This is sunlight falling on a roof. If you convert it into electricity but then don't use that electricity, is it really a waste? It's like saying that the overflow from my water tank that collects rain water off the roof is 'wasting' water.
It could be argued that it's a waste in the sense that the generated electricity could have gone to someone else if there was a grid, but if the grid operator isn't allowing excess to be put back into the grid (e.g. because there's no demand at that time because it's sunny and everyone is using solar), then the grid operator needs to solve that with some form of energy storage (e.g. batteries).
Instead the entire paradigm of centralized generation may need to be called into question and we should instead be focusing on a hybrid centralized baseline + local generation and storage. Places like China do fine with promoting residential solar where nearly half the solar was on residential rooftops (2023) [1].
[1] https://globalenergymonitor.org/report/china-continues-to-le...
| Policymakers are now attempting to come up with solutions. “You can make solar play nice with the grids,” ...
| Yet the best solution would be for energy firms to respond to the competition and sort themselves out.
The article is talking about: * how solar is disrupting the traditional utility model * in countries where the utilities provide a poor service wealthy people are doing there own thing producing their own power with PV * how this leads to less customers for the utility leading to more expensive power for people who cannot afford to generate their own power * that solutions like grid-tied home PV instead of independent systems provides a better outcome for everyone in the area.
I don't think it it to much of a stretch to say that the article is advocating for, as you say, "a hybrid centralized baseline + local generation and storage."
In my opinion, a lot had to do with how they set retail rates. The retail electric companies set different rate categories and tiers. Most residential customers don't realize that they're often subsidizing commercial and industrial customers. So, of course there's going to be a death spiral when those residential customers decide to generate themselves.
> Rooftop solar offers an alternative to a monopoly that can no longer be considered natural.
Electricity generation can no longer be considered a natural monopoly. That sounds like an endorsement of rooftop solar.
In fact, it even somewhat welcomes it by pointing out that the competition utility companies now face will force them to offer better service.
I don't think that moving the generation around is really an "instead", because the problem at hand is that distribution is expensive and someone has to pay for it if you want a grid. And most of that cost is the local stuff.
So how do you get everyone connected that wants to be, without it costing them a ton of money? You might have to make the grid cost into a mandatory tax.
Whether the electric company is private or state-owned is mostly a separate issue.
If we're ok with everyone being an island or building a system capable of massively distributed generation, great. It will be massively more complex, less efficient, and more expensive to maintain. Let's just be honest about the nature of the problem.
I'm so, very sick of it.
This narrative is going to ruin us all. The rich and powerful will be ruined as well, it'll just take a little bit longer.
I think this is true of a lot of things that are 'in our house' (or on our property). A fatuous hypothetical example might be a large central refrigerator shared between multiple properties.
The apartment building I live in has large central boilers for the hot water, to save space in the apartments. This benefitted the property developer, and is probably more energy efficient (although, just like our solar power example, transmission loss needs to be accounted for), but has downsides for the apartment residents.
A better example is private vehicle ownership, as opposed to public transport. It's a good example of something that has moved from a more centralised control to individual control, with benefits and downsides.
Note, I said amazingly cheap, not efficient. We have more efficient solar options but they're in the lab waiting for a breakthrough to make them cheaper or being replaced in the market with options that waste more and cost less per useful watt delivered.
The Economist did a whole issue recently about how amazing solar is and how it is changing the world but they've been mildly climate skeptical for years platforming frauds like Bjorn Lomberg and it still leaks through in their writing, even if they've switched to "solar being too cheap is bad" from "solar is too expensive to help".
Solar is competing against systems that pay for their fuel directly and which still turn two thirds of it to waste heat.
The solution is of course a mix. Solar/wind/hydrogen/gas/etc., big grid/home systems. It will require grid upgrades.
Batteries are already happening [0]. And electric cars + home solar systems with batteries have a further ability to allow additions to this at scale if the grid supports it
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_energy_storage_syste...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Australia
[2] https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/Others...
[3] https://www.wri.org/update/sustained-portfolio-policies-have...
[5] https://gogn.orkustofnun.is/Talnaefni/OS-2021-T009-01.pdf
I think there are three stages of renewable development. The first stage renewables partly offset traditional suppliers. The second stage is you actually have excess part of the time. And the third stage you have a lot of season excess. China and Texas are in the first stage but California is in the second stage already.
I'm not sure it's that simple as evidenced by the ever increasing hours of negative electricity prices.
As far as I know, there are so far no good applications for short bursts of negative prices. Everything that would love those is so capital intensive/high fix costs that even 10 or 20% utilisation rates at negative prices are not enough to make it economically viable.
Season excess is also a big problem. Batteries to smooth the days/nights cycles are fine, you can use them ~365 times a year. But a battery to smooth out summer/winter cycles can only be used once a year!
I do find the rest of the article more or less balanced in the discussion of the issue, even though it tries very hard not to actually squarely put blame where it lies
If that means the grids go bankrupt and default on payments to the fossil fuel industry, then I will try to pretend to be very sad for at least 60 seconds.
The group of people that will ultimately benefit from this includes just about everyone except the octogenarian plutocrats that are actively accelerating climate change.
Maybe once they die off there will be some financial incentives to help repair the atmosphere (assuming life extension technology doesn’t doom all of us to living with their immortality).
