
A Solar Boom So Successful, It's Been Halted - dkoch
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-boom-so-successfull-its-been-halted
======
bsirkia
The top comment from u/theysayso on the same Reddit thread seems to put things
in a good perspective:

Other posters have already noted that you can still have the solar panels,
you're just not going to get paid for net metering. What people typically want
is the best of both worlds, to charge onto the grid when the produce more than
they use (and get paid for it) and have the grid available to supply power
when they generate less than they use. But maintaining the grid also costs
money. If all your ratepayers split, it makes it more expensive for those
"left behind". Who gets left behind? Typically people with less money, that
can't afford the systems in the first place, apartment dwellers, etc. The
other noted challenge are battery systems. You can go completely off the grid
but installing the batteries is WAY more expensive, takes and takes up a lot
of space. The technology is disruptive, which the article really didn't go in
to. For PV to push electrons onto the grid it needs to be at a greater
potential. So if your local grid is 120v the PV needs to adjust to 120.1v.
Then your neighbor installs one, and this her/his neighbor. If you're on a
long radial line the voltage at the head end might be 126 just to get it to be
118 at the tail end. Normally a utility will install capacitor banks to adjust
the voltage. Now you have PV going in everywhere totally screwing with the
voltage so it becomes a bit of a grid management challenge. You need to know
where all that is going in, what its rate of power is at any given moment
(clouds/rains suddenly everything changes and the utility has to compensate).
So yeah, a sticky problem that could get out of hand pretty quickly.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1tey5l/a_solar_b...](http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1tey5l/a_solar_boom_in_hawaii_proved_so_successful_that/)

credit:
[http://www.reddit.com/user/theysayso](http://www.reddit.com/user/theysayso)

~~~
twelvechairs
Unless subsidised its a long way before home PV makes sense. if I notice PV at
the larger or more convenient locations for it in my area (the pool, the
storage warehouse, the substation, apartment blocks) I might start to consider
whether viable as a cost effective single-house solution.

~~~
danielharan
Define "long way"? HECO's price per kWh look pretty steep to me, $0.35 in
Oahu: [http://www.heco.com/heco/Residential/Electric-
Rates/Average-...](http://www.heco.com/heco/Residential/Electric-
Rates/Average-Electricity-Prices-for-Hawaiian-Electric,-Maui-Electric,-and-
Hawaii-Electric-Light-Company)

