Under Current Policies, Residential Batteries Increase Emissions In Most Cases (arstechnica.com) 182
schwit1 shares a report: Another year, another reason to take the promises of residential home batteries with a grain of salt. This month, a group of researchers from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) published a paper in Environmental Science and Technology reporting that there are very few cases in which operating a residential home battery reduces overall emissions -- assuming that households are economically rational and trying to minimize costs.
Of course, if the battery is only discharged during periods of peak emissions and only charged when fossil fuel use is low, then a household might reduce emissions. But across 16 representative regions, operating a battery this way ended up being costly. "There may be good reasons to decentralize the grid through ubiquitous installation of small RES [Residential Energy Storage], but cost-effective emissions control is not one of them at the moment," the researchers write.
Of course, if the battery is only discharged during periods of peak emissions and only charged when fossil fuel use is low, then a household might reduce emissions. But across 16 representative regions, operating a battery this way ended up being costly. "There may be good reasons to decentralize the grid through ubiquitous installation of small RES [Residential Energy Storage], but cost-effective emissions control is not one of them at the moment," the researchers write.
Why not measure health effect (Score:4, Insightful)
in locality of where batteries replace toxic carcinogenic exhaust fumes.
Science funded by oil is fascist.
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Altruistic Answer: Yes
Nationalist answer: Why? That's THEIR problem.
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Canadian answer: it's not our fault, but we're sorry anyway.
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A battery without solar is missing 1/2 the point (Score:2, Insightful)
You have a battery and most days you have a trickling, free energy source just bouncing off the top of your head being wasted. A high % of people who would add the greater expense of batteries would no doubt add solar.
It's a no brainer yet they don't consider it somehow?
Re:A battery without solar is missing 1/2 the poin (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't really get solar WITHOUT the batteries.
The people I know in Minnesota with panels literally don't see much payoff for 10-ish years. The utilities are eventually going to get their way and greatly cut their payback rate for grid buyback.
Generating and storing energy for your own use is the only thing that makes sense, but right now the economics of it for the average homeowner don't work well.
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Payoff on panels for me is about three years. Admitted lots of sun but no spectacularly good deals on the tariff. Payoff for batteries would be so long they'd be unlikely to ever break even.
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I'd think you'd have to be getting a good deal on the tariff to get that kind of breakeven, I'm in a small city in Colorado where they've refused to create an incentive structure that'd leave poorer residents funding the upper middle class and the breakeven is closer to 5 yrs. The city isn't particularly backwards (indeed we've got free buses, muni fiber and a commitment to be zero-carbon by 2030) but it's hard to match the incentives that the larger utilities do without disproportionately hurting the poor.
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Buyback rates will have to drop at some point. How long do you think those utilities can afford to buy power at consumer rates?
Building new power generating plants is very expensive in terms of capital and regulatory expenses. It is also really difficult politically with the "not in my back yard" crowd. By encouraging consumers to generate their own power (using net metering / power buyback), utilities can delay the need to build new power plants. While this is expensive because the utilities in effect pay to act as a big battery (at minimal charge to the consumer), this cost can be less expensive than the cost to build new power p
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You're using people you know in Minnesota to explain solar economics for the average homeowner? You don't spend much time thinking about this, do you?
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Solar without batteries uses the grid. Storage is inefficient; so is transmission. If you generate and someone half a mile away consumes, that's more-efficient than battery storage or than transmitting from the power station 15 miles away.
Because the grid net meters over long time spans, this is more economically-advantageous to the homeowner than using a battery.
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Re: A battery without solar is missing 1/2 the poi (Score:2)
Dunno why my solar array should subsidize coal plants. That's a problem for them to solve. If they think batteries are necessary, they can install them at the coal plant.
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Wouldn't putting it on the grid cause the power load to fall, thus reducing how much power you're consuming? Meanwhile you still need your night time base generation, so running off batteries at night is inefficient.
Solar on your house is just daytime generation, and would displace load. When using batteries to store solar, actual consumption at peak is higher than just putting the extra power on the grid.
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Solar without batteries make sense in southern areas where large amounts of solar power mean large amounts of AC. So in that case, it's just lowering peak use costs. In those cases, the correlation of power to usage is very direct.
