distributed energy storage to go with it, to make it work most efficiently, and the car battery and the power wall provide that storage.  Elon Musk has made a strong case that the economics of this system are still workable, despite the dire warnings from utility companies, and he's betting his personal dollars that it will be profitable to figure this problem out.[/quote]

We'll see.  I haven't seen any evidence that the PowerWall is useful for grid stability, though I assume the PowerPacks are (there's zero documentation, of course, but if utilities are buying them, I'd expect they would require frequency stability algorithms and the like).

The grid is going through an unbundling of services - historically, power generation (spinning metal) provided, as part of this, phase load balancing, frequency stability, voltage stability, etc.  That's no longer true of a lot of distributed energy resources - they just provide watts.  We'll see how this works out.

[boarder42]

its not you vs the utility ... the utitily has assets you have to use.  the grid as a whole is a community.  some only consume some will produce and consume some will store and consume some will produce and consume and store.  its extremely inefficent to go 100% off the grid... you have to size panels to produce power at the peak of your useage creating a lot of times with excess power... where does it go when you batteries are full.. why not make money putting it back on the grid for others to use. 

The high energy states are rapidly seeing a problem CalISO is having serious issues with ramp up time when solar goes down b/c of darkness.

[nancyjnelson]

I think this will be life changing on the societal level.  (Yeah, maybe I'm a little overexcited.)  Even though Musk went out of his way to assure everyone that there would still be a lot of work for the utilities and power generators, I am assuming their role in modern life will become smaller.  While it will be a few years, I can imagine a developer or developers building communities of energy efficient homes using the solar roof and battery (which will hopefully by this time be capable of storing a whole lot more energy), with possibly small generators or windmills for back-up.  No connection to the grid necessary.

Power distribution will hopefully become much more region-specific, which will make the entire system safer and more reliable (remember the power outage of 2003 which affected an area from Toronto to Ohio?).  Yes, there will still be a use for fossil fuels, but like the utilities their role in our lives will become smaller.
 
Which is why I'm having trouble understanding the whole Dakota pipeline thing.  I mean, I understand why the protests are happening, but I have trouble why anyone is still interested in investing so much $$$ in the infrastructure of something that is likely in the process of dying off.  And risking the water supply to book (especially in light of numerous reports from our intelligence community that say water security issues will have long term global and national security impacts).

I read in one article that the project would produce 12,000 jobs, and in a place like North Dakota, that's major - my husband was originally from ND and when we made visits back home we could see the options were limited. 

Which just makes me glad I found MMM - a lifestyle which has helped put me in the position that I am now able to make decisions based on my long term goals rather than my immediate needs.

[Syonyk]

A solar and battery powered community of homes will be very cold and dark in the winter. Even with some wind.

And you think HOAs are bad? Wait till they have jurisdiction over energy use.

[nereo]

Power distribution will hopefully become much more region-specific, which will make the entire system safer and more reliable (remember the power outage of 2003 which affected an area from Toronto to Ohio?).  Yes, there will still be a use for fossil fuels, but like the utilities their role in our lives will become smaller.

Region specific is great if you live in a region where power generation is favorable. If not - well sucks to be you. Also at a regional level whether your area is 'good' or not for power generation can flip pretty quickly... seasonality, natural disasters, a few weeks of unusually cold or calm days.  An interwoven grid allows utilities to buy and sell excess power as necessary.
As I understand it, the power outage was the result of a cascading fault through the system.  The good news (if you are an optimist) is that we learned from this experience.  THe grid today is barely recognizable from the grid circa 2003, which isn't surprising.  Think back to our digital lives then - no FB, no twitter, no iPhones or Android or "apps".   This isn't to say there aren't other huge faults lurking (the pessimistic view) - just that our attention hasn't been drawn to them on a wide enough scale.

Which is why I'm having trouble understanding the whole Dakota pipeline thing.  I mean, I understand why the protests are happening, but I have trouble why anyone is still interested in investing so much $$$ in the infrastructure of something that is likely in the process of dying off.  And risking the water supply to book (especially in light of numerous reports from our intelligence community that say water security issues will have long term global and national security impacts).

I read in one article that the project would produce 12,000 jobs, and in a place like North Dakota, that's major - my husband was originally from ND and when we made visits back home we could see the options were limited. 

