Once upon a time, the consensus was that renewable energy was too expensive and too scarce to be a viable source of power to run the electrified society we are proud of. Since then, the price of solar panels has fallen all the way, the efficiency has become higher and higher, and homeowners have installed them on the roof in droves.

Someone once thought that we would never have enough solar energy. In some cities, it has become too much. In South Australia, solar energy output may be large on sunny days. The power sector is facing grid stability issues and is taking measures to limit the output of solar energy to the grid.

One of the problems facing South Australian utilities is how to properly control a grid with thousands of distributed power sources. Generally, in traditional modern power grids, the voltage and frequency are controlled within a set range by carefully matching the supply of the main power plant with the needs of users. Fast-responding factories can go online to make up for shortages and close when demand drops, everything is fine.

Unfortunately, solar energy is not so easy to throttle, especially when it comes from thousands of independent households, each of which has its own roof installation and inverter to feed back to the grid. This has led the authorities to consider measures, such as charging homeowners the cost of exporting energy to the grid during peak periods, to slow down the large-scale use of home solar systems. Because the substations in certain residential areas cannot cope with the huge energy inflow, export restrictions on suburbs where household solar energy is most concentrated have also been proposed.

South Australia has 280,000 homes equipped with rooftop solar, accounting for 35% of the state's housing stock. It actually created a huge power plant that the authorities could hardly control. In some cases, solar energy alone meets 100% of South Australia's energy needs, and then natural gas, wind energy, and other power generation resources export their energy to the interstate market. However, when there is nowhere to output excess energy, things can quickly become dangerous. In the most recent incident, on a day when solar energy transmission was particularly high, the interstate link was interrupted due to routine maintenance. The power regulator decided to shut down 12,000 home solar systems through newly granted power to keep grid demand above 400 MW, which is enough to keep major natural gas plants online.

This is achieved through a relatively rough method, but if it is not controlled, the voltage will rise high enough that the household solar inverters will suddenly turn off collectively, causing a sudden drop in supply and large-scale blackouts. The same happens in the case of short-term voltage dips. If a large generator goes offline and the grid voltage is below a set level, thousands of home inverters may suddenly trip to respond, exacerbating the problem and causing power outages.

A big power outage, a large block of power grids will immediately go offline, and it is difficult to recover; a black start is stressful and expensive, and it is avoided at all costs. Therefore, the authorities are taking measures to limit the possibility of these problems in the future. The newly installed inverters must have a voltage ride-through protection function, allowing them to continue to operate under voltage disturbances to avoid sudden shocks to the grid. In addition, inverters that can be remotely controlled by the power sector are also required to be controlled via the Internet or 4G data link. Substations are also being upgraded with improved voltage management hardware to enable suburbs with high rooftop solar penetration rates to better export energy to the wider grid.

Other measures can also help. Grid batteries like Hornsdale Power Reserve can help by storing excess energy for later use when solar demand is low. In these cases, household batteries can also be a good solution, even if the grid is sufficient, homeowners can make full use of their solar panel output. These measures are not cheap at present, the penetration rate of household batteries is only a small part of solar energy, but government subsidies are in place to promote popularization.

Household energy storage is best implemented together with grid control measures, rather than implemented separately, otherwise thousands of household battery systems offline at the same time may bring the same risks as current household solar energy. In addition, it is not a panacea in itself-a long and bright summer week may saturate household battery resources.

When household solar energy first entered the market, these measures were not necessary. The few homeowners with hardware do not have enough power generation capacity to affect the grid in one way or another. However, as the number of household generators has increased, it is necessary to implement a method to control this huge resource. By implementing control of household solar generators, the power sector can make full use of the power generation capacity without causing the grid to face the risk of power outage due to overvoltage or undervoltage events. Having a lot of solar energy is a huge victory for renewable energy in combating climate change. However, if you want to take full advantage of this new technology, you need to invest in the grid to keep up. If household solar generators are to provide electricity to Australia, they must work together.

They should use the surplus electricity to desalinate seawater into the reservoir.

Or pump water to a higher place to generate electricity later

It won't be the first time something like this has happened... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowy_Mountains_Scheme

Who said it must be fresh water? On the coast of South Australia, close to the current wind farm, we have many cliffs. Create a saltwater pool on top of these, where you have your pumping solution.

Maybe it's a gravity battery? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_battery

Not so much. Salt will corrode pumps and other equipment. It will also seep into the groundwater and kill everything it touches.

The number of potential pumped storage stations in the United States is 150 times the storage needs of all its electricity networks, while Australia is close to 10 times. We just need to build high-voltage power lines for them, build pumps/generators... and fill them with water. ;-)

"Snowy 2.0" is a multi-billion dollar project that aims to use pumped storage capacity to transform the Snowy River hydroelectric power generation plan, so it has already begun. Just a long tunnel through the mountains takes longer than saying "I can go through an elephant".

Someone here is talking about charging domestic photovoltaic generators for grid feed charges, ostensibly to pay for network upgrades to manage overvoltage and modified energy flow. This is great for network operators-they don't have to invest in making their outdated networks fit for purpose. Although renewable energy is cheaper and easier to survive, our government has done everything possible to delay the demise of coal. Our Prime Minister "Slow Motion Morrison" once raised a piece of coal in Parliament to praise it.

Note that with millions of homes owning solar energy, electricity suppliers sometimes get tired of increasing negative electricity bills, which means that the electricity company must pay them. Therefore, I guess it is charged.

Or dig a lot of bitcoins

This is a good solution. It's easy to expand, and it sets a beautiful and personalized cut-off curve.

That is, people will switch from solar energy to Bitcoin mining under different thresholds.

But really, this is a brilliant argument for a large hydrogen cracking plant.

Is it hydroelectric fuel? b/c Otherwise we can crack CO2 and get 1C instead of 4H (+O2).

We need at least hydrogen to produce steel, and now almost all comes from natural gas. It will also be needed to make ammonia for fertilizer, which is also of petrochemical origin. Even if we do not use any fuel as fuel, it will still be used.

Or remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere

Can we use excess electricity to fix carbon?

Yes, we can, but this requires solar producers to adopt a different payment model.

Australian copper or alumina refining can use all the "extra" energy that anyone can generate. As a bonus, no conversion loss can reduce the use of traditional fossil fuels and reduce long-term carbon dioxide emissions.

The cost of desalination was once a major issue in Singapore, but waste energy from the refinery eventually turned it into a freshwater exporter. As other posters have pointed out, even the highest quality reverse osmosis water purification plants use an astonishing amount of energy.

I hope we encounter Australia’s temporary oversupply problem at home... ;-) Like most problems in the world, it is very likely_not_technical engineering issues, but political, financial and/or social problem. If a power company thinks they can stop the Jevons paradox, then they are deceiving themselves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

You made a good point about the ability of aluminum production to absorb excess solar output. But it is even better than this: use aluminum production to adjust all power sources as needed. Yes, let the large smelters-by the way, all of them in South Australia or Tasmania-absorb the excess electricity, be it solar or keep the output of the utility power plant to a certain minimum above. It is doubtful that this even requires additional infrastructure, as smelters are already obsessed with operating in the era of cheap electricity. Just change their tariffs to reward correct behavior. If this does not accomplish the job by itself, the smelter can install battery capacity, because doing so can make more profits.

Although these refineries need a stable power supply. Aluminum refining operates in a molten state. If it can only obtain electricity for a few hours at noon, if it can operate, the efficiency will be very low.

@Dude Waste heat and power recovery systems are usually still feasible and extremely inefficient because the source cost is basically zero. However, carbon offset credits can be profitable for companies running industrial processes. ;-)

Except for Portland (VIC), it uses so much electricity that it appears on the AEMO power generation map as a negative output power station.

In addition, aluminum smelting requires not only electricity, but also carbon, which leads to net carbon dioxide emissions, because the cheapest carbon comes from fossil deposits (coke).

> It may be _ not a technical engineering issue, but a political, financial and/or social issue

Our federation is stubborn and must protect fossil fuels anyway. Therefore, at best, they only verbally expressed their clear demand for grid transformation. Basically, each state uses renewable energy alone. South Australia was the first place in the world to have a large Tesla battery, and it paid for itself in the first few months of operation.

There are rumors that a $1 billion cable will be laid from the Northern Territory to Singapore to provide Asia with excess solar energy. Please note that the plan also involves covering many square kilometers with more panels.

"Twiggy" Forest is in the planning stage of converting ironmaking from coal to hydrogen. If he can't build all the solar panels he needs, then we can sell him a few GWh everywhere.

Hydrogen cannot be exported well, so it is planned to convert it into ammonia (NH3), but this is all in the early dream/experimental stage. A Danish company is experimenting with the use of ammonia to run marine engines, so even transportation vehicles do not contain fossil fuels.

My brother can output up to 70 kWh to the grid every day because he can only use 20 kWh at home. That is a panel with 19 kW on the roof. I'm off the grid, so there will be a bunch of batteries.

The state government and a large number of companies are pushing down the efforts of the caveman "barbarians" to keep the coal hips alive, but coal power stations are constantly shutting down because they cannot compete-like a horse-drawn carriage.

By the way, the excess solar energy is permanent. Since it is variable, there will be a surplus for several days a week. Energy storage equipment such as wind energy and pumped storage and grid-scale batteries are beginning to fill the gap, providing better and cheaper frequency regulation than coal.

This is meaningless. Why do you need a different payment model? When you sell something legal, it doesn't matter who bought it or what legal purpose they used it for. You need some evidence to prove this claim.

Because the current payment model does not reward the use of energy to store carbon.

Or lift heavy weights and use potential energy when there is no sunlight

Similar idea, but in the UK, they use rotating stabilizers, which are basically huge flywheels to balance energy

We also use water for this purpose, for pumped storage.

Unless the heavy weight is something that can be pumped into the reservoir, this is completely impractical. There is a start-up company that "I major in industrial design" is currently deceiving people with the idea of ​​using electric cranes to build large towers, but for many reasons, it will fail as an energy storage system.

A friend and I have been thinking about doing something like this, which is more interesting than anything else, but I would love to know the name of this startup and all the reasons you can think of :-)

For mechanical accumulators, the flywheel can store more energy with less mass, especially if the material is strong enough to achieve higher speeds; higher than 10,000 RPM is a good start. Does Caterpillar manufacture/manufacture UPS with flywheel batteries? The Dutch have some small grid-scale flywheels, half buried in the ground for safety. Please note that unless they have magnetic non-contact bearings, I can't see how much they have changed. This is not only to reduce self-discharge, but also to extend service life.

