The link doesn't mention it, but ERCOT (the Texas grid) is the one most at risk here, because state law specifically forbids linking it to other regional power grids so that the state can avoid federal laws regulating utility companies. The other grids are all connected to their neighbors, which can help compensate for issues by transferring power between them.
The Texas Interconnection is tied to the Eastern Interconnection with two DC ties, and has a DC tie and a VFT to non-NERC (North American Electric Reliability Corporation) systems in Mexico. There is one AC tie switch in Dayton, Texas that has been used only once in its history (after Hurricane Ike). On October 13, 2009, the Tres Amigas SuperStation was announced to connect the Eastern, Western and Texas Interconnections via eight 5 GW superconductor links.
It’s a matter of capacity. ERCOT only has 1220 MW of interconnection capacity across 4 asynchronous links [1]. Compare this to e.g. California ISO which seems to have about 10,000-15,000 MW of synchronous interconnection capacity [2]. Neither is adequate to fully support historic peak demand in the system [3-4], but California has much more flexibility in emergencies.
I live in ATX, where the ice can knock out power for days to a week. This winter, Austin Energy accomplished a Herculean but Sisyphean task of reconnecting 130k customers in a few days.
Municipal grid gear here isn't rated for the ice burden like utilities in the north east.
It seems to stem from the 2021 ice storm outage, but that wasn't even close to the worst power outages seen in other parts of the US that are part of larger interconnects, so I don't see why it's special other than it's hip to hate on Texas by coastal elites like us.
Well a lot of people were annoyed Texas tried to blame the issue on renewable energy. Also people saw the private management of the grid or whatever being arguably attributable to the failures (outages, people freezing, people being overcharged) as a case study for why Republican strategies are less than ideal. Also, just everything is politicized because it’s easy to do so when you’re constantly on Twitter reacting to other people’s reactions.
Well I'm not an fan of the Texas republicans but, in the grand scheme of things Abbott wasn't entirely wrong.
So, the wind was blowing at a tiny fraction of its installed capacity. Had it been producing at anything near its nameplate capacity then we wouldn't be talking about this now. But of course this isn't entirely unexpected, it was the predicted behavior.
OTOH, the reliable sources of power in TX has been getting squeezed for decades now. Many of them are only making money when the wind stops blowing. The rest of the time they are starving, so its no wonder they cut weatherization efforts (and lots of other things) because it costs money for something which may/may not happen. And you have to pay the NG suppliers to maintain a couple extra orders of magnitude in capacity and storage which sits unused most of the time, which again they didn't do. So the wind didn't blow, and the NG plants and producers simply failed to make up the loss because they didn't have the cash to assure their own reliability.
So, its basically what many people (including myself on this board) have been saying for a long time. What you have now is a game of weather predictions statistics dictating the reliability of the power grid. Its possible to win for years on end, and then boom perfect alignment of the stars and you fall back to non renewable sources which have been underfunded and not built out sufficiently to carry the full grid load. So you can play games with the statistics but solving the problem is an exponential cost problem unless you willing to just go build and maintain 100% of the grid requirements using carbon sources as backup.
It wasn’t just the 2021 outage. Ercot fails the same way every decade or so.
Also, that outage knocked out something like 25% of global PVC production for about a year, which interfered with basic infrastructure projects globally. You can’t build modern drainage or plumbing without PVC. Without drainage or plumbing, you can’t build buildings or repair roads.
Also, it was totally predictable, totally avoidable, a bunch of people died as a direct result, and the last N times this happened, they did nothing to fix it.
(Fixing it would involve winterizing their production facilities, which over half the planet has done every year for over a century.)
Uh right, so almost the exact same thing happened in 2011, and that is how the energy cap was raised to $9K/MWh. The idea being to incentivize the reliable operators to be reliable by paying them a fortune when the power is most needed. Which as we found out didn't exactly work that way because bean counters aren't happy to fund reliability for "what if" scenarios that happen once a decade.
This time around they largely just reverted that previous action and returned it to the earlier 2012 proposal (~5k/MHw), and recently have been talking about basically having the state government pay to build NG plants. (although i've not been paying real close attention to where those bills went).
But ERCOT energy is also cheaper than the US national average. The reason that 25% of global PVC production was ultimately sourced from Texas was probably linked to those power costs.
I'd rather my regulators copied ERCOT than what they are actually doing; I pay a lot for power because of serial gold-plating of infrastructure. Then maybe Australia'd be able to afford to manufacture something in globally significant quantities.
Not "fixing" things can lead to better outcomes for most people.
Ok, but the cost of the outages far exceeds the cost of buying antifreeze for the facilities that failed, even when averaged over the years between failures (and this has happened so often, we have that data).
The reason it hasn’t been fixed is that the ercot market (which is an artificial, legislated thing) is intentionally structured so that the production facilities make unbounded profit during correlated failures.
I say “intentionally” because this keeps happening and the legislature explicitly refuses to fix it. There is no better proof than that.
One simple solution, assuming you don’t like legislating technical fixes, which I don’t like either, is to fine the shit out of them during correlated failures. For example (real legislation would hopefully be better):
100% of money in the market during months with more than a 10% peak outage would go to the game and wildlife service, or some other popular Texas thing, and they could establish criminal liability for intentionally curtailing production during power shortages. So, when this happens, costs go to max, and revenue goes to zero.
