Shoot, my electric is like $.0625/KWH
But there is also another 75-100 bucks tacked on as fees. Tempting to go solar and disconnect from the grid. Even without selling energy back to the grid, I would break even. (Savings over 20 years ~200 bucks)
Comment on ‘If 1.5m Germans have them there must be something in it’: how balcony solar is taking off
ayyy@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Home solar indicates a massive management failure of public utilities. If it is more cost effective and more pleasant to generate your own electricity without any economies of scale, something is very wrong.
Bytemeister@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Gonzako@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The rent seekers making everything worse again
Strawberry@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
God, I love living in a nuclear plant evacuation zone
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
it’s not actually that bad, unless you live next to a gen 1, or maybe gen 2 plant. Unless you’re next to one of like, three existing operational RBMK plants.
By the time you needed to evacuate from that area due to a nuclear disaster, you would be well informed, and probably gone already. Even if you didn’t the radiation exposure is likely to be incredibly minimal. Probably under the regulated limits.
Strawberry@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
I wasn’t being sarcastic. I appreciate that my local energy provider is green and stable
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
i mean, i would also, but that’s a weird way to phrase that statement
Cataphract@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
I live in an area where there is a monopoly of power supply by one of the worse polluters in American history, in a small area within a county there’s an existing co-op power company that was basically grandfathered in because it’s been in existence for so long while no other competitors are allowed in the area.
That co-op when I lived in the area was about half the cost of the monopoly company, a relative gets actually paid to be a member because they received their fathers account when he passed away and extra funds are distributed among all the members based on how long they’ve been with them (a little weird, but at least better than shareholders getting the profit).
You are absolutely right that the electric companies as a whole have failed, they’ve been allowed to amass too much influence and coverage while squashing any kind of competition. Why electrical needs aren’t considered a national resource is mind baffling to me. Our country and citizens way of life would literally grind to a halt without it.
Squizzy@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Infrastructure should be public, with regulated access for wholesale and retail. It works. The grid operator needs to make money for large scale projects like interconnectors, modernising, maintenance and build.
fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Microgeneration makes way more sense to me. If you generate the power where it is used without pollution, we should. The unfortunate piece is we have to many landlords who’s interest are too divorced from their tenets to put up more microgeneration
ayyy@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
These microinverters aren’t made of fairy dust. Doing this stuff at utility scale uses a lot less nasty minerals and chemicals.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
a mix of both is good, there’s arguments for doing local co-generation. Where you essentially turn a community into it’s own power plant, and when you’re talking about things like micro inverters, the cost doesnt really change.
Is it more efficient to do it at a utility grid scale? Yes, does that make it overall better? Not really, you still have to deal with grid inefficiencies, and maintenance, and well, you still have to deal with installations, so the cost isn’t that significant at the end of the day.
Solar is one of very few renewable energy sources that you can actually locally build and maintain on a small scale, no sense in removing that utility from it, that’s part of the reason it’s so popular.
ayyy@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Even if you have perfect eutopic solar communities you would still have to build and maintain the grid for the times when it’s cold and cloudy/snowy/rainy for a week straight to import from somewhere with different weather. It’s completely unreasonable to build that much battery capacity into every town, as nice as it would be.
fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Transformers, power lines, roads, trucks, and maintenance teams to move from large scale plants to houses also doesn’t grow on trees, but if maintenance in remote places doesn’t happen it can burn a lot of them.
Sometimes large scale plants make sense, but as the back up too microgeneration where the costs of infrastructure to move from unpopulated to populus areas make sense.
I am also a fan of less inverted power in microgeneration though. More and more of power usage is DC anyways. The need to convert to AC as much IMHO, but that is my far more radical take
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
microgeneration purely in DC only really makes sense in stuff like campers and RV’s where you’re going to be using primarily nearby, low power consumption devices.
AC is still better, plus modern switching technology while still fairly expensive, is considerably more efficient now. If you’re doing AC you also get a number of other benefits, notably, literally every existing appliance and device uses and works with AC voltages, the entire standard around electricity and home wiring is based on AC mains, all of the accessible hardware is also produced for AC mains, not that you can’t use it for something else, it’s just not intended for that.
Certain appliances will use induction motors, and similar other tech (clocks for example, often use the frequency of the power grid to keep time) based directly on the AC sinewave. You could still run them on DC, it’s just significantly sillier. Plus transmission efficiency is a BIG loss in DC (even now with modern solid state switching components, it’s still just, not ideal), granted thats less of a problem on a micro grid scale, it’s still a concern and potential restriction, nothing beats the simplicity and reliability of a simple wire wound iron core transformer. There are a handful of other technical benefits, and drawbacks as well, but fairly minor.
Having a dedicated DC supply side might be nice for a home environment, but the question is what do you standardize on? DC/DC voltage conversion is fairly efficient as it is already. Converting from AC/DC is incredibly easy and not particularly inefficient at lower power consumption, it’s more of a problem with higher draw devices. But you can easily get around that by using a higher voltage to convert down from.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Generators take space, require maintenance, and have a certain optimal capacity that isn’t necessarily hit on a given roof.
For wind energy in particular, the bigger the turbine, the more yield per $ spent. If you go out to Corpus Christi you’ll see these enormous turbines - $10M to $50M / ea - that generate on the order of $24 to $75 per MWh, or $.024-.075/kWh. Home wind/solar don’t get anywhere close to that.
