Wishful thinking.

From the 40 gallons in your storage tank to caverns full of natural gas it is all about the ebb and flow of energy. Mostly dependent on weather.

I see no evidence that storage is ever going to outpace demand most especially in peak heating seasons. The need for some form of modulated output or storage can't be ignored.

If solar power has yet to contribute 1% of consumption they have a long row to hoe.

If I'm dreaming it's about fusion.

Nuclear is not renewable? If you are all-in for technology, then Nuclear should be in the mix unless you follow science to the point of irrational boundaries.

I think Naam has a more balanced plan: http://rameznaam.com/2015/04/08/how-much-land-would-it-take-to-power-the-us-via-solar/

Good heavens, Dana, for a smart guy you seem like you're in the bag for rooftop solar.

Quick quiz: rooftop pv will keep the lights during blackouts , yes? No. The rights of the lineman trying to fix the glitch trump the right of net metering customers to send juice backwards in the grid to zap him. PV could be helpful given enough output in a specific substation as long as the grid is smart enough to recognize that fact. (It is not.) Alternatively a smart inverter coupled with custom home gear (batteries) could keep your lights on. The latter is not economically feasible. The former is being fought by the solar industry in California.

Which brings us to Australia. From Alice Springs to the nearest civilization (Darwin) is 931 miles. The power loss and reliability factor over those distances underscore the need for a smart grid, which is quite close to being a fact in Australia.

How so for the US grid (expressed in outages)?

" The five-year annual average of outages doubled every five years, which means the current five-year annual average is four times what it was fifteen years ago."

:http://insideenergy.org/2014/08/18/power-outages-on-the-rise-across-the-u-s/

And there's nothing smart about our grid. The median guess at the cost of wising it up is a half trillion dollars. Dana has the answer for the generation. Now granny just needs to come up with the cash.

In the US only about 25% of all roofs would be suitable for PV, but there's a fairly clear path to the combined rooftop & utility PV becoming a double-digit fraction of the mix as cost boundaries are crossed. The 1% number in the energy mix from EIA date only includes larger arrays, not the residential stuff on the ratepayers side of the meter,( but the large arrays are still the lion's share of US solar.) The doubling rate of the PV expansion is less than 2 years, so 1% now implies more than 2% by the end of 2017, and more than 4% by the end of 2019 etc. As the stuff gets cheaper the doubling rate is likely to increase.

If you're thinking 1% is a low number with a long row to hoe, it's actually half way to owning it all when looking at exponential growth.

Most people have a hard time thinking exponentially, which is how Ponzi managed to keep running new scams. It's the other constraints that will bound PVs total take-over, but as it grows the price will continue to crash, which is likely to accelerate the growth. The recent reinstatement of the 30% tax credit pretty much guarantees that it'll beat wholesale grid price parity soundly on raw cost before the subsidy tails out.

Nobody seriously contemplates an all-solar grid (not Ramez Naam, by his own assertion), except perhaps those who prattle on about how expensive the storage necessary to run a mostly renewables grid will be. But it will become the cheapest form of power there is, and it's possible to scale it and site it at the load with very little grid infrastructure requirements (unlike most wind and all nukes.) If the 25% of suitable rooftop area were implemented, it would be a double-digit fraction of the all grid power shipped in a year.

The wind blows in winter even if the sun doesn't shine (much), and at scale it's cheaper than combined cycle gas. That's how capacity factors on fossil plants in Texas are falling year on year despite being the one part of the US where demand for electricity is actually growing- usually in summer where PV can also be picking up the slack on grid peaks.

Nuclear isn't renewable, but there is enough spent fuel rod parked at existing reactors to run the entire US grid for a century at current levels if re-used in a molten salt reactor. In the process it would reduce the hazardous-life span from 10s of thousands of years to a handful of hundreds of years, which is a more tractable long term storage/disposal problem, and it won't require trucking the stuff around. It's worth doing even if wind & solar & storage costs were zero, and it should be cheaper lifecycle power than legacy nukes have been.

