The Solar Power Scam

a reply to: C0bzz

You did so good naming a sane path until you hit wind turbines...

As of this moment, wind is a joke. Between our subpar storage technology and infrastructure, them usually being way the hell away from EVERYWHERE, and in general the wind turbines we have just plain sucking HARD when it comes to actual duty cycle...

Wind is an extremely expensive, ruinous to wildlife, bad for it's neighbors, bigger hole in the water you poor money into than boats are by far!

One thing a friend found out is you can not beat the power company.

He owns 10 ac of desert land that he lives on in a double wide Mobil home with his company shop outside in the back.

He has plenty of money from his company and the room to install 1 to 2 ac of solar on his property.

The power company told his his idea for that system is to large and they will not pay him for excess power.

They also told him that a system must be installed on the Mobil home even though it would not be safe to do because the home was never built for solar being put on the roof, Plus his trees shade most of the roof and he would have to cut them down and spend more power cooling the home in the summer.
He can not install it on his shop because it has a 8 inch thick spray on foam coating

a reply to: roguetechie

The post you replied to was from 2012. 6 years ago.

I stand by exactly what I said. But in those 6 years we have learned some things (I also graduated university as an electrical engineer and worked on some seriously cool things across three different industries).

- CCS hasn't been doing well. Where are prototype CCS power stations?
- Nuclear hasn't been doing well (see Olkiluoto, VC Summer, Vogtle, Toshiba, B&W mPower).
- Wind energy and battery technology continued to progress.

I update my statement with:

Solar, Wind, Batteries, Gas, Efficiency, Gasification, Cogeneration. Maybe that's not a complete solution for all scenarios and all countries but we can use those as starting points.

Wind is an extremely expensive

www.eia.gov...

a reply to: Forensick

You don't understand the electricity market, Australia is blessed with endless amounts of sunshine, except when it's cloudy or night. With the amount of solar on the roofs eventually you will see a reverse of the traditional demand. The increase in 'cheap solar during the day means that power companies are selling electricity cheaper than they can make it. Guess what happens when power companies lose money? They close power stations. Guess which power stations they close? Expensive coal fired base load power. Guess what happens when they close and the solar or the grid fails? Power outages.

Well if the grid fails then you get power outages anyway, so that's a fallacy.

The technical requirement for the grid is that generation and consumption are always balanced. Over extremely short timescales, this is done via synchronous generators, the same ones which generate electricity at most power stations. Via their rotation, they store huge amounts of energy via their own rotation. If load is instantaneously increased, supply and demand is still matched as the energy is removed from the rotation of these generators. The generators will then slow down and the regulation systems on a power station or battery will command increased power, to prevent the generators from slowing down too much placing the grid out of specifications. If the load change (or generation change) is too great, then blackouts have to occur to prevent total system failure. Note that a short to ground can be regarded as an extreme and sudden increase in demand (P=V^2/R and all) that must be disconnected immediately before it jeopardizes the rest of the system.

So when it comes to providing stability to the grid and enabling it to function, generation must match consumption over short-timescales, medium timescales, and longer timescales.

Which brings me to baseload. On the electric power grid, someone or something will always be using electricity. Street-lights for example. This minimum load is called baseload. Given this, it has made sense to build massive power stations that employ massive economies of scale to satiate baseload. But, there is zero technical requirement for base-load power, as long as supply matches demand, all is fine. The momentum of the massive generators in one of these power stations helps grid stability, but power output from one of these stations can generally only change slowly, so they're not actually all that great for providing grid stability services, instead highly dispatchable resources are needed - that can produce power quickly and on demand.

Most renewable energy is subject to environmental conditions such as: day/night cycles, the tides, weather patterns, and the seasons. And they often do not have huge mechanical synchronous generators connected to the grid either, so at first glance they lose in that area too. However, note that wind turbines do still have rotating generators and turbines which store energy - they are just not directly connected to the grid. Instead they are connected via power electronics which can react far more quickly than a normal generator can to changing conditions. Faking the stability of a rotating synchronous generator brings is already implemented on some wind turbines. Further, batteries paired with some power electronics can also provide this stability far better than a conventional power plant can (short timescales), and can even act as dispatchable power over medium timescales.

