Posts by BenWilson
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Capture: Someone, Somewhere, In Summertime, in reply to Nora Leggs,
Looks more like a fly to me. This summer I've noticed a LOT more bee imitators. But also, my sunflowers in the back seem to have finally brought actual honeybees back to my garden. Will get some shots soon...been busy!
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Capture: Got the blues, in reply to Bruce Buckman,
Nice! Love the sun's 6 prong breakup. It's almost like a star of Bethlehem.
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Hard News: Done like a dinner, in reply to Bart Janssen,
If been keeping a lazy eye on solar panels because I’d love to have them for the “dream house” after I win lotto, but in the end it looks like a wind turbine (far enough away from the house to not hear the noise) is a better bet than solar at the moment.
Me too. I periodically check the prices, crunch some numbers on usages, and find again that there are a number of obvious moves that come first. Heat pump, solar water heating. I'd not heard of heat exchangers for water until this thread, that sounds like it's worth looking at. In other words, there's lower hanging fruit in the electricity saving areas before worrying about generation. PV has been steadily becoming more and more viable, particularly since grid connection became possible here, but it's still a lot of cost and hassle. I only mentioned it because the discourse about electricity production here seemed to be ignoring it, and it could very well become a great deal more viable as a massive project at a governmental level than it is with individual fiddlers living out the neoliberal method at glacial pace.
Also, very interesting to hear that you think we're on the cusp of a tech change in solar panels.
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Hard News: Done like a dinner, in reply to ChrisW,
Thanks for that correction. I misread my source, which said 9,751 MW. I read that as 975MW. That was as at 2011, so yes, 4000MW added would only add 41%, rather than quadrupling it. Ta. Knew I was going to trip on one of these calculations. But as you say, that's quite a lot. Especially since once the main infrastructure is in place, jacking up a solar setup isn't much more than tacking more panels on the end of the array. As the price of the panels drops, the incentive to do this increases.
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Hard News: Done like a dinner, in reply to Andrew Stevenson,
Yes, my memory was that Vector was the most proactive in this regard. It does make sense from the grid's point of view to put smoothing suppliers right there where the power is being used.
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I’d like to also note that the amount of power that could be generated from $10,000 setups is something like 4KW. A million houses generating that would give us 4000MW. This is around 4 times our current total capacity from all power sources. [Ed's note. See below for correction and further discussion. RB.]. Which is why I said earlier that a large scale uptake of distributed solar would gut itself – the bottom would fall out of electricity prices real fast, and presumably that would reduce the savings that could be made by installing solar. So it would probably balance out at a much lesser uptake, just left to market forces. Economies of scale would also drive down the costs, there would be more importers of panels, more technicians to install them, better processes at the power suppliers to get the installs to happen, improved design of the grid. It sounds like a free-market dream. Surprised that the supposed champions of the free-market, our neoliberal overlords, aren’t all over making it as easy as possible. But that presumes they actually have any real talent for organizing even such a simple thing as this, a solution completely in line with their supposed economic theories.
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Hard News: Done like a dinner, in reply to Lilith __,
In fact anyone can do this, now. Some rellies of mine just got solar panels fitted. You tell the power company and they come and put a meter in to show how much you're giving back to the grid. They charge for setting up the meter, but after that they pay you for your solar power.
The devil is in the details, though. How much they charge you for the meter and how much they pay you for the power are the difference between viability and non-viability. I haven't researched this extensively, but I think only one company offers to buy and sell at the same rate. All the rest sell at retail, but buy at wholesale, which means the system saves an order of magnitude less money. Furthermore, there are no agreements that force them to stick to any deal made. So they could pull the carpet at any time. And organizing it all has sounded like a major mission in most cases I've heard of. There is the issue of the danger to technicians of having a power generator somewhere on the street - they think they've shut off the power for repairs and get zapped by someone's solar grid.
However, all of these are organizational details that the government could take an active hand in making clear and simple. If they were proactive about such things, and felt that a million houses with $10,000 worth of self-funded power generation might be economically stimulatory. They could get 10 billion worth of privately funded power generation of the most admirable kind just by passing some laws, and removing the lips of big business from the electricity nozzle.
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Hard News: Done like a dinner, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
Except we’re not so keen on capital improvements that don’t improve the capital value of the property.
There is an element of that, I'll freely admit. I think it's changing, though, as the ideas become less fringe and more proven. Active support from the government, as has happened with insulation, makes a big difference.
But we had to let go of solar water heating -- it was just such a big investment that would take a long while to pay off.
How much, how long? How does it compare to money in a term deposit? Or even the stockmarket?
the weather in Auckland would still have the greatest impact on solar supply.
Makes a change from it being about the weather in the South Island.
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Hard News: Done like a dinner, in reply to Paul Campbell,
you do however need to change your hydro to be more bursty - to be able to handle larger loads with the same water, the dams don't have to be bigger, just more penstocks and a bigger powerhouse (not something you can do easily to an existing dam except Clyde and particularly NOT Manapouri) - see my suggestion above about working better with wind power, the same applies to solar.
Is decentralized solar that bursty? Individual panels are bursty, but the aggregate effect of ten thousand panels on roofs across an entire city would very much have a smoothing effect. Across the entire country, a day that is mainly fine would be much the same as any other day that was mainly fine, I'd have thought. And you can see clouds coming, days in advance.
The other advantage to this is that solar panels are capital improvements to their property, something that NZers are not so much keen on as outright addicted to. They're tax free investments. Perhaps that's yet another reason they are abhorred by government.
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Hard News: Done like a dinner, in reply to BenWilson,
I'd also back up my above point that solar is the renewable of choice that physicists tend to lean to when considering a future without fossil fuels for electricity production. The problem of storing the power is solved for the most part by reversible metering in a country like NZ where hydro forms such a big part of the base generation. There's no need to make big farms for the power when it can pretty much be made right where it gets used, on real estate that is sitting idle (roof tops).
Basically, the technological problem is very much solved already. The only significant barriers are institutional. In fact, it's such a good idea that it could kill itself, since it would make electricity too cheap. Such is the world we live in.
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