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I've never understood why people think it's legitimate to expect an electrical generation company to buy surplus power from home owners at full retail rates. Why should a home owner be any different than any other generator who sells at wholesale rates? It simply doesn't make any economic sense to force an electrical company to buy power at retail rates when they could get it from other sources at wholesale rates.
Add to that the problem of peak residential solar not really lining up with peak demand in ma
Re: A battery without solar is missing 1/2 the poi (Score:2)
Why should homeowners be forced to sell the energy they generate at below market rates? Would the coal plant operator accept a law forcing them to sell at wholesale?
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Sure if by 'infrastructure costs' you mean shareholder profit, lobbying, marketing, call centres, taxes etc. Here in the UK the grid part of electricity seems to be 10% of the ticket price per kWh.
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I don't really get solar WITHOUT the batteries.
The people I know in Minnesota with panels literally don't see much payoff for 10-ish years. The utilities are eventually going to get their way and greatly cut their payback rate for grid buyback.
Generating and storing energy for your own use is the only thing that makes sense, but right now the economics of it for the average homeowner don't work well.
Yeah, I feel the same way. Massachusetts also had a law where you had to sell solar/wind power back to the grid and you couldn't install home batteries (while connected to the grid for power). That's being changed because solar vendors realized that they could make more money by adding the Powerwall to the solar package.
OK, I've learned my lesson (Score:2)
I'll remove the PowerWall, and start using the coal burning furnace, and the wood stove and fireplace. /s
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Wood furnaces, surprisingly, are carbon-neutral: The carbon they release exactly balances the carbon taken in to grow the trees. In principle anyway - there is still the emissions cost of collecting and transportint the fuel. They are terrible for particulate emissions though - lots of smog.
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Oh, sure. Just as carbon-neutral as coal, oil, and natural gas anyway. Not that this is a useful definition of carbon-neutral.
Where the timber is sustainably harvested (putting the energy costs aside) it's probably pretty close to carbon-neutral. If you used renewable power, the whole thing could conceivably wind up being carbon-negative because all the parts too small to be firewood wind up getting composted. This usually involves chipping it, which does take some energy, but you can also build a "hugelkultur" by throwing it down someplace you'd like to build soil, and dumping some clean dirt on top of it. You can then plant into
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Oh, sure. Just as carbon-neutral as coal, oil, and natural gas anyway. Not that this is a useful definition of carbon-neutral.
There are two major carbon cycles on this planet: The geological cycle, which takes millions of years, and the biological cycle, which operates on a time span between a few months and a few decades.
The carbon in fossil fuels are pulled out of the geological cycle where they had been sequestered for millions of years, and it is responsible for the currently increasing accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere. Most all of the carbon in wood was pulled out of the atmosphere by trees within the past few decades. R
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(Even if you don't harvest trees to burn them, in mature forests they'll release their CO2 as they rot, so that doesn't significantly change the overall picture.)
Yes, it absolutely does. When they decompose in aerobic conditions, which is generally the case outside of rainforests, the decomposition of trees leads to carbon sequestration in soil. Not all of the carbon is released, unlike when you burn them.
Re: OK, I've learned my lesson (Score:4, Insightful)
The PowerWALL is also terrible at towing my boat, walking my dog and satering my plants.
Other shocking news:
I heard that wood burning fireplaces don't actually improve the air quality in homes. Just makes them warmer.
Fire insurance doesn't stop fires - just gives you a chance to get some money back after a fire, so you can buy replacement stuff.
Life insurance - doesn't make you immortal. My friend had insurance and he DIED!
Salt is a terrible beverage!
Liquid Nitrogen is useless at removing terrible, scary, urban blighting BLACK ice.
Truly, all of these things are useless at accomplishing goals they are not intended to accomplish.
I do hear that the PowerWALL is pretty good at storing power for use during blackouts, or smoothing your own power peak demands though. Maybe they could market it for that instead of whatever ad the high on crack writer came up with.
I have to go post a bad review of my new truck - it is useless as a dirigible, no matter how much helium I pump into the cab.
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Fire insurance doesn't stop fires - just gives you a chance to get some money back after a fire, so you can buy replacement stuff.