Meanwhile PV costs keep going down.

~~~
waps
First of all "keep going down" ? Good, but they're, well, not there yet. I
don't think it's possible for residential solar to become actually profitable
given that we already have an electricity grid, without causin the
consequences illustrated below. For now lots of things are still under
subsidy, and this masks the problem.

Second solar has the problem that it creates a tragedy of the commons. This
has been obvious in several European markets now. Once built, the electricity
is free, but not continuous. That means that for the majority of the time,
traditional utilities have no hope whatsoever of competing with solar prices
... and then comes the 10% not covered by solar or wind (it's easily more than
20%, but I get a feeling we'd get into an argument).

At that point electricity is needed from traditional sources. Of course,
because of this they need to be ready at a moment's notice. Capacity needs at
that point might vary from 10% of total to 100% of total, so you still need
the same fossil fuel capacity you have right now. It doesn't have to run at
full speed anymore, of course. It can't be turned off, because when renewables
fail, they don't give you much warning (we're talking minutes at most).

Note that means that large scale renewable plants cannot be used to power
homes, because of economics. The more of this you have, the less efficient the
market becomes (because the smaller ones maintained "for free" by individuals
can't be beaten on price).

It has other pros and cons. In the case of plant failure, the system is much
more resilient. And in the case that something disables most small plants
(say, an earthquake), the system is much more affected than today (because
rooftop solar just isn't built to power plant standards). Double this effect
for comparison against nuclear (which is built to withstand ridiculous stress
for obvious reasons, and that means it can almost always simply remain
operational during a disaster)

Here's the kicker :

    
    
        Disconnecting from the grid is not realistic for most people, Chung said. The current state of battery technology means they have to be replaced after a few years, he said. And putting a system with batteries on a typical house would cost $40,000 versus $25,000 for one without the storage component, he said. Moreover, the battery portion isn't eligible for the tax credits.
    

(this isn't entirely true, it's only true if you "minimize" the storage
component. A battery that can hold 3-5x the power that will ever be drawn from
it will last 20-30 years -at least- under that load. If you load it up > 95%,
you get 2 years at best)

So we're stuck upgrading the grid ... Or making solar installations 2x or 3x
more expensive than the currently are, and not just in money : you need
battery chargers, space (batteries aren't small), maintenance, ...

So there's 2 things we "can" do:

1) do what greens suggest, and make the rates reflect the new cost structure.
Of course that means effectively raising the rates on traditional electricity
by a factor of 10 or 100. This will mean that anyone who doesn't have solar
right before this happens is so thoroughly screwed it's not funny.

It will also disproportionately affect the poor. For two reasons. First, they
can't pay for their own little renewable plant, and can't get the loan. Second
they usually live in highrises that cannot be powered using renewables, except
for the penthouse. If you think this is wrong, call up a picture of
residential highrises in Hong Kong, you'll see what I mean.

It will also reduce the size of the economy. Energy is one of those non-
negotiable things, with almost zero price elasticity. It's effectively a tax.
Even more so because the government usually controls the other side.

Oh and, in toto (everything taken together), it's less efficient than
centralized production. It's attractiveness (to non-believers) comes entirely
from the front-loading of the cost. You invest once and you have 99.99%
predictable costs over the entire period. Given that we're running out of oil,
for things like Google's datacenters, that's a deal that just can't be beat.
It also means that it's now actually possible to give Factories their "dream"
electrical contracts : 20-30 year long contracts with fixed prices. You take
out a bank loan, build a plant in a place with 100% predictable power usage,
and deliver the power over dedicated infrastructure, not connected to the
public grid at all.

In short, option 1) will have a lot of victims, and few beneficiaries.

2) We could take the industry's arguments. They do have merit. Electricity is
not an optional thing, and taking it away from at least some people is not a
reasonable thing to do. So relegating the public grid, and power plants to
backup status at 10x or 100x the price per kilowatt is not a reasonable thing
to do (for starters, do this anywhere north of New York and you will have the
poor in cities freeze to death in large numbers like we had 70 years ago).

Furthermore, allowing people to upload power in the grid really does require
modifications. Downward-only plants are much simpler than bidirectional
plants. They're also smaller, so in many cases new land must be bought by the
utility company.

Who must pay for this ? The industry's argument is simple : if they're forced
to accept power from solar, then the people actually doing the feeding in must
pay for the modifications, and the loss of ROI in the plants. That's only
reasonable, as their solar investment is worth much less without the ability
to feed it into the grid, and those power plants.

So ...

So we're back to where we were 10 years ago. Many people want small solar (and
in some industrial cases, small-scale wind plants). Who pays for the real
cost, in the massive grid modifications, the new market equilibrium (that
requires a much higher electricity price), and the necessity of keeping tons
of plants spinning idle ?

Either the people installing solar do, or everybody does. My personal opinion
is probably clear : we don't have a choice : we must make anybody who wishes
to feed in power to the grid pay. And when solar grows large enough without
feeding into the grid (which will be the obvious response), we will need to
tax renewable installations. The alternatives have consequences that are
simply not acceptable.

This is not an issue of crooks defending corporate profits (not that I'm
saying that's not part of it). This is an issue of how powering a society gets
financed.

~~~
m4x
_when renewables fail, they don 't give you much warning (we're talking
minutes at most)_

If your country has a lot of hydro (which has ramp times measured in seconds)
this doesn't matter.

Additionally, clouds don't magically appear and obscure an entire cities
sunlight over the course of a few minutes. They pass over cities, so as one
area loses solar generation another is regaining it. Or maybe it's an overcast
day where the the solar generation is at a predictable low level all day.
Neither of those cases pose any problem to hydro or any other plant that can
ramp up and down over the course of a few minutes (and every nation has these
- you can't run a grid without low-response time generators)

 _In the case of plant failure, the system is much more resilient. And in the
case that something disables most small plants (say, an earthquake), the
system is much more affected than today (because rooftop solar just isn 't
built to power plant standards)_

I'm not really sure what you're saying here. That distributed generation gives
you resiliency? In Australia and NZ, if the grid goes down then your solar
inverters turn off too so it doesn't affect the grid's reliability at all. I
believe most countries have this requirement.

