What’s it going to take before US homeowners start putting solar on their roofs en masse? With all the power outages in Florida after the hurricane, rooftop solar would have been useful.
Rooftop solar only helps in scenarios like that if you also have an attached storage system. You're not going to power your fridge/oven/dryer directly from the panels.
I would also like to see rooftop solar become widespread in the near future. But I think for most people to get on board, they'll need to be able to break even on the investment within something like 3 years.
Storage makes it better, but even just being able to charge your laptop, phone, car and run your air-con during the day would be a win.
I don't think most solar installations are designed to operate without a grid connection though, and even not all powerwall installations can run off grid.
Though I'm not sure that they beat a generator (diesel or connected to your gas line) if you really anticipate regular grid outages and probably won't for a while.
>Storage makes it better, but even just being able to charge your laptop, phone, car and run your air-con during the day would be a win.
You mean the car that is parked during the day in your office parking lot a few tens miles away and the laptop and phone that you are carrying with you?
Seriously, without some form of (efficient) storage system, the whole thing depends on exchanges on the grid.
Off grid - as I see it - is a very nice solution (still with some minimal storage) for a hut in the woods, where everything is specifically designed for low power (and where you don't have a dishwasher, a washer, etc.), replacing - in a more environment friendly way - the noisy generator, but still it remains something good for youe being there on - say - every other weekend.
Having an el-cheapo (diesel or gasoline) small generator for emergencies is handy, but only for those hopefully very rare emergencies, the cost for a good quality (suitable to run often and in several hours stretches) generator and for the fuel is not competitive with solar (though of course the initial cost of solar is still higher).
I was talking about in the "hurricane just hit your state" situation, in which you may not be commuting to work as usual, though in future two car families with one car at home during the day will not be unusual.
In the normal run of things though, I agree, the correct and sensible thing is to be grid connected, and have sane regulations that ensure that excess from generating customers gets redirected to their neighbours and that everyone gets compensated fairly for their contribution to a well running grid so that incentives are correctly aligned.
This value will in most cases be more than utilities would be prepared to pay if left to choose a number themselves and they will unfortunately generate propaganda to make solar installations seem like free riders rather than go by actual studies of how much they reduce the peak demand. In both Australia and the USA studies have found Billions (with a B!) in savings thanks to solar installations.
How do solar panels behave with 150mph+ winds? I could imagine that they'd see significant damage in a storm like this. I believe roofs in parts of Florida have to be prepared to withstand high winds, not sure if that can be accomplished with solar panels.
I have a house down in Florida and it has solar, but not on the roof. When storms come, the caretaker hits a switch and they rotate to be upside down. They don't have a broad cross-section, so they should do okay in some pretty strong winds.
I have the same thing here, up in Maine. I live in one of the windiest places around and it hasn't been a problem. It gets flipped for blizzards, mostly.
If windows can be built to survive it, so can PV. Might be prohibitively expensive, but wouldn't a potentially sacrificial layer of plastic or wire reinforced glass a few cm above the PV panels suffice?
As I understood it it's not against damage but so that they wouldn't get lifted from the roof and become projectiles. Since they're probably light compared to their surface area, I can imagine that they'd fly around at least as easily as shingles. But maybe they can be attached well enough to prevent this.
Everyone seems to be forgetting that you can get paid to transmit your extra power back to the grid during the day. Air conditioning, for example, is high during the day. You might not need it at home but someone else will.
We have one of these, and if the power goes out it's got enough power to run e.g. the fridge/freezer so your food doesn't go bad. It can't handle even momentary overloads, so it's not good for powering motors, but I've run our fridge on a UPS powered by the inverter and that works fine.
>hey'll need to be able to break even on the investment within something like 3 years.
???? That's a 33% discount rate. Kind of insane expectations... I put solar on my house in 2014, after doing a bunch of analysis showing the breakeven point was 8-12 years. After having it and checking the utility bills, it looks like it's going to be 10-11 years. Maybe less if they raise their rates.
Unless there is a some level of prepper in you, those powerwalls do not make any economic sense. Most of the Solars that SolarCity installs are grid tie-in, means no power at substation means no power even with those panels on roof.
Customer located storage solutions do make economic sense in many situtions, that's why some utilities will pay you to have one in your home and let them control it's charge/discharge when they need to. Usually that economic benefit is left on the table due to the utility being poorly regulated but that's subtly different from the thing itself not making economic sense.
Can you provide a link to these any of these utilities?
Most are so focused on reliability they are quite resistant to pushing the limits. There must have been some cost savings such as avoiding building or upgrading a substation
If US utilities were focused on reliability, they would have stopped putting power lines above ground a long time ago.
The power grid in the US is way more unreliable than any other country I've experienced, and I can only think that it's because the utilities are so profit-focused that they put lowering infrastructure costs above losing a little revenue due to power outages here and there. After all, the real societal costs due to unreliable power are completely externalized onto their customers.
The utilities are fine talking about reliability when it comes to newfangled competitors like solar, but that's mostly because they're a threat to their bottom line, not because they actually care about reliability.
