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?
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.
They dont need to "hand it over" to the feds... they are the feds.
The USPS gets a tax break and preferential treatment, like a monopoly on your mailbox and increased penalties for harassment of their agents vs. a slightly more private carrier like UPS or FedEx, but they are not themselves "the feds". They're just a business with protected status which is dressed up to look patriotic, and they're hardly the only one. I know that when I was a kid, I thought Federal Express was affiliated with the postal service. Given what I see around me on a regular basis, it's probable that many adults still believe that. And like any large corporation, FedEx has to some extent grafted itself onto the federal government, e.g. (FTFL) "In 2001, FedEx sealed a $9 billion deal with the USPS to transport all of the post office's overnight and express deliveries".
Bullshit
Who the fuck are you, coward? You're only capable of bullshit.
Not all ideas are viable.
Irrelevant. This is an idea already proven viable.
Deny it all you want, but Lithium ion based batteries are reaching the limits of their energy density.
Irrelevant. Not the only technology.
There are not any breakthroughs on the horizon that are going to make lithium ion batteries cost
More irrelevancy.
Perhaps its YOUR cognitive dissonance that is preventing you from recognizing that the technology is not viable.
Already proven viable.
People like you are quick to turn to conspiracy theories
Not a conspiracy theory, this was a deliberate attempt on your part to paint me with that brush. Also, conspiracies are the norm, not the exception. If two people team up to defraud a third in a way that breaks the law, that's a criminal conspiracy.
and pop psychology
Cognitive dissonance is not pop psychology, and you also don't get to suggest that I'm suffering from it while also insulting the concept.
as to why alternative energy is not mainstream when it is simple economics.
Yes, very simple economics: The entrenched interests have lots of money, and have been using it to manipulate the situation so as to remain in a position of power, as our corporatist system is designed to enable. No spooky invisible hands are needed to explain what is happening.
Farmers want the best yields possible. They assume that the products advertised to them are acceptable,
because being so irresponsible is easier than being responsible enough to do the research to determine whether the products are safe. But don't fool yourself; this is still irresponsible behavior. Society encourages it by taking away your farm and throwing you into the street where it's illegal for you to live if you have a bad season or two, which is just another reason we need MGI. Then people can better afford scruples.
Toss a few gallons of water in your trunk before you head to remote locations -- while the propylene glycol in the antifreeze may not kill you, the corrosion inhibitors and other ingredients
The glycol is the corrosion inhibitor. That's its job as much as anti-freezing. That's why we use it even in climates without freezes, and not just a smaller package of corrosion inhibitors. You have to substantially change the properties of the water to retard corrosion.
You wouldn't drink the water in your engine even if it didn't have anything added to it, because with or without a corrosion inhibitor you will still have corrosion, and you don't want to be drinking heavy metals. Iron is not too bad, but Aluminum is fairly horrible. Many engines are still made of both, and the ones that aren't are generally all-Al. Regardless, you can check coolant condition with a voltmeter. If your coolant is making more than about 0.1v, then it's doing damage through corrosion and you need to change it. If it's making more than 0.2v, then you're definitely suffering ongoing damage.
There's no way for a data service to be cheap
Of course there is. There's a way for data service to be free. It's called mesh networking, and all it takes is for enough of us to care at the same time to spend a few bucks (okay, maybe a couple hundred) on a fancy WAP and maybe build some decent antennas if we live in the sticks. Problem is, even here on Slashdot people will bitch and whine about how the uplink bandwidth has to come from somewhere and refuse to get involved. Well yes, no kidding. But we also have to start somewhere. Forget Internet2, we need Internet3. For me, since I do live in an area of low population density, there's no point in messing with it since I have no one to mesh network with, hence my endless campaigning.
The only thing that's ever going to solve this problem is open mesh networking. That brings a whole new set of problems, but we need to tackle them sooner rather than later because centralization is getting stronger rather than weaker.
"What man has done, man can aspire to do." -- Jerry Pournelle, about space flight