Jaap, if you focus on cranes, choose how much energy you want to store, and then calculate the required mass x height product. Calculations appear elsewhere in this discussion. Then figure out what you will use to hoist it, reliably, repeatedly, and with affordable maintenance. There is a difference between thinking and dreaming, I believe you know.

@Erik thanks for this! Flywheels are very cool, but they do scare me :-) Picking up the weight automatically, accuracy and reliability are indeed the hardest part.

Or there are some systems that start each dedicated chiller to the maximum capacity during peak production and then return to the previous set point. The same is true for starting the water heater to the highest safe temperature during this period.

All these solutions are great, but it ignores the fact that excess power is generated in a local area (rather than the entire grid). It is easier/cheaper to reduce localized supply than to solve the problem of lack of grid complexity or the establishment of a large amount of distributed demand.

How about building a heat storage device in the same block where solar energy is installed? It is almost entirely suitable for HVAC and is very cheap to implement. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFnSFWx13mo

This is already happening in Hawaii. Now, in some areas of Hawaii, it is not allowed to install new residential solar energy to feed back the grid. Enphase made a special firmware for their micro inverter to achieve this. The excess electricity generated by residential panels is basically cut in the residence, which is a huge waste, but it will not mess up the grid until pumped storage, mges or similar can be implemented.

If it goes into battery storage and powers the house at night, I would not call it a waste.

Yes, the "nessie curve" is like the "duck curve" in California, but it's worse. There is no net demand at noon and afternoon, and then the sun goes down, and suddenly everyone wants to buy electricity, everyone is scrambling to start the gas turbine.

I seriously doubt that we will never get a pump in'aina. If the telescope is too big, I can't imagine it would be good to cut out a few large holes to fill in the water.

This seems to be one of those problems, but it's actually just a problem because it cuts profits.

Kind of. We do need those large old-fashioned power plants to operate on days with poor solar energy. But this is a problem that should be solved by upgrading local substations. Coupled with more electric vehicles that can be charged during the day may also solve this problem; local generation of Vs for local use. The main problem is the imbalance of all this. A bathtub with warm water is good. A bathtub, mostly warm water, 100 degrees Celsius at one end...not that much.

Although Australia's NEM (National Electricity Market) only covers the east and southeast coasts, it has run at least four to five thousand kilometers. In the daytime, the cloud cannot cover all of these, so once the outdated network can better supply power to the upstream, in the long run, coal demand will be zero. Power can still be generated at night, while hydropower can be reserved for night use-even pumped storage can be used to generate power during the day. The success of the grid-scale batteries developed by Elon Musk for South Australia has made other states want them too.

How is the progress of CST in North Africa? The energy storage in molten salt (NaNO3?) has been used to power the city at night, the first phase is 4 hours, then 8 hours, AFAIR. There are so many available technologies and so much space to promote them in the process of creating highly profitable job creation.

Melbourne is a city of 10,000 square kilometers (well, only 9,992) and many electric trams. They are all powered by electricity purchased from large solar farms. Don't know the train-that would be a bigger part.

Related note: Australia has more jobs today than when we entered this Covid crisis, and there are talks about bringing in more skilled workers from overseas. Getting rid of coke/coal is a difficult task, but the health benefits of a country’s economy are extremely stimulating.

"It is impossible to cover all of these with clouds"

This sounds very much like a challenge...

Hey, New Zealand! Is there an active volcano?

How about arc welding?

In Denmark, Aarhus University and the University of Queensland run a pilot plant that uses excess renewable energy (usually wind energy there) to produce hydrogen, which is then injected into a biogas generator. Why? Because biogas usually contains 55% of methane and the rest of CO2, when hydrogen is added, microorganisms will convert more CO2 into methane. Since approximately 21% of the natural gas in the Danish natural gas network is biogas, once it is fully developed and promoted nationwide, this process will have a significant impact on the climate.

Especially as our Prime Minister Slomo Morrison’s pathological progress in energy reform is slow, Australia will be the last one to accept and adapt, if he has his own way. But despite his Luddite uncompromising, family, company, and state government are still struggling.

I think this means that solar installations need better infrastructure to control the grid.

Or the grid needs a better supply and demand model. Big planners just can’t go online so fast, no one will be crazy enough to rely on solar power and peak power plants alone.

The supply side of solar energy is out of touch with the market due to feed-in tariffs, so they don't have to care about what's happening on the grid. Just push away everything you take out of the wire, it's someone else's problem-you will get paid anyway.

In California and many other states, you will not be paid more than your total consumption (yearly). Therefore, if you have overproduction, the power company will keep it for free, but you still pay for the equipment that generates electricity, and you give it away for free, which increases the time to break even.

But then again, by combining various federal, state, and county tax credits, you can accumulate subsidies up to 95-97% of the cost, including some infrastructure costs, such as building a new garage or roof under a panel. Since my last check, some of them may no longer be available, but the point is-if you are rich enough, you can basically get solar panels for free, and then you can also offset the electricity bill.

So who cares about the duck curve?

Hmm...well, the solar tax credit will be significantly reduced to 10% in 2022 and will be phased out in 2023. The company will still receive 10%, but the energy generated by the additional regulations cannot be used to heat the swimming pool.

Moreover, you can use the excess generation for the next bill. If you do not state your wishes, the utility will get your electricity for free.

https://programs.dsireusa.org/system/program/detail/276

"Net excess power generation: The retail rate is included in the customer's next bill. After the 12-month period, the customer can choose to extend the credit indefinitely or collect the remaining electricity at a rate equivalent to the 12-month average spot market price for the current year Credit payment from 7 am to 5 pm. Generated. (If the customer does not make a positive decision, the credit is granted to the utility company without compensation to the customer.)"

“At the end of the customer’s 12-month billing period, the balance of any surplus electricity will be adjusted to a separate fair market value, called Net Surplus Compensation (NSC). The NSC interest rate is based on a 12-month rolling average of energy market interest rates The rate is currently approximately US$0.02 to US$0.03 per kWh"

Of course, this will incentivize you to roll over your points and use more electricity because the retail price is much higher than NSC-so you can ride a subsidized electric car for free and turn on the air conditioner without paying extra.

I found the rough reasons for the large-scale high-pressure shutdown to be unbelievable. Assuming 240V has a “10%” range, the inverter will not all work at 263.99V and will shut down when it sees 264.00V. In addition, due to the transmission line resistance, they won't even see the same voltage at the same time. This will cause a slow drop in small power generation, basically keeping the voltage near the cut-off voltage.

However, undervoltage is a different problem. Even a slight voltage drop will shut down the generating capacity, causing the voltage to drop and spiral into brown within the grid and eventually black.

Operating at such a limit may result in transient events.

Sudden disturbances, such as the loss of a large load or the cutting off of a power transmission branch, will cause a large number of generators to shut down beyond the limit, and the overall situation will change from oversupply to undersupply, and the rest will protect themselves accordingly.

Why not implement some kind of random delay before each inverter shuts down? Then some people will decline earlier than others, and things will stabilize themselves.

+1. You have it. A very good solution...

This is the basic meaning of "voltage ride-through protection". They will slow down the safety features of the inverter so that it can withstand transient disturbances in the grid without shutting down immediately. Of course, this also means that it will not react to real faults in a hurry, which may continue to cause faults and damage more equipment, because you cannot turn off the inverter.

Well, it seems that they can/should be designed to shut down immediately in case of severe overvoltage/undervoltage, but have a random delayed response to small changes. Or they have already done so, anyway, I am not an inverter expert...

Well, this is just kicking canned food on the road. The problem is that the supply and demand on the grid is not flexible enough. Solar power generation is more than anyone can use at peak output, so even if you relax the fault boundary, this will not solve the problem. It just ignores these symptoms temporarily, until they add more solar energy, and then it violates the new restrictions.

Even as the voltage approaches the limit, the output power is smoothly reduced.

Install curtains on the cells. When the grid starts to reach its limit, closing the blades a little or a lot will limit the energy the cells can produce.

Of course, its mechanical aspects may have some problems that need to be overcome, and dusty moving parts may start to malfunction or get stuck, but there is nothing that cannot be handled.

Another solution is to turn off the output of the unit as needed to accomplish the same task. Although I don't know if this will negatively affect solar cells hit by light and cannot move these electrons.

This makes me wonder how to build a home system with "alternative loads" (?) so that when the grid is not purchased, any excess can be used. Maybe set it up to increase the output of household AC power, increase the temperature of the water heater by a small amount, automate the cycle of certain appliances such as washing machines or dishwashers, or only charge electric cars when there is excess solar energy?

This is not like power reserve or desalination on a homeowner scale that makes sense.

Hot/cold storage is almost something you can do at home, but there is no incentive to do so because you lose your subsidy for unsold electricity, and for heat, you are competing with much cheaper natural gas for price comparisons anyway.

I saw people in California buy solar panels and sell them to the grid, then install gas stoves, showers, refrigerators...

Do you have any reference in this regard? In my experience (and the current legislation and the attitude of the power company), this is impossible.

As I pointed out earlier, in California, power companies will only buy and consume the same amount of electricity. If you produce more than you consume, the power company will keep it for free. The production volume is less than the consumption volume, and you will receive a large bill at the end of the annual billing cycle. There is also an "all-electric" home plan, which is stopping/reducing gas appliances in the home.

Why is it so negative about household solar energy?

California's energy model is zero net energy (ZNE), and all new residential buildings must now meet the requirements. But like many things outside of California, politics is subjective/emotional or does not involve technical (objective) reality. They sued their public utility company for causing a fire due to poorly maintained wiring, which resulted in alternating power outages. Energy reliability is not their top priority. They have written a good "visionary" policy, hoping that engineers will eventually be able to make it feasible. It's just that California is not the best model.

Well, of course, I have seen someone do this and then brag about the money they saved by providing gas for the house and solar for free electricity.

Home solar power is negative because it is a tax break for the upper middle class and it relies on taxpayers' money—a kind of reverse Robin Hood plan. It didn't really solve any problems, it couldn't scale up, and it caused serious damage to the grid.