Transporting crude via pipeline is the most cost-effective way of moving it.  Currently Canada lacks the capacity to process anywhere near the amount of oil they extract, so most of it is sold to the US and then processed either in Oklahoma or Texas... but first it needs to get there.
As for it being "dying off" - once it reaches the refineries, most of the products (gasoline, diesel, heating oil etc) get consumed within several months.  While demand has leveled off somewhat, we've got over a billion cars and trucks that consume petrolium, hundreds of millions of homes, power plants etc. and we are still building more. Even if electric cars take off like Musk and others are hoping (and I count myself in that camp) the lifespan of cars means that we'll still have hundreds of millions of fuel-burning cars for the next few decades.

I don't know what the ROI for a pipeline is exactly, but I think it's less than a decade.

then (as oyu mentioned) there's the notion of jobs and business and competition.  Certainly the easiest route that oil can take is to go through the US and wind up at our refineries in OK and TX.  It's far more difficult to go over the Canadian Rockies to get to the west coast, and it's further to pipe it to eastern Canada where it would still need to be put onto a boat and shipped to refineries (adding cost).  Problem of course is that no one wants a pipeline going through their backyard, especially when they gain nothing or almost nothing from it.  There will be some work from building the pipeline, but that will progress in stages and once your region is finished (several monhts) all those dollars will shift down towards the next region where they're building.  Once operational pipelines don't require very many people to maintain it - I think I read it was something liek 5 people per hundred miles.  The bulk of hte permanant jobs will be where the refining occurs and where the oil is extracted.

All of this of course is skirting the question about whether we even should take that oil out of the ground.

[ooeei]

Which is why I'm having trouble understanding the whole Dakota pipeline thing.  I mean, I understand why the protests are happening, but I have trouble why anyone is still interested in investing so much $$$ in the infrastructure of something that is likely in the process of dying off.  And risking the water supply to book (especially in light of numerous reports from our intelligence community that say water security issues will have long term global and national security impacts).

As nereo mentioned, pipelines are a good way to transport oil.  The alternatives are trains, trucks, and boats.  All of these transport methods have had their share of spills, but pipelines are the cheapest of the bunch (and comparable in safety). 

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2014/04/26/pick-your-poison-for-crude-pipeline-rail-truck-or-boat/#42df3a185777

It's a popular opinion among a few of my friends that electric cars are taking over, because they're talked about all the time and are innovating and improving very quickly.  The reality is, over 99% of cars in the United States still run on petroleum products.  This September was the first time electric cars cleared 1% of new car sales. 

The numbers can also be marketed in a way to make it seem much higher than it is.  "Electric car sales increased 33% this year, 4x the rate of conventional automobiles!"  That's great, but if electric cars only represented .3% of the new car sales before, they now represent .4%.  Or in other words, for every electric car sold, over 250 petroleum powered cars were sold.

Their growth is impressive, and I suspect they'll catch up to petroleum eventually, but it will likely be on the order or decades from now, rather than the few years many people seem to think.

The market share of plug-in electric passenger cars increased from 0.14% of new car sales in 2011 to 0.37% in 2012, 0.62% in 2013, and reached 0.75% of new car sales during 2014.[6][7][5] As plug-in car sales slowed down during the 2015, the segment's market share fell to 0.66% of new car sales, with the all-electric segment flat at 0.41%, while plug-in hybrids declined to 0.25% from 0.34% in 2014.[7][8] The market share increased to 0.83% during the first nine months of 2016.[9] The highest-ever monthly market share for plug-in electric vehicles was achieved in September 2016 with 1.12% of new car sales, marking the first time plug-in cars sold more than 1% of the new light-duty market in the U.S.[2] September 2016 is also the best monthly plug-in sales volume on record ever, with 16,069 units delivered. The previous record were set in August 2016 with 14,973 units.[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_electric_vehicles_in_the_United_States#Markets_and_sales

[Venturing]

Revenue will come more from monthly "hook up charges" than total kw used, and the buying and selling of power will become much more regulated.

