The numbers Solar City gave me showed a net savings of $30 a month. That's it - 30 bucks a month. And that is assuming you buy into their calculations - which I don't.
You really don't think energy costs will go up over time? Ironically, the only way they wouldn't is if we committed to more renewables.
But the real "so what" is that they are OCRing the mail
Lot's of people still actually hand-write addresses. It needs to get OCRed in order to be sorted.
You have to finish the sentence before you can understand it. I'd bet you just interrupt in the middle of sentences all the time, and thus fail to understand what people are telling you by preventing them from actually finishing a complete thought.
If you go back and read the complete sentence, which expresses a complete thought, then it makes perfect sense.
You use a lot of big words, I don't think you know what any of them mean.
You've proven full well that I do.
What I argue is that there's structural differences that makes this a better idea to to centrally than at home,
But you're wrong.
If it's cost effective for you to store the power in a battery and use it in the daytime it's going to be more cost effective for them to store the power in a battery and sell it to you in the daytime.
Cost-effective for who, and on what basis?
The very reason they sell it cheap at night is that there's no cost effective way to store the excess power for later,
It's not cost-effective for them, because they don't have a secondary use for the battery.
You're on the wrong end of the Dunning-Kruger effect here, buddy.
You still have failed to support your argument in the slightest. We're waiting, though we're not holding our breath, because we want to live.
The problem with that plan is that so many aspects of the way the system is designed give people with money and/or time an advantage that you'd basically have to scrap it.
This is a problem?
"Neonicotinoids in bees: a review on concentrations, side-effects and risk assessment"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
"Many lethal and sublethal effects of neonicotinoid insecticides on bees have been described in laboratory studies, however, no effects were observed in field studies with field-realistic dosages."
As they say there's need for further study regarding synergistic effects and the like. But real exposure effects in the field are what counts, not just laboratory findings. Otherwise it's like finding that table salt is OMG-toxic as studied in the lab, even tho we know it's safe in normal realworld use.
Honeybees are technically an invasive species in North America; they were imported, not native. There are numerous other species, including small native bees, that did the pollination work before honeybees came along. Far as I have heard, populations of these native bees have not been affected by CCD.
Neonicotinoids are relatively expensive (4 years ago, Imidacloprid was $25/pound, about 5x the cost of permethins), and I'd guess despite being about a quarter of the insecticide market, that in ag they are probably not used outside of the fairly limited areas that grow fruits and vegetables -- as those crops have a better profit margin. Yet CCD has been seen very widely, including in areas where there isn't any row-crop agriculture.
Anecdotally, I've used Imidacloprid to control desert stink beetles, and did not observe any issues with my wild honeybees (who frequented the same areas, cuz that's where the water was).
The scare over DDT was manufactured. Silent Spring (which I read, back when it was new) was mostly fiction and has been discredited, yet it influenced a whole generation of environmentalism -- that, not truth, was its point and intent. Some estimates put malaria deaths due to ending use of DDT in the millions. Meanwhile, the connection with condor populations was at best tenuous.
I own a shitload of DVDs. But I usually watch downloads. Why? Because no need to rip it first, it's already handy, and no risk of scratching my disks. The disks are backups.
Just curious, what monitor do you have?
Actually there's a pretty good trail being laid down:
http://missoulian.com/news/loc...
Not only that, but per this article (with stats), bee populations are stable to increasing despite CCD:
http://www.perc.org/articles/e...
The amount of honey being produced is a good indicator, given you can't make honey without bees.
This won't load for me but I imagine it goes into more detail:
http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/br/...
And actually, you can demonstrate 'insanity' in any wild colony with an aging queen -- the bees become aggressive at greater and greater distances from the hive. I watched this with a wild colony that had taken up residence in the wall of a barn. For the first three years, they were 'gentle' (not concerned about intruders) -- to the point that you could actually poke around in their entryway without incurring any retaliation. The 4th year, they got twitchy about people walking nearby. The 5th year, they regularly chased people who passed within about 20 feet of their hive entrance. The colony died off entirely that winter. Far as I saw, it never swarmed, indicating they didn't produce any new queens.
We probably don't see this in domesticated colonies because modern beekeepers are diligent about replacing queens in a timely manner. But I asked an old-timer about it (who'd been in the bee business since the 1930s) and he said that was all perfectly normal for a colony with an old queen.
I do understand the solar industry, that's why I fliped two big middle fingers to them and bought and imported all china solar panels and installed a 5Kwh setup for drastically cheaper than any of the overpriced US crap.