California’s net metering rules allow you to cash in excess production at the average market interest rate or extend credit to next year. Please refer to my response to your comment above.

Therefore, your friend owns a house, spends a year to pay a very large electricity bill (set their basic consumption and basic NEM limits very high), then installs a solar photovoltaic system, and then installs a lot of gas Equipment to reduce power consumption. One year later, part of the basic NEM was repurchased. Although this sounds possible, it seems that it takes a lot of effort/money to get a small benefit, and it is unlikely that this benefit will last for more than a year.

Assume that the average household consumption is 20 kWh per day. And how your friends managed to reduce their electricity consumption to zero after installing a solar system that generates 20 kWh per day. This means that all the electricity generated is surplus, so the IOU pays 0.03 * 20 * $365 at the end of the billing year: $219. Will this pay for the additional gas consumed?

But next year (or a few years later) IOU will adjust the base NEM to match the zero consumption in previous years. IOU will now buy back zero surplus, although it is really happy that it can do anything above the basic NEM limit (now zero) without paying fees.

I don't think they will benefit a lot, and they are likely to lose money overall. Maybe just to brag (or prepare).

You seem to want to make household solar energy evil, but household solar energy has many unnecessary shortcomings, and the IOU will quickly offset the benefits.

In addition, what about all the subsidies used for IOU... PG&E alone has about 200 million U.S. dollars in revenue in the past 10 years, set a profit record during that time, and is still avoiding proper maintenance and upgrades...

@RF Dude "California is not the best model" Yes, I agree. The vision is beautiful, but politics, corporate greed and monopoly power make IOU almost do whatever it wants.

> How your friends managed to reduce power consumption to zero

That is not what happened. You still need electricity for lighting and TV etc. What happened was that this guy had gas water heaters, gas stoves, heating, etc., and then started to brag about how they use solar energy to run their house, how their environment is, and how cheap it is because they get free electricity.

Well, they actually use natural gas to run their houses and offset the small amount of electricity they use solar energy, which is very irresponsible because their electricity needs (morning and evening) are completely different from their solar production. So they don't actually use any of them themselves.

In other words, if you don't actually use solar energy, they prove that solar energy is useful for you. Having a system that captures daytime energy in hot water is more expensive than having an instant-on gas heater and gas stove. Extrapolate to other homeowners and you will begin to understand the big picture-which is why in California they prohibit the installation of gas pipes in new apartments.

The point is, of course, you won't make a lot of money by building beyond your net metering limit. However, everyone can do this: everyone wants to sell solar energy to offset their net usage, but no one actually wants to use the electricity they generate, so you get the duck curve. The average producer rate dropped to a low of US$15/MWh at noon, and rose to US$60/MWh at night, and the changes between price mechanisms have become more and more acute each year, only in a short period of time. Increased the demand for more than a dozen gigawatts. a couple of hours.

You seem to be operating under the assumption that all California states are operating on the same provider under the same rules. Although I have not studied the compensation of people under Edison's leadership under PG&E, your experience does not match my own.

I want to install solar energy on my roof because my current rate is about 0.28 kWh. Most of these are used for fixed cost elements of transmission, such as wires; few of them have actual power. In the past few months, I have been cited many systems and discovered some limitations that I did not anticipate. Because, until a few months ago, I thought that the scheme you described here works in the same way as "California".

1) I can only install enough solar capacity to cover my average monthly consumption. This is a potential problem because I have always wanted to give up my gas stove and use electricity (they cook better). However, I was advised to buy the stove first, because it is difficult to allow the capacity to be increased in the future. (It is easy as a technical solution, but not easy as a bureaucratic solution.)

2) Solar-powered households must switch to a time-sharing billing system. (In my city, all citizens are transferred to use time.) Peak electricity cost is 5-9pm MF. Other times it is cheap electricity. In winter, unless you have a battery, the sun sets too early to offset the peak with solar energy. And most families with two working adults consume most of the power MF between the ages of 5-9.

3) For the battery, I was quoted about a 5-year break-even point. The best and largest battery I can get is Tesla (or, at least, when I am quoted, *probably* get it.) This sets a limit for an effective solar system, no more than what I can inject into my battery every day , Because the price I work hard is not worth it. The battery I was quoted was rated at 13.5KwH. And, not coincidentally, the supply of my roof system settings is almost identical.

4) I have been considering installing a hot tub on the heat pump and using any excess power to generate heat. My new washing machine has a function that can be activated by a timer, Bluetooth commands or an app. Some solar devices can now activate electrical appliances to consume electricity on demand. It is not economically feasible to sell electricity back to the grid at a price of 1 or 2 cents per kilowatt-hour, and buy it back for 28 cents later in the day.

The problem with the time-of-use plan they let us adopt is that it encourages people like me who already have a gas connection to use gas appliances more-it’s cheaper to run, and the price doesn’t change. But this is not surprising, because utilities It is "Pacific *Natural Gas* and Electricity".

As far as I know, all public utility companies have similar rules and plans. The net measurement comes from the federal level, as do about half of the tax credits and other incentives.

>The problem with the time-of-use plan they let us adopt is that it encourages people like me who already have a gas connection to use gas appliances more-it's cheaper to run, and there is no price change.

This is my point of view.

Net metering is net metering on a one-year basis, not time of use—hence the name—so you can write off expensive peak power and push worthless waste of electricity into the grid during off-peak hours. To save money, you can use gas appliances and then use a little more solar energy to cover the rest-no storage, no batteries, because this requires additional costs. This is a problem, so the state subsidizes batteries and prohibits the installation of gas pipelines in new places.

HaD has already eaten two long replies, so I will not waste more fingertip skin on this...

If you want NEM, you need to switch to TOU first, they are not mutually exclusive. Every month, I receive a very complex energy statement (not a bill) detailing when and when I used which electricity and when and when I generated which electricity.

At the end of the (billing) year, my IOU will balance usage and generated content (based on TOU) and send me a bill for any consumption costs of my generation. If I generate more, then they keep it (unless there is an unlikely event of a small percentage increase between previous years and the current annual consumption in my favor).

This seems to work as you complained about, it should work... But it’s not fair to home solar owners, because the IOU will pay only 100% of the energy consumed in the past [1], and then They keep the rest for free and sell it at a profit [1].

Your IOU FUD-y-ness roar... There is no free money, there is no nearly 100% subsidized home solar installation that everyone can get, and the villain is not a home solar owner. Please consider the IOU should be held responsible. PG&E has received more than 200 million US dollars in subsidies in the past 10 years, created record profits during that time, and has been unable to maintain the grid infrastructure, so much so that we are now shutting it down or It’s just a bit windy to burn to death... IOU is also responsible for the duck curve problem (if not more) just like the household solar personnel.

Reality: Solar energy is hardly worth it. Most people will find that the return takes longer than expected, and there is no advantage in the event of a power outage (thanks to the anti-islanding policy of IOU)...

[1] Unless you are in DC, you can sell up to 200% of your past consumption. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/08/12/dc-citizen-wins-increase-in-net-metering-limit-to-200-of-past-usage/

— Try shorter posts, because HaD review is eating up my posts —

If you want to use NEM, you need to switch to TOU first, they are not mutually exclusive. Every month, I receive a very complex energy statement (not a bill) detailing when and when I used which electricity and when and when I generated which electricity.

At the end of the (billing) year, my IOU will balance usage and generated content (based on TOU) and send me a bill for any consumption costs of my generation. If I generate more, then they keep it (unless there is an unlikely event of a small percentage increase between previous years and the current annual consumption in my favor).

> This seems to work as you complained it should work

Incomplete. NEM works on a net kWh basis, so it does not care about generation time when offsetting your bill. TOU simply allows you to pay more for the electricity you have to buy.

What I am after is a buy-all-sell plan that pays you based on the actual market value of the electricity you generate. This is net dollars and not net kilowatt hours. This means that if people want to make money from solar energy, they can't remove it from the grid like everyone else — they have to put it in batteries or thermal storage boilers, etc., to avoid buying electricity in the future.

NEM/TOU still means that you can exchange low-value electricity (non-peak period) for high-value electricity (peak period). The only difference from the past fixed-rate contracts is that the utility company can output enough solar energy if you don’t .

If you have signed a contract based on net worth instead of net kWh, then this is not NEM-this is not how federal regulations define it.

It seems that a true/pure buy-and-sell plan will eliminate any solar value and strengthen the monopoly of IOUs. The IOU will pay between US$0.02 and US$0.03 per kWh for any electricity generated, and charge a fee of US$0.23 (and above) per kWh for any electricity consumed. Even if the house consumes the electricity generated by the house, they will still pay the full price of $0.23, even though they get a return of $0.03...

This is almost zero, and it is not sensitive to any solar energy. This does not really solve the duck curve of renewable energy. But it does protect IOU profits and helps ensure that we will see record profits in the future because they can monetize ungenerated electricity. It will also vigorously strengthen the monopoly of IOUs, which will help ensure that future renewable energy plans will not happen when the profits of IOUs are damaged. As it is, this is basically to generate electricity after eliminating any meters that cannot be paid for by the IOU.

A fair system is needed, but buying and selling is not. NEM-TOU is not.

Also, why should IOU pay $0.03 per kWh for my off-peak power generation and then sell it to my neighbor next door for $0.22 per kWh (this month’s off-peak TOU consumer price)? I also generated a considerable amount of electricity during peak prices, which was also purchased at bulk prices, but sold to my neighbors at $0.56 per kWh! But wait, that's only if I have any surplus that exceeds my annual consumption, otherwise the IOU is free. Shouldn't I get most of the money, and the IOU only gets $0.03?

In addition to optimizing profits, IOUs will not be motivated to do anything (such as solving the duck curve or repairing their transmission lines). Blaming home solar does not solve this problem (or accurately blame).

"It's not like power reserve or desalination makes sense on a homeowner scale."

With clean water it becomes more and more difficult to find it possible.

As for the flywheel... https://youtu.be/8X2U7bDNcPM

Irox, right above, claims that the net charge for domestic photovoltaic self-use is 20c/kWh. This rampant misinformation is no different from coal-funded FUD, but let us generously attribute it to ignorance.

