MF: Would half a million Teslas crash the power grid?

[PeterK]

Kind of analogous to the highway maintenance taxes included in the price of gasoline. If lots of people switch to EVs and buy more efficient cars, they will need to raise the tax per gallon which will drive less gas consumption, etc. Ultimately they need to change the collection mechanism or the last guy with an ICE car will be paying a whopping price per gallon.

 

[ItsNotAboutTheMoney]

SCE needs to change how it assesses the network charge and the prices it pays and charges for power. The simplest approach would be to have a flat monthly wires charge based on the amperage of your service interconnect -- a pretty good gauge of the capital cost SCE has invested to serve your house. As for your power, SCE should have to pay you 110% of the current real-time spot market price of power, as set by the California Independent System Operator. (The extra 10% comes from the reduced losses associated with getting power injected directly into the distribution system.) Figuring out the price you should pay for energy is a bit trickier, because SCE has all sorts of contracts that they're (properly) allowed to recover in rates.

That's just crazy talk, Robert! Suggesting that people pay for the services they receive is, just, so, so, so ... reasonable. Obviously, this is combined with people paying the full cost of initial installation.

My only question would in relation to efficiency. If you are an efficient household in a property with an existing high interconnect does your interconnection correctly represent your "share" of grid maintenance?

 

[Robert.Boston]

My only question would in relation to efficiency. If you are an efficient household in a property with an existing high interconnect does your interconnection correctly represent your "share" of grid maintenance?

From a utility's planning perspective, yes. They've got big transformers for your house, which cost real money to buy and will cost real money to replace. This is what we call the "shallow interconnection costs." Another metric could be peak monthly net load, which is a better proxy for your "deep interconnection costs" such as the need to build new transmission lines and other shared facilities. Big industrial loads pay on these two bases (plus time-of-use energy consumption), but we've never felt it was worth the cost to meter and bill this way for residential.

 

[rolosrevenge]

I don't think they should pay you 110%, because while true, you may be helping with your injection, until IEEE 1547 is changed and you can have an active var management on your inverter, your unity power factor panel could overvolt the node you're connected to (which is a commonly observed phenomenon). Then there's the issue of wheeling. You're paying for your service interconnect, but that's your fee to access the backup power. You want to make a profit selling, you should have to pay a wheeling fee to move your power to other customers. This is what's done in transmission networks. So the proper system would have you paying a flat distribution connection monthly fee (on the order of $20 - $100/mo.), paying for the net energy used, being paid less than spot market price for the energy produced (which includes the distribution wheeling fee) and being paid for voltage support if your inverter supports that mode of operation. That's a truly sustainable system where everyone pays their fair share. Even if battery storage gets down to $50/kWh of capital cost, you'd still need to get a 30 kWh system to try and go off grid with the same reliability as the utility which would cost $1500 upfront and need to be replaced every 8 - 10 years. You'd also need to oversize your solar system substantially which would cost another couple thousand upfront to get off the grid. Then you'd also have to do all of the maintenance yourself. I don't really see utilities going anywhere.

 

[jerry33]

Even if battery storage gets down to $50/kWh of capital cost, you'd still need to get a 30 kWh system to try and go off grid with the same reliability as the utility which would cost $1500 upfront and need to be replaced every 8 - 10 years. You'd also need to oversize your solar system substantially which would cost another couple thousand upfront to get off the grid. Then you'd also have to do all of the maintenance yourself. I don't really see utilities going anywhere.

Presumably a Solar City lease using old Tesla batteries would reduce the battery cost to practically zero, and the lease would eliminate most of the up-front cost and maintenance of the system.

 

[rolosrevenge]

Presumably a Solar City lease using old Tesla batteries would reduce the battery cost to practically zero, and the lease would eliminate most of the up-front cost and maintenance of the system.

I doubt that, there'll only be a finite number of old Tesla batteries, and the demand for energy storage is huge. Tesla's not going to give them away when there are people who are willing to buy them, and second life batteries are not going to last as long as new ones. Plus, you still have to significantly oversize your system to exist off grid, so you'd end up paying more to solar city in the lease than you would to your utility.

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Though this is an interesting problem. I should run some Monte Carlo simulations to see what the cost of solar and batteries would have to be for different areas in order to make such a system cheaper and more reliable than the grid ...

 

[neroden]

Yes, SCE will spend what it has to keep reliable distribution service and set its tariffs to collect the costs. This investment is exactly how utilities earn a profit for their shareholders, because their allowed rate of return exceeds their weighted cost of capital. Anyway, I digress...

The problem in your particular case arises because you mostly don't pay the wires charges.

In New York State, there's been a long transition period ordered by the Public Service Commission. There is now a flat connection fee: $15.11 /mo for electricity, $16.30/mo for natural gas. Both are going up, but the natural gas fee is going up a LOT more. The idea is that these will pay for the network maintenance, the portion which is not proportional to usage.

Apparently the network of natural gas lines is *FAR* more expensive to maintain than the electric grid, because the approved rate increases see the base price for a natgas connection skyrocketing, while the base price for an electric connection is only going up a little more.