How does not being "built to power plant standards" have any effect? Your
inverters are still required to generate clean AC, and if they can't match the
grid closely for any reason they stop generating.

~~~
Swannie
"In Australia and NZ, if the grid goes down then your solar inverters turn
off"

Yes... and that's precisely the issues here. How do you know when the grid is
down? You'd see a drop across your grid connection? Makes sense. But what if
the grid went down, but because all the local houses were supplying greater
than 100% of the local load requirements, it never looked like the grid was
down?

That's the challenge. As I understand it, power utilities are considering
"smart grid" as a distributed control mechanism to kill PV interconnects in
such instances. However traditional grid control is normally built very
stringently to allow fast detection of issues and fast isolation/resolution
with redudant lines. If you have one rogue smart control point, you could end
up electrocuting the engineer.

~~~
m4x
If the grid supply goes down for some reason (natural disaster, car hits
transformer, significant sustained overload blows pole fuse etc) then
everything connected to the grid in that area will see some or all of the
following effects:

* sudden change in supply voltage * sudden change in frequency (and rate-of-change of frequency) * sudden change in phase angle

You can't mask these signals and they are particularly pronounced on the
section of grid that was affected (i.e. the part that is now blacked out).
These (and more) are the specific effects that inverters monitor for, and they
will disconnect if they notice anything unusual. Inverters aren't checking for
the _presence_ of a grid supply, they're monitoring it's health. Your local
lines company dictates the trip limits based on your address and size/type of
installation.

As for safety, compare some scenarios that a lines worker could actually find
himself in:

1) he has turned up to a fault and found that a HV line is on the ground and
the auto-recloser is still trying to re-liven it at periodic intervals. The
voltages are so high that walking anywhere near the fault could result in him
being electrocuted due to a step voltage. The power levels involved are high
enough to cause a major explosion. 2) he has to open or close a circuit
breaker in a switch yard. He has no way to know whether the breaker is going
to explode when he racks it in. At least he probably won't know about it if it
does blow up. 3) he turns up to a fault on a 230V line, tests it and finds
that there's still voltage present despite the earlier fault. He visits the
houses connected to that part of the circuit who have a grid tied inverter and
manually isolates them before investigating further.

That last one is hypothetical, since I've never heard of an inverter failing
to turn off and even if one did stay on initially it would very quickly trip
on overload after trying to supply your house and your neighbors all by
itself.

Testing the safety of a circuit before you work on it is an everyday part of
the job for electricians. Finding that a circuit is still live is very common,
and having one re-liven unexpectedly happens too from time to time. You just
take precautions, wear protective gear, and do your best to minimize the
danger.

------
zmmmmm
Just an anecdote, but I had a conversation with a statistician who worked for
the electric utilities here in Australia, and he said that solar subsidies had
been so successful that it has caused a large and completely unanticipated net
drop in power consumption over the summer months. Further, the situation is
embarrassing for the authorities because they negotiated massive electricity
price rises on the basis of needing large infrastructure improvements to
handle future load. These price rises have been very politically sensitive as
they are asserted to be part of the cost of the "carbon tax". It is now clear
there's no need for even a fraction of the infrastructure they're building,
and one consequence has been that there's been a rapid scaling back of solar
subsidies to try and make all parties look a bit less foolish.

I think the moral of the story is that people are way more enthusiastic about
installing this kind of thing than rational analysis would estimate.

~~~
sentenza
Wait a minute. Increased decentralization of power generation _does_ make
large network improvements neccessary. This does (in the case of Australia)
not have anything to do with load, but with locality and network resilience.

The traditional electricity network is a bunch of interconnected star-shaped
networks, each with a large power station in the middle. You now not only have
to get bigger power lines to where the decentralized "power stations" are, but
you also have to increase the overall interconnectedness, to avoid instability
(think parts of the network going out of phase with other parts, localized
overload and so on) due to the volatility of the renewables.

Unlike Australia, some countries with unevenly distributed renewables do
indeed also have to massively increase their overland capacity (central
Europe).