Prime placement of units, distribution across a wide area, and a degree of storage capacity means you’re going to get better and more consistent yield.
AA5B@lemmy.world 1 week ago
But people will always be interested in generating their own, just like we don’t use communal bath houses, or community heating, or unfortunately mass transit. Yes, group services can be a lot more efficient and more reliable but they’re also out of your control and become an ongoing cost
Krauerking@lemy.lol 1 week ago
Who is we? Lots of places do communal bath houses. Japan has an entire industry around it. Mass transit is also highly prevalent.
Yes there will always be some level of individual desire to do things or need in some cases but communal projects are useful and common I don’t get the dismissal of that for energy creation something we long ago figured out was better to be done at scale and distributed after.
This is neoliberalism and treating it like it’s the only way to exist. It’s a failure of consideration or imagination. Either way your take is not right for that.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Spas and apartments and buses/trains do absolutely exist. Only the former is considered “luxury” in the US, though.
Wasn’t Solar City’s whole gambit to effectively buy everyone’s roofs and lease them back for a fraction of their real market value?
I don’t think you escape “Own nothing and be happy” just by throwing up a few hundred watts of solar on an extension cord.
MeThisGuy@feddit.nl 1 week ago
welcome to the land of windmills
Barsukis@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
Makes sense mathematically or you think makes sense?
fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Both.
The reduction of infrastructure and leveraging existing buildings without reducing their existing utility vs converting a new space to be a dedicated power plant plus the infrastructure to move power from less populus (normal case because the cost of populus land is high due to demand) to more populus space.
I also idealogically support it because it makes more controllable by people and less controlled by an outside entity (a corporation/state).
azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Grids work on economies of scale. The bigger the better. Ask anyone who lives on an isolated island for their power bill. That’s why it was such a big deal when the Baltics switched from the Russian grid to the EU one.
Bigger grid = more intertia&redundancy = less likelihood of failure, more options, lower costs.
Electricity isn’t like chicken eggs. Transporting it is for all intents and purposes free. The network is expensive, but whether your house is pulling 1 A or 5 A is a non-difference to your utility. So to think local generation is “better” is a complete fallacy. Unless your house is fully disconnected from the network (not “net zero”, disconnected) then it’s not helping to generate power locally. Like someone else said, it’s actually way more expensive per kWh than grid-scale solar.
Now this would all be a “you” problem, except the big problem with microgeneration is that current tech is “dumb”. It’s either pushing power on the network, or sometimes tripping if the voltage goes above 250V or so. Which actually happens in rich neighborhoods on very sunny days where everyone is pushing power.
What this means for the operators is that on very sunny days, they cannot do anything but account for the extra residential solar power. Which might mean they have to very quickly spin up or down alternative power generators which were not meant for this. Or they might be dealing with complex issues with current flowing the other way than designed and large voltage fluctuations on specific parts of the network that don’t have the necessary infrastructure to “dump” that extra solar somewhere else.
The end result is that, counter-intuitively, microgeneration is one of the many failures of the neoliberal electricity market. It’s more expensive and more disruptive for society than if those solar cells had been put to use in grid-scale solar production. They only end up where they are through political mismanagement and misaligned incentives (e.g. net metering which does not account for negative externalities).
Saleh@feddit.org 1 week ago
I am sorry, but your ideas about how these things work are ignoring a lot of issues.
First of all you have significant losses in the distribution grid. This is minimized the higher your voltage is, which is why longer range grids run on 110 kV and more. Then you have an intermediate level, typically 20 kV. Finally you get your local distribution with 220/230V. Also “current flowing the other way” does not exist in AC, because the “direction” changes 50x per second.
Then you only have a limited transportation capacity, so moving a lot of electricity from a central plant of course costs a lot of investment and maintenance. The idea that “Transporting it is for all intents and purposes free” is completely out of touch with the reality of the electrical grid.
But it gets worse. The more producers and consumers you have, the more you will need to balance fluctuations in production and consumption. This is why traditional grids were built around having a high baseload, with incentivizing high demand industries to connect, stabilizing demand. For renewables this is completely different, because renewabls will fluctuate. So the more energy you run through the centralized grid, the more short and medium term storages you will need to provide and the more investment and running costs you will have.
You mention this with there being too much production on the local grid and then in another place also needing to react to this. This is not a problem exclusive to local grids. It is a problem for any level of the grid with integrating renewables. Note how the article also mentions the limit of 800W without requiring a permit.
Finally in the long term we need to make the demand more flexible to production. So if the sun shines and the wind blows, household appliances should run, the fridge should cool a bit stronger, and the water heater heats up for the evening shower… Having a responsive demand with millions of agents can easily lead to overshooting, so that the demand spikes up far beyond supply, because every consumer reacts at the same time and it doesn’t temper out.
This problem is much smaller, if every household can directly see their own production and consumption and already limit how much excess goes into, or is demanded.
So microgeneration is part of the solution and not a problem like you make it out to be.
fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
I am a big grid fan too. The hope that HVDC ca,n mean longer time with solar on the grid, and more averaged wind power.
Smarter grid ties is definitely something that I would like to see as well, including battery usage. The infrastructurea though isn’t just a potential reduction in wattage needed to be supported in the last mile, but not needing infrastructure at all dedicated to a power plant. Again pro renewables, solar, wind, hydro. Wind and hydro benefit from scale quite a bit, and I don’t think roof top solar alone will cover industrial power usage, so I expect we will have some grid scale plants, but in addition to microgeneration.