In New England about half all annual grid power (and a larger fraction of the peak) is currently sourced by combined cycle gas, and every time there's a cold snap (like this weekend) the gas-fired generators feel the pinch of pipeline constraints, singing in harmony along with the gas pipeline companies about rate-basing new pipeline development. This song has been going on since the 1980s even before gas became the biggest slice of the regional electric pie. A couple of years ago the generating companies were caught flat-footed and the spot price of gas went stratospheric, and along with it the LMP, with truly eye-popping wholesale electricity pricing. Now that oil prices have crashed it's cheaper to run #2 jetters to cover the shortfall when gas supplies are constrained. There are no good cavern formations for gas storage in this region, but there is substantial LNG capacity, but storage capacity sited at the generators' end of the straw is extremely limited in this region, and likely to remain so.

From up here in the peanut gallery I'll be watching the LMP in quasi-real time when it hits negative double digits F on Saturday & Sunday. If your curious, the daily history and quasi-real time pricing gets tracked here:

http://www.iso-ne.com/isoexpress/

Two years ago during a Polar Vortex event the LMP hit the red zone and stayed there for hours on multiple occasions, but I think the generators are better prepared for it this time around.

More wind and more transmission grid connections to Quebec Hydro would fix much of that problem, and it looks like that's going to happen in the next handful of years. Capacity factors of wind are increasing and the cost of wind is falling. and that too will eventually make a dent in the wintertime peak problem, but that too requires more grid infrastructure investment. Investing in more pipeline capacity to better and more cheaply feed the existing gas fleet is likely to end up as a stranded asset unless LNG export markets were developed, but the proponents of that approach currenly want to hang the full cost on the ratepayers, not the potential exporters (go figure, public money to support a private industry.) It's not yet clear who is going to get their way, and who is going to be stuck with the bill. DONG energy has a huge offshore wind proposal in the works, but offshore wind is still pretty pricey compared to combined cycle gas, even WITH pipeline capacity constraints to work around.

Demand response will also soon be a major contributor to dealing with those wintertime peak demand price spikes, as well as air conditioning peaks, but fully integrating those resources into the ISO-New England wholesale power markets is still a couple years out, having been delayed 18 months by the shoot-down and eventual resurrection of FERC Order 745. I'm beginning to doubt that the gas pipeline folks are going to get their way even though gas will continue be the major slice of the pie for at least 5 more years.

In the meantime the regional growth of distributed PV is likely to be unrelenting and will show up as missing load. It won't touch the winter peak problem, but the annual grid peaks in this region are from air conditioning loads not heating, and that's where it will cut into gas-fired capacity factors and summertime peak pricing first. Between PV, grid storage, and demand response the value of gas peaker assets will be crashing. Before the NRG shareholders gave him the boot David Crane went on record as saying there will never be another gas peaker built in the US after 2020, and that was even before the Supreme Court reinstated FERC Order 745 (he was talking about the crashing cost of grid storage, not demand-response.)

The utility biz as we've known it will barely be recognizable by 2025. It'll be an interesting (if not totally comfortable) ride as it all sorts out.

So the answer is; you are going to be paying more for electricity. I don't care who you are.

And. Don't put your life saving in to anything solar, lest you get the "Nevadan" solar spank'in.

It makes long over-hangs, and thick insulation more attractive all the time. Wait, isn't that where this thread started?

We just finished a house with a south facing wall 9 x 40 feet of glass and condition it with the new iSeries inverters from Unico.

Rational thought is a fraction of the process.

Most people are reactionary in response to stress. When the brown-outs start, those who can; move. Those who can't suffer.

Regional control, including government energy credits, make the most sense. We are energy-rich here in the Midwest and still in-the-bag for solar with plenty of science and more blind-faith than we deserve.

I know we all agree that insulation is the best long-term hedge against rising fuel prices and discomfort in general but other options are getting scarce and the off-the-grid in not going to work for we aging boomers.

I looks like the ISO-NE planners managed to keep it out of the red zone this weekend, albeit with some excursions into the yellow. ( No PR fodder for the pipeline folks on this one, despite half-century record low temps. )

Solar spankings NV style would never fly in New England, nor would it in Minnesota, where whether it's net metered at retail or remunerated on the state legislated VOST methodoloy, the deal on day-1 has a 20 year lifespan that cannot be changed by utility or regulator fiat.