This is why your analysis that closing baseload power stations is going to cause blackouts and attempt to blame power blackouts on renewable energy is dead wrong. Baseload power stations require highly dispatchable power to ensure grid stability during fault conditions and to meet demand above baseload. Renewables require highly dispatchable power to ensure grid stability during fault conditions and to meet demand when less renewable energy is being generated due to environmental conditions. Renewables also need a function to provide the stability that a synchronous generator provides due to its inertia, whether that be via battery, using the wind turbines as inertia, or actual synchronous generators connected to the grid. All these factors can be managed.

In terms of SA 2016 blackout, the summary of events is:
1. Three transmission lines tripped due to extreme weather.
2. Coupled with further faults caused by extreme weather including tornadoes, voltage fluctuations caused wind farms to reduce output, loss of 456 MW. This was primarily related to Low Voltage Ride Through (LVRT) behaviour. LVRT settings of wind turbines were not fully known by AEMO prior to this incident and therefore not adequately planned for. These LVRT settings relate to stress and fatigue limits of wind turbines (note that LVRT is also going to apply to many types of generators) and the settings have since been amended to provide much better LVRT capability.
3. Interconnector was subsequently overloaded and tripped.
4. Inadequate generation (757 MW at this point) versus demand (1826 MW), and inability to increase fast enough.

AEMO found that wind turbines tripping due to high winds was not a factor. AEMO found that wind intermittency was not related to the blackout. AEMO found that the thermal power stations did contribute to grid stability via their synchronous generators, but the time from interconnect failure to blackout was too fast for the governors to actually respond.

The AEMO recommendations (same report) can be found in table 1. Overall I would describe the incident as a failure of planning and contingencies.

Best not to sell your electricity to companies. Implement a more modest systems to reduce your needs.

You only need a single battery and a 250 watt solar panel for example to power your fridge.

Of cause one battery will not power a fridge forever when the sun stops shining. So you need a mains powered transformer to charge the battery when its voltage drops below 50% of its reserves. Which depending on battery might be 12.2 volts or so.

So in effect you are using 100% of your solar. With the mains acting as a backup power source when needed.

Continued from previous post.

However, it is political suicide for a government to allow blackouts (as is proven in south Australia recently). Why is that? Well because you guys are the absolute minority in your opinion and people want reliable electricity.

No, this is a false dichotomy. Let's not turn Australia into a backward nation politically like the states.

As far as Solar, you don't buy solar to make money, not on your roof anyway, at best it will offset your bill IF you do your heavy hitting electricity use during the day, if you don't, for the 6 hours of sunshine the power companies have lost money they recoup in the peak hours of breakfast and dinner when demand spikes, the market drives the price, not the power companies. If you run solar and air conditioning, does your aircon match your solar? Do you only run it off the solar? Where do you expect the electricity to come from when more people have aircon that solar??

Batteries.

A battery is less than useless, you will get an hour at best if you have an electric oven/cooker some computers and televisions.

According to my electricity provider, AGL, the average two person home in my area uses 1,035 kWh per 90 days. This is equivalent to 11.5 kWh per day. The Tesla Power Wall is 13.5 kWh. So less than an hour? 13.5/11.5*24 = 28 hours. Even if your load is incredibly peaky, it should last through at least one day until the next days peak.

I'm going to keep on going about batteries in the other thread.

Seriously ill informed moaning about electricity prices focussed on the wrong people, what kind of prime minister signs up for an unachievable reduction in greenhouse gasses when there isn't a technology (short of nuclear) that can achieve it sustainably.

Nuclear is politically untenable in Australia and even if we tried it would be till 2030 at least before it started operation. The recent experience in the west for building nuclear power stations has been poor.

Also the current emission reduction target is 26-28% reduction by 2030 on 2005 levels. This is not unsustainable. That isn't even a particularly ambitious target either.

Maybe renewables and batteries cannot get us to a full solution, but they can get us to a partial one. We better start working on a full solution immediately whilst continuing to double down on renewables and battery. IMO.