Or, they could just legislate basic 1800’s reliability measures.
Or, they could let all the idiots that voted these idiots freeze, but keep the industrial facilities online.
At this point, I don’t care. (Despite the efforts of some red state politicians to detain pregnant women, the US still has open internal borders, after all).
Anyway, I just want to be able to buy PVC the next time a line in my yard gets cut.
Nothing makes me give a shit about grid reliability in far off lands more than, well, a literal pool of it.
Just to double check, you actually do mean you're happy for some people to die from cold in exchange for lower energy bill for yourself, and ignoring the required infrastructure maintenance? (hoping outages won't affect you too much)
No, that would be stupid. The idea would be to save ~25% on power bills, let the grid fail once a decade and build up alternative things for dealing with disasters, like some sort of well stocked and warm community hall.
That would be much cheaper, and has the added benefits like prepares the community for all sorts of disasters.
This means people dying. To move people to a community hall you need enough transportation, clear roads, working communication, and many other things that are indirectly relying on power being available or the disaster plans working properly. (Which they sometimes won't) Also this would have to work for everyone at risk - not for the number of deaths we know about, but likely 100x that.
You can't ignore the effects of that once-a-decade failure and hope things will work fine.
What, so the grid is indestructible but organising diesel for buses is an impossible task? That isn't realistic at all.
Wikipedia tells me that something like 250 to 1,000 people died in the Texas power outage which was basically the worst conditions the state has ever seen. Assuming that the at-risk population was 100x that we're still talking numbers that can be managed in an emergency fashion a lot more cheaply than raising power prices by 33% across the board which seems to roughly be the gap from Texas to California.
Raising power prices 33% will also kill people, they won't be able to heat their homes every year. I know people who have that problem right now, it is horrible. Even raising prices by ~10% to go from Texas to US national average will probably kill people. Someone will have to make hard choices between eating and heating if the prices go up 10% in real terms. Cheap power saves lives.
> What, so the grid is indestructible but organising diesel for busses is an impossible task?
No, grids fail locally quite often and that's easier to manage. A large scale outage where you need to move thousands of people, and know who/where they are in the first place, with plans not fully tested for a decade at a time however is going to fail in many ways, especially when communication is also impacted. Maintaining the plans, training, supplies, etc long term is also not trivial.
Community can step us locally in many ways, but not as state-wide solution.
> be managed in an emergency fashion a lot more cheaply than raising power prices by 33% across the board
There an assumption that it will be effective at scale. And that the price increase would be required. (I've seen quite a few sources saying proper maintenance would be cheaper than dealing with the fallout)
Yeah sounds expensive to do right. Do you think it would cost more or less than regulations that ended up raising electricity prices by 10%? Hint: it'd be much cheaper.
> Community can step us locally in many ways, but not as state-wide solution.
Actually it can. Coping without power for a few days is 100% something that a local community can do. There isn't a need for state-wide coordination although that'd probably help.
I mean, end of the day you're worried about a couple of hundred lives once a decade (and, for scale, hundreds of thousands of people die in Texas each year already - probably quite a few of which could be saved if power was cheaper!). The regulation is obviously not worth it, there are cheaper ways to look after cold people.
The costs of outages are much greater than just a few people dying. A lot of effort is put into quantifying the costs of reliability on the electric system, only for you to just hand-wave it all away. At least try to educate yourself at more than a surface level if you’re going to argue about it online.
You're up against permanent increases in the cost of electricity which would likely be measured in tens of percent. Proposing to take that cost on to mitigate a once-in-a-decade event is unlikely to be cost effective. And that is generously assuming that this is actually a once-a-decade event and not an outlier that caught everyone off guard.
If you want to make an argument that it might be cost effective go ahead; I'd suggest that prices would be going to go up somewhere in the range of 10-33%. ERCOT responding by increasing standards on power producers is the usual brain-dead response that pushes prices up higher than what people would need to pay if they had a choice. Which is going to cause more damage and probably kill more people, it just happens to be deaths that the pro-regulatory types feel comfortable with ignoring because it isn't easy to name names.
You don't need to educate yourself as much as sit down and think through the second order effects of whether the situation is actually broken before asking ERCOT to 'fix' it. They are going to push the situation somewhere where the net damage will be more than it is now.
It's not about the outage in 2021, but the bills that were produced during that ice storm. During the ice storm, the utilities charged the max, $9,000/kwh, leading to people having five-figure bills just to keep the heat on for nine days so they didn't freeze to death. The NYT headline is of someone who owes $16,752. Most Americans can't pay a surprise $500 bill, never mind a sixteen thousand dollar one. It's become political because there's a question of if the government should step in and do something about those unaffordable bills. The matter is currently tied up in court so we'll just have to wait and see where this goes.
The other bit of politics is that this is a proxy fight for "can government regulation be good"? Government regulation would have prevented the prices from skyrocketing, but the thesis of Texas is that government regulation is bad.
The people who got absurd bills are the ones who explicitly opted in to paying the wholesale prices on the grid. In the good times that could mean paying very low (or even negative) prices[0]. But that was a gamble, and in the ice storm they lost hard.
Now perhaps retail customers shouldn't be allowed to be directly exposed to the wholesale grid prices for their own protection, but it's not like these were people buying a perfectly normal electric plan who then got wacked over the head with a $16k bill.
