Comment by pfdietz

The hardest possible demand to meet is random, reasonal, and spikey demand spread diffusely over a large area. Which is more or less homes.

Conversely the easiest possible demand to meet is localized constant and high demand. Basically AI datacenters or industrial users. These guys are basically paying for the grid and residential have it as a subsidy.

The supermajority of the price of electricity is fixed costs related to installing and maintaining capacity. The marginal problem of increasing generation or utilization is cheap. I believe it's like under 20% even for gas power where you have to buy gas. For grid solar it would be even crazier because marginally its basically free they really don't care how much you use it even goes negative but the fixed costs are everything.

So what causes a lot of social problems is when wealthy people get their own private solar because the whole current pricing structure revolves around wealthy people using a lot of electricity and paying down the connection costs for poor people. If they have solar the poor people are fronting the maintainence cost which destabilizes everything.

Unfortunately the connection fee does not cover all fixed cost. For a long time the model has been fairly "progressive" in this regard. Some of the fixed costs of the grid have been paid for by amortization over the per Kw cost, which had the effect of charging people who used more a larger chunk of these fixed costs. Now with the option to provide your own power if you have upfront capital for solar can build as big of a system as they want. As other comments in the thread have mentioned, net-metering is largely functioned as a subsidy to give money to people who are already doing fine financially. I want green energy, and I think that decentralization has definite benefits, but it's pretty hard to argue against maintaining the grid to allow re-balancing and covering supply shortfalls in specific areas. Here is a video discussing this problem - https://youtu.be/C4cNnVK412U?si=ZzZhoApFW3khqrdq&t=720

LFP chemistries are approaching ~$50/kWh, and CATL's sodium chemistry is supposed to be ~$40/kWh (per CATL); soon it will be more expensive to ship the battery storage than the storage itself.

"Watershed moment:" Big battery storage prices hit record low in China auction - https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/china-alread... - April 19th, 2024

EVs have giant batteries - they can be connected via their DC ports and charged/discharged via solar inverters - technically. The current spec for CCS and NACS doesn't allow for this (Chademo did, but they lost the 'format war'). Giant effing oversight on manufacturers' part if you ask me.

Some people have managed to trick their cars into reverse charging via solar hybrid inverters and some custom hardware and it works as advertised - which is no surprise since its a lithium battery charge controller charging/discharing a solar battery.

If you could use your 60kWh EV battery on top of the 10-20 kWh you have at home, it would be a game changer, most people could power their homes for a week on that sort of capacity.

Utility-scale solar needs land and has to deal with line losses. Rooftop solar does not have to deal with either.

Not necessarily - you have to pay for that infrastructure between the plant and your home.

Balcony solar is even cheaper to build than utility-scale solar.

If long term storage (like Standard Thermal) comes into play, I could see industrial users decide to just decouple from the grid too (or, use the threat to do so as a means to drive down what they are charged.)

We may see industrial users preposition themselves in locations with ample nearby PV potential. If I were building a factory in the US (or a data center) I would think twice before putting it in a higher population density area.

We may also see local microgrids develop. This would still have distribution costs, but not transmission.

Commercial properties often have enough roof area to meet most of their daytime demand on-site. And industrial consumption in Western countries has been flat or declining for years, so "stable, high-voltage generation" may face less demand than assumed.

The bill you pay for the grid in such cases typically doesn't cover the fixed costs, and would have to be much higher if solar demand destruction becomes big.

Where do the massive upgrades to the distribution system required for this kind of setup come from?

We simultaneously hate utilities and want them to redesign and pay for a distribution system that was not intended for bidirectional load flow.

Our municipal distribution systems are barely adequate. Net metering produces essentially no revenue but imposes a huge load on that infra.

I think I can answer that, though I'm not a Pakistani but as a Nigerian in a developing country, you might also have a petrol generator for night times. But for the majority of people just having your phone and power bank charged for the night is pretty ok, a plus if you can keep a handful of bulbs on also.

Shift usage to daytime and rely on battery storage.

overprovision for their needs during the day and utilize battery power at night.

At night, what people will do is wait until the morning to run the washing machine.

Visit Australia, plenty of people are! When the real paybacks are generally 4-8 years (depending on what we're talking about) why wouldn't people be? We have 4.2 million solar systems (for reference there are almost 11 million dwellings). Just this year the Federal Government started giving out grants for home batteries and over 55,000 people have already taken that up and at least 90,000 home battery installations exist so far according to these stats: https://cer.gov.au/markets/reports-and-data/small-scale-inst...

Even if people don't go to the lengths I do (I like to watch the current generation and will slightly delay my use big loads like the washing machine, dishwasher, dryer etc. to try and use as much as my solar as possible), it's still very common for people to choose to do things like set the dishwasher timer in the day to use solar - which is great because it's also taking load off the grid.

Most of the costs for residential solar are installation. Systems that you install yourself, e.g. balcony solar, have payback times below five years (even in less than ideal regions, like Germany). I would assume that labor in Pakistan is a bit cheaper.

My payback is 6-7 years in Canada with $0 invested.

“Responsible for my own power generation” = I do literally nothing. Nada.

I get $1000 a year for free.

Please show me someone who does not want $1000 per year for absolutely nothing.

A lot of people in my area are interested and it would be a net positive for them long term, but the area is poor so few can afford the initial costs despite knowing the money they would ultimately be saving.

#1 is correct. #2 is quite incorrect.

Most people don’t have the capital to be responsible for their own electricity generation, except the rich.