[trial3]

i think it’s kind of the opposite: balcony solar is good for power companies in the same way that them asking you to turn off your lights is good for power companies: if each customer is using less overall power they can serve more customers with existing infra.

that obviously depends on time of use and the sun etc, but balcony solar in the USA can’t come fast enough. my electricity in NYC is almost $.40/kWh, a limited secondary source is still huge

it makes a lot of sense to me as someone who has casually researched as a way to make the load of an A/C vanish from the perspective of my utility, but i can’t see regulations catching up nationwide soon.

any real microinverters can detect the grid being down and shut off to prevent zapping people working on power lines, but the complexities of split-phase power (you can consume on one leg but backfeed on the other leg rather than consume what you generate, which is bad for billing etc) and risks of intra-circuit overload will all freak out americans.

we put outlets absolutely everywhere because of how scared we are of extension cords, there’s an education and “am i going to start an electrical file” consumer sentiment obstacle to widespread adoption in the US

[tencentshill]

Have you seen this? Free battery in NYC if you charge it with off-peak power

https://everyelectric.com/

[harmmonica]

That definitely sounds reasonable for balcony, but I was trying to ask if you were able to generate the lion's share of your usage from a DIY or plug and play system would the utilities be against that? I would think so because that would eat into their profits. If enough people were knocking several cents per kWh off their bills, would they just end up charging more for the infrastructure to make up for the loss? I'm sure there's some happy medium where they'd be happy, as you say, but at some number I'm guessing they'd fight back against too much adoption.

> my electricity in NYC is almost $.40/kWh, a limited secondary source is still huge

This alone would be incredible from wider adoption of balcony (incredible for the consumer I mean). If you knock a few cents per kWh off, which I think you can do with daytime/early evening usage (when the panels are still producing some energy so no storage required) that would be fantastic. Baby steps to a full system that you can DIY without anyone objecting.

[toast0]

> If enough people were knocking several cents per kWh off their bills, would they just end up charging more for the infrastructure to make up for the loss?

Traditional residential electric utility billing puts a lot of emphasis on usage, but when there's a lot more residential solar, that ends up not reflecting the costs very well. I think, over time, you'll see things where you pay a distribution fee per kWh in either direction, and then also pay for energy input and get paid for energy output. You might also see a demand charge that scales with your connection size or your maximum load/generation. If you don't have local generation with export, everything kind of mushes into the usage charge, especially if it's tiered... but when you exporting with net metering, you pay the same bill for exporting 950kWh and importing 1000kWh as someone who imports 100kWh and exports 50kWh, but one customer is using the grid a lot more than the other.

You see something like that with California's NEM 3.0 tarrif setting export price to the 'avoided cost' instead of offsetting import one for one. Under NEM 3.0, the utility is disincentivizing using production credits as long term storage. They prefer you use or store your energy onsite; if you can export while costs are high, that's nice too.

[mrDmrTmrJ]

Yes. The utilities want every household to pay them every month.

Here in California, PG&E has a "base service fee" of $24/month. That you owe even if they sell you no (as in ZERO) electricity:

https://www.pge.com/en/account/billing-and-assistance/base-s...

[volkl48]

Seems reasonable if you want to be connected to it.

The grid costs a significant amount of money to build and maintain, and maintaining the available capacity to serve you electricity even if you only use it a couple months of the year (or even a couple days of the year) still costs money.

If you don't want to be connected to it at all - then I mostly feel you shouldn't be mandated to be.

[harmmonica]

Yep, totally, and I'd personally be overjoyed if I could pay PG&E (hypothetically; they're not my utility) $24/month to keep the grid afloat, but no more than that because I'm producing all I need locally (at the risk of repeating myself, I know this is possible today. Just hopeful that over time it becomes possible to do that install in a plug and play fashion just like you can do with the balcony solar, but at whole-house scale (or at least some material fraction of the whole house usage)).

[ssl-3]

If demand upon infrastructure decreases, then the infrastructure itself can also decrease.

We don't need to solve that problem in advance.

[harmmonica]

Hope this ends up being true, and that solving it in advance is not required because that would mean the utilities would not have pushed back. I just feel like they will unfortunately. But baby steps with the balcony seems like we're heading in the right direction. Just wish we'd move faster.

[Paradigma11]

But then you have that week or 3 when you need all the infrastructure.`

[ssl-3]

Sure. Shit happens.

The system we have now is imperfect. The system we will have in 10 or 20 or 100 years surely will be imperfect, as well.

We must not let perfect be the enemy of good: If we do, then we'll never get anything done at all.

[daedrdev]

In power grids the system must be able to handle peak loads for weeks at a time. Either it will shed loads (aka shut off electricity) or things will explode. A black start cannot be allowed to happen as it would be catastrophic

[ssl-3]

Peaks don't last for weeks, but yes: Load must sometimes be shed.

That happens today. It will happen tomorrow. It's imperfect. This imperfect nature doesn't mean that progress must cease, or that all things must be forever maximalized in search of perfection.

[arbitrary_name]

i think that is an overly simplistic axiom: the utilities must cover a fixed asset base (poles and wires and transformers), pretty much regardless of how much or whether a household consumes from the grid.

the less the utility recoups via billing for energy usage, the bigger the deficit to cover their fixed network costs.

they are frequently interested in having you consume energy, to help defray those costs, especially where the marginal cost of the energy is very low.

the more users who disconnect, the more the fixed costs must be recouped from a shrinking customer base, triggering more incentive to leave the network. this is called the death spiral.

In addition, things like balcony solar don't save them cost: it introduces complexity because they need to safely manage that load, they need to be able to predict and measure it; in my experience working with utilities and network operators for many years, they flat out don't want these distributed generation sources unless they have a lot of say in how they are added to the grid, and how users can be charged for the privilege of generating their own power. that is often a very significant barrier to regulatory change.

[trial3]

that’s true, i was considering only the perspective of the major city i live in rather than networks with lower ratepayer densities where the economics are probably totally different

i do think “fully consumed or gated to never backfeed balcony solar at scale” is all i’m referring to, which i naively hope is a smaller regulatory change than backfeeding

[zardo]

> I do think “fully consumed or gated to never backfeed balcony solar at scale” is all i’m referring to, which i naively hope is a smaller regulatory change than backfeeding

I though the point of these systems was you plug them in to your wall socket and they lower your electricity bill. If you want to avoid tieing to the grid you can't have such a simple deployment.

[0cf8612b2e1e]

Everything I have seen about balcony solar requires it to be grid dependent and cannot backfeed.