The point is not that the "true" price in the sense of what it ought to be. It is the "true" price in the sense of what the market is actually paying for the service.
When people put out the number $23, they compare it with the cost of power and wonder why, if it is so much lower, it doesn't already swamp the current solution.
So the purpose of the comment is to explain that it is not a complete solution, and not reflective of the total ("true") bill.
Why should I worry about a complete solution?
We have a moderate sized portable generator, but running off that for weeks becomes a very unpleasant experience. Certainly far better than not having power, but unpleasant.
Driving 2 hours away to the nearest place we knew had unlimited fuel, turning my car into a rolling bomb on the trip back with dozens of gallons of fuel in gas cans, etc. And the endless droning of the thing running.
If those sorts of disasters are not a major concern for you, I don't think a battery makes much sense.
You can also store quite a lot of propane in a small footprint without some of the issues that come with gas or diesel.
That's a crass state, what causes these outages? Is it a investment backlog of the power grid?
You can also size your panels such that you never produce excess energy but you will be leaving a lot of roof space that could be making energy to waste. A sunny winter day still makes a ton of energy.
The grid will switch to solar + battery if it becomes cheaper than alternatives (gas, coal, nuclear, etc.)
It's such a damned shame that so many decades of potential progress in nuclear power were stymied by misguided FUD.
That's why.
If I move to a house with solar panels, I budget on power costs = cost of grid connection + X * grid power price + (1-X) * solar price (which is the capital cost of the panels smoothed out over their useful life).
The issue here is that I can't maneuver into a situation where my power price = solar price without sacrificing my ability to do anything after sundown without candles. Clearly, the true cost of power in a solar-enabled house is going to be higher than the cost of the solar panels.
Which was the point you misunderstood: dedicated storage installation are not needed at current production levels, and can be avoided even when solar's share of the energy mix grows.
Among the possibilities are "smart" appliances scheduling their demand to production peaks (dishwashers can often wait a few hours, cars might not need to charge right away). The same is true for industrial usage, where smelters, for example, have the natural capacity to store energy as heat.
A growing fleet of electric cars could also serve as distributed storage: if your car is parked for the night, it could feed energy back into the grid (partially, if you are paranoid).
More than batteries they utilize gas peaker plants, inefficient, dirty and expensive plants that can ramp up and down quickly to match demand.
You seem to be referring exclusively to solar photovoltaic.
Solar thermal generation has quite a different, evening-friendly, distribution curve.
I haven't followed closely recently but my impression was solar thermal has not delivered as promised. Things like Ivanpah was relying on natural gas more than expected. Is this an accurate impression?
Yet confusingly the article chose images of solar thermal. It's a bit of a worry when the journalists aren't conscious of the most basic aspects of the industry they are covering.
Perhaps, but we're better than conflating solar pvc with solar thermal - especially when we talk about large scale deployments, and even more especially when we talk about systems that incorporate Big Storage (batteries or otherwise).
Parent (to your comment) wasn't specifically PVC, parent (to them) wasn't either (more about true cost), and parent to them was bemoaning the common misunderstanding around how pricing works, rather than ethics / feasibility / ambiguity around underlying technology.
> I haven't followed closely recently but my impression was solar thermal has not delivered as promised. Things like Ivanpah was relying on natural gas more than expected. Is this an accurate impression?
My impression is that solar thermal is going to provide a much more scalable solution, especially in terms of avoiding the duck curve (or at least mitigating the impact of same). I see PVC + batteries being one of those tech combinations that works reasonably well in front of, as well as behind, the meter ... but solar thermal's definitely grid-level.
By coal standards?
It is swamping the current solution - it just takes a while for new plants to be built and old plants to go offline.
Which is to say, for example, that a grid supplied by solar and wind will need proportionally less storage per megawatt as the geographical size of the grid increases. A larger grid "averages out" the intermittent sources better as it gets bigger.
A state sized utility solar installation is non-trivial and that's why you don't yet see utilities providing solar themselves to the grid, and even if they did the price would be different.
So you don't see everyone using it because it's expensive to get started and because utility providers have yet to build solar plants capable of supplying a state. I don't think anyone has.
In time though, a combination of rooftop solar and utility scale battery/renewable systems to cover baseline load will probably be how we power the nation. Perhaps some gas or other generators will stick around to provide the baseline.
Solar is great for businesses and schools, well basically anything that operates mainly or totally during the day.
This chart is a few years old, but it shows that the peak demand was in the early evening:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=830
The peak demand will also vary at different locations and times of year. As the wikipedia article states:
>...It depends on the demography, the economy, the weather, the climate, the season, the day of the week and other factors. For example, in industrialised regions of China or Germany, the peak demands mostly occur in day time, while solar photovoltaic system can help reduce it. However, in more service based economy such as Australia, the daily peak demands often occur in the late afternoon to early evening time (e.g. 4pm to 8pm).
My chart, if you look closely, has a granularity of one half hour. If you want something even more granular, ISO New England data more clearly shows the peak to be between 2pm-3pm for a typical summer month: https://i.imgur.com/rX1JqoJ.png
I think you might have posted the wrong image to imgur. You linked to: https://imgur.com/wTIt5tg
I am not sure how you are getting half hour indications on that weekly chart.