~~~
whatusername
Yes and no. As I understand it -- most of the network improvements are to do
with Peak Load. (ie -- the days where it's 45 degrees C and every household is
cranking A/C). Solar PV definately helps reduce those few days a year Peaks.

In the Australian context -- as I understand it -- the Privatization of the
Electricity Generators was such that they are legislated to only charge a
fixed % of their costs. So the only way for them to make more money is to
increase their cost-base (aka "Gold Plating") and then charge their customers
the additional fees.

------
JDDunn9
Hawaii has the highest cost of electric in the nation. I used to live in
Hawaii, and working from home, my monthly electric bill was $500-$750. Hawaii
also has year-round sun, being close to the equator. The state also has rebate
programs for solar panels. When I was looking into it, if you got a 5-year
loan, it would be cheaper to buy the panels than pay your electric bill.

There's no (legitimate) reason Hawaii's electric should be so high. They just
have no incentive to reduce prices, and they have to keep their 6-figure
salaries. I knew plenty of people that wanted to build solar/wind farms, but
the electric company either wouldn't accept their electric at all, or would
give them pennies on the dollar.

~~~
danielharan
The price per kWh is sky-high there - that said, I'm surprised with that high
a bill. What on earth was using that much energy?

~~~
JDDunn9
Wish I knew. I know most people didn't use A/C at all, and I did, so that may
have been part of it.

~~~
Crito
Did you consider options like swamp coolers? I'm not familiar with Hawaii's
climate so I don't know if they would be effective, but that power bill is
more than many people pay in rent...

~~~
JDDunn9
I never heard of swamp coolers before. Honestly I think the problem was I just
kept my mainland lifestyle. In Hawaii, people keep electric consumption in
mind with every purchase. Most people use fans instead of A/C. High efficiency
appliances. Even keeping lights off whenever possible. I didn't realize the
electric problem until after I had already purchased the large screen plasma
TV, A/C, etc.

~~~
Crito
Swamp coolers are basically just water mist things connected to big fans. They
work off of evaporative cooling, so they are extremely effective if it is dry
but not effective at all if it is humid.

~~~
matthewbadeau
I know on Oahu, certain parts of the island are very dry while others are
extremely wet. I haven't seen evaporative coolers on this island. They might
be here, I just haven't heard of anyone using or talking about them. Many
people have older homes with jalousie windows and rely on the trade winds to
cool their homes down.

------
ChuckMcM
There is always the even more expensive choice of going off grid entirely. But
that requires a power storage facility of some form.

If we are fortunate and can get to reasonable "supercap" sort of technology
this will become easier.

I note with some interest though that most roof top systems put only enough
out that they could, in theory run a Tesla Super Charger to a Tesla battery
supply. You could then pick a point in the afternoon where you did the
'switch' and switched over to inverters running off the Tesla battery pack.
Providing electrical load from that point until it got below a set charge
point on the batteries. Some days you'd probably go from 4PM to 9 or 10PM,
others only until 6 or 7. But you would get the benefit of not having to pay
for that power when you were running off the Tesla. Elon if you're reading
this you should figure out how to make that happen, you'd get better volumes
on the batteries with Tesla (better economics of scale) and people could do
this without utility participation.

~~~
MichaelGG
Is the battery technology the same? I'd imagine in cars space is at a higher
premium and may have other constraints that seem like they might perhaps be
less-than-optimal for houses. I recall seeing large banks of lead-acid(?)
batteries in datacenters and at a few houses.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Sadly no.

With a super capacitor charge is stored as charge, and in a battery charge is
stored by a reversible chemical reaction. The challenge of running the
chemistry back and forth in a battery is what causes them to wear out
eventually, and limits charge and discharge rates.

When we put solar on our house we looked at putting in a whole house "ups" as
it were (the typical off grid setup was not unlike a data center, batteries
that carried you until you could get on to generator power) The maintenance
and replacement of those batteries is a pain.

But in terms of kWh stored and power delivery ability, the packs we were
sizing were not unlike that of a Tesla Model S (65 - 75kWh) and Tesla has
already got a replacement and refurbishment plan in place, and the packs
themselves need no maintenance under normal use. So it seems like an
interesting pre-packaged solution, except you'd need a high efficiency house
inverter as well but progress there has come from the solar investments.

------
edent
I've just had panels installed (in the UK)[0] and we use a hot-water converter
[1].

If we're generating 2kW, and only using 600W - the excess of 400W is _not_ fed
back into the grid; it goes into an immersion heater and gives us hot water.

That saves us on burning natural gas, and prevents problems with the grid.

Now, depending on where you live, hot water may not be the most pressing
problem. But it's slightly more practical that spinning up a fly-wheel :-)

[0] [http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/12/free-money-from-the-
sky/](http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/12/free-money-from-the-sky/) [1]
[http://www.solariboost.co.uk/](http://www.solariboost.co.uk/)