Actually it does, by giving large companies a vested interest in preventing fires and minimizing damage from them.
This makes sense. (Score:5, Interesting)
Even a lithium-ion battery has only 99% charge efficiency, so it makes sense that adding a battery to your photovoltaic (PV) system can increase emissions compared to a PV system with no battery.
Note the following:
This is why it needs to be a revenue-neutral carbon tax. If the tax is 10 cents per kWh and the average person uses 4,000 kWh per year, then everyone would receive a $400 check every year whether they used any electricity that year or not.
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If the tax is 10 cents per kWh...
10 cents per kWh tax? I pay less than 10 cents for 1 kWh from the grid...
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Welcome to europe where i pay about 6ct for one kWh, 3 cent per kWh transport/grid costs and a whopping 14 cent per kWh tax.
Those taxes go straight into politicians' pet projects, not towards investments in renewables.
My country is not as green as they pretend to be. For example, our politicians are trying to convince the public that driving a 2500kg electric car is `greener` than driving a small and efficient 800kg gasoline car. They promote solar panels but fail to properly insulate old houses. It's all p
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2,500kg electric car doesn't use a small, inefficient combustion engine (a larger, slower engine is much more efficient) to generate its power. For driving styles that don't suck down gasoline like crazy, the heavier car stores energy in its moving mass, then transfers about 2/3 of that back to battery during regenerative braking. The greater mass also helps with mildly-uneven ground, allowing the car to travel up hills more efficiently when the hills aren't that tall and the car is already moving at spe
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the [hevier] car can coast uphill further on its momentum
You need to review your physics book. How much a car will coast uphill does not depend on its mass. The rest of your claims may have some merit though.
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The force of gravity acts vertically and the normal force acts perpendicularly on an object on a slope. This creates a resultant force proportional to the mass of the object. A heavier object accelerates down a slope faster.
When rolling back up the next slope, rolling resistance comes into play. Heavier cars have to run tires at higher pressure due to tire load, so don't have proportionally-higher rolling resistance. Likewise, due to high-performance lubricants, the loss to frictional forces in drive
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the car can coast uphill further on its momentum, and the car has regenerative braking to further improve on this base efficiency.
Absent the regenerative braking, the greater mass is always a liability when going up hill, or at any time really. At best, it means that there's more energy being dissipated by the tires and bearings (all the time) as well the suspension (when the road is lumpy.) But when you have regen, the problem of having to spend more energy to maintain speed while climbing a hill is offset by the benefit of gaining energy by maintaining speed when you come down the hill. You still have greater losses in the non-braki
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You essentially recover all the gravitational potential energy going downhill, so you don't need to apply as much driving force to maintain your cruising speed.
If the descent is so gentle that you require neither friction nor engine braking to maintain your speed, then you certainly are getting back the energy you spent climbing the hill. However, that seems relatively rare in my experience.
Solve the problems you can solve (Score:3)
For example, our politicians are trying to convince the public that driving a 2500kg electric car is `greener` than driving a small and efficient 800kg gasoline car.
That's because in many cases the EV actually IS the greener option. There is no such thing as an "efficient" internal combustion engine, at least in https://www.quora.com/How-ener... [slashdot.org]">comparison to electric motors. My Chevy Bolt EV has a fuel economy better than any remotely similar sized vehicle with an ICE you can buy. It's not even close. Furthermore it generates less waste to operate too. I don't have to change ANY fluids aside from wiper fluid for the first 150,000 miles of operation. I've dri
Electric vs gasoline energy (Score:2)
If you are basing your Bolt getting "fuel economy better than .. any ICE .. not even close" on the EPA rating of 100-130 eMPG?
That rating assumes 100% efficient conversion of heat energy into electricity delivered through the power grid to the battery posts in your car.
Yes, I am aware that some electric power comes from zero-carbon sources and that 60% conversion efficiency is claimed for the best combined-cycle natural gas-fired power plants.
The claim that you are getting most of your power from gre
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How about instead of a tax the utility company just sends the battery pack a signal to tell it when to activate? Could be done over the internet or some kind of power line comms system or even something separate like ISM band radio (LoRa or Sigfox).