Like anyone else, I will buy the panels which provide the most output for my dollar, and which fit in the space available. But if the world would institute some laws which would penalize countries for slave labor and environmental abuse, then it would cease to make sense to buy a lot of that crap. I sit here surrounded by similar crap, but the point remains.
I use grid intertie and drive the meter backwards. No local storage.
That's certainly cost-effective, but it won't help as much in an outage.
Electrical bill is $14.95 a month because you have to pay the "fees" and the scumbag leaders in my states government passed a law that allows the power company to not pay for any surplus I generate above my own use.
Yes, scumbags are always the problem. Obviously it wouldn't make sense for you to add a lot of battery on the basis of selling power back at shifted times.
Just because you put words together, it doesn't mean the resulting sentence is true.
And you just made a meaningless statement which advances the conversation in no way whatsoever, since it could equally be applied to anything anyone said ever. If you want to provide some sort of meaningful information, you can do that. Or can you?
What happens if you buy this battery and a year or two down the road someone comes out with a battery that is twice as efficient as the one you have?
Then the whole world changes, whole corporations go out of business overnight while others swell, and there is widespread financial chaos.
This is the exact question I asked Solar City when I was considering solar panels for my house.
That's because you don't understand the solar industry even a little bit. When new, more efficient panels come out, not only is their price per watt higher but the price per watt on the old panels comes down. The primary benefit is not reduction of cost, at least not at first, but in reduction of panel area needed. That reduces the size of an installation which can reduce its cost — but in the case of a residential solar system, that is rarely the case. Since they're usually fixed and roof-mounted, the amount of materials used to mount them is fairly small and there are no property cost considerations whatsoever. The homeowner doesn't care if they have three or six panels on their roof, because they're on their roof and they're not taking up any space they were using before.
The truth is that improvements in batteries and solar panels do not come in 100% increments. They come in small increments delivered over long periods of time, just like the savings on energy costs delivered by a solar installation. Not installing solar now because you're worried that solar is going to get better is just depriving yourself of the benefits that you enjoy by doing it sooner. Meanwhile, your system can be upgraded piecemeal, so you can replace your batteries in 15 years and your panels in 30, maybe add some more batteries then. You can mix and match different kinds of panels to a certain extent; sure, you need different charge controllers for old and new style panels, but you can have both kinds of charge controllers right next to one another, connected to the same battery bank. So really, there is no basis whatsoever for your concern that a 100% efficiency improvement will come along tomorrow and eliminate the value of your investment. And frankly, if such a leap in efficiency were realized in a commercial product, then some government would probably buy up 100% of it and you wouldn't be able to get any anyway. Kind of like what happened with nanosolar, which was then driven out of existence by the chinese dumping panels on our market so none of us got to buy any of it. That stuff had the potential to be disruptive, but now we have to wait for someone to conceive of the idea again with some new and even cheaper technology because we're okay with goods produced with slave labor so long as it doesn't happen within our borders.
Distributed storage capacity solves nothing if the grid operators cannot manage it.
I bet you don't downshift your car because you think it's going to hurt your engine, too.
It's only a solution if the batteries help balance the grid.
Yes, that was what the GP was talking about. Good news! You get at least a "D" on your reading comprehension test!
This is bad for homeowners with PV, because they want to run their meters backwards and get paid, and grid balancing would reduce their ability to do that.
You have no idea what you're on about. Increasing homeowner battery capacity is how we're going to implement grid balancing, and when the homeowner's battery bank balances the grid, their meter is going to run backwards and they're going to get paid. But unlike a grid-tied system without batteries, they'll be able to release the power when they want to, and as such, they will get paid as much as possible while simultaneously also providing the maximum grid balancing value — by providing power when it is most needed. It is not a coincidence that power costs the most when there is the least power available.
What is needed is net metering. The infrastructure cost and connection fee should be completely divorced from the cost of power, and the users of the power should effectively pay the providers with just a small cut taken off the top for whoever is managing the tracking and billing — which need not be the same as the infrastructure provider. Indeed, recent events regarding PG&E's inability to maintain neighborhood power distribution infrastructure provide some evidence that tying the two together is disastrous.
Fracking is actually a GOOD thing overall...
Who told you that?
We've been doing it for decades in various areas without much of an issue
It increases production with very low cost and low risk.
To the corporation. for the rest of us, it equals increased seismicity and water contamination. As well, the "fracking fluids" are just refinery wastes. they have no business injecting that into the ground anywhere.
I take it back, perhaps there is a conspiracy.
Genetics explains why you look like your father, and if you don't, why you should.