> "...and I can only think that it's because the utilities are so profit-focused that they put lowering infrastructure costs above losing a little revenue due to power outages here and there."
There is more that goes into transmission line engineering than cost. "Agility" is important, and it is a lot harder to tap underground transmission lines than overhead lines. Outages, while less likely for underground, are actually, on average, longer than overhead line outages.
the PG&E project is a technology demonstration which is a nice first step
green mountain power appears to be a retailer of electricity and not a distribution company; they don't own any power lines. The distribution co. will have to be on board to safely accept power flowing in the opposite direction (from the load), and for the most part they have no incentive for this so don't really care.
Green Mountain Power (GMP), a subsidiary of Gaz Métro, is the largest electricity distributor in Vermont, serving over 70% of the market and more than 260,000 customers. GMP’s core business includes the distribution, transportation, generation, purchase and sale of electricity in Vermont and, to a lesser degree, electricity transportation in New Hampshire and electricity generation in the states of New York, Maine and Connecticut.
The GMP network comprises over 1,500 km of overhead transmission lines, 18,000 km of overhead distribution lines and 1,600 km of underground distribution lines, located mainly in Vermont but also extending to New Hampshire and New York.[17]
At least up here in the PNW, grid-tied solar systems are actually required to shut down in the event of power grid failures (sending power back into "dead" lines is a good way to get people killed), so while I definitely would like to see what you're talking about, I'm not sure a selling point of it is resiliency for power outages.
I'd still see that posing problems for crews of electricians. A customer home safety disconnect could fail to operate in which case you'd be feeding the supposedly "dead" distribution line.
>All told, the Edison Electric Institute estimates (pdf) that some 18 percent of the country's distribution lines are buried. For the transmission system, only about 0.5 percent of lines sit beneath the surface. "Undergrounding an entire power system," says EIA, "is considered cost prohibitive." Instead, most utilities will just try to bury a few key lines.
Some places, yes. Unfortunately, in most places we don't. Usually wealthier neighborhoods get underground cables, but even then most long distance cables are up in the air, so if a hurricane destroys a long distance cable, you are screwed even if you have underground cables in your local neighborhood.
The low population density makes underground cables very expensive in many parts. Even where you have underground cables for neighborhoods, longer range transport will be done above ground (as in many parts of Europe). It's probably cheaper to rebuild poles every few years than laying underground.
They can still be damaged by debris flying around. Happens less often but just two damaged lines can cause blackouts for huge areas. And repairing them takes much longer. But not sure if any of those got damaged during the hurricane.
Price of storage and ease of installation isn't there yet net metering allowed a large number of home solar installations. Blocking those has slowed it down. The price of panels etc is less than half of a home installatons so panel prices coming down is unlikely to fuel much morenhome solar growth
In most places unless there are huge subsidies (e.g. net metering) commercial scale solar should be less expensive overall. Solar owned by the homeowners might help in niche scenarios but overall it's often just not a good investment for many individual homeowners
Net metering technically isn't a subsidy since they are being compensated for a benefit they provide, it's just forcing utilities to not pay less than they're benefiting, and solar is a good investment for individuals when sensible regulation ensures they get a share of the benefits they provide to the grid.
"Nevertheless, by the end of 2015,
regulators in at least 10 states had conducted studies to develop methodologies to value distributed generation and net metering, while other states conducted less formal inquiries, ranging from direct rate design or net-metering policy changes to general education of decisionmakers and the public. And there is a degree of consensus. What do the commission-sponsored analyses show? A growing number show that net metering benefits all utility customers"
Powerplants often get paid many multiples of retail rates at peak times. The retail rates are averages. And, in places with air-con usage, those peaks coincide to a high degree with solar production.
The closer we get to the economically perfect solutions the better, but even powerplants have lots of weird regulations and "subsidies" around their pricing e.g. paying gas peakers to be on standby because it's not clear exactly how much power will be needed. At some point you have to accept simplicity rather than waste money on perfection. Net-metering is a pretty good solution by any measure.
The structure of how power plants generate electricity and are paid for it are idiosyncratic to their particular operating and economic conditions. It would make no sense to try to force something completely unlike that in to their regime.
Thus the many efforts that are designing a "value of solar" regime that encompasses the important aspects of solar, so that equitable and efficient cost schemes can be designed.
Pretty significant, I'd imagine even without flying debris. There's often an air gap in between the roof and panel which is going to make things really exciting in 100+mph wind.
Maybe building codes could be updated so that there's an airfoil on the outside edge of rooftop installations, like on your car's sunroof, to reduce the likelihood of liftoff?
Hurricane prone areas have building codes that require hurricane-proof installations. Most panels are built withstand extreme conditions, e.g., 2-inch hail, etc.
I recently read that in parts of Florida the roof needs to be secured with concrete to avoid wind lifting tiles. Can this be done with solar panels? I always had the impression that there's space between the panel and the roof. In this case, couldn't wind of a hurricane lift the panel?
The building codes are mostly the latter - maintain integrity of the roof, don't become projectiles. The manufacturing standards are more the former, such as "withstand 2 inch hail at X mph and maintain at least 95% of rated capacity"