Through a grid it may be sent to a plant which will produce green hydrogen, or to a dam (pumped-storage hydroelectricity)... or sent to another region (even quite remote, via some (U)HVDC line) which will use/store it.
The solution is obvious and cheap. You don't need powerwalls in 2025 all the major backup battery manufacturers now make $3-4k models which you can wheel around and can take your excess with zero conf off the shelf.
Takes like this are why corporations will plunge humanity into a painful end through climate change.
If wed had invested to in socialism,we would build out batteries.
What a selfish techno dystopia
However, what will likely happen is that these private utilities will see the writing on the wall and instead do what PG&E is doing in CA and just start charging "transmission fees" to keep their rates even higher despite massive daytime solar abundance.
Everywhere there is state/municipal owned utilities it's almost always considerable cheaper than private.
Not everywhere, it's really the regulation that matters, not just the ownership - here in Alberta we've got a market where we get municipally-owned utilities where we still get high rates comprising of energy fees + transmission fees + distribution fees.
I don't know how there are still some that haven't worked out that a privatised natural monopoly is one of the worst ownership structures for anything important - as if multiple other companies could ever build a other electricity transmission networks on top of each other in the same area (or water and sewer systems, etc.) and provide actual competition! It's impossible and ludicrous.
Eskom South Africa:
>CEO and the cyanide-laced coffee...dramatic example of how criminality has seeped into South Africa’s state...organised theft, mainly of copper, on an industrial scale https://www.ft.com/content/5fe8291d-9895-4272-9e0a-eefa27911...
Pakistan:
>Pakistan's energy shortfall refuses to abate amid scorching heat, load-shedding...Pakistan's urban centres are now suffering up to six hours of load shedding...Calling it a "crisis of leadership and coordination", a former PEPCO head criticised... https://energy.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/oil-and-gas...
Not sure you can blame solar for that. The rest of the world seems to manage solar without death spirals.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42971311
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42975492
If the privately owned utilities are left to their own devices when solar comes in and eats their lunch, expect more "climate change driven disasters," right?
If the tax payer is ultimately on the hook, then the tax payers should own the utility.
I’m not sure I understand how this works unless you split off loads into a subpanel that is fed by a UPS which is fed by solar panels, and also isolated from your utility connected electrical service.
As far as I understand it, you can’t have power generated by solar panels feeding loads in your grid-connected panel without backfeeding the grid, same deal as a generator backfeeding a grid-connected panel. You have to kill the MCB or service disconnect to prevent backfeeding.
If you have links with info on how this work (one-line diagram would be extremely useful) I’d be curious. I sell and run commercial electrical work, FWIW. I’ve done zero solar jobs so my understanding could definitely be wrong!
Disaster for who? Not the users that's for sure.
Another aspect of this in the US electric utility context is that if more power is genrated locally, and exxcess is distributed as locally as possible, then long distance distribution is reduced. THere aren't as many needs, and certainly this reduces planned expansion of long distance distribution.
However, this is also a "disaster" as defined above, since construction of those long distance transmission facilities are also payed for with public bonds and therefore direct taxpayer funding.
The economist never ceases to amaze in this twisted logic...
I have to say, my days of not taking economics seriously as a science are certainly coming to a middle
This is self inflicted behavior from monopolies that ignore user research.
The current solutions look to be market based, which boils down to getting rid of "one fixed price per kWh" and moving to something closer to paying whatever the wholesale market is charging. Not exactly that as the wholesale market is wild. It can varying by over a factor of 1000 during the year. What has happened is time of use charging which boils down to different fix rates for different times of the day. Controlled loads, which translates to the supplier being able to forcibly turn off things in your house. If you agree to that for your car charger for example, you get to pay about USD $0.05/kWh to charge your car. And there are demand charges, which means you don't pay per kW/h used but rather your peak draw in kW over a 3 month period.
Net metering was never a thing here, but now they can forcibly turn off the feed-in. In return they where used to set the maximum feed-in very conservatively based on how much the grid could absorb form every panel in the suburb at the worst possible time, now they will take the maximum your wiring supports.
Finally they now allow households to form themselves into power plants, that sell the power they generate / store directly on the wholesale market.
Meanwhile, the story is talking about grids disallowing net metering as a big step. It ain't a big step. It wasn't even a first step for Australia, as the distortions it caused were obvious so it was never allowed.
It looks to me like Australia has largely solved the day to day "grid instability" problem the article talks about. We do have places whose yearly average is 70% renewable, and they are fine. I'm not so sure about how them solving the "sun hasn't shined and the wind hasn't blown" for a week issue. It's not insurmountable as even on cloudy days, solar outputs 20% of peak. However, right now the solution in that 70% state is gas peakers.
The grid is a utility. They weren't originally built with the idea of customers sending power back at a small scale. So it's tricky to maintain power fluctuations when you have all these extra data points. Plus considerations for the quality of consumer hardware. So naturally companies would prefer to have solar installations at scale as opposed to by residential basis.
https://www.comed.com/smart-energy/my-green-power-connection...
6 month turnaround sounds pretty weak.
https://secure.comed.com/MyAccount/MyService/Pages/RequestIn...
If the solar-roofed house can involve home batteries, problem solved.
You can't run a grid with maxed out cheap renewables. It's like having a society where the police and prisons staff closes shop and goes home when the sun sets and still expect law and order to persist.