~~~
JelteF
600W + 400W != 2kW

~~~
edent
These are metric watts, not imperial ;-)

------
diarmuidie
One of the big problems with PV and wind power is that they don't offer any
inertial load on the grid. This means that once the percentage of these
sources increase the grid frequency stability decreases.

When using renewables you must still generate a majority of your supply from a
big rotating generator. The inertia of the spinning generator keeps the
frequency from straying from 50/60hz.

In Ireland they broke a record a few years back for having 50% of the electric
generation coming from wind power. This was at the upper limit set by the grid
operator (eirgrid) because above this level the frequency of the grid becomes
unstable. Even though more wind power was available they didn't add it to the
grid.

~~~
marshray
Poor, poor, Ireland. That must be just awful for them. Thank God we in America
aren't at risk of hitting that 50% figure of energy supplied by wind or solar.

~~~
diarmuidie
I should point out that it was only for a few hours in the early morning on a
windy summers night (low base demand, no AC or heating demand).

On average though 2013 renewables provided ~17% of total demand
[[http://www.eirgrid.com/media/EirGridAnnualRenewableReport201...](http://www.eirgrid.com/media/EirGridAnnualRenewableReport2013.pdf)].

System Non-Synchronous penetration (SNSP) is a real-time measure of the
percentage of generation that comes from non-synchronous sources, such as wind
and HDVC interconnector imports relative to the system demand. In the Irish
grid this is limited to 50% for stability.

------
a3n
I think ultimately this will cause people to install these systems to run non-
essentials, with automatic switchovers, and optional battery backup fed by
solar. And yeah, the switchovers and batteries will be expensive, but once
utilities start doing this en masse people who want this bad enough will suck
it up and get their personal benefit from using "free" electricity and
possibly doing the planet good, rather than from selling electricity back.

~~~
djchen
They mention one person's cost for a PV system with batteries in the article,
it was $14,800. (Look for "Hayashi bought a system with batteries"). It also
states the buyer will be able to recoup his upfront cost in 2 years thanks to
tax credits.

That doesn't seem too bad.

------
politician
How do we reconcile the fact that base-load generation (e.g. coal, nuclear) is
hard to throttle, yet PV is increasingly sapping the profits from peak
generation hours (i.e. mid-day) resulting in economic disruptions and perhaps
ultimately in off-peak electricity disruptions as base-load generators become
increasingly expensive to operate?

I personally think that that's the reason the brakes are being put on PV, and
not the populist "robber baron" explanation offered by the article.

~~~
crdoconnor
Isn't that itself a robber baron explanation?

If the grid operator is primarily concerned with profits from peak generation
hours, and trying to prevent solar from impinging upon that, it doesn't seem
reasonable to legislate a way to protect those profits, ESPECIALLY not when it
is environmentally damaging to do so.

~~~
maxerickson
The rate schedules are highly regulated. If they lose the peaks they are going
to either get an increase in other rates or throw their hands in the air and
turn it all off.