> But that was a gamble, and in the ice storm they lost hard.
It wasn't necessarily a fair gamble. It was determined after the fact that for 2 of the 3 days, it shouldn't have been kept that high. There's still questions as to why, and who stood to benefit.
As I recall, that $9000/MWh cost actually went primarily to power distribution companies, who, to my understanding, had been somewhat neglectful at making sure their systems could handle such adverse conditions... Which is a sort of 'insult to injury' in that a decade prior a similar situation happened.
> As I recall, that $9000/MWh cost actually went primarily to power distribution companies,
There was a power company ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griddy ) that offered wholesale spot rates to retail customers. As this was often lower than other retail prices and the customers were intend to be savvy of the demands they were putting on the grid (and turning off things when prices went too high), this lead to some rather large bills.
> Many of the people who have reported extremely high charges, including Mr. Willoughby, are customers of Griddy, a small company in Houston that provides electricity at wholesale prices, which can quickly change based on supply and demand.
> The company passes the wholesale price directly to customers, charging an additional $9.99 monthly fee. Much of the time, the rate is considered affordable. But the model can be risky: Last week, foreseeing a huge jump in wholesale prices, the company encouraged all of its customers — about 29,000 people — to switch to another provider when the storm arrived. But many were unable to do so.
> Katrina Tanner, a Griddy customer who lives in Nevada, Texas, said she had been charged $6,200 already this month, more than five times what she paid in all of 2020. She began using Griddy at a friend’s suggestion a couple of years ago and was pleased at the time with how simple it was to sign up.
A lot of people don’t explicitly opt into these plans. In Texas there are dozens of private companies to choose from when getting setting up an electricity plan. Some of these companies pull shady tactics like starting you on a discount plan for one year then automatically rolling you to the wholesale price plan. They have salesman at the grocery store signing vulnerable people up. You could still call that opting in because they signed the deal.
In the winter outage case, shutting off the power may have resulted in freezing to death. Should choosing the wrong power contract result in death while you sleep?
You seem to be coming from the position that there was enough power for everybody. That was not the case.
Besides, how hard is throwing on an extra blanket, layering up shirts, wearing a couple jackets, etc.
A house doesn't instantly cool down, either. It may take a day or two for the temp in the house to decline. You'll still get solar gain through the windows, and some coming up from the ground.
Those people purposely signed contracts exposing them to the spot prices. They got exactly what they signed up for. Those people were few overall as well, by the way. Most people are on fixed contracts.
Yes, that definitely happened. My retail electric provider (REP) closed up and sold my contract to another company who honored it until the end of the contract (which is actually only just now expiring).
My costs went up a bit because my delivery fees are subject to change based on regulatory approval. But otherwise I, and many others, didn't experience absurdly high electric bills from this.
> just to keep the heat on for nine days so they didn't freeze to death
I wonder how people survived freezing weather before HVAC systems.
> Government regulation would have prevented the prices from skyrocketing
The Law of Supply & Demand is always in play, meaning price caps result in shortages. According to your post, shortages mean people will freeze to death.
I would assume that historically, cold snaps like the ones resulting in the Texas 2011/2021 blackouts were far less common.
To that point, an article [0] published shortly after indicates that 61% of all homes in Texas used electrical heating rather than Natural Gas. While -yes-, you still typically need electricity to run a gas heater, the grid demands are certainly much lower compared to an electric heater.
>The Law of Supply & Demand is always in play, meaning price caps result in shortages.
I think people who want prices controlled are thinking of doing it by controlling demand via rationing. Some people don't get all the power they want at any price, so others can get a minimal amount.
If someone wrote an OS that starved low priority processes of run time, you wouldn't say it was a law of nature, you'd say the scheduler should be fixed, right?
Is it meant to be a logical truth, independent of empirical facts? To me, it's a contingent fact even though it often is true. Nor do I see any reason to be certain that rationing which does cause some misallocation necessarily creates net harm.
Do you believe that markets can be evaluated based on some independent standard of appropriate allocation of goods and services?
If you have a fireplace you don’t use you’d do well to have a flue inspection before you light a fire in it though. If there’s a birds nest or something up there or cracked masonry or - in an older house - creosote deposits that could catch fire? You’re gonna have a bad day when you light up.
Probably because they are literally overseen by political entities and their leadership is partially selected by the legislature. They are a political entity.
I'm annoyed because I'm being forced to pay for the inflated energy prices caused by the Texas outage. My incumbent utilities got permission from the PUC to charge us.
They were minutes away from a total meltdown that would’ve knocked out their grid for months, according to the heads of ERCOT at the time. Had they not issued an emergency rolling blackout and destroyed the grid, it would’ve undoubtedly been one of the largest humanitarian disasters in American history.
Texas wasn't really set up for being so cold, so it caused deaths and considerable damage because the infrastructure was simply not good enough to handle it (despite being very new/modern in most cases).
It got politicized because it was so difficult for people there to handle it. When other places have power outages, the infrastructure and building designs make living through it much easier.
I’m pretty sure much more damage is done yearly by fires started by PG&E but no one seems to constantly bash California’s power company. The focus on ERCOT is most certainly because of politics at least on Reddit and WaPo etc where we see the most noise.