Oh and you can't turn Coal power off and on, if a cloud comes over you may have less than a minute to cover for the solar before half the city shuts down, unacceptable so you need coal there waiting at a loss for the inevitable demand and price spike.

It is very unlikely that clouds are going to instantaneously form over an entire city.

By the way, one of the biggest uses in Australia for solar and battery systems is farms where the grid is weak and too expensive to upgrade.

It's in Australia's interest, including for national security reasons, to curb global warming and part of that means develop batteries. Global warming would mean destabilizing the region and the world, which means we would need our defense force more. It would also mean more refugees into our country and others which could further cause instability. And Australia is much smaller in population compared to our neighbors. Lastly, Lithium Ion batteries can be used for a variety of defense purposes.

a reply to: NuclearPaul

Surely a kW/h of electricity supplied by Solar panels, is exactly the same as supplied by the grid.

Why would there be a discrepancy in what you are paid for a Solar kW/h, and what you pay for one supplied by the grid?

That is just ridiculous...the unit of energy is the same regardless of who is supplying it.

If the power company charges 25c per kW/h, that is what they ought to pay someone who is supplying the same amount of energy to the grid, regardless of whether that comes from Solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, hydro...a unit is a unit is a unit.

a reply to: TheRedneck

I know this post is 6 years old, but:

You are correct in your energy estimates. While my home is small, I have estimated power usage at about 3.6kW average based on my electric bills. Of course that also does not include heating or AC.

LOL.

I use 0.250 kW average and get an electric train to work, where I proceed to work on clean technologies.



I try not to heat or cool my apartment and just wear more clothes, screw paying for energy. But yes, that figure includes heating and cooling on the few occasions that it is used.

What exactly are you using that electricity for?

a reply to: C0bzz

I'm glad you've been able to do cool things across a variety of industries...

I still very much disagree with you about wind though, and I'll be honest in saying that I'm not going to bother going through those charts and figuring out all the fun little tricks that were used to make their preferred answers look the best.

Maybe wind works TOTALLY DIFFERENT IN AUSTRALIA, but I don't think so and FWIW I've spent my entire life (more than 30 years) in areas that jumped on the wind band wagon bigly very early. I've seen the abandoned turbines and the news stories all the "fun" accounting tricks for my ENTIRE LIFE.

Wind pretty much sucks even now. (and it's progressed insanely from where it was in decades past to get to it's current suckage)

I know you guys are upside down and all there in Australia, but physics just can't work that different even with the whole upside down thing.

a reply to: MysterX

That's not true though.

A unit needs to be generated at the right time corresponding with grid demand, which there's absolutely no guarantee of.

Also why would the power company buy electricity at the same price they sell it for?

That makes literally no sense.

a reply to: phantom150

If you install the new lower cost solar cells and use a simple inverter that can match the frequency in the mains, then you would not have all the expense for battery backup running completely off line.

Not sure how this works in the states, but it does sound as though the hybrid solution would be more cost effective provided you have reliable power delivery already in place. Very attractive to the consumer if they could smart small and seamlessly integrate their solar produced energy with a frequency matching inverter.

a reply to: Cauliflower

That´s called "island mode" and is used when you do not have any mains for guiding the frequency and voltage. But for that you either need much more panels to guarantee there is plenty of juice coming down most of the time from the roof and / or a battery storage.

Otherwhise your pv-system is either in idle most of the time, or not producing enough.

a reply to: verschickter

People don't understand until they start trying to design a working implementation of a micro grid (island mode) that can also still establish a two way connection with the main power grid just how much goes into being able to have light and power for your stove refrigerator and computer simultaneously!

It's not a small or simple task. I'd like to see microgrid stuff improve and become more and more plug and play of course, but it's not an easy task.

Also, there's really legitimate questions about how much duplication of infrastructure and etc versus high level centralized infrastructure gives us the best cost benefit ratio.

Though, this advance I'm reading about that has potential to cut dissipative power loss by a bunch could very seriously change the game too.

The problem with all of this is that there isn't ONE solution.

We ideally need to make advances in a bunch of key places as well as very carefully consider how we implement our solutions. This is really where AI and big data can help us by doing the massively iterative number crunching to develop nice tight and very economical bespoke custom solutions.

