California utilities scapegoat rooftop solar for high electricity rates
Utilities in California and nationwide are fighting rooftop solar, the major threat to their effective monopoly on the electricity market, said the California Solar and Storage Association (CALSSA)…
Just keep pulling this nonsense and people will hog all that low cost electricity for themselves. Why should I pay utilities to take it when backup battery prices are getting cheaper?
schools and farms cannot use their own solar energy production and must sell it to the grid at a low price and buy it back at a significantly higher price.
The thing is, they are feeding the grid when the sun is hitting hard (mid-day) which is the time of day when the grid needs the most help. So they are helping to flatten the consumption peaks. They should be getting the best sales price at that point. So it’s like they are getting boned for improving the grid and giving the powerplant relief.
Well the grid needs the most help late afternoon. Which is right when solar starts to ramp down and when people get home and load starts to ramp up.
During solar hours, prices sometimes even turn negative. Literally paying people to take your energy, since solar is so plentiful.
The issue is those late afternoon, early evening hours.
And it’s actually more difficult on power plants. Solar is great when the sun is out, but when it goes away, you need all your power plants running. Issue is, a lot of power plants don’t like to turn on and off. They’d prefer to just run at one speed, all the time. But when the sun is out, we have to turn off power plants, since we’d make too much power. And turning them back on can be a long and expensive process.
And that’s where some of this rhetoric comes from. From a power plant perspective, we go from no-load in the afternoon (all solar), to full load in the late-afternoon/early-evening (no solar). The grid was never designed for this, and it’s having a hard time adapting so rapidly.
Batteries are totally a solution but the technology is super green and not really at a grid scale yet.
How about this as a fix:
The excess solar energy goes to a battery charging vending machine for EVs that sits in the driveway. Someone with a low battery for an e-bike/scooter or nanocar books a battery and pops by to swap their low battery for a full one. That would perhaps be a way to profit from selling the excess energy instead of getting ripped off by the grid.
That would require all (or at least a critical majority) of the manufacturers of such vehicles to implement a standardized form factor, which isn't going to happen short of legislative action. (I mean sure, they're almost entirely just 18650 cells at their core, but swapping individual cells is hardly practical or safe for average end users.)
Indeed universal standards can’t be expected to exist or relied on and my comment doesn’t assume that.
What I would envision is a company that needs to deploy a battery swapping infrastructure for a car like this one (which I hear is common in Spain). People and businesses with extra solar power could have a 3rd-party drop off a vending machine which could be brand-specific.
Or it could be scooter batteries. I heard about battery swapping station for scooters in the UK. I don’t recall the brand though.
(update) It’s worth noting that a sustainable user-repairable battery is being planned, called the “Infinite Battery”:
https://www.ifixit.com/News/101675/bike-manufacturers-are-making-bikes-less-repairable
If there is too much supply, wouldn't the prices go DOWN?