I’ve seen tons of PG&E bashing for the fires on this very forum, not to mention in the news media. Just because you haven’t witnessed it don’t assume it isn’t happening. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Part of it is that the rest of the country is being told that Texas (and Florida) are economic miracles, so their influence could extend beyond their borders.
Texas set up an energy market that was to eliminate waste and in doing so set up their grid so that it was constantly almost at load shedding (as that has the least waste).
The problem is there were minutes away from a black start in which Texas would have been without power for an extended period of time - not days but weeks or months (and that the black start generators were also failing).
Connecting to a larger system seems like it would reduce your risk on average, but increase systemic risk. Perhaps a coordinated terrorist attack would cause a power outage across the entire country except Texas, making it more appealing?
If someone attacked all the interconnects then the net importers would lose power or brown out while the net exporters would be just fine. (assuming the net importers are currently running power generation at capacity).
For the grids under load, if more capacity can't be brought online they'd do rolling blackouts while working to restore the interconnects.
There are far better targets for a coordinated terrorist attack if they wanted a larger impact.
The option to connect to spare capacity and to sell power to another market is more useful than not having it. The worst case would be needing it but not having it.
The risk of very high altitude "super EMP" nuclear attacks is the most concerning. If Taiwan were attacked, it would stand to reason that China would first create CONUS disasters against infrastructure without a direct, kinetic military attack. This would be most effectively deployed by EMP at very high altitude while simultaneously sabotaging infrastructure with hacking.
The core problem with this argument is that if China were to detonate a nuclear weapon high in the atmosphere the US will immediately retaliate with massive nuclear strikes in which case the world would effectively end
If solar on rooftops (with batteries or EV connections) became really widespread in the US it may make some sense to be able to isolate communities from the rest of the grid to localize failures. Utilities would probably hate it but it could be really resistant to disruption.
> Utilities would probably hate it but it could be really resistant to disruption.
I mean, I don't really understand why they'd hate it. I'd hope they'd embrace it. Deploying batteries for communities would allow utilities to still support things like net metering while also also allowing them to turn off grid connection for an area so the main lines can be worked on (without disrupting service).
It'd also give them a lot more time to address outages, even really severe ones.
Not to mention their ability to better control load and generation with rapid response batteries.
I have a dynamic pricing contract, prices are generally around or slightly below fixed market rates, but when it's sunny or windy I get power for free, or better. Got paid to charge my car today. I like it, because it makes me more mindful of the e-grid (also free power)
So, it is possible to have some force changing consumer behavior. It all depends on sane legislation, allowing a system like this to exist.
We have a dynamic (hourly rates) contract as well and well and we sometimes see negative electricity prices. This does not mean electricity ends up being free since there is also the transmission charge, energy tax, renewable energy surcharge and value added tax on all of these to pay. Do you actually get paid to use power, i.e. do you not have to pay any of the mentioned charges?
If they do get 100% free, this continually reraises a question of mine: outside of crypto mining, is there anything a consumer can do to capture benefit from free electricity? Low efficiency synthesis of ethanol, hydrogen, carbon capture, desalination, precious mineral enrichment from seawater? With net metering rates tanking, I would love to see some way to productively capture spare juice. The duck curve is not going anywhere.
Easiest is probably using your house as a thermal battery and just temporarily dumping energy into cooling or heating down to a set temp and then when allowing your house to normalize when prices go up.
Alternatively, charge your own batteries and load balance. It's boring but effective.
You could have your computer queued to run high energy ops when free, queue training models, compiling, etc. Which would generate a lot of heat, thus cranking the AC.
I could see how this could easily 10x your power draw for a few thousand dollars and work in the background.
If in a cold climate, heat the earth under your house. Then, that earth slowly gives its heat back to you over the coming months (soil is quite a poor thermal conductor, so the heat hangs around underground for a really long time)
Obscenely powerful heaters are rather cheap. Assuming prices only go negative pretty rarely, you really want 100 kilowatts or more of heaters under your house to get as much free power as possible.
Residential power here for single family homes -- the type which could reasonably do what you suggest -- is almost always single phase 120/240V. As an upper bound, let's consider 400A service. (Most homes have services smaller than 400A, and even 400A service is typically delivered to a pair of smaller panels to keep conductor and busbar sizes manageable.) Such heaters would be considered continuous loads, reducing the 400A service to 320A of current. Resistive heaters are a linear load, so we can multiply 240V * 320A to get 76.8 kW at maximum.
Hitting 76 kW is wildly impractical. Exceeding 100 kW is nonsense.
Often the base price is negative but you still pay some for taxes etc. Yesterday, net price was also negative because the base price was so ridiculously low...
I had a similar contract when I lived in IL, and I also liked it and it made me more conscious of my energy usage patterns.
But there was always this niggling concern that the price could spike to 200x like it did in Texas, without me being able to react. Regulation to cap the peak rate would help allay consumer fears, IMO, while still offering ample profit potential to providers.
I want to see electricity meters configurable with a "max I am happy to pay per day" setting. When that limit is near, they beep/alert you. When you hit the cap, they turn off the whole house.
You could adjust the limit as you please, with a default of perhaps $100 - but they spare you from million dollar bills, even with uncapped dynamic pricing.
If a reasonable number of these were deployed, the prices would never spike super high, because there would always be someone else willing to turn off their tumble dryer to save 50 bucks.