Have a legal mandate to reduce emissions and reduce costs for consumers, i.e. run it for the benefit of the planet and the owner rather than the power company. Give people a small incentive to adopt it.
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Yes in principle.
In practice smart grids are hard because they are massive distributed feedback systems and it's really hard to make one so you know for sure there aren't any resonances. It gets harder still when you have automated trading systems.
If one runs riot on the stock market, then they just roll back the state of the exchange to earlier in the day (because if you're rich enough you don't take risks to make money). This has happened before. Now imagine it happening on an electrical grid where price
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I think it is not so simple. Not all fossil fuel sources of electricity are equal.
Here in CA, with a significant amount of residential solar installed, there is concern about the "duck curve" -- solar output tails off around 6pm, while demand increases until about 9pm. This demand must be met by using relatively ine
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Why? Instead of increasing supply, why not reduce demand? That's how eBay works, if you think about it. Does the winner ever complain about being overcharged?
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Most Federal administration is highly-efficient. Social Security's cost is under 1% of its funding; several of the welfare systems are below 4%, although TANF has a nearly 8% administrative overhead.
take this article with a grain of salt, too.. (Score:3, Interesting)
home batteries are about cutting the COST (i.e. saving money off the home's electric bill)... by storing low off-peak energy (from whatever the fuck the energy generation source is) for use during high-cost peak times.. it has abso-fucking-lutly nothing to do with emissions for most people and most installs (an exception would be an off-the-grid home with solar or solar/wind + battery)
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It has do to with emissions because it depends on how the base load power is generated.
In Ontario it would lead to a lowering of emissions because base load is generated by nuclear and hydro. Someone with a battery would be charging the battery with base load electricity and using it during the peak times when gas fired generating plants come online to pick up the extra demand.
In many places in the US base load is still being met with fossil fuel. If you use your battery during the afternoon peak price when
Why Would It Reduce Emissions? (Score:2)
Intuivively, if a battery perfectly stored the energy from the power plant, and perfectly released it, the amount of emissions would be the same as if the battery wasn't there. So it shouldn't be surprising that using batteries doesn't lower the emissions.
The article supports the intuition by making it apparent that trying to use batteries to arbitrage the emissions from the power plant based on variable emissions efficiency of the power plant isn't likely to cost-effectively work either.
Re: Why Would It Reduce Emissions? (Score:2)
Zero-emissions generation facilities (e.g. solar, hydro, wind) are slow to start up and slow down, making them poorly suited for peak/transient loads. Coal, natural gas, and diesel are far more responsive.
If residential batteries allow for smoothing of the demand side and buffer against unexpected peaking, generation can largely stay with zero-emissions sourcing.
Thatâ(TM)s the idea, at least.
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I think you have that back to front. Hydro is quick to start up. Coal is typically used for base-load generation is typically slow to start up. Natural gas: it depends on the type of plant (base load or peaker). Wind is quick to start up.
Response time (Score:2)
Zero-emissions generation facilities (e.g. solar, hydro, wind) are slow to start up and slow down, making them poorly suited for peak/transient loads.
No idea what you are talking about. Solar panels and wind turbines can be turned on/off extremely quickly provided you have spare capacity. When combined with an appropriately large bank of batteries their response time to load changes is effectively instant and FAR faster than an fossil fuel source.
You also are ignoring the fact that solar as a general proposition tends to work best precisely when the sun is shining the brightest which is super helpful for use cases like air conditioning that correlate s
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Solar can help when the sun is out but energy is pulled down the grid when the cost is low to ensure the battery pack is always ready.
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Some years ago, GE announce hybrid natural gas hybrid turbines that had batteries hooked into the system. Normally they have to keep some number of turbines running idle in
Is that an actual argument? (Score:2)
I don't think I've ever consciously noted this being a bullet point on any pro/con breakdown for PV.
IMO, batteries aren't meant to decrease emissions. They are a tool towards autarky or optimizing income by putting power into the network when it's most advantageous.
Or even as a backup if your network isn't very stable some days.
But reducing emissions really has never been something I think I ever heard as a serious argument.
here in the UK (Score:3)
Charging batteries from the grid is insane in the UK unless done purely for power security. Most storage systems are hooked up to microgeneration (almost all PV) and the battery is used to avoid selling power cheaply to the grid then buying it back for much higher prices later. Any effect on emissions is a side effect, albeit one that should reduce them.
