[vegardx]

There's a lower bound to how cheap electricity can be, the infrastructure to distribute it isn't free. Every country price this differently, but one way to solve this is to split the cost per kWh in use and transport, which is common in Europe.

In Norway we have a model like that, and it effectively sets a lower boundary of (depending a little on the region) around 0.50NOK/kWh, around 0.05$/kWh. The price for electricity quite often go into the negative during summer, but you still end up paying for the distribution.

[nl]

This is clearly a good point in that infrastructure is a cost and needs continual upgrade and maintenance.

However it's not clear that the appropriate way to pay for that is usage based: looking at domestic supply for example it's roughly the same cost per house to connect to the grid, so it doesn't really make sense to pay more if you have more usage.

I'm not sure what alternative models look like for this and I'm not sure they are better or worse. But there probably is room for innovation on billing this part.

[vegardx]

For the last mile you're probably right, but the electricity has to come from somewhere. So you also need to size the production capacity, distribution network, sub-stations and whatnot to match the installed capacity. Things get really bad, really quickly, when demand and availability doens't match.

[londons_explore]

I recently learned that electricity meters cost ~150USD.

At that sort of price, for low usage users it might be multiple years simply to pay back the cost of the meter.

One can buy a $3 meter from China, but obviously it is less accurate. I'd like to see a system where less accurate meters are used, but you pay a small premium to cover any inaccuracies in metering.

[vegardx]

Are you sure you want less accurate meters? There's a lot of losses in the network itself, and without accurate meters it's hard to pinpoint where they are and if they can be fixed.

In Norway we quite recently switched to more accurate networked meters and at that time they said that as much as 30% of all electricity produced wasn't accounted for, which you end up paying for, one way or another. Some of these losses are from the network itself. But a not insignificant part was from people illegally tapping the grid or last-mile losses due to poorly maintained infrastructure that was hard to pinpoint without using expensive manpower to physically check every single connection.

[londons_explore]

Meter inaccuracies are sometimes over and sometimes under. Losses are always under.

Across enough thousands of meters, you should be able to separate the effects. I suspect the hundreds of millions saved if a country switched to cheap less accurate meters would easily pay for other methods of policing/detecting theft. For example, 'radar' down the electricity cables can see how far away every switch, device and wire is. It would be pretty straightforward to put radar devices at a few places on the public network, then effectively triangulate to some house who is stealing power because when they turn stuff on and off (which the radar can see, together with the cable length), no nearby customers meter sees the increased load.

[vegardx]

I don't really understand the argument you're trying to make. You want us to use less accurate meters and then pay a premium to cover those inaccuracies, which is supposed to be cheaper than just buying accurate meters? And then use some technology that doesn't seem to exist to detect losses and theft? If it was this easy we'd already be doing it.

These meters are more expensive, but not that much more expensive. The majority of the cost, by a long shot, comes from installing them. These meters also offer a lot of other capabilities, which greatly improves the reliability of the network. If you spread the cost of these meters over the projected lifespan we're talking about cents per month.

[dzhiurgis]

Your infrastructure doesn’t have to be so beefy when you produce and cache it locally. In my climate, 500W vs 15kW wood be enough boost for winters. That’s 30x reduction in pricy infrastructure.

[7e]

Energy storage via batteries is ridiculously expensive if the storage is greater than 24 hours. Hydrogen tanks (or salt caverns) might be the solution, but there is still the capital cost of the electrolyzers and fuel cells.

[vegardx]

Everything I read seems to suggest that hydrogen is a pipe dream for energy storage, as the output efficiency is so low. And that's before accounting for all the issues of just storing and distributing it.

Solar panels and wind turbines produce electricity, the highest form of energy, directly. Instead of converting that to thermal or chemical energy for storage and then back to electricity for distribution, you're better off just storing it at as thermal energy at the destination. I think we often forget that thermal energy means everything from ~0 Kelvin. A heat exchanger can be very efficient.

I think there's going to be a lot of interesting stuff happening with dual-use PV panels and thermal heat exchangers. In some cold climates you generally want as much thermal energy as you can get your hands on.

[dzhiurgis]

10kWh would be enough for my house (on top of constant 500W and few kWh from solar) and costs about $2000 USD. That’s probably few centimetres worth of underground cabling or orders of magnitude less than street transformer.