Just hoping that everything in fridge doesn't spoil until billing resets at midnight? That doesn't sound like a gamble most people would be willing to make, especially on a regular basis. I would imagine that at least for the (shrinking) middle class and above that widespread instability in the grid will drive the sale of a lot of PV systems and battery storage.
From my experience with regular power outages in the Seattle metropolitan area, your fridge will last 24 hours after the power goes out, if you don't open the door.
Your water heater will provide water hot enough for a quick shower for a couple days.
Sure, that doesn't sound like a stretch, though most people would find that not being able to open the fridge for many hours would cramp their style...
There’s circuit breakers with wifi connectivity that lets you turn off load through an api. Could code this up or use their apps for energy management.
Consumer demand just isn’t there for this type of product yet
That's a neat idea and all but what do you do when it's -20° out? Everyone around you simultaneously needs heating but no one's trying tumble dry anything.
but you've hit your daily limit? It's one thing to charge your Tesla later, it's anything
If you live in an area that can drop to -20, you should be prepared for HVAC failure.
Just like when I lived in Iowa, the car always had blankets in the trunk. When I lived in Arizona, there was always a gallon of drinking water in the trunk (it works in the radiator, too!).
While I completely agree with you (and still carry blankets in my trunk in AZ!) the freeze in Texas was an anomaly that may nor may not have been reasonable to plan for:
> Texas experienced temperatures over 50 °F [28 °C] below normal. Records more than a century old were broken
How many people have planned and can execute plans for once in a century events that happen at scale?
I’d consider myself more prepared than most, but if a large chunk of Phoenix lost power in the middle of the summer for more than 24 hours, I think the result would be even worse. There was a study from a few days ago that predicted >12k deaths during a heat wave+power outage. That makes me reconsider not getting whole house batteries ;-)
Even with a cap, it feels like it would just take one freak occurrence (power plant/transformer/blizzard) meltdown to erase any potential savings from subscribing to dynamic pricing.
With the horror stories in Texas, I was assuming significantly worse caps. Regardless, I have very little consumption I can time shift to off-peak hours (laundry? dishwasher?), so dynamic pricing would unlikely ever work out for me.
Fixed pricing is basically dynamic pricing + insurance. In the expected case, you pay more over any period of time if you take the insurance. If you can afford the risks, going without insurance tends to be cheaper.
Home solar installs (and that change) would be NEM, not TOU. California had a mandate to move everyone to TOU a while back, though some might still be on the old plans.
As a residential electricity user there is little reason for me to be on tou unless I also have an Nem for installed solar. All the tou might do is expose me to inconvenience and high costs.
That really depends on your usages. The extreme examples are if you have an electric car that you can charge overnight instead of peak hours, or work any shift that's not 9-5 so that you avoid the 6-9pm peak hours.
And of course the whole point is to incentivize changing usages to using less power during peak hours, which it does better than the old plans. There's always going to be a slight inconvenience to get everyone to change habits.
It's mainly going to inconvenience the poorest people who have the least amount of flexibility.
I have solar and a battery so it's really very little inconvenience for me, but those who can't afford that (and it's harder to afford now), will pay the worst costs.
By disincentivizing residential solar, the private utilities maximize their profits and decrease renewable energy installation.
The poorest people still won't be able to afford residential solar even with the greatest incentives. And the old rates that forced the electric company to buy electricity at 1:1 retail rates which was never sustainable. Those rates include grid maintenance, not just power generation.
Unless you have a battery, your peak demand is likely to be when solar generation is low, so you're still reliant on the same grid capacity during peak hours. That's the duck curve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve
Under the old plan, if you have solar and no battery and exported enough power during the day to cover your electricity costs at night, how much are you paying for grid upkeep? Basically zero. So who is going to be paying for the grid? Those who cannot afford to get solar. That would become a huge problem when the majority of people have solar panels.
But they don't buy at retail rates, so that's a fallacy. The CA utilities pay a fraction of retail rate for residential grid energy inputs with even the old NEM. And I am charged a separate grid connection fee with that setup, so nothing of what you're saying seems to align with my direct experience nor with the policy coverage I've read.
In my experience, any excess you generate is given to you in 1:1 credit. Any excess in the credit after a year is paid in a fraction of rates, yes. Sure I have a daily basic charge, but that's on the TOU plan, not NEM. Otherwise what did you think NEM 3.0 changed if NEM 2.0 was already a fraction of retail rates? Which power company are you on and what rates are you getting?
Even the CPUC's website says "retail rate (including generation, distribution, and transmission components)": https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/NEM/
The grid has to be built to handle peak power, and if you don't have a battery, solar doesn't help with that. But it's not fair to split up grid fees evenly, say in the daily basic charge I have in my TOU plan, because poorer people will use less power and contribute less to peak. And you've brought up points on why raising prices during peak is no good either, then it'll be only affordable to the ones who have solar to offset it. And any fees only to solar customers disincentivizes solar.
Utilities are actually incentivized to charge more per kwh in order to capture profits at an allowed percentage of that kwh. That really serves nobody but the shareholders of the private utilities, and it certainly does not serve the poorer customers. The poorer customers would be served by the fastest move to renewable energy, as pollution from fossil fuel generation also disproportionately affects their health due to placement of generation in their neighborhoods disproportionately.