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battery is used to avoid selling power cheaply to the grid then buying it back for much higher prices later.
Here, we have to use net metering. If your power company could meter your power during the day and at night separately, billing on a one-hour cycle, then you'd sell wholesale and buy market, transmission, and taxes. Because it's metered once monthly, you're avoiding that.
Let's say you overgenerate 10kWh at 8 cent electricity, 11 cent transmission, and 3 cent taxes--21 cents per kWh. That's $2.10 you'd pay to buy it, but the utility pays you only 80 cents. Sounds like a rip-off, right?
Here's the thin
Bad battery (Score:2)
Of course, if the battery is only discharged during periods of peak emissions and only charged when fossil fuel use is low, then a household might reduce emissions. But across 16 representative regions, operating a battery this way ended up being costly.
I'm pretty sure the time at which the battery is to be charged is set by user preference. It's not the battery that increases emissions, it's the owner of the battery who wants to reduce cost as a priority. It is more important to have a few extra bucks a month to spend on more consumption and pretend to be doing something worthwhile for the environment, than actually do something worthwhile for the environment. However this article tries to blame the battery by hiding the facts under the weasel words "Unde
Confused study. (Score:2)
The paper examines cost savings on one axis and the carbon reduction on another. It showed reduced cost and reduced emissions does not happen. Under certain circumstances
Why? (Score:2)
If you charge at night when rates are low, you are using baseload power which is often from coal plants. If you discharge during peak use, you are offsetting natural gas turbine plants. Coal produces more CO2 per kwh than natural gas.
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Base load plants are generally more efficient than peak load plants. Is the amount of CO2 from an inefficient peak load plant greater than that from a more efficient base-load plant?
Here in CA, the amount of electricity generated using coal is very small -- I think it is limite
I work in the industry and this is correct (Score:3)
I worked on a very large pilot in Oklahoma. We everyone two pricing options and they paid the lower one at the end of the month. The first was the current system of 12 to 20 cents per kwh. The second was peak prices of $0.78 and the lowest price was free. Average savings per month was $50. Savings for the utility would have been double that. The reason for the huge savings to the utility is it would have reduced the utilities peak demand. Over 10% of a utilities infrastructure is used for only hours a year. Eliminate that peak and you save the utility tens of billions of dollars. The pilot was an amazing success. The regulator of the utility then went and fucked the entire thing up so badly that they pretty much killed the idea for all of North America. Oh, and the politicians all patted themselves on the back for preventing an evil utility from making huge profits. If Oklahoma and Gas and Electric had rolled out the concept for everyone in the state their profits under their new regulated prices would have dropped.
Whole home batteries (Score:2)
Unless you're tying them to an actual means of production (solar, micro-wind, micro-hydro, etc), you're not really doing anything to decrease emissions.
You're basically playing "hot potato" with grid resources.
nuclear reactors (Score:2)
Paraphrasing article (Score:2)
Humans dumb.
To quote a certain replicant: "Then we're stupid and we'll die!"
Re:Consumers should be like the government ! (Score:5, Interesting)
Capitalism is not going green until it is profitable.
Then we need to make it profitable.
Two of the biggest reductions in CO2 emissions have come from LED lights and shale gas. Both of these industries were developed by profit seeking capitalists, and have been widely adopted because they actually make economic sense.
Residential batteries don't make sense, are not cost effective, and may not even be helping the environment. Maybe some new battery design may make sense, but then money should be going into battery bR&D, not battery installations.
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>>Two of the biggest reductions in CO2 emissions have come from LED lights and shale gas. Both of these industries were developed by profit seeking capitalists, and have been widely adopted because they actually make economic sense.
Yes, but no on LED lights.
The big driver for pushing the LED light development was EU regulation. Before that there was not much of a market for them, so the development was slow.
But suddenly the companies saw that in few years there would be people who were forced to buy a
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Residential batteries don't make sense
They do if they are used right. What we need is a more intelligent electricity grid that can coordinate the residential batteries so that they benefit more than just the owner. To make it fair the owner would have to be compensated of course, but that sounds like a great way to pay for infrastructure.