This trend is already underway.  Shortly after I installed my grid-connected residential rooftop solar array, my utility changed their rate structure to lower the per kWh cost of electricity, but raised the per month connection fee.  The net results was very little change for most people, but a huge hit to people with solar As an unfortunate side effect, this new model does nothing to encourage conservation.  It's actually more logical to waste electricity, if you're (in the extreme case) paying a flat fee for unlimited use of it.

Or alternatively rather than a flat hook up fee you pay a hook up fee that is calculated based on your usage during periods of peak demand on the network, after all it's the peak demand that actually determines the required capacity of the network. I know of one network that works this way.  Not surprisingly many consumers hate it. But the nature of that particular area means that their overall kWh consumption is relatively low but peak consumption is incredibly high so this methodology much more accurately reflects the true cost back to the consumer.

[Metric Mouse]

I think this will be life changing on the societal level.  (Yeah, maybe I'm a little overexcited.)  Even though Musk went out of his way to assure everyone that there would still be a lot of work for the utilities and power generators, I am assuming their role in modern life will become smaller.  While it will be a few years, I can imagine a developer or developers building communities of energy efficient homes using the solar roof and battery (which will hopefully by this time be capable of storing a whole lot more energy), with possibly small generators or windmills for back-up.  No connection to the grid necessary.

Power distribution will hopefully become much more region-specific, which will make the entire system safer and more reliable (remember the power outage of 2003 which affected an area from Toronto to Ohio?).  Yes, there will still be a use for fossil fuels, but like the utilities their role in our lives will become smaller.
 
Which is why I'm having trouble understanding the whole Dakota pipeline thing.  I mean, I understand why the protests are happening, but I have trouble why anyone is still interested in investing so much $$$ in the infrastructure of something that is likely in the process of dying off.  And risking the water supply to book (especially in light of numerous reports from our intelligence community that say water security issues will have long term global and national security impacts).

I read in one article that the project would produce 12,000 jobs, and in a place like North Dakota, that's major - my husband was originally from ND and when we made visits back home we could see the options were limited. 

Which just makes me glad I found MMM - a lifestyle which has helped put me in the position that I am now able to make decisions based on my long term goals rather than my immediate needs.

Interesting information in this thread: http://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/off-topic/dakota-access-pipeline-protest/msg1281800/#msg1281800

I've never got the 'temporary' argument of jobs like building pipelines etc. That'd be like saying "We shouldn't build this new housing development; it only takes 4 months to build a house, and after that, all the jobs go away." Yeah... to build the next house, or school or factory or whatever.

[mwulff]

I believe that we will see an uptake on solar installations across the residential sector because of these solar-shingles. Now there are two ways (or more) ways this could play out:

1. We get the grid-owners onboard and make a system where we can distribute power efficiently to where it's needed. I don't need my solar power around noon, but the factory 3 km's from really does need it. I need my power around 6 pm when I come home and want to cook. A good system would allow me to sell my solar power to commercial businesses and buy it back at cost. Maybe just on the same day.

2. Grid owner's don't get onboard and we see more and more island-solutions with high capacity lithium batteries. With a 14 kWh battery we could potentially be off-grid for 7-8 months of the year. This is a bad scenario that I personally wouldn't want to see.

3. We get even more serious and start installing huge batteries, hydro-storage, solar and wind and take the entire grid off of fossil fuels. This would require political support, tons of money and time. But it is the best solution in my opinion and can incorporate elements from my nr 1. solution. Think of residential neighbourhoods as huge grid-level solar farms, not just individual houses.

For me the math looks a bit like this:

I pay $0.34 for 1 kWh to my house (excluding a connection fee) and I can sell 1 kWh of solar power for $0.13.

This means that I have a gigantic incentive to use all the power I produce instead of sharing it with others who need it when it is being produced. So even though selling the power is the best thing to do for the grid as a whole (from an emissions perspective), my incentive is to use as much of my own power as possible.

However since the price gap between buy and sell is so high it becomes almost impossible to not invest in a Tesla Powerwall.  With the powerwall and our electric car we could use about 85-95% of our own solar power which means that the system would have paid for itself after about 6-8 years. That is well with the warranty for the powerwall and the solar panels themselves should be good for 25-30 years.

I personally would like to see the grid vs. local incentives aligned and the solar shingles used to build residential grid-scale powerplants instead the "every man for himself" solutions we have now.

A little link to some background info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#Renewable_energy