I found this podcast interesting in terms of lower cost technical solutions as well as community control of their own microgrids, but it's really unclear how to push back private utility lobbying to get there.
Those are completely different topic than residential solar though. I don't disagree, we should be moving to renewables. But even in a community microgrid, are you going to incentivize private solar? There still isn't really a way to incentivize too much without passing along costs to those who cannot afford solar. I would much rather have a community owned solar power station, instead of funding individual private residential solar.
It's not a completely different topic. If a microgrid interface is allowed, for example, then different community and investment models can be considered on a per microgrid basis. If only utility models exist, then most likely a much narrower set of models exist - and likely under serving many communities and groups in addition to higher pricing.
> Electricity isn't even a market where people can 'panic buy' like toilet paper.
People can "panic buy" generators, and have been doing so for a while. With solar panels on the roof for when the sun is available and some alternative source like your generator (cheap to buy, expensive to use) or batteries (expensive to buy, cheap to use) for when it is not and power has failed you can be mostly energy independent.
That happened in NorCal in 2019. There were no generators to be had south of Chico, CA that summer. Had to go halfway to Redding to a random Home Depot that didn't have a large customer base. When you need a generator because PG&E decided to have a PSPS for a week or 2 without warning, then you need it immediately. It's not a panic purchase when it's an emergency purchase of inelastic necessity, not hoarding of 4000 rolls of toilet paper.
Gasoline generators are a PITA. Most of them require frequent oil changes. And floating neutral generators generally won't work well with GFI circuits because they easily see an imbalance in current across neutral and to the ground path. If you want your generator to be safe and work with GFI, you'll have to use a bonded one and ground it.
Most residential solar sets in California lack battery backup capacity and do not generate power in the absence of grid power "for safety". This is because most homeowners are uninformed consumers and don't know what options they need. It's worth getting a subpanel, moving critical loads to them, and having a 3-way ATS with solar-batteries-inverter, grid tie, and an autostart natural gas generator.
The trick with a gas generator is to have an electrician install an interlock on your electric panel along with a hookup to your generator. Then it's a snap to switch over to the generator, and start it.
The only trouble is that gives no indication when the power comes back on. So there you are, generator blasting away, while power is restored. Leave a couple circuits always connected to the line power, and hook those to a radio or a light so you know when the line is back up.
P.S. if you get a generator with an electric starter, odds are good the battery will be dead. The trick is to add a couple power posts to it, so you can jump start it with your car.
I use a mechanical interlock like you have described and I actually prefer it to a more complex ATS. I like simple systems.
But you can, in fact, see when utility power comes back on if you have a "smart meter" - the LCD panel readout is dead/blank during the outage but is active and displaying once the power comes back on.
So we just peek at the meter every once in a while to see if PG&E is back ...
I agree with your general argument (retail consumers overwhelmingly do not face instantaneous price signals).
However, I think you can "panic buy" electricity. I live in a place with unreliable electricity. On hot days, I'm more inclined to cool my house with the AC earlier/colder than I would if I could absolutely count on the electricity being available. If the power goes out, at least my house is cool for a short while.
Contrary to this report, I've seen multiple predictions[0] that due to a generous amount of hydro generation available after the winter storms, California should have adequate supply this summer.
They don't really have anything to do with each other other than both dealing with "power." Your report is talking about total capacity/generation due to having average stock of hydro and the linked report is talking about usage during "extreme demand" periods.
It doesn't matter how much generating capacity you have if you can't transmit all of it to where it's needed when all AC's are on full blast and everyone is charging their cars and everyone is cooking on electric stoves, or need to totally cut it off to large areas to prevent forest/wild fires during these extreme demand periods, which is when it's hottest. Blackouts/brownouts will still continue, and even be planned for, even with excess hydro. Infrastructure/delivery goes way beyond just raw generation.
They'll get batteries and solar too eventually. Prices of these things will come down over time. And grids will adapt to incentivize people to have them as that is cheaper than building a lot of new plants and infrastructure. Virtual plants are much cheaper for them and can be used to balance the grid.
> The total capacity of energy projects in U.S. interconnection queues grew 40% year-over-year in 2022, with more than 1,350 GW of generation and 680 GW of storage waiting for approval to connect, according to a new report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
While listening to a recent NPR podcast about green energy, the claimed that there were projects proposed for green energy that in sum would be larger than todays complete US generation from all sources.
The main problems are around interconnect and upgrading infrastructure. Lines and transformers are built to a certain capacity and connecting all these new projects could cause failures and blackouts. BEFORE you can even get approved, there has (historically) been a multi-year study required to validate everything. They are now doing them in groups of projects of 50 or more. However, then the estimates are for what would be needed for ALL 50 projects which is clearly overkill as they won't all pan out.
There is money in the Inflation Reduction Act to help upgrade the infrastructure and expedite the process but it is a trickle when we need more. The other approach is to just hook things up and wait until something breaks. Then the supplier would have to limit their capacity until they paid for increased carrying capacity. All said, this seems to indicate that infrastructure is the main bottleneck.
From my quick skim of the site, it was unclear to me the timing of the queue. Do projects sit in there for 90 days or three years before approval?
Once approved, the project still has to be built, correct? Is there a resource that lists plants which are actively expanding? That seems like a more useful short term metric to understand new capacity, because items in the queue may never be constructed.