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You can make batteries work as a green solution or as an economical solution today, but not both. This will eventually change, with daylight hours being “off-peak” tariffs, and late night considered on-peak for residential users. At this point, oversizing a PV array and adding batteries starts to make sense... but your costs go up.
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Then we need to make it profitable.
How do you square these two statements? Capitalism has this chicken and egg issue. Till there is a evidence people will pay money for a residential battery no body would invest seriously in residential battery technology.
The current Li-ion batteries were developed for automotive applications, battery weight is very important, heavy fluctua
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Then we need to make it profitable.
That's hard to do without using the s word that republicans seem to hate so much, ... at least when it doesn't suit their vested interests.
*subsidies
Re: Consumers should be like the government ! (Score:2)
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In what way are residential batteries and PV not saving money ?
Electricity demand is highest during the day, and lowest at night.
If Electricity is priced based on demand, the batteries are buying high and selling low, exactly the opposite of what makes sense.
Residential batteries are stupid. It makes far more sense to feed the power back into the grid.
Batteries only make sense where utilities misprice power, through either corruption or incompetence.
Re:Consumers should be like the government ! (Score:5, Insightful)
Electricity demand is highest during the day, and lowest at night.
That is 100% false. Here is a graph [wikipedia.org] of power usage over the course of the day. The peek is at 8pm to 9pm. It tends to rise slowly over the day but about the time that solar drops out is when you need to be ramping up power production.
Re:Consumers should be like the government ! (Score:5, Insightful)
Umm what? It'd make far more sense to charge up the batteries at night (from the grid) when the price of electricity is lowest and your house needs the lowest amount of energy; and to discharge the batteries during the day when electricity is most expensive and you use the most, and you possibly have solar panels providing most of your energy needs.
Feeding electricity into the grid requires utility infrastructure upgrades (in many cases) in order to handle that; residential batteries may be cheaper in those cases.
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If it takes 15 years with (tax incentives which might be removed) than its a laughably stupid idea for most consumers.
If you have the upfront capital to put in the system you'd be better off buying some shares in a mutual fund today and just keep paying your current electric expenses.
If it takes 15 years to pay for itself you are then left with an asset that is at least half way though its useful life. Probably quite obsolete, with newer models offing much greater payback. You may never even realize any o
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Making it price-neutral but potentially more reliable during utility outages are worth more than a few bucks in a mutual fund. And generators are nice, but don't kick in fast enough to prevent a brownout or temporary blackout.
Re: Consumers should be like the government ! (Score:2)
Maybe if your community doesn't have reliable power. Most of us would prefer a few extra dollars in our retirement accounts than we would an extra hour of power per decade.
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I am saying don't try it yet. Wait another 10 years for the people with more money then the sense to pay for the next generation of technology before you buy it. I also think commercial enterprise needs to lead, here. The technology needs to be made to work in office buildings, hotels, golf courses etc before its scaled down for the home.
Re: Consumers should be like the government ! (Score:2)
Batteries scale pretty linearly. There's no reason to start with large scale commercial and "scale down". In this context, the scale you're looking for is widespread deployment, so that battery manufacturers get into a competition frenzy.
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Batteries scale pretty linearly. There's no reason to start with large scale commercial and "scale down". In this context, the scale you're looking for is widespread deployment, so that battery manufacturers get into a competition frenzy.
Some numbers for you to consider. The Gigafactory produces ~20GW/h/yr. The US grid (3 separate grids actually) uses at least 500GW all the time and that figure is only growing. So that means if we only used Tesla's batteries (the world's largest maker of batteries) for grid backup, it would take 5 years to make enough to backup the wind and solar we already have deployed. And that doesn't count the rest of the world that uses another 2TW all the time. To backup a grid, you need to be able to handle all
Green is profitable (usually) (Score:2)
Capitalism is not going green until it is profitable.
As a general proposition going green already IS profitable. Waste disposal costs money and the cheapest way to reduce that cost is to not make the waste in the first place. Energy consumption costs money so technology that minimizes energy consumption improves profits. "Going green" very routinely is a very easy path to improving profits and companies are well aware of this. Not to mention the economic benefit that comes with technology development and deployment of green energy sources.