Combine that with on demand manufacturing, automated product design, and a few advances and you have a much leaner, less resource intensive, and still very robust grid.

Using less whether it's kilowatt hours or metric tons of rare earths, copper, and or aluminum should always be a primary focus going forward in my personal opinion.

In some cases that likely means that we should burn natural gas and coal etc rather than mining refining and etc another hundred thousand tons of rare earths!

We're reaching a point where such a holistic approach is becoming possible and I believe we should take advantage of this.

I know, I use a big pv-system for serving the mains (selling 100%) and a small, self-built 24V system with battery for the well and hydrophonics green house.

I still have 10 years left on contract but after that the inverters will probably have died or reached their zenit, and I will replace them with a battery solution that supports island mode.

This way, if there are prolonged outages (never was a case since now but you never know) I can pull the main-fuses and still be able to have light.

Instead of electricity, I use gas for cooking (love it).
Instead of oil/electricity/gas, I use wood that is 100% regional, most of it from trees I killed and slaughtered by hand, myself.

Those pv-modules regain the energy spent on the whole process in about 3-5 years depending on how effective the system is planned and oriented overall. After that it´s surplus energy. Financially the big system has paid for itself aftert exaclty 6 years.

Wind:
When I go outside on the nearest hill and I rotate 360° I count 34 clearly visible windmills. I´ve seen the destruction that was done to the forest and they are ugly to the eye.

Those pv-modules -at least here- will be recycled to build new and better ones so they are not lost if damaged or degraded. I´ll favor pv-systems over wind anytime.

When I grew up you could go outside and escape our modern world. Now you either hear or see windmills everywhere. I find that saddening. The next generation in my region won´t even know how true nature looks, because of those ugly windmills.

a reply to: verschickter

That's very cool, and btw lol @ trees I slaughtered myself.

I like the way you explained your setup and definitely agree on the solar over wind thing.

a reply to: roguetechie

I've seen the abandoned turbines and the news stories all the "fun" accounting tricks for my ENTIRE LIFE.

Which fun accounting tricks have you seen?

a reply to: C0bzz

Corrections to my previous post. Not going to cite all of it, but I can.


Source.

- Coal power stations are capable of Frequency Control Ancillary Services (FCAS) and as shown in the above image presently provide about 45% in Australia. However, coal power stations have high capital cost and low fuel cost, they are less suited to this than other forms of electricity generation, such as gas. See figure 22 of this report for evidence.

- Using a battery to fake the inertia of a synchronous generator is not identical and not a direct substitute for the real thing. Usually therefore it is termed fast frequncy response, or FFR. More discussion on this here and here.

Further points:

- As shown in the above image, batteries now take up about 10% of the FCAS market. This is almost entirely the Tesla battery.

- EDIT, going to include figure 22 anyway. Note this is Australia specific.


Capacity factor can be thought of duty cycle. Wind is limited to about 40% because the wind doesn't blow all the time (for example).

Combined Cycle Gas Turbine win, wind wins, solar wins. Obviously wind isn't providing the same value since it's intermittent.

- Also waiting for the perfect energy source is a waste of time, research yes, but don't wait.


And thanks to Australian Electricity Market Operator (AEMO) for all the fantastic data & analysis.

a reply to: C0bzz

I definitely agree on the idea that waiting on the perfect energy source or other silver bullet technologies is foolish, to a degree we have to begin using new stuff so we can learn how to make it work best for us.

On the accounting tricks thing I mentioned, that is one of those things like the stuff you posted for the Tesla battery being Australia specific...

I'm pretty sure that the accounting tricks and etc were due to easily exploitable loopholes in state And federal subsidy stuff in America. (We handle our infrastructure here so schizophrenically and just plain bad it's literally crazy)

The best most realistic answer I can give you is just what I saw and experienced and read about in the local paper, which being in the part of the Pacific Northwest I was in the paper was heavily in favor of alternative energy so at the point where they're calling shenanigans things are truly bad.

I hate it when I write a post and know I'm about to give someone completely unsatisfactory answers, so my apologies for that. I sat here and tried to remember more about the exact news stories I had in mind, but couldn't find them.