It's both, a small project with grid capacity nearby can be approved quickly but larger projects without nearby capacity can take years to get resolved.
I'm glad ERCOT added 4 GW of renewable generation capacity, but that doesn't translate into regional or localized energy reserves. Distributed energy storage relieves transmission grid capacity. Without enough grid capacity, consumption can't be fulfilled even with infinite generation capacity. The challenge is in deploying safe and efficient distributed energy storage, also realizing there are domestic terrorists who aren't above shooting holes in transformer fins.
We absolutely should acknowledge the causes of our infrastructure uptime differences and evaluate if it's actually worth it to match the uptime of a place that doesn't have the same challenges.
Like, sure, if we wanted to we could massively build our electrical infrastructure to absolutely never go down. Hurricanes, tornadoes, massive hail, earthquakes, whatever. We can build so much redundancy and extreme engineering tolerances. It might cost us $1+/kWh though. Is it worth it? No? So then there's some dollar amount where we'll allow some downtime and failures for cost savings.
So what if the power in my house goes down a few minutes a year. I'd much rather pay a lot less for a few minutes of downtime than pay a lot more just so...the lights don't go out for a few minutes every now and then?
I’d also point out that Germany has its share of wild weather, including floods and storms. And yet they keep their grid up a lot more reliably than the US.
Germany has some floods, but nothing like a hurricane or tornado. I only spent 2 years in Germany, but even a typical summer thunderstorm in the NE US seemed worse than in Germany.
If Japan had 1.2 minutes of outages a year would you say Germany had shit infrastructure? No because 12 minutes is great and not really worth improving on.
2 hours per year without power per year is probably fine. A year is a long time.
Don’t get the Tesla power wall, it’s more locked down than anything else in the market. Get a system you control with an API you can access, not proprietary crap.
Like locked down OSes and hardware, locked down distributed energy resources will be the next place where you’ll lose your access to your devices due to corporate greed. The data and API access for DERs are like GOLD today. If you don’t control them, someone else will, and poorly. No company I’ve seen today is competent enough to scale to what’s going to be needed in the future. They’re all focused on cloud stuff, but at the scale energy works at and the compute necessary to efficiently use future energy systems, we’re going to need to switch to a distributed system on the edge, at the generation and load sites.
Edit: I’m in HN slow mode for some reason, likely that the fascists aren’t my fan today and have been flagging all my comments, so here’s my reply:
Sorry, no, but I mostly deal with commercial products. I know of the power wall only because my friend got them and they kinda suck. Tesla sometimes fucks up control, too, draining the battery for their own use to make money on their VPP. I suggest asking directly to the sales people if you will have full, free access to your telemetry in bulk to download and that you have API access to the whole system. Those are the two most important factors.
Better still to use a hybrid inverter plus battery with an open API which you do not allow access to the 'net, instead accessing the things through a proxy like OpenHAB or HA. Isolate all your IoT equipment on a network which is blocked from accessing the 'net and use proxy applications for control and data visualisation.
I'm using a Fronius Symo GEN24 in this way, I can access all features through the API, it can not suddenly update itself without my knowledge or consent. I do not have a battery attached yet since these are too expensive still and I can sell any excess power at market rates for the coming 5 years. After that time I expect battery prices to have gone down so I'll probably get a set of batteries which should enable us to be mostly energy independent from spring to autumn.
No third parties are involved in any way, no data is exchanged with "the cloud".
Edit: I'm also rate limited for some reason, a common occurrence [1]. No idea whether this is related to flagging, my UID being throttled by default or some other cause. It does not seem to be related to downvoted posts since I have been rate limited many times without any visible downvotes.
I was thinking something similar. You're saying 1/3 of North America is at no risk of energy shortage even during extreme demand? I find that hard to believe.
Relevant but only one set of constraints among many: after an epic winter snowfall, water level has hit 2 years ago at Lake Powell and only last year's level at Mead...
Nuclear plants take 15-20 years to build in practice, cost double, triple or more of initial estimates just for construction, more billions for teardown, and even more for storing all the waste. On top of that they're at real risk for natural disasters (of which no US state is secure - either it's hurricanes or earthquakes) and accidents due to mismanagement and corner-cutting. And no one wants to live near one either, which means a shitton more cost in construction because you have to build them in the desert, or the project gets boggled down for years by NIMBYs.
In contrast, you can build a solar or wind plant in less than a year. And the profits for these end up in the local community where they stand instead of investment funds owning the nuclear plant operators.
Nuclear power is a base energy source. It’s not as easy to start and stop power generation with nuclear. You can use nuclear to help cover your base usage but then you have to rely on sources like solar, wind, natural gas, etc, to help in the high demand.
Extreme heat events tend to go hand in hand with great solar yields. So actually building some solar power plants would be a sensible thing to do.
But that would probably need some involvement from public sector and US public sector has been systematically dismantled since Reagan at least.
I am not saying it's not happening elsewhere, but I sure am glad that it's not going to be me and my family who's gonna eventually reclaim the public sector at the cost of watering the democracy tree.
> Many of our customers in Massachusetts want to know exactly how changes in heat can affect solar panel performance. Solar panels are generally tested at about 77°F and are rated to perform at peak efficiency between 59°F and 95°F. However, solar panels may get as hot as 149°F during the summer. When the surface temperature of your solar panels gets this high, solar panel efficiency can decline somewhat.