In Australia, self-consumption occurs behind the meter. The electricity supplier cannot see it, cannot measure it, and the legal basis for any related charges is zero. This is the case in any jurisdiction where citizens have the minimum imaginable democratic freedoms. If you let a rascal make you pay for self-generated self-consumption, then you are as unimaginative as a slave. If such a gulag exists on the planet of tnis, just don't connect the photovoltaic power generation and its load to the network-keep them away from the grid-simple.

In Australia, Tasmania’s electricity supply is now 99.2% renewable. South Australia is 59.7%, and here in Victoria only 27.7%, so we have a lot of wind and solar energy to be installed before 2050, when coal power generation will be extinct for ten years or more, net carbon emissions must be zero. 2020 The annual installation of small-scale (usually domestic) solar power generation is 3.2 GW, and the installation speed is still accelerating. Coal is dead and can only be rolled by power.

Sorry, Eric, I did not make this request. I claim that the United States has *proposed* legislation aimed at ending tariffs behind the consumption of electricity meters.

Here are some details of what you claim is "rampant misinformation":

Some random news articles: https://www.blackhillsfox.com/2021/04/23/black-hills-energy-looks-to-amend-tariff-on-renewable-energy-to-ensure-electric-rates-are -Fair and reasonable/

https://www.keloland.com/news/capitol-news-bureau/sd-regulators-allow-late-interveners-as-black-hills-energy-seeks-changes-for-co-generation/

And actual proposal: https://puc.sd.gov/commission/dockets/electric/2021/el21-011/StaffMemo.pdf

See here: "BHE requires a switch to the "Buy All/Sell All" method. This means that QF customers will buy all the electricity they use from BHE and sell all the electricity they generate to BHE. So if the customer is in In a given month that consumes 500 kWh of electricity and produces 100 kWh of electricity, they will purchase all 500 kWh from BHE at the tariff rate, and BHE will purchase all the 100 kWh they produced at avoidable costs from QF customers speed."

Maybe you can explain why this is my "ignorance" or why this is "error message"? Your little gibberish after accusing it seems irrelevant, maybe you can better connect it after reading some.

If you like your back consumption, you should pay attention to these things, even if it is not in your backyard/country, because once the IOU gets a little money from our own power sold back to us, we are done... IOU thank you Help them by marking it as FUD/error message.

As someone from the UK, maybe I should lower my expectations of Australians... (?)

The shorter version as HaD moderation seems to be a 50/50 opportunity.

I did not claim that I proposed a plan to do so.

And the actual proposal/plan: https://puc.sd.gov/commission/dockets/electric/2021/el21-011/StaffMemo.pdf

See here: "BHE requires a switch to the "Buy All/Sell All" method. This means that QF customers will buy all the electricity they use from BHE and sell all the electricity they generate to BHE. So if the customer is in In a given month that consumes 500 kWh of electricity and produces 100 kWh of electricity, they will purchase all 500 kWh from BHE at the tariff rate, and BHE will purchase all the 100 kWh they produced at avoidable costs from QF customers speed."

Wrong message/FUD/ignorance? I will leave it to you.

Or not the shadow, but the LCD layer. This has the advantage of allowing the panel to be dimmed while adding a small load to the grid.

Now Irox tells us "I claim that the United States has *proposed* legislation aimed at ending tariffs behind electricity meter consumption." That is, it hasn't come yet, but it has come, so it's basically the same story. The United States does seem to have a default assumption that corporate threats become a reality. In Australia, they are known for their (usually hollow) roar-just hang a flag on the mast, see how much fire it attracts, and then quickly if the citizens are sober and have any value to their property retreat.

The proposal has neither a legal basis nor a practical opportunity. First, the wiring behind the meter is your property; your contractor pays for, installation, and maintenance costs. The property rights of the utility company are limited to the electricity meter. What they can do is determine what kind of equipment you can connect to, and can prohibit connection to photovoltaics or other power generation equipment when you are connected to the grid.

Even if households are forbidden to connect to the grid, the second group of unconnected circuits cannot be prevented from running from the second main switchboard. Therefore, dishwashers, air conditioners, water pumps and other heavy loads that are only really needed during the day can be used. It is still powered by domestic photovoltaics. Add batteries and move the lighting.

Given your new president’s unequivocal commitment to renewable energy, encouraging this rant by docilely surrendering to it would be extremely frustrating. Organizing protests and cracking down on the media will embarrass the president if he does not attend the party as soon as possible. Comparison: McDonald's wants to open a store in our suburb. We raised $45,000 and sent a team to the United States to protest outside their headquarters, equipped with large inflatable kangaroos, advertised on conspicuous billboards, and published a full-page advertisement in one of your major newspapers to make flash mobs lightning. In protest, these clips were circulated on YouTube and several large gatherings were held here in Melbourne. They say that the price of democracy is always vigilance. Try a web search: burgeroff tecoma coverage is international: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-24364204 Yes, they threatened us to protest on the grounds of court proceedings, but ultimately failed because we insisted on us Gun. Although they eventually built it and were stopped by police guards, it was a humble stone-faced conservative building with negligible signs, so from the outside, any other business would be fine. Adding in this case, what we want is their use of the _their_ property. So I can suggest staffing when facing threats.

There are no negative effects. The panel is only slightly heated when not in use.

You don't even need to go that far. You can electronically throttle the panel by moving the panel to the less efficient part of the IV curve.

But the real best solution is to supply storage-throwing away free energy is just a bad thing.

Well, it's not really free-you already paid for it, you just didn't use it, which is stupid.

However, storing energy means paying more for it. Calculated at today's battery prices, the price is much higher.

I mean at the grid level: from the perspective of the grid (if you think of the grid as a "total consumer"), if the supply is so high that it can buy energy for free... it should find a way to store it it. All it did was lower the market price later.

In my opinion, many problems are that there is not enough power to promote grid-scale energy storage. In terms of scale, they should be *extremely* cheap-enough to shut down spike plants. There are *large* grid-scale energy storage mechanisms (molten salt, flow batteries, compressed air), which can compete with peak power plants or even exceed them in scale if there are subsidies/tax incentives. Of course, grid-scale batteries are not terrible.

But, of course, the problem with any subsidy is that once it is in place, it is difficult to make it disappear unless you establish a natural mechanism to do so. (This is why opposition to the tax/dividend system is so annoying).

That's right, but this is still only seeing the trees but not the forest. There is no free lunch here: one person pays for the panel and provides "free" electricity, another person pays for the battery and buys "free" electricity, but consumers will eventually pay for both because the taxpayer pays the first guy subsidy Selling electricity at a loss, the second guy offsets the cost of the battery.

There is currently no technology that can make grid-scale batteries "extremely cheap." Even in the cheapest case, it will still at least double the cost of energy you use. If you want to promote renewable energy throughout the day, there is no benefit.

Well, yes, I listed a few of them. Compressed air and hydropower are already within the scope of natural gas peak shaving plants (less than an order of magnitude), enough for a large number of systems to be built. Other systems (molten salt, flow battery) are so close that there are projects under planning.

A moderate tax/dividend system is enough to break the balance. I mean, the levelized electricity prices have been falling, so they are not incapable of supporting subsidies.

>Compressed air and water power are already within the injection range of the Qifeng Power Plant

The average base load price is around 40-50 USD/MWh, while the breakeven price of CAES is about 100 USD/MWh. Again, it's not cheap. Hydro is good and cheap when available, but adding new capacity is a problem.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1876610217309360

The main problem with CAES (and the molten salt related to it) is its inefficiency. It wastes about half of the energy you put in, even if the technology itself is free, it will obviously double the cost of energy produced.

I said *peaker*. Of course, energy storage cannot compete with base load. Peaker plants cost more, and they are very bad in terms of carbon. You haven't tried to flatten *everything*.

I said: "If you want to promote renewable energy throughout the day, that won't work."

The problem I have always encountered is people pushing for semi-solutions, such as "Oh, we will only replace spike plants", but this does not do what we should do. It doesn't really solve any problems-it just hides them.

Grid-scale energy storage is not "extremely cheap". It is expensive enough that it can currently replace some of our most expensive ways of generating electricity. If we rely on this system-large-scale overproduction and then peak in the rest of the day-then the price of the power system will continue rising.

Thermal storage is orders of magnitude cheaper than batteries and is ideal for HVAC loads.

Ordinary thermal energy from burning natural gas is much cheaper than solar power generation and storage.

Some people may argue about heat pumps, but this is just a higher investment cost, and there are also adsorption heat pumps for gas burners (and coolers). You have cheap natural gas, and you have cheap HVAC. The only thing you need power is to run the fan.

This seems to be a question of how these commercial measures are implemented. If only used in a few cases, this little "hacker" will have almost no adverse effects. But when many people do this, the problem is exposed.

Therefore, the long-term solution seems to be to store energy during off-peak (dark) hours, or to reduce our extensive energy use to only when the solar panels are turned on. Eventually, after we solve all the stability issues, we may be able to shut down these power plants permanently, but unfortunately, I may be dead by then.

Liquid air battery. https://youtu.be/yb1Nuk3_t_4

This is an opportunity to study the problems that may be common in other parts of the world with the spread of solar energy. The distribution of existing power grids and existing power generation assets (and workers) has just begun to be scrutinized and imagined. Add home energy storage, huge solar and wind energy, energy storage farms, large-scale electric vehicles, and politics, and you will face major human challenges. The driving factor is climate change. For large facilities, cheap solar and wind energy are cheaper; resistance will change the existing infrastructure and manpower. Thank you, Australia, you are the tip of the iceberg.

We need to motivate people to point some or all of the solar energy in different directions. 10% E, 20%NE, 20%N, 20%NW, 30%W are very suitable for pumping out production during the day.

Either increase the incentives to install panels facing these directions, or change the price paid per kilowatt hour to support early and late production.

See below: Paying market prices instead of subsidies-oversupply will lead to negative prices, and people must reposition their panels and install batteries, otherwise they will not make any money at all.

The best solution is to stop formulating complicated bureaucratic plans and regulations and let the problem resolve itself.

California has begun to adopt a time-sharing pricing and installed capacity restriction model. As ToU pricing causes peak hours to become "home from get off work" time range, people will face the panel toward the afternoon sun to maximize value. And those with batteries and electric cars charge them late at night.

Net metering does not care about usage time, as it will offset your bill based on net kWh. "NEM 2.0" still retains this.

