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Solar happenings
- Thread starter vfx
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nwdiver
Well-Known Member
Yeah... that's certainly A LOT better than the idiotic production fees in NM or the capacity fees with APS. I'm ok with a peak demand fee... that's how commercial power is billed.
Spot on, @drees. The Tesla home storage sales team should hop the first plane to Phoenix and start taking pre-orders.
swaltner
Active Member
$50 a month fee is crazy. That's more than I was paying for electricity (outside of summer air-conditioning) BEFORE I installed the 5kW solar system. So, they're saying my rates should go up when I consume less electricity. Crazy!
Right. I see that the key factor is that you have extraordinarily cheap power (as I noted in the other thread). I can get 11 cents / kwh, and this is considered a cheap part of NY, with a lot of hydropower. I just checked, and Arizona is upwards of 11 cents / kwh. Most of California is far higher.
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I would love to know how Amaren are pulling that off. I'm a little suspicious that they're doing something dangerous like running old nuclear plants into the ground without maintaining them, and without building a decommissioning reserve. (And sure enough, they own the Callaway nuclear plant.) Or they might be doing something similar with old coal plants, running them into the ground without paying for the EPA-mandated upgrades. (And they do own four antique coal plants in St. Louis, including the 4th largest mercury polluter in the nation, Labadie.) On the other hand, they have three dams, which should supply cheap hydropower basically forever, but they don't produce very much. Looking into it more deeply, Ameren is also heavily dependent on natural gas plants, so their rates will probably skyrocket the next time gas prices go up.
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Indeed, the Phoenix (Salt River Project) fee structure seems designed to sell solar + batteries. Salt River Project's poorly thought out attack on solar power just created a very good market for Tesla. I suppose as a Tesla investor I should thank them?
Salt River Project's poorly thought out attack on solar power just created a very good market for Tesla. I suppose as a Tesla investor I should thank them?
SolarCity is not happy about this:
SolarCity Files Lawsuit Against Salt River Project for Antitrust Violations : Greentech Media
So I track solar energy generation in California. Yesterday was the first day ever that the peak production went over 5,000 MW. Due to more facilities coming online in the last 12 months, total power generation in February 2015 versus 2014 was up 58%, from 565,820 MWh to 894,566 MWh. Depending on the weather, March could be the first month where total power exceeds 1,000,000 MWh. This does not even include solar thermal (Ivanpah and such), just utility scale solar PV.
TheTalkingMule
Distributed Energy Enthusiast
nwdiver
Well-Known Member
So not residential PV either? Love the data... is there a web-link for that or do you have exclusive access to something?
http://www.caiso.com/green/renewableswatch.html
This gets you to the raw data, then its about how much effort you want to put into extracting it. I asked about a year ago if they could give me the actual spreadsheet with all the data, and they never responded.
There is also a guy in France, I believe his name is Bernard Chabot, who manually was doing something like I am doing. But he was capturing all the data, not just solar. He put out monthly reports on California Renewables for several months, but he seems to have stopped. He was really into the solar thermal generation, and Ivanpah specifically. Maybe when Ivanpah started having trouble meeting it's initial projected levels of generation, he might have lost interest. Just speculation on my part. Ivanpah says that it will just take time to reach the levels originally stated, as they wring the bugs out of the working plant. The solar thermal category include all solar thermal in the state, not just Ivanpah.
RT
Those numbers do not include residential PV, as the Cal ISO never sees that. The ISO is in charge of the transmission system between the producers and the local utilities. So they can see what the large producers are supplying to them, and what the utilities are drawing.
The daily power graphs at http://www.caiso.com/Pages/TodaysOutlook.aspx are also pretty interesting. At the time of this posting, the demand from 8 AM to 5 PM is basically flat due to all the solar that has come on line. The peak demand has now shifted to 7-8 PM. This is quite different than it was a year ago. As more solar is added, it strongly indicates the need for grid-level storage to flatten that 7 PM peak.
Soooo, while everyone's talking about storage (and batteries will start being installed, in a big way), the other thing which could happen is grid transmission.
With the huge daytime solar production in California, I'd expect them to be pushing that energy out to cloudy Oregon and Washington, if the wires are available.
With the huge daytime solar production in California, I'd expect them to be pushing that energy out to cloudy Oregon and Washington, if the wires are available.
The wires are absolutely available. CA imports a huge amount of power from PacNW, so all you would be doing is reducing imports, not actually flipping net flow. The difficulty is the inter-control area transfers are scheduled in hour-long blocks (in the West), which makes it tough to balance solar.
Is that something that needs to change? Would that be a change for the better and be more in the direction of a smart grid?
The WashingtonPost has a big article about the political problems the solar industry is facing:
Utilities strive to fetter solar industry's growth - The Washington Post
Utilities strive to fetter solar industry's growth - The Washington Post
lolachampcar
Well-Known Member
The die is cast. Utilities need to be the method by which homes go PV and not a temporary impediment to the inevitable.
omgwtfbyobbq
Active Member
Can't that DC backbone reverse direction too? I was under the impression that they sent power down during their mild summers and we sent power up during our mild winters.
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It'd probably be easier to set up a webscraper and dump it all into a CSV file. More work up front, but less down the road.
Maybe I'll take a look at it this week.
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