> ...
> For example, the temperature coefficient of LG NeON® 2 solar panels is -0.38% per one degree Celsius. This means that for every one degree Celsius above 25°C, the maximum efficiency of an LG NeON® 2 solar panel will decrease by 0.38%. Conversely, for every one degree Celsius below 25°C, the maximum efficiency of that solar panel will increase by 0.38%. (Yes — cooler, sunny weather is best for your solar panels and can help offset any decreased efficiency in the summer.)
> According to the manufacture standards, 25 °C or 77 °F temperature indicates the peak of the optimum temperature range of photovoltaic solar panels. It is when solar photovoltaic cells are able to absorb sunlight with maximum efficiency and when we can expect them to perform the best.
> ...
> For example, if your solar panels have a coefficient of minus 0.4 percent, their output on hot days will drop nearly twice that much compared to the output of a panel with a coefficient of only minus 0.2 percent per one degree Celsius.
> White or light-colored roofing also helps to lower the temperature around your panels, since these colors reflect sunlight more and do not get heated up like dark roofing.
> While above mentioned points involve passive cooling methods, some people opt even for active cooling systems.
---
Extreme heat days, while they tend to be sunny often have poorer performance for solar while the demand for power (AC) goes up.
Generally, at it is now, they're unreliable and unpredictable, and we lack adequate storage capabilities to mitigate those things.
It's not unreasonable to look to shifting to those technologies, but the course were on now of shutting down controllable power plants first is hard to characterize as anything but irresponsible.
> The net capacity factor is the unitless ratio of actual electrical energy output over a given period of time to the theoretical maximum electrical energy output over that period.
In the US for 2018 data
Nuclear: 92.6%
Conv. Hydro: 42.8%
Wind: 37.4%
Solar PV: 26.1%
Solar CSP: 23.6%
Landfill Gas: 73.3%
Other biomass: 49.3%
Geothermal: 77.3%
Coal: 54.0%
Natural Gas CC: 57.6%
Natural Gas CT: 11.8%
Natural Gas ST: 13.7%
Oil ST: 13.9%
Oil CT: 2.5%
This also depends on the month of the year (hydro provides more in the spring than in the fall, solar provides more in the summer than in the winter). The installed capacity of solar provides only a fraction of what it theoretically could in the winter when the days are shorter and the sun is lower in the sky.
Go off grid now while you can to get grandfathered in before they make it illegal to go off grid. When the people with money go off grid and stop paying in and the grid starts to collapse from lack of funds… expect laws forcing you to pay back in regardless. Just a baseless conspiracy theory :-)
If you go off grid but still have a grid connection that you can use any time you want, you should still pay in. All the transition equipment is still needed.
Full off grid should probably not have to pay anything. But if something breaks you are on your own.
100%, I'm in the process of taking a tiny house fully off grid and part of that is planning my own backups. I'd never expect the power company to help if/when I cancel my service completely.
Honestly, partly just for the challenge of it. But more importantly I don't like the approach we have taken to prioritize convenience above all else and centralisation rather than independence.
For example, I don't like how big a role oil plays in my life and I would like to be less dependant on it day to day. I'm also trying to grow and raise more of my own food so I'm less dependant on industrial farming and meat production.
Living in a tiny house is a tradeoff that makes it possible to even consider going of grid. I can't imagine trying to design a sustainable off grid power system to great and cool a 3,500 sq.ft. house, designing for 350 sq.ft. is already daunting enough.
Isn't the common argument these days that life with oil is ruining the planet and will fundamentally break it as early as 2030?
Life would be very, very different without oil but if we honestly think our use of oil is breaking the planet I don't know what the choice really is. We'd be picking between breaking the planet on the time scale of decades or having to go back to life as it was lived up until the last few centuries. As terrible as that transition would be, the two paths seem like an obvious choice.
It isn't ruining the planet, just altering weather, for good or bad.
"fundamentally break it as early as 2030?"
Who is saying this?
ALL of modern civilization is only possible due to cheap energy from oil. We couldn't make solar panels or wind turbines with only power from solar panels and wind turbines.
> It makes absolutely no financial sense to go "off grid".
It makes plenty of sense if you're operating on a small scale, on the order of tiny house territory.
This is obvious if you just imagine the extreme case; someone in a yurt on some land with just LED lights and laptop/phone/Starlink to power.
The cost of getting grid-tied alone would trivially blow out the cost of such a meager solar+battery+inverter setup. That's not even considering the recurring cost of power bills.
But I would agree it probably doesn't make financial sense to transition off-grid if you've already got the power poles and meter connected outside. Especially with a sizable inefficient American house...
If only there were a way for every home and business to generate electricity locally as a sort of decentralized power grid, like by putting some sort of low-carbon powerplant on their roof.
And then what if we built it bigger for better economy of scale by hooking up all the generators and all the consumers in an area together? We could share different methods of generation! Maybe someone has a hydro generator instead of completely relying on solar that stops working when it gets dark. We could have a bigger, more efficient gas generator instead of multiple smaller individual gas generators.
Sure. I can do that now. The math works out so that I'll break even on the expense in 25 years even when I include government incentives... right about the end of life for the solar cells. If I lived closer to the equator, my break even point would be sooner, but right now for many people it's a huge up-front outlay for zero benefit.