You only need to pay more time-of-use electricity bills when you cannot generate so much solar energy in winter, and turning the panel to the west will reduce the total output, thereby further reducing your return. This will not incentivize anyone to help resolve the imbalance between supply and demand-it just gives utility companies the opportunity to charge people more.

Utilities are pushing for more fixed fees and "buy all sell" plans for NEM 3.0, but good luck.

This is a problem: stop paying subsidies (feed-in tariffs), but pay market interest rates: when prices become negative, people will automatically stop selling electricity to the grid. Then they must buy batteries or find other uses for the power supply, otherwise it would be economically unwise to install them. The problem is avoided.

All these coping mechanisms and barriers to dealing with this problem on the grid are the cost of renewable energy that people have been complaining about. This is only covered by political means, and now others must pay for the cost, and the person who installs the solar panels gets a guaranteed profit.

It seems that those people I know are angry at the government for "supporting" this industry, or that industry is satisfied with "green" subsidies...keep the government away from it!

The government has a legitimate role in creating new markets. Subsidies can help bring solar and electric vehicles to more mature markets faster, thereby improving economies of scope and economies of scale and lowering consumer prices. As the market matures, these subsidies will gradually decrease over time. Keep in mind that fossil fuels have many external costs borne by residents. These costs are not included in fuel pricing or taxes, including medical costs and the impact of climate change. It is a legitimate activity for subsidies to create improved technologies and markets to offset these external costs.

If the government ignored the market, we would not have electric cars now. Tesla will not exist. The solar industry is still too expensive and inefficient to have much impact. Capital is only transferred to profitable markets; when was the last time a new industry was born without direct government involvement and bearing the costs of basic research and market development?

They “helped,” but most of the money was spent on people selling old things that could not be cracked in the market without subsidies. This is a very inefficient way to fund research and development, because you can do an appropriate government-funded research project to directly solve this problem.

If any, payment of subsidies will hinder development, because usually suspects will enter the market to obtain these subsidies. Companies that do not carry out any R&D themselves are cheaper and outperform those companies that spend part of their funds on R&D-this is why China is able to occupy 80% of the solar market by selling old technologies, while trying to develop thin-film solar, etc. Western companies with new technologies went bankrupt.

In other words, subsidies are wasted on solar panels imported from a country that delays or delays any actual development by ignoring environmental issues and simply pushing for quantities, thereby making solar panels cheaper.

>If the government ignores the market, we won't have electric cars now.

We don’t have—really—electric cars now. This is too expensive-Tesla would still not make any profits if it weren't for the government subsidies in the form of clean car credits that other car companies had to pay to them.

What I mean is that it is very reasonable to promote green development through methods such as carbon tax/dividends. If the solar capacity is so high that you can store/recover and balance energy in this way, then it doesn't make sense for a fossil plant to provide peak capacity. In this sense, it makes sense to tax what is produced from fossils and allocate income to renewable energy. Once you have considerable solar capacity, you really want to encourage the development of energy storage, which will do just that.

"Then they have to buy batteries or find other uses for the power supply"

To be clear, a lot of the problem here is that for distributed energy generation, you *really* want more intelligence in grid-connected inverters and general solar installations. It is easy to restrict photovoltaic panels. Managing the oversupply from the panel should be a joke, but the grid has no control over them.

Conversely, levying a carbon tax will provide an abnormal incentive for the government to continue to use carbon/fossil fuels because it makes them a lot of money. Taxation is a terrible way to control the market because money will not disappear-the government uses it for certain purposes, then gets caught up in these promises, and then has to continue to levy taxes to continue paying any fees.

After all, this is basic crony capitalism. As long as alternatives to fossil fuels and carbon energy are actually ineffective, they can be taxed—consumers have no real choice, and businesses and governments benefit from it. The same is true for the renewable energy industry, because they can run a legal cartel at a fixed price to support the entire business, otherwise they will not be able to operate. Everyone just procrastinated and pretended.

Now you think why don't we build any nuclear energy? Why is there insufficient funding for fusion research for a long time?

"Why is there insufficient funding for fusion research for a long time?"

Yes... Fusion research is really, really not a long-term underfunding. This is actually like cancer research. In a sense, yes, you can invest a lot of money on this issue, but it won’t let the tricky problem suddenly break through.

This is a fundamentally challenging problem. We really don’t know where the correct size/proportion/design is. Especially now that fusion research is *exploding*.

The theme of the game is that large budget projects like ITER absorb public funds, and the project timetable can extend to decades, while small budget projects like Wendelstein 7-X released results and progress, but slowed down due to lack of interest. Speed ​​and funding.

Taking into account the state of knowledge at the time, the fact that ITER was funded almost completely refutes your entire argument of "long-term underfunding".

"Like the results and progress after Wendelstein 7-X"

I mean...W7-X is neat, but you are talking about a triple fusion product experiment, about 2-3 orders of magnitude away from a viable power plant, while tokamak is only an order of magnitude or less. So I don't understand what you mean. For example, the jump from W7-X to HELIAS (about 5 times the scale) is much larger than the jump from JET to DEMO.

You are welcome to have your own horse in the competition of preferred fusion design, but it is hard to blame the community for merging in JET-style design. So maybe in the end it was a "funding error", but it certainly wasn't because of any evil.

Yes, except that the triple product is the product of temperature, density, and time limit, W7-X is the only product that shows the potential for steady-state operation without theoretical or technical hindrance, and has a roadmap for practical realization. . At the same time, traditional tokamaks like ITER are limited because they are unstable and no one has come up with a trick to solve this problem. Even so, they still take ten years to complete anyway, because it is the government and The bastard of the industry.

You need a triple product of about 10^28, and 7-X has reached 10^26, and is limited by the lack of cooling on the reactor wall, so it cannot run longer, but they are completing the cooling system and splitter upgrade this year, The plasma test should be resumed in 2022 in a truly steady state. If it goes according to plan, and I don't understand why you don't, then they will be 20 years ahead of ITER in terms of proving that you can build a real fusion reactor. The next question is, will they get funding to build another thing that can actually be fueled and set ablaze?

My guess is: no. It is not in the interest of the government or other industries, because it will undermine the entire pig barrel project around renewable energy.

W7-X is a *concept* experiment for understanding the operation of the star simulator-it is more similar to JET than ITER (and the time scale of the two explains *why* ITER is a tokamak). The scale-up from W7-X to the actual reactor (equivalent to reaching the demonstration stage) is well covered by Warmer et al., and *including* many material issues that ITER is also working on.

There is no "crossing" here. It's not like the "starfake" walks up to the "tokamak" and says "haha, you suck" and then walks away with the money. A lot of ITER research/work is directly applicable to the design of the star simulator.

Even after the ITER stage, they evaluated W7-X data and ITER data and said "Yes, okay, commercial factories should be based on star simulators," and there is no "waste" in ITER research. Materials research, superconductor research, diagnosis-all of these are still directly applicable. You confuse "ITER machine" with "ITER program".

"My guess is: no. This is not in the government's interest."

Okay, now you are familiar with the tin foil cap series. W7-X is a billion-dollar experiment. You are not talking about trivial things. It's not like you just say "Hey, here is some tritium, give us some energy!" The same-scaling up to an actual fusion reactor requires *a lot of* material engineering, most of which is currently done under the ITER umbrella.

In other words: W7-X is completed and reaches a steady state, showing scalability, but reactor-scale equipment will not receive funding immediately. Why? Because it doesn't make sense. You still have to wait for ITER's material engineering, so it *doesn't matter*.

Obviously, you think that the star simulator will be a better design choice in the first place. You are welcome to make such comments, but I *very* disagree that this was foreseeable 20 years ago. The idea that the government somehow put them on the wrong path (if you think that $50B is invested in a plan they know is a dead end, this is the only conclusion you can draw) is crazy.

We did not build nuclear energy because it was too expensive and there was a lot of waste. In addition, no one wants them to be nearby, especially after the Japanese disaster. In addition, the levelized cost of solar energy plus energy storage has reached the cost of nuclear power. When you can build a solar array and put down some batteries, why build a large factory that generates radioactive waste? Note that even if Trump tries to "save coal," the industry itself is shutting down because the cost of the new factory is too high. Not only that, the cost of solar energy plus energy storage has even cut some existing factories, and it is cheaper to replace them than to keep existing factories.

The government may like taxes, but companies don't. Corporate lobbying is very effective in eliminating taxes.

>W7-X is a billion-dollar experiment. You are not talking about trivial things.

That's still peanuts, and it has been spread for more than 20 years, because the funds are pitiful. At the same time, how many billions of subsidies does renewable energy have every year just to buy electricity from suppliers?

>If you think that $50B is invested in a plan that they know is a dead end, you are crazy.

It will not be the first time, and it will not be the last.

This is why I said tax/dividends. Just like the government, there is nothing.

Like, suppose you are taxing a fossil supplier with 2.5 c/kWh. If the market price of electricity is 10 c/kWh and 50% of it comes from renewable energy (50% comes from fossil fuels), you pay for renewable energy, such as 12.5 c/kWh and fossil fuel 7.5 c/kWh. As the proportion of renewables increases, the amount of improvement decreases, and as the proportion of renewables decreases, the amount of improvement increases. Subsidies are naturally diminishing.

But it's the same. Those who get dividends depend on it. The more subsidies you pay for renewable energy producers, the more they will delay the actual economic improvement of production-in order to fight for the continued flow of subsidies.

One can always waste money.

If you pay market-based interest rates, no one actually depends on dividends because you cannot make market forecasts. The problem with the current subsidy type is that the solar type is based on constant income. Stay away from it, it won't be so bad.

In addition, the government does get something: they can decide who gets the dividend, how much the dividend is, how long it lasts, and for whatever reason... No matter how you decorate it, this is the same tax and expenditure, which is traditionally used Buy votes from the public and pay rebates to your business partners.

>Because you can't make market predictions

You can predict the macroeconomic balance: the system will not eliminate fossil fuel production, because REE production depends on fixed prices. Shifting funds from one to the other allows renewable energy generators to exist as usual, but as their income is small, they will lose additional fixed transfers and new investment will cease.

> But the grid does not have any control over them.

