My Solar PV Thread

[oil pan 4]

For 2020 utility owned solar farms are going up about 3 times faster than residential.
So utilities building at 3x the rate of home owners tells us they want it really bad and utilities making solar more difficult for home owners to get leads us to the conclusion that home owners aren't flooding the grid with uncontrolled solar power but that the utilities just want to control it.
Because if we're making our own they can't sell it to us.

[redpoint5]

The utilities can always make money as long as people are connected. They are guaranteed an amount of profit and can raise and lower rates and fees upon PUC approval to meet those profit amounts.

Sure, they are probably slow to adopt new ways of doing things, and I'm sure if your job is to deliver high quality and reliable power, you'd want as much control as possible.

I don't actually believe what you're implying, that they are randomly shutting down residential net-metering for no reason other than to force those selected customers to pay for all their electricity.

[freebeard]

I don't recall the details but EVTV reported their utility company was buying their electricity and then selling it back to them at 4x.

A properly engineered housing system would incorporate passive solar as much as possible (space and water heating and cooling) and then have redundant 110VAC and 48VDC subsystems.

[JSH]

Originally Posted by freebeard

I don't recall the details but EVTV reported their utility company was buying their electricity and then selling it back to them at 4x.

A properly engineered housing system would incorporate passive solar as much as possible (space and water heating and cooling) and then have redundant 110VAC and 48VDC subsystems.

A lot of utilities either do a straight swap kWh for kWh or where time of use pricing is in effect they only buy electricity at the lowest tier price.

What they are trying to prevent is people installing a battery system, charging it at night on cheap utility power and then selling it back to the utility at peak rate.

For people with residential solar peak production should be at the same time as peak electrical pricing.

[JSH]

Thanks for the details redpoint.

I don't think the ODOE is coming back either. There should be another block of $500K available but I suspect it will disappear in minutes too. $2 million was funded and the ODOE website says $1.5 million is allocated.

$1250 - $1500 isn't make or break for a solar project. The big thing for me is do I spend $10,000 to eliminate a $65 / month power bill. A 13 year payback isn't very appealing.

[redpoint5]

I'm live now. Interestingly, the new meter is the exact model my old meter was, so I don't know why it needed to be swapped. I suspected it would be the same model since I know this particular unit is capable of bidirectionality. Probably just a programming thing, and they must do that offsite somewhere.


To further address oil pan's conspiracy theory, many utilities allow customers to pay more for "green" energy. The utility then needs to build that energy as consumers volunteer to fund it. It wouldn't surprise me if more people add a couple cents per kWh to their bill for solar than those who actually have solar installed on their home.

Here's an example of the problem created when a significant number of people begin backfeeding the grid with their solar. Can you imagine what happens to the grid if 20% of customers were doing this?

You've got production going from 5kw to 0.5kw minute by minute, a 10x change in output constantly. Since the grid must produce exactly the demanded power every milisecond, it becomes a huge problem to smooth these spikes out on a large scale. You'd need batteries to buffer this kind of output, and generators would have to ramp up and down or turn on and off frequently.

Originally Posted by JSH

$1250 - $1500 isn't make or break for a solar project. The big thing for me is do I spend $10,000 to eliminate a $65 / month power bill. A 13 year payback isn't very appealing.

It was very borderline for me too, but I put 4 different companies against each other to bid both my dads project and mine. You'd be surprised how many times they could find another $500 to save on my bid. "Oh, you're referring your dads project, you get that $500 referral credit". All the discounts go out the window though once you start sharing the numbers from other installers. One of the companies pulled their bid, which is a sign that the price is getting favorable to the customer.

The thing that convinced me to go for it was that it does add equity to the house upon sale, this hedges against future price hikes, and hopefully grandfathers me into net-metering so that I can add more production capacity down the road if natural gas prices spike and I switch heating over to electric.

[freebeard]

Software defined electricity (it's been a while since I looked at the details):

Sustainable Real-Time Surge Protection

The VectorQ Series provides sustainable real-time surge and transient protection for power networks up to and including solar flare and EMP protection within threshold limits. It also prevents any customer side surge or transient from affecting the upstream grid infrastructure.

https://3dfs.com/

[oil pan 4]

I know precisely what happens when too much solar comes on line its happening in at least one part of California.
But they have half of the nation's solar generation capacity.
The rest of the country is no where near California.
They are having this problem with localized places with less than 5% of homes having solar.
Nationwide on average it's about 0.5% of homes have solar. But divide that up between California and everyone else the numbers look more like 1.5% in California and closer to 0.2% everywhere else.

The absolute maximum number of homes that could have solar is only around 75 to 80%. Because you have to own your home, have pretty good credit, have a big enough roof that's suitable for solar and just those 3 things disqualify most people.

[redpoint5]

I'm still not discerning your point, so you'll have to help me out by explicitly stating it. Best I can surmise is that you are implying that very specific locations cannot be near max capacity for solar generation because the nation as a whole isn't near max capacity.

[jjackstone]

Originally Posted by oil pan 4

...The absolute maximum number of homes that could have solar is only around 75 to 80%. Because you have to own your home, have pretty good credit, have a big enough roof that's suitable for solar and just those 3 things disqualify most people.

Don't have to own your own home. Landlords can place solar panels on their rental homes and/or apartment buildings. Is that good for them or not? Only they know.

Credit? I don't know. most of the people I know have one or two vehicles that look as though they may have paid $15,000 to $20,000 for. I'd rather pay five thousand for the car and ten thousand for the solar.

The roof I agree with along with not all homes have a clear enough view of the sky to get usable sun throughout the day.

JJ