>...ISO New England data more clearly shows the peak to be between 2pm-3pm for a typical summer month:
Yes, that was why wikipedia says:
>...It depends on the demography, the economy, the weather, the climate, the season, the day of the week and other factors. For example, in industrialised regions of China or Germany, the peak demands mostly occur in day time, while solar photovoltaic system can help reduce it. However, in more service based economy such as Australia, the daily peak demands often occur in the late afternoon to early evening time (e.g. 4pm to 8pm).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_demand
The EIA web site was talking about October, not the summer months when air conditioning would be used.
As another data point, With PG&E pricing, the most expensive hours are noon to six:
https://www.pge.com/en_US/business/rate-plans/rate-plans/tim...
I think my point is that statements like "hat matters is peak grid usage (ie. residential+industrial) and it is actually mid-day—perfect for solar." can over simplify the problem. The amount of demand will vary in different areas at different times of the year and even when it is raining, there will still be demand.
See https://i.myimg.io/wi9J.png
«The EIA web site was talking about October»
This is why I also showed an October chart, with a peak at 3-4pm.
But, yes, peak can vary with weather, time of year, etc. All I'm saying is that in general—not always—peak PV generation coincide reasonably with peak electricity demand.
OK, for many reasons we are just going to have to agree to disagree on that chart. (I just measured https://imgur.com/wTIt5tg and on my machine it definitely is more than 41 pixels between each day but that doesn't mean each pixel is representing exactly x minutes of time, there is no indication on the chart each pixel actually represents 35 minutes or if it is interpolated data, etc. To me it gives a rough showing of energy demand over a week.)
>...This is why I also showed an October chart, with a peak at 3-4pm.
It isn't clear to me why there would be peak demand at 3-4 in the afternoon in an October day. As the EIA site says:
>...During this period, usually in the early evening, operators need more generating capacity–including more costly "peaking" units. Both day-ahead and long-term forecasts account for these peaks to ensure the assignment of adequate capacity.
>...But, yes, peak can vary with weather, time of year, etc. All I'm saying is that in general—not always—peak PV generation coincide reasonably with peak electricity demand.
I think we basically agree on that. Peak PV generation is probably closer to noon, but in general more energy is needed during daylight hours than at night. (And obviously a hot sunny day will spike energy usage for cooling and solar PV is a perfect fit at that time.) The problem to me is when people over simplify this issue. The amount of demand will vary in different areas at different times of the year and even when it is raining, there will still be demand. I've always been a supporter of solar power but there is a lot of handwaving going on when people say we can get 100% of our power from solar and wind without there being some huge advances in energy storage.
If you think of it as two power grids, then "the big power grid"—the industrial grid—can be fully powered by solar, and the residential grid, i.e. "the small power grid", is kind of trivial to solve in comparison.
Even for domestic users, electric storage heaters, water heaters and electric car charging are all amenable to demand shifting. Over time, those will probably become the largest users of electricity if prices keep plunging.
I think there's a lot of money to be made out demand shifting tech, especially if people keep erroneously believing that variability is a problem best solved with expensive lithium ion batteries.
Oh, and my stomach says dinner is most definitely not irrelevant.
This completely ignores the fact that the people buying solar get subsidies and they aren't the ones paying for the burdened grid.
In some states, distribution companies are paying retail prices back to solar producers. That means these people get to freeride on the grid and force the power company to deal with their unstable power supply for free.
The point of the article is that in this case, even without subsidies solar would beat anything else. This is despite heavy import duties that were recently imposed.
Unless they are taxing solar, that's not a subsidy when comparing the two.
Where fossil fuels are subsidized is in the externalities they don't pay for (i.e. environmental impact).
A coal power plant does not get paid retail rates for the power it generates. The utility company charges more precisely to pay for transmission and the people to maintain it.
Let's punish the free riders and reward the people who are reducing the total societial cost of energy.
The fact that solar owners get access to the energy grid for free seems like a clever way to punish the free riders by increasing their costs in a roundabout way.
Don't want to pay the higher costs for your power grid? Then upgrade to cleaner energy! Sounds great.
The companies that operate grids are not the free riders. By having idiotic legislation that allows solar owners to free ride the grid, you only punished the utility company. Sometimes they own power plants, sometimes they don't.
In CA, though solar continues to be installed, we've reached a point--due to a lack of good/cheap storage ability--that at the end of the day (where Solar has been working fine all day), in order to meat evening demand, the only way to address steep demand is to fire up coal-fired plants. They work, but they're not only expensive, they're dirty.
Yes, yes we are.
The correct calculation uses the capacity factor, not the name-plate capacity.
We need to get out of the mindset that all power generators need to produce a steady amount of power 24/7. A flexible grid made of many power sources that can be ramped up and down can just as easily meet demand and may even be best since it is resilient when any one power source goes down for an extended period of time.
You can't just say that solar should be more expensive because it only works half the day. You could just as easily turn that argument around and say that nuclear and coal plants should be more expensive since they are only economical if run at a constant load and require long shutdowns every year for maintenance. There needs to be extra capacity on the grid to meet demand during nuclear/coal shutdowns, but no one states that nuclear and coal should be more expensive as a result.