Electric-Car Owners Hard Hit by Massive California Power Shutdown

If you can't sell the excess your probably out of luck. Was there a reason you didn't do propane for the heat?
I know I had an all electric apartment in Colorado before solar became popular and it was a killer.

 

The power company. Actually they pay me to store it.

 

There a number of sustainable power sources besides solar. Even so, the lifecycle costs for solar even with incentives don't pay for themselves in most parts of the country. We might get there someday but no one alternative source is enough to entirely replace fossil fuels anytime soon in the USA, much less the world.

If alternative energy ever does overtake coal and gas power plants, they wouldn't necessarily need to sit idle earning no revenue. Utilities can buy power on demand from several states away from other utilities. That part would be no different than the way about 60-70% of all alternative energy is distributed now, from states where there is a lot of sun or wind to sell.

 

Propane is available. I didn't want it. My house is relatively new and well insulated. We have about an equal amount of heating and cooling days. My all electric power bill averages out. On a graph it would look like a bell curve with Dec, Jan & Feb being the most expensive but much less for cooling in warmer months.

I'm not against solar but a big ass wind turbine would be more cost effective for me.

 

Your example is no good.
But having said that power companies are very good at forecasting their loads. Solar does complicate it but it ain't a show stopper.
Solar is getting cheap enough that it may actually be economical to overbuild the solar supply for low output days.
But my favorite is these guys.



https://insideclimatenews.org/news/...4-hour-renewable-energy-crescent-dunes-nevada

 

A lot depends on where you live.
I'm in Arizona where the killer is air conditioning.
I didn't have solar, but my neighbor did.
It paid for itself in six years.

 

Solar definitely will be more efficient in AZ or FL. Cooling is not really needed where I'm at except from about mid May through the end of Sept. Electric costs in MO are about the same as nat gas. Propane is actually a little more expensive and requires a big tank that needs filling. All electric forced air from floor registers works well for my house. I would never consider anything like electric baseboard or radiant floor heat.

 

Not talking about you go back and read again. This fossil fuel plants that are not selling power which is not making any money and you say they should make it and store it, where are they going to get all this free unlimited storage?

 

That's the best place to keep it, until they shut off the grid. Most inverters shut down when the power goes down on grid intertied systems. You will need a large battery bank and an ATS(or manually disconnect from the grid) to continue to run during a power outage. You will also need a way to burn excess RE if you make more electricity than you can use during an outage. Your system becomes a lot more complicated to be able to also run off grid.

 

Yeah. It's almost like --- like a power failure.

 

How so?

They are as good as is the consistency of their generating capability which for solar relies on the weather which they cannot control. How big would a molten salt storage farm be to power New York city? And as I noted in a previous thread

"Not at all. The technology doesn’t exist right now. I’m optimistic. We may get there one day but right now here’s a case in point. The largest solar farm in the nation does not produce enough kilowatts to power the New York City subway system. And that farm is 4,000 acres, which is five times the size of Central Park. So when Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says we are going to power the entire country on renewables there just isn’t the land to come up with the solar farm or the wind necessary to have these renewables. So the science just does not equate to how we run our economy."
https://dailycaller.com/2019/01/31/tucker-energy-green-new-deal/

And now you will need even more to produce the power to store in those molten salt fields and how many days storage are you going to build and what will all that cost?

 

No electric power didn't do any favors for gas stations either????

 

As that happens they reduce what they pay you for it. As business expands they will balance that with building new supplies. There are probably companies that specialize in mergers and acquisitions based on it.

 

It's not an all or nothing type of thing.
But I would vote to give up Oklahoma.


Starting with some conservative assumptions from a 2013 National Renewable Energy Labs (NREL) report, we know that it takes, on average, 3.4 acres of solar panels to generate a gigawatt hour of electricity over a year. Given the U.S. consumes about 4 petawatt hours of electricity per year, we’d need about 13,600,000 acres or 21,250 square miles of solar panels to meet the total electricity requirements of the United States for a year.

 

Ron, Solar actually only accounts for 1.3% of all power generated in the USA in 2020. Cutting down virgin forest land to build solar farms is more harmful to the environment than the small overall benefit solar can ever provide. Wind farms may account for more power than all solar now. At least the land under the wind turbines can still be farmed. Hydro power is more efficient but obviously not available where there are no rivers to dam. Natural gas is going to replace coal. Nuclear is really the only other halfway practical alternative to gas or coal.

 

Yeah, It's only starting to be a problem in a few places.

 

Your page is not interactive. What do the numbers represent?

Post the link if you have one.

 

My bad.
It's the percentage of power from solar by state.

 

I just had a quote done for my house in Florida and I'm looking at best a 12 to 14 year break even. I was disappointed that it wasnt lower but I guess that explains the serious lack of panels in my city. 6 year projected and I would have signed up immediately.

 

I think the subsidies were better a few years ago. And of course Trump put a 25% tariff on them as one of his first shots in the trade war.

 

30% break, but still pricey. my electric bill average is about 2k annual, but they projected increases there too. and net metering is on an annual use it or lose it.

 

Put aside the climate and I'd still have one for a daily drive.

1. Instant torque is fun
2. Range is perfectly adequate for a city environment
3. Depending on the model they can be very powerful.
4. Cabin noise is much reduced

All thar adds up to a great daily drive that isn't suitable for some other applications like trucking or very remote touring

 

I don't know who your power company is, but SCE charges $0.39 kWh during the summer and $0.31 kWh during the winter and that's tier 1. My friend bought a house that already had solar, he tells me when he adds power to the grid SCE credits him at $0.04 kWh. Such a deal.

 

Do you know what a question mark (?) means in a written sentence?

 

Because I wouldn't want a grid-tie system and my electric utility discourages using them.

https://www.gladesec.com/member-services/considering-solar/