Because politics doesn't allow it. The owner must be able to sell and collect feed-in tariffs to recover the investment and make a profit. In many countries, such as Germany, this is achieved through the enactment of clear laws, which stipulate that solar energy has the right of passage on the grid. Net metering also assumes that the utility company will accept all electricity at any time. There are also politicians who are pushing for a right-of-way law similar to that in Germany.

I can't find information about Australia, but the general theme is that you can't cut, if you cut, then you have to pay compensation to the owner for this, which is stupid because you pay the solar owner to produce and not produce energy.

"Because politics doesn't allow you to do this."

Uh, no, I'm pretty sure the reason is because when I checked last time, there were 3 connections to the grid-connected inverter, and none of them were "please reduce the power you provide".

There are both political* and* technical issues here.

Yes, but the main problem is: solar power competes with itself. It has an unfortunate feature that all producers are doing it at the same time, so the more you have in the market, the lower the price will be. This is why if prices are not fixed through subsidies (tax credits, net metering, and feed-in tariffs), they cannot make ends meet. If they cannot all sell in as many quantities as possible, then they cannot exist.

This is the main reason why there is no utility-side control option.

Yes, I have encountered social/economic issues, but these are not important if the technical issues are not resolved. You don't want to transform the economic infrastructure, and then someone says "Uh...how do we do all this now?"

There are no technical issues. The technology of controlling generators through the signal of the power line itself has existed as early as the 1950s. They used these signal generators to switch between day and night metering at customer premises before the advent of smart meters that worked via radio/Internet.

Yes, but they have meters, not grid connections. I'm not saying you *can't* do it, but because they didn't need it before everywhere, *now* there is a technical problem.

We have different understandings of the meaning of "technology". In Germany, for the same reason, they made mandatory renovations to inverters in systems above 10 kWp. Again, this is a socioeconomic issue, not a technical issue.

What percentage of the cars in the grid area are electric? A quick search shows that each household has more than 2 cars, so each household may have about 100 kWh of storage space.

Not an original idea, borrowed from https://withouthotair.com/

But there is a problem-under normal circumstances, when solar energy is at the peak of production, the car may not be at home. In addition-the car may need to be charged at night...

So buy another car. One you stay at home during the day to charge, the other you go out. Change the car the next day.

"Buy another car", please give me the money I bought first!

It sounds like you need government subsidies.

Cry me a fucking river, this planet is dying. Fix the grid so that we can really use all this rooftop solar instead of thinking of complicated ways to cut off solar producers and keep fossil fuel plants online.

Or we can stop messing around and build a nuclear.

Attempt to find more than 5 locations that were actually successfully recovered after the reactor was decommissioned. The dirty secret is that the cooling pool contains 1,000 to 15,000 years of exhausted fuel. No one wants to pay for it, in their backyard, or even in many places, partially recycled... This is still a problem for your great-great-grandchildren.

Traditional nuclear fuel should be reserved for space travel projects... where waste can be dumped in uninhabited places.

I now stick to my vision for the future of goat carts full of WiFi capabilities, because in our lifetime, it is more likely than viable fusion capabilities.

Many/most existing nuclear power plants are mainly built to produce nuclear weapons fuel, only as a side effect/excuse to generate electricity. If we build modern power stations only for energy production, then we will have cleaner nuclear power than what we currently experience.

Not really, the terrible Candu reactor we use at home uses many types of fuel, and no one here will tolerate nuclear weapons. In fact, we have burned most of the decommissioned Pu for countries like the United States that are trying to reduce global tensions as a general policy (it can be said that the results are mixed).

The thorium reactor is still not a real choice, but who knows,,, you know that the fuel economy of the goat cart is 0 mpg. ;-)

Do not. This applies to RBMK series reactors (Chernobyl...), which are almost amplified plutonium breeders connected to turbines. Ordinary PWR or BWR reactors are very unsuitable for plutonium breeding

I'm sorry, buddy, I won't let you get rid of this. I am tired of people spreading this kind of personal opinion message, and expect it to be believed just because you say it, and because it makes a good "voice."

There is a simple and easy way of credibility:

Provide impeccable high-quality attributes for your claims.

For your reference: No one is more excited than I am to see the evidence in this regard. Absolutely true.

Well, this is a list of 13 in the United States alone... https://www.nei.org/resources/statistics/decommissioning-status-for-shutdown-us-plants

Modern designs and technologies such as breeder reactors have almost no transuranic elements, and greatly reduce the waste and the radioactivity of the waste. You can even run them from the "waste" of the mysterious reactor design in the 1970s that we were forced to run.

Do you really need people to look at the list of contaminated/leaked sites (even sites hidden on Google Maps)? I believe those huge uranium hexafluoride tanks are safer now than decades ago. ;-)

In addition, solving problems in rail cars does not really solve any problems. Therefore, we will have to agree to disagree with this technology.

If your scientific arrogance is still stronger than your sense of survival, then you can always dig for clams near the drainage runoff of the Hanford site. Facts have proved that it is very difficult to build something that can be waterproof for 30 years, and no one has ever really solved this problem economically.

The goat cart wins again... You know that most goats are still safe to eat, but I admit that this cart is not very edible. ;-)

However, this is a bit far-fetched, because you confuse the waste generated by the Manhattan Project and other military nuclear materials (Hanford, etc.) with commercial nuclear energy production, and commercial nuclear energy production has no responsibility for those "giant uranium hexafluoride tanks" because It never made them.

At least two-thirds of US nuclear waste is caused by military weapons programs, while commercial nuclear waste is completely controlled, and these things are ignored and dumped locally.

> Facts have proved that it is very difficult to build something that can be waterproof for 30 years, and no one has ever really solved this problem economically.

Yes, they have: deep drilling. The main problem is political, not economic or rational, because the existence of effective waste disposal methods means the loss of the waste argument against nuclear power.

The last time they tried to drill an empty test hole in Nevada, the entire project was shut down by protesters and politicians who catered to them-even though they didn't plan to put any nuclear waste in the hole at all. Merely researching and planning nuclear waste disposal will be strongly resisted by the public for unreasonable reasons. So how do you hope someone can solve it?

Exactly. The free market has already said that its desire is solar energy. Utilities must adapt or be allowed to fail. This is what the market wants, and the market wants to make sure that they are not screwed up in the process. There is no need to support a dying system at the expense of our planet.

What does the free market say when solar energy exists because there is a feed-in tariff that pays a fixed price for any electricity sold? The problem is caused by politics, and it will disappear for the same reason: cancel the feed-in tariff, and all electricity that is not suitable for the grid will disappear.

Another option is a rotary stabilizer. It's basically a huge flywheel that can spin under overcapacity and generate electricity when production slows down. They just installed one in Scotland (although to be fair there may not be a solar overcapacity problem like southern Australia)

https://www.gepowerconversion.com/product-solutions/generators/rotating-stabiliser

Don't be too clear about this, but this is a problem that manufacturers and suppliers in the solar industry should (and probably are) anticipate and solve. It only takes a person with an IQ slightly above the ape level to predict that this is the real consequence of feeding electricity back to the existing grid. Manufacturers must know that this will be a problem, not an investment solution, give up their responsibility ahead of time and decide to pass it on to consumers, they will now be forced to pass government regulations and impose a solution on them by the power company-payment .

Before an industry is allowed to sell products or solutions with far-reaching impact, it may be time to devote as much energy as possible to solving all possible consequences of the problem solution. Good luck for marketers and management to sign this method. This strategy will not generate any revenue.

Of course, this is exactly why flowcharts and comments are so-extremely-unknown and unused in the world of writing computer programs-it is not a sexy thing; and it is difficult to persuade the end user to be such a rash Behavior pays.

A notice posted on my desk: "Why is there always not enough time to do it the first time, but there is always time to do it again?"

A notice posted on my desk:

"Why is there not enough time to do it the first time, but there is always time to do it again?"

Impose on the power company...

What? ! It's more like imposed by the power company. This is just their bottom line issue.

Move the power by advancing the phase instead of increasing the voltage. There must always be a reference and stable phase source to work, so a generator must be used. Each solar inverter should be equipped with a phase control function and controlled by the power company through power line signals. Therefore, grid stability can be balanced with the generator's ability to maintain phase control without changing frequency.

It is two-way. Technically speaking, to advance the stage, you must push the voltage up to the grid before...

South Australia uses large grid-scale batteries installed by Elon Musk for network frequency control auxiliary services. It outputs the power of a medium-sized generator and reacts faster than the old method. Cyber ​​experts are obviously very satisfied with the way things are done in the 21st century, and other jurisdictions now need them.

Of course they are happy. During peak load periods, owners can sell electricity for up to A$14,000/MWh. This allows them to hand over the money.

In my opinion (from my height in North America) this is probably the best problem they might encounter. I am curious how many of these systems have battery storage capabilities, and how many are dedicated grid-connected systems? If connected to the grid, install the battery and give up the connection to the utility. Of course, your mileage may vary, depending on local and federal policies and laws. My system is not now, nor will it be bound to the grid. Screw them.... I prefer to be as self-reliant as possible.

As far as I'm concerned, this story just emphasizes what I have been saying for more than a decade-the current implementation of the "grid" is largely out of date. Of course, heavy industry and some other extreme situations may require it. But in general, we should redesign the infrastructure around local power self-sufficiency. The grid infrastructure part can still be used to allow areas with temporary power problems to obtain electricity from surrounding areas; but in general, community-sized areas should be self-sufficient in terms of electricity. Yes, in situations where you need to connect one power area to another, there are some challenges in maintaining synchronization-but now this should be an easy problem to solve.

Wouldn’t it be great that major winter weather events will not cause power outages in most areas of a continent, or in most areas the size of Texas? "Cascading failure" will no longer be a term commonly used for power generation and distribution.

> In general, community-sized areas should be self-sufficient in terms of electricity.

They should do this, but this can actually be achieved only if there are gas turbines or diesel generators in every community. It does not apply to intermittent and undispatchable renewable energy sources. According to needs, wind energy must be far away from residential areas, while solar energy can only be used during part of the day, part of the year, and weather permitting.

The average energy cost figure of grid-scale solar plus battery (4 hours storage) can compete with all forms of fossil fuels. The problem is no longer intermittent, but a sufficiently complex grid to handle more complex combinations of sources and consumers.

I want to look at these sources because I can calculate that the cost of the battery is the same as the production price of the gas turbine base load electricity.