Generally speaki
Re: Powerwall smug (Score:2)
I own four powerwalls. I didn't buy them to save the environment. I bought them to reduce my electricity costs while providing backup power.
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The only LED bulbs I've ever had burn out were the cheap ones bought at the dollar store. LED or not, you get what you pay for. Also, there's no mercury in LED bulbs, unlike fluorescent bulbs.
My Philips LED bulbs have been running fine for years without any change in lumens. Yes they're around 10 dollars per bulb, but they're only expensive if you have a huge house which requires a dozen bulbs. And if you have a huge house, you shouldn't be bitching about things like LED bulbs prices.
LEDs are great but not perfect (Score:2)
The only LED bulbs I've ever had burn out were the cheap ones bought at the dollar store.
Then you haven't bought as many as I have. I've had a fair number go bad including some expensive ones. Don't get me wrong, most last a really long time and work great but I've had some pretty pricey ones fail for various reasons. Still better than incandescent bulbs by a country mile but not failure proof. Brand does seem to matter somewhat in my experience but it's not the only factor. You need a fixture designed so the heat they do produce won't fry the electronics. I've lost a few to that problem
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That's true and good but LED bulbs aren't exactly devoid of toxic materials [scientificamerican.com]. They often contain lead, arsenic, and other materials that need to be properly handled when disposing of them. Safer than CFLs in most cases but not anything you want to go around licking if you get my point.
Not a lot of surprises there.
Arsenic is often used for semiconductor doping (for GaAs junctions) because of its electron properties. Lead is used for soldering, which you'll find, surprise surprise, in pretty much all electronic and electric devices.
But the (un)scientificamerican article is about the same kind of stupid like people claiming that flu vaccines contain Thiomersal which contains mercury and will lead to authism. You could also say that table salt is comprises of chlorine and sodium. Both of w
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Excellent post.
Would read again.
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There are alternatives to arsenic doped semiconductors. Only for applications like high performance photovoltaics those gallium arsenide junctions appear to be indispensable. And those appliances are more likely to orbit Earth or go further into space than being put on roofs.
There's also lead free solder. Various countries like California or other organizations like the EU have strong regulations for lead in consumer products. Of course just banning somethin
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The only LED bulbs I've ever had burn out were the cheap ones bought at the dollar store.
Then you haven't bought as many as I have. I've had a fair number go bad including some expensive ones.
To be pedantic, LEDs themselves fail remarkably close to never. (In all my life, I've never seen even one single LED that failed for any reason other than the leads physically getting snapped off or someone deliberately/accidentally applying massive over-voltage.)
However, the cheap electronics that they use to convert household current to low-voltage DC fail pretty frequently, mostly because many electrolytic capacitors have a half-life measured in months. :-)
It's about the device, not the components (Score:2)
To be pedantic, LEDs themselves fail remarkably close to never.
Yeah well we're not buying or using a single LED are we? You aren't being pedantic because you are talking about something completely different and frankly irrelevant. LED light bulbs and LED light fixtures do fail. It doesn't matter if the actually lighting element still functions if some other part of the device fails too.
Anyway I've seen plenty of LEDs fail for all sorts of reasons (usually voltage/current fluctuations and/or heat problems) but then my day job is manufacturing wire harnesses and elect
Re: Powerwall smug (Score:2)
I'd need about 40kw of solar to be truly grid independent. I have a neighbor who is totally off the grid. He gets diesel and propane deliveries on a regular basis. Costs him about 45 cents per kw, i believe, all in with generator replacements.
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Re: Powerwall smug (Score:2)
You know the laws were changed after Enron, right? I live in CA and I never set the clock on my stove; I haven't had a power interruption in over 5 years.
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In theory, with enough controllable storage capacity, and also more long-distance (weather system and time-zone spanning) HVDC transmission lines, you could do away with coal plants altogether and not have
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That would allow all the coal plants and natural gas generation plants to be shut down, thus saving all of the CO2 emissions from electricity generation.
How is that not obvious?
Now in reality, we should be exploring use of deep geothermal for base-load generation too. Might be more cost-effective than ju