The second would be a huge problem. The first is something lots of people are
going to complain loudly about.

~~~
moocowduckquack
_or throw their hands in the air and turn it all off._

Resorting to doing that just drives people onto solar on mass.

~~~
maxerickson
Sure. But lots of those people are currently staying away from solar because
of the capital costs.

It sort of seems like the two big inflection points will be solar getting so
cheap that it pays for itself in a few summers and neighborhood or household
scale batteries becoming practical.

~~~
moocowduckquack
Lightsail has an interesting approach to the storage problem -
[http://www.lightsail.com/blog/making-economical-clean-
energy...](http://www.lightsail.com/blog/making-economical-clean-energy-at-
planet-scale/)

------
bavcyc
Typical transmission design is a loop for redundancy. Distribution lines will
have loops, for the feeders, with an open point such that it is actually a
radial system but one that can be fed from 2 substations/circuits. Laterals
are the lines where there are no redundant circuits. The other option is
networks, which are much more expensive but have much more redundancy.

Lateral design: typically a load curve is used to calculate the maximum load
for each service point. The system is typically designed to handle close to
that amount. If a house has a 200 A main breaker then it can use up to 160 A
of current (unless the NEC changed since I did this type of work). Typically a
house will never use 160 A even at peak load, but better safe than sorry so a
37.5 kVA transformer is probably used.

The power is designed to flow from upstream (substation) to downstream (point
of service). The system protection (reclosers, fuses, circuit breakers, etc.)
are designed to interrupt over-current from the downstream headed upstream.
The exception to this is a network design where protection is designed to
protect equipment in both directions. Network design does not happen much at
the distribution level, although it is used in major cities.

If customer(s) are(is) adding power to the system then at a certain point you
will have reverse power flow. And if the system is not designed for this, then
bad things could happen and customers are not happy when the electric company
causes damages. So the utilities want to be careful.

If the rate payers (customers) want a reliable system with the ability to feed
power back onto the system then there will be a cost associated with it.

For the most part utilities have a monopoly granted by the state and are good
at lobbying to protect their interests. What is best for the customer might
not be best for the utility.

------
blaze33
Today, there's another thread on the front page [1] related to the Google
Fiber "no servers" clause.

So, be it information or energy I can't help but notice the similarities
there. Our networks were essentially designed, decades ago, for mass
production and consumption, I have no doubt we'll end with more distributed
energy production and storage means similar to what happens with the rise of
fast, symmetric Internet connections but in the meantime we'll see a lot of
these stories while the evolution finds its way.

Regarding the electricity consumption, we have access to the French realtime
data online [2], I don't know if there's the equivalent in the U.S., I'll be
curious to see the data for Hawaii. It's interesting to note how the daily
consumption patterns differs between summer and winter (we have a lot of
electric heating in the winter and little, albeit increasing, AC in the
summer). Obviously there's a limit to how much PV you can plug on the grid
without proper storage but it doesn't seem that's already a problem.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6949326](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6949326)
[2] [http://www.rte-france.com/fr/developpement-
durable/eco2mix/c...](http://www.rte-france.com/fr/developpement-
durable/eco2mix/consommation-d-electricite)

------
revelation
There is no technical mystery here. We just need the right legislation to
awake utilities from their century-long sleep on infrastructure investment.
Americas grid is an embarrassment.

~~~
sliverstorm
That's not all we need. We also need the will to fund it. Non-telco electric-
type utilities are not sleeping in piles of money.

------
spiritplumber
I don't know about net metering, but you can build a serviceable system with
12 volt PV cells, recovered UPSs, and some lead-gel batteries (which you
should store outside). You can use car alternator diodes for overvoltage
protection. Should I draw a schematic?

~~~
jzwinck
I don't think a schematic is going to solve the problem at hand. It's more of
a local political issue.

~~~
spiritplumber
True. I was just referring to reducing the price of ancillaries.

------
D9u
What is completely unnecessary is connecting your solar power equipment to
HECO's systems.

Buy some good deep cycle batteries and store your own power off grid.

I live in an area which HECO has chosen not to serve, so that solar is a no
brainer.