If you compare LCOE + storage to retail prices, then you are comparing apples and oranges.

The point is that the bulk cost of removing natural gas from the pipeline is only about 1 cent per kilowatt-hour, while the cost of electricity through the turbine is about 3-4 cents. Most of the 28 cents you pay are fixed system costs, taxes, and company profits.

The cheapest reasonable lithium battery, for example, $75/kWh, cycles to 2,000 deaths at an efficiency of 90%. The cost of the battery alone is 4.16 cents per kWh, not including the price of electricity. Based on the same comparison, I can't see any way that solar LCOE+ batteries are cheaper than fossil fuels.

The grid is still very useful, not only for heavy industry, but also for integrating other sustainable energy sources, such as wind energy. Even remote photovoltaic power generation will reduce the size of the local batteries needed, and they are not cheap. But I think the main benefit of the grid is that it connects the widely distributed pumped storage hydropower to the city and its nighttime energy needs. Grid-scale batteries may last for 10 years, but hydroelectric generators will last for at least 50 years or more.

What we don't need is a fusion reactor on earth. We already have all the fusion reactors we need for free, and it also distributes electricity at the cost of some photovoltaic panels. The problem has been solved in a safer way, so let's continue.

In the Netherlands, there is a phenomenon called "stadsverwarming", which is best translated as "district heating". The idea is to use the "waste heat" of the power plant to heat the home. I think most devices were built in the 80s, and I am not sure about the overall efficiency of the system. One of the problems is the heat loss of 10 kilometers or longer pipelines.

A few years ago, this system was expanded near me. The local sewage treatment plant (a few kilometers away from a densely populated area is smelly) pumps the methane gas to a small generator in the nearby center, where it is converted into electricity and heat.

One of the benefits of such small systems is that they can be added at an economically meaningful time and place, while still using the regular grid as a "backup."

Methane can also be stored for a period of time (a round tank of about 10m has been added), and the system can also help alleviate peak loads.

Similarly. Our district heating plant burns wood chips and other industrial waste wood such as sawdust. Their main problem is that the system is older and was originally built as an open loop running on coal, so the end of the pipeline would flow into the sea. Since the water must be heated until the last building where it is used, things passing by that house waste energy.

Isn't anyone looking at the safety of this? Control a lot of power through 4g. What happens when the network goes down. Do they update the firmware when they find a loophole?

This is stupid. I saw this problem many years ago and solved it. If the production of solar energy increases, the line frequency will also increase. As far as I know, if the line frequency is too high, every solar inverter in Europe will slowly reduce its output, stopping completely at 50.2 Hz. Rather than a problem, it is now a good way to stabilize the grid.

https://www.modernpowersystems.com/features/featuredealing-with-the-50.2-hz-problem/

(While holding the popcorn while waiting patiently for the inevitable rant of Dave Jones on EEVBlog)

I see a lot of comments here about solving problems or thought to solve problems, but it boils down to this in the final analysis. The grid is not close to being maximized 90% of the time. It really boils down to this. Utilities must pay for electricity generated not by them, but by producers, such as gas, coal, or nuclear power plants, or from hydropower plants on rivers that have been dammed. Public utility companies do invest in wind energy and solar energy, and sometimes they also invest in others, but in most cases, public utility companies are service and billing agencies. They buy electricity and distribute it to regions, local consumers and maintain the local grid, which is a subsidy from the national grid funded by the government! Production plants are also funded by the government, and contracts are signed with companies that maintain them. Take the Hoover Dam as an example. This is such a huge project. The only way to proceed is through government support. The same is true for most other high-capacity plants (such as nuclear power), and the only way to complete these plants is through government inspection and supervision. The problem with the renewable grid system is that when people produce more power or output than the system to which renewable energy is connected, utility companies will see a decrease in revenue, which is almost unacceptable for them because they Cannot cut wages and operating expenses. As a result, they suffered a loss of profits. The working principle is like this, alternating current flows in both directions, solar power generation is gradual, sooner or later there will be no electricity, sooner or later there will be no electricity! Cloudy days will definitely make volatility a problem. However, the grid-connected inverter system is unstable in this situation, and when everyone is producing and no one is producing, utility companies may encounter difficulties. Therefore, there is an absolute need for smarter systems. Since grid-connected systems must monitor the condition of utility lines from the beginning, they must be connected, otherwise they will not work properly or cause unsafe conditions in the power system. As mentioned in an article, the next point that causes frequency problems is impossible. Solar energy has nothing to do with frequency or voltage, grid-connected inverters operate synchronously with line frequency, or they cannot be in a grid-connected cycle. The line voltage is controlled by the inverters with set parameters in the synchronous inverters. They are just like this. They are synchronized with the line voltage and frequency before connecting the solar output to the utility line. When this happens, the meter is either reversed. To run, or run to stop, measure the power fed to the load circuit and consumer appliances. I haven’t participated in it for some time recently, but I do know that when I participate, the utility needs to sign a contract with the owner of the feedback system, and the meter monitors the output of the renewable 2 meter, the utility company’s meter and the owner’s meter, and the utility The business company will read the two and make adjustments based on differences in consumer use and production. The truly best build system is to set up a multi-system that will store excess current for later use and limit what is fed back into the system, which is not difficult to do. All that is needed is a system that utilizes a limited inverter output and another inverter/charger to use the stored power when there is a higher demand. This will require the installation of a switch system in the feeder, which actually does not affect the grid load more than when the heavy load of a particular facility is suddenly turned on, and there are equipment that can also adjust this. As I said before, when everyone installs solar systems and electricity sales decline, utility companies will implement policies to restrict the public from cutting revenue. This is the only way they can continue to operate, just like any other business, they must produce and sell, or they will go bankrupt.

Let us take them out of business. If they cannot or refuse to adapt, they must cease operations. The profits of a company, whether public or private, should not be a reason for us to maintain a failed and outdated system.

Just give people large subsidies to install household batteries in areas with overproduction of solar energy.

Which ones are mainly paid by people living in areas where solar overproduction is not a problem, or who has nothing to do with the whole situation?

As batteries enter the grid at a steady rate, who will subsequently reduce prices during peak and off-peak hours, thereby benefiting from the solution. Anyone can buy solar energy and batteries to further benefit from the same system.

The only reason for the price drop is because they are offset by subsidies, but in fact the cost has risen, and you indirectly pay more for the same energy through taxes.

There is nothing important in South Australia, their population is less than 2 million. They also have very high levels of sunlight, so if you are looking for case studies that apply to other people, then they are like an inconsequential example.

Europe is planning to use the high sunshine in North Africa to support their electricity needs, so those who really understand the problem will actually look for very relevant learning opportunities. The Mediterranean submarine power cable will not even be as long as the cable planned for North Australia to Singapore.

In the rapidly accelerating solar revolution, Australia has not kept up with the pace of the world leader, but Sundrop Farms in South Australia grows tomatoes in a 20-hectare greenhouse. All the water is desalinated seawater, about 2.8 milliliters per day, because even according to Australian standards, South Australia is very dry. All the energy comes from the 23,000 mirrors focused on the 127m high boiler tower. The steam generates all the electricity needs, condenses and heats the 20-hectare greenhouse, and then irrigates the tomatoes. They produce tomatoes worth US$100 million each year and sign a 10-year contract. The greenhouse heating alone can save 14,000 litres of diesel per week. It is invested by US private equity and uses European technology. The operator is a German family. It is as international as possible, and has nothing to do with the part of human beings who don't eat.

Allow me to respectfully suggest that coal has nothing to do with the future of mankind.

Australia has 300 years of carbon-based energy reserves, and it also accounts for a large proportion of the world's uranium and thorium reserves. Until commercial fusion reactors make all other energy systems irrelevant to the large-scale grid, they can't even use a small part of it. What South Australia does has nothing to do with most humans. In addition to all the uranium from there, some of it is located in French reactors and regularly powers the German grid when renewable energy is insufficient. ROFL

The problem is simple, the battery is not yet cost-competitive during its life cycle. Putting in energy and then taking out the energy again (divided by the frequency you can do and the cost of the battery) is more expensive than buying electricity from the grid-last time I did numbers in Australia.

What most of my friends (in sunny areas of Australia) do is install solar energy, use it to run central air conditioning, pool pumps, wash during the day, etc.-and output a small amount to the grid. Then use the grid at night (when the air conditioner is not working so hard and waiting) as their battery. They usually end up with about zero usage fees-but still a fixed cost service fee (which is quite high in Australia).

Another option-what I would do when I retire to my holiday home in the tropics-is to put a relatively small battery and either completely disconnect the grid (some of my friends have already done this), or turn it off As a separate backup-that is, if your battery is dead, you have to go out and throw a switch to connect it, because it has rained for three days in the rainy season. I mean, there are many places in Australia that have more than 300 days of sunshine, so it's not that difficult. .

In Australia, where there is still a large amount of coal-fired power generation, adding backup generators to your system and completely disconnecting the grid is no longer an environmentally irresponsible practice. An ordinary 3 KVA alternator does not cost money, and a few liters of gasoline per year is also insignificant. (Biofuels would be better.)

With no grid connection available, I have no choice but to do this, because a week’s worth of high-quality batteries requires another mortgage.

serious question. I pay for off-peak electricity (mainly hot water) at night in Victoria, not far from South Australia. When using solar energy, shouldn't it deviate from the peak during the day? In addition, isn't the stored hot water a cheap form of battery? Can the refrigerator contain a large ice cube to store energy during the day? These changes are not big, but hot water can reach one-third of household electricity and about 20% of refrigerator?

Being market-driven, innovative and flexible, we were sold to incredibly annoying electricity sellers. Financial losses should stimulate innovation. It seems to be BS. Market losses stimulate political interference so that they can continue to profit in their usual way.

Thermal energy storage has played a role in large and medium-sized areas in some areas, usually district heating and cooling or hydraulic systems with ice storage. We can certainly turn to more home grid balancing solutions, but this is the choice of consumers.

Of course there are some obstacles. You can't start and stop the heat pump compressor when the production peaks. You will shorten the cycle and destroy them, so some other buffer solutions are still needed.

Just like there are community solar installations, due to sharing costs, economies of scale, and the complete inability of some communities to own rooftop solar, perhaps there should be community storage. It can be a small district heating and cooling with a thermal storage buffer, or a battery, flywheel, or any peak shaving that works best.

