apparently a partial off-grid is a collective nightmare situation, as coal/nuke can't be turned off so opex remains constant, but the revenue goes down, so unit prices has to go up to make up for it. noisy electricity that is "sold back" to the grid is also hard to synchronize and basically wasted, and so that cost is further added into the bills.
I tend to agree. Rooftop solar is a collective disaster and doesn't make sense as anything greater than a niche solution.
Commercial solar already struggles from seasonal variation requiring you to over build by 5X to get reliable power. Residential
PRooftop takes it up a notch by costing 10x more than commercial.
California Power policy is so backwards it makes my head spin.
I can't believe they made rooftop solar a requirement for new houses when daytime spot prices are often negative. It's common for new houses to come with solar leases with negative savings. This is the type of thing the government should be preventing, not mandating
Rooftop solar is perfect.
The lack of a full, east/west ultra high voltage
transmission line to connect markets......like the one China is building out, is the issue.
Once a grid is connecting time zones, rather than "regions" then the whole peak demand thing, just goes away, add batteries in the gaps, and for remaining peak clipping, and then averages start to become much closer to real world demand.
That doesn't solve the cost issue. Rooftop is at least 10X as expensive as plopping down panels on flat land, even before taking into account the efficiency of doing it in a desert vs rainy SF.
Same for home battery storage. A Powerwall ~$1000/kwh, grid storage is $250/kwh and can actually stabilize the grid.
Incentivizing it is a massive waste of public money. It is mandating citizens spend $1, when a commercial operation can do it for 10 cents.
agreed. Legally requiring home builders to include rooftop solar, and providing tax rebates doesn't address the fundamental challenges. In fact, it makes it worse.