$0.49 per Kilowatt Hour is what HELCO (Hawaii Electric Light Company, HECO's
Hawai'i County subsidiary) charges, which is the highest price for electricity
in the USA.

I certainly don't need a $35,000 solar power system, I'm getting by on a
system which cost me about $5k.

My basic needs are refrigeration and lights, as well as power for small
electronics.

For high draw appliances I use a gasoline powered generator. (washer, propane
dryer, power tools, etc)

Screw HECO!

------
Swannie
What is the power utilities number one priority? Profit? Supplying power?
Providing reliable power? Serving its customers? Buying back power from PV
arrays?

If you answered any of these, you're wrong. The number one priority (at least
in the utility I contracted at) was safety. Safety was front and centre in
almost all design decisions related to power system control, and was the
dominant company culture. Even "low" voltage distribution of 230v is dangerous
without the correct equipment and training.

Let's put aside the issues with local transformers and substations - at the
end of the day, AC power are relatively straightforward systems (though they
are far from simple). The control of those systems is, actually, quite
complex, and deals with multiple failure states. Adding PV supply into the mix
is problematic. Though well studied, it appears that without better electical
signalling (for example, overlaid at the local sub/transformer), Islanding
will continue to be an issue.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islanding](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islanding)

------
blazespin
Government needs to fund grid upgrades if they expect Utilities to support
solar.

~~~
Implicated
Because said heavily subsidized utilities can't do it themselves?

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crdoconnor
They have zero incentive to do so.

Ultimately, they should be re-nationalized. Privatized utilities' incentives
are completely screwed up.

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cpwright
My ConEd bill is broken up into delivery and generation charges. I think it is
fair for you to be able to sell power back to the grid, but either at the
whole sale generation cost; or alternatively the generation cost less the
delivery cost. Allowing you to sell it wholesale like any other power producer
seems like it could be a reasonable compromise. That amount might fluctuate
too much to be something understandable or usable. If the distribution cost is
deducted from the amount you net meter, that would also compensate the utility
for having to build the infrastructure to handle the reverse power flow. This
second alternative, of course, has the disadvantage that the power is
"delivered" twice (and thus charged twice).

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ig1
This is nothing new, Germany had similar issues several years ago:

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-29/utilities-giving-
aw...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-29/utilities-giving-away-power-
as-wind-sun-flood-european-grid.html)

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mrfusion
I saw a whole house natural gas electrical generator at Costco for only $2000
I think.

If the grid wont take you I wonder if someone could use solar panels during
the day and use the generator at night. Wouldn't that be cheaper than
batteries?

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skuunk1
Unless the energy companies get to make a profit on solar power they will
fight it tooth and nail with lobbying and legislation, no matter how good it
is for the environment.

Why not set up a system where energy companies install and maintain solar
panels on peoples' houses and then charge for the maintenance as a service (as
opposed to individuals paying for their own panels in order to reduce their
power bills)? That way they will be incentivized to not only offer solar
power, but to invest in technology to also make it more efficient. Also
individual home owners will not need to outlay such a large initial cost.

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crazytony
I'm a little late to this game but I've heard similar stories years before
(maybe California and Germany?)

Does anyone know if utilities are changing their installation design books? To
me that would be the first place to start. I don't know about Hawaii but I
know in other parts of the US massive subdivisions are being put in on a
regular basis. I would hope that those new subdivisions would be geared to
support this use case.

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dhughes
It must be nice to have the option of solar panels, at present I have a metre
of snow on my roof and that's on the south side.

And that's after I spent three hours shovelling off as much as I could before
the ice storm hit us today.

It snow 15cm before the ice storm now I'm back to square one.

I'd like to have solar panels but I can't see how I could keep them from being
covered in snow without shovelling them off off at least once per week Dec to
Feb.

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oijaf888
Couldn't you just wire up resistance heater wire between the panels? It might
take a little while to melt all of them but that would be a pretty simple
solution.

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transfire
Reduce your load, buy a generator and/or batteries and dump the grid.

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blazespin
This is not feasible with current battery technology. See the article for more
information.

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known
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_quo_bias](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_quo_bias)