As the scale increases, the initial cost per unit is always lower, but when you move to a larger grid-scale installation (such as Hornsdale), the economy will shift from saving money for communities or individuals to making money for businesses. So it turned to politics, where everything was messed up.

As a global society, we must bear the cost of this energy transition in some form. This has proved to be a rather messy thing, and only after the dust settles can you see the above content.

I live in South Australia, and if the idiot who manages the state and country tries to charge me export fees, it will only motivate me to leave the grid.

Because the federal government firmly supports partners in the fossil fuel industry, there is a lot of hype around the negative impact of solar energy.

I am currently running the first generation Tesla power wall and 3Kw solar, which is enough to cover 90% of my electricity consumption. 4.82MWh in 2017, 4.77MWh in 2018, 4.89MWh in 2019, 4.74MWh in 2020

In the summer, when the battery is fully charged, I use the excess electricity by remotely turning on the pool pump and solar pool heating. In winter, once the battery is fully charged, I shorten the running time of the pump. The price I paid to connect to the grid was more than the power I drew from it.

If everyone buys solar energy and batteries, the power company will go bankrupt. This is the real reason for the negative hype about solar energy in South Australia.

If the grid and large generators continue to work hard to pass the fault to consumers, they will see people buying storage systems and abandoning the grid altogether. Then they will realize that when they are all facing bankruptcy, they should do something else. I said let the dinosaurs die. If they don't want to pay for the electricity they use, cut off their power. Once again, we let the public subsidize large companies that ignore the environment of failure. It's time for them to close their doors.

When they say they want to use something like 4G to turn on or off feedback, I always get confused. Can't they just modulate the signal to the power line itself? I’m sure I’m missing some complexity, but I don’t know it will be worse than a 4G modem

> Modulate the signal to the power cord itself

This is the so-called pulsation control, used to control off-peak water heaters, especially IFAIK in New South Wales. I am not sure if it is still in use. There was a crazy moment a few years ago, when someone came up with a good idea to use the power grid for the Internet. Thankfully, no one told these grubmint! In the property, the power line signal is used for things such as WiFi extenders-I have a pair in my house.

Now that the cellular infrastructure is so mature, it makes more sense to use it.

Of course, the success of solar energy has brought some recent challenges, but it has also brought huge opportunities. With differential pricing based on demand, homeowners (or businesses) who own batteries can make money by buying and selling electricity. There are also companies that can adjust their use to take advantage of low-cost "excess" electricity. This is not a problem of too much solar energy, but a problem of too little imagination.

I question whether it is still prudent to rely on external power lines for the entire power supply of each structure, which are susceptible to unforeseen events, including storms of unprecedented scale, especially considering that we are very prone to over-reliance on electricity. (There are also coronal mass ejections to consider, although their destructive effects are rare, where the grid is vulnerable to potentially widespread damage and long-term power outages.) Personally, I really appreciate having my own independent visit The liberation effect of the right solar battery power supply (of course, clear sky allows)

It seems to me that every building has its own solar panel power storage system-at least as an emergency/backup power source-it seems to make sense; although this may not attract attention to the various large-scale dollar and cent profit margins CEO of an energy company. If the popularity of solar panels will be at the expense of the profit margins of traditional energy production companies, one can foresee obstacles, including political and regulatory obstacles. If it conflicts significantly with the company's big profits, even very progressive proposals will be greatly resisted and often successful enough.

Of course there will be some people, usually Internet trolls, who will laugh at this idea as "unrealistic." One person's rebuttal is based entirely on the misconception that if it is possible to have this kind of independent solar power generation and storage, it can be done now and it will make some people very wealthy. Unfortunately, when people generally think this is illogical, certain entities are more likely to maintain an outdated but still very profitable status quo energy system.

Off-grid solar is not uncommon in Australia. Most major installers provide a fully self-sufficient off-grid solar installation. Not every inverter is suitable for this situation, so the choice of inverters has been reduced. Compatibility with the selected battery (think first) further reduces the choice.

Some installers are still struggling to solve complex problems. My brother’s installation sometimes trips the battery circuit breaker when starting the backup generator. (For the deep winter when it is cloudy for several days.) Resetting them is annoying, but the installer is struggling to find the reason.

Since I have to pay for a few kilometers of SWER lines and step-down transformers, I will switch from home generators to off-grid solar before permanently moving to a new building. The water heating in winter mainly comes from the water jacket in the flue on the wood heater. (There is an oven at the bottom for baking bread.)

This sounds more like an ending to get rid of having to compensate for the contributions of small producers. You can easily punish large producers because their contact with small producers is inefficient/ineffective. The final effect is the same, a solution will be found, but this little guy will not be tightened in the process.

Placing a shadow on the PV to control the output is not really a suitable solution.

Your other thought-this is how the lead-acid battery charge controller works-constant current up to 30V (for 24V systems), then switch to constant voltage-about 28V-for one or two hours, and then the "floating" voltage is 27.4, Until the sun began to go down, the yield naturally declined. The output can be controlled electronically-no mechanical solutions are required.

My charge controller can be programmed to switch the overcurrent to a different load once the battery reaches the float voltage-water pump or a second backup battery pack.

Many homes have a readily available solar battery-hot water service. Well, the entropy of hot water is not as low as electricity, but it is needed every day, and we don't want to burn coal to heat it. Rather than putting a water heating panel on my roof (which may leak), it is better to connect it to transfer the excess power to the heating element. Instead of spending money to buy a heat pump whose mechanical parts will be assembled after a period of time, it is more reliable to spend money on more photovoltaic panels. This shields more roofs and saves air conditioning, especially at 43 degrees. C (109 F) days.

It is not difficult to store as much energy as a 10 kWh battery: 250 L water heating 34.4°C = 10 kWh (250 kg * 4.1813 kJ/(kg·K) * 34.4 / 3600 = 9.99 kWh)

In Australia, if you put enough solar energy on the roof, if you still set the HWS time switch to night electricity, you will be considered a bit slow. Even with an on-grid tariff of 12c, self-consumption is much better than around 24c. This is what the distributor can do by remotely controlling the switch. After all, we have remote meter reading, which is an order of magnitude more complicated. )

I vote for a liftable house as a battery

It may be necessary to equip children with parachutes and school lunch boxes. If the house weighs 100 tons, it is equivalent to a 10 kWh battery, and it must be lifted:

10000*3600/(9.8*1000*100) = 36.73m (or 120 feet, in the old currency.) This is before the loss.

So not suitable for small houses. You will get nosebleeds.

Data centers mine bitcoins when needed to consume excess electricity, and use the mined bitcoins to buy electricity when demand exceeds supply.

The comment is TLDR, but today's solar energy is centered on the "grid" because its main benefit is to provide 90% self-sufficiency. Instead of designing solar energy as part of a complex grid-connected system, it is better to design solar energy as a self-sufficient commodity. For 100 years, people bought cars for personal consumption. Uber sharing and P2P car rental services have only been explored in the past 5 years, but I don’t think they are very practical. Can I make a little money by sharing a car I own? Yes. I want to emphasize the possibility of some strange ticks on the back seat and some unreported vomit? Do not.

The same is true for solar energy. I don't want to deal with other peak usage demands, especially when usage is completely ignored (ie solar users don't know how much electricity they use or where they come from-that is distributed solar).

With the emergence of a large number of false news, companies are getting less and less profit from fossil fuel investment and trying to maintain their monopoly... We should start installing panels to collect early morning and evening sunlight and take them outside the peak noon period. Tax deductions are provided for households connected to the grid. The other ideas posted here make sense, pumping the water up the mountain to rotate at night... Solar energy is the way forward, and the grid must be bent to accept this new technology in the future, otherwise the grid will become obsolete. Full Disclosure: I own a 7kw solar house and run for public office as a member of the local power company's board of directors...fight for the public from the inside. For reference only, to keep your solar system away from dust and RFI EMI, the method is as follows. http://valleymedia.org/satchat/k1kp-416-34-35.JPG

At least in Australia, the domestic array has economic incentives for both the East and the West. The north-facing (southern hemisphere) array peaks between 10 and 2 o'clock. At this time, many families are working and going to school, with little self-consumption. At least in the sunny half of the year, the panels on the eastern roof can power breakfast cooking and morning heating or air conditioning, while the western array can provide power for dinner, dish washing, etc. Because we don't have a steep roof here (I don't know what snow is), the two formations will still produce considerable effects at noon in summer, allowing the house to cool all day. There is no need to buy electricity for peak consumption-peak prices are already a powerful driving force for planning solar installations around domestic consumption patterns.

The second motivation is that network operators now need to be able to throttle grid-connected inverters during peak solar power generation to ensure network stability. Therefore, the north-facing array will not receive feed credits in the finest weather, or at least much less than it can generate, because the vast majority of devices face that direction. On the other hand, electronic warfare devices produce good results during peak times when the network is in urgent need of power, so the possibility of throttling is very small.

The third incentive is that when solar energy injects a large amount of power into the grid, that is, at noon, the coal-fired machine has to pay to supply power to the grid. By approaching the same situation on the shoulders of that period, you can steal their lunch longer and make them bankrupt faster. They closed their doors one by one because they burned money to continue their business. Yes, when electricity is not needed, we have negative electricity prices here. (Obviously there is not enough Bitcoin mining. ;-)

"Intermittent" wind and solar power generation requires "fossil fuel" backup, PNM vice president Thomas Fallgren concluded in "Energy". Quote from "Energy Source" http://www.prosefights.org/irp2020/emnrd.htm

Two very ignorant observations: 1) Limit the number of solar panels in the home. 2) I think solar energy is more like an attraction to attract money than in reality, as environmentally friendly as a huge white sale. Here, a large amount of "free" government funds, including those specifically used to solve epidemic problems, are transferred by the city/county government to install solar arrays, which either do not serve anyone in the state. Either just for the installation so that the local government can make money-don't use it to run the facility, please be careful-they claim it will offset utility and other expenses. This is an abuse, but no one "responsible" cares.

Thank you for sending me information about it, I learned a lot from it! I appreciate your details, and I am grateful for your time and energy to help us. Your insights and summary are useful.

Thank you for sending me information about it, I learned a lot from it! . I appreciate your details, and I am grateful for your time and energy to help us. Your insights and summary are useful.

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