More wind and solar in Texas has led to lower electricity prices, not higher. As the stuff continues to get cheaper that model can happen elsewhere.

The evolutionalry model to watch is how it all shakes out in NY under their on going major regulatory reforms. If they screw it up it'll be crazy expensive, but if they don't it should produce long term downward pressure on costs.

OK, this is weird, even for Nevada- a "second amendment solution" to PUC decision making?:

http://www.utilitydive.com/news/armed-observers-heighten-tensions-in-nevada-solar-net-metering-debate/413821/

Todd- it's highly unlikely that Darth Solar is going get everything they ask for in CA any more than Darth Utility will. (And if they do, they will pay for it in the court of public opinion soon enough.) Dragging out silly pop quiz straw-man arguments to kick around gets in the way of having an intelligent discussion.

I don't even know what "...you're in the bag for rooftop solar..." means in 'merican dialect.

As the world price for distributed solar continues along it's relentless learning curve it's now become inevitable. That doesn't change the inherent unfairness of the Nevada PUC decision to screw the existing distributed PV base rather than grandfathering them, regardless of what they deemed fair for new installations. Whining about bully-solar sticking it to granny and using that as a stick to beat up the existing solar base in NV even when their own studies showed that the existing base had not cost granny anything was unbelievably tone deaf and politically stupid to the point that even NV-Energy is asking for a 20 year grandfathering for those installations.

The alleged smartness of the grid in Australia relative to the US is being overestimated, and not particularly relevant. (The Australians have over-paid for their grid, for capacity that will never be needed.) At current penetration levels additional distributed PV in almost all cases increases rather than decreases local power reliability, even in the dumbest-of-dumb grid areas, primarily by relieving peak summertime load.

I do believe that rooftop PV will soon be cheap enough everywhere to become a cost effective and useful fraction of the total grid power, unless expressly locked out by regulators or the abuse of monopoly power, which would only be delaying the inevitable. ( That's with or without net metering, tax incentives, or SRECs.) I don't believe there are sufficient economies of scale or any other rationale for placing distributed PV entirely in the purview of the monopoly utilities. If the solar lobby overplays their hand on net metering or other issues going forward they'll get slapped- count on it. But the utility monopolies can't just dig in their heels and expect to stop this train either. For the utilities it's an "adapt or die" scenario, like it or not. How much it costs (and whom) depends on how well it's managed, by both the utilities and regulators. I'm not betting on the current Nevada PUC being able to find the sweet spot, but NY has a real shot (better than most.)

The reason I believe distributed PV now inevitable is the insanely rapid learning curve that shows no sign of letting up. The price of utility scale PV of three to five years ago is today's rooftop price. Plotted linearly over several decades it looks like this:

http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/5346a722ecad044e6855604c-800-531/screen%20shot%202014-04-10%20at%209.56.09%20am.png

When the price gets low enough. other ratepayers can just give granny her own rooftop PV, or the community solar equivalent thereof. Ultimately it's not granny who's getting screwed, but the shareholders of investor owned utilities that fail to adapt.

I gotta assume that everyone here finds your misdirectional blather as tiresome as I do. My case in simple declarative sentences, starting with the one you've danced around for 10,000 words, give or take:

As in NV ending net metering, be wary that a good deal deal in a sunny clime with expensive electricity won't last.

A "distributed" grid in which your lights go out along with everyone else on the East Coast, rooftop array or not, is a bad joke.

Utility scale solar farms can also meet summer peak load and at half the price.

The yieldco investors funding leased residential solar, now accounting for 3 of 4 installations, should read the debenture clause saying there's no guarantee rate structures will remain the same.

(Wishful thinking here on my part that we remain a nation rather than a collection of greedheads and one-note zealots Dropping off the grid will not set you free from granny. Find the line on your cell phone bill that says "universal service charge."

Read the first declarative sentence again.

"Read the first declarative sentence again. "

I assume you mean the simple declarative sentence:

"I gotta assume that everyone here finds your misdirectional blather as tiresome as I do."

And back-atcha! :-)

Congrats on a post of fewer than 100 words. Now if those words were only responsive....

To close the loop, the NV PUC is grandfathering existing net metering customers sort of, restoring the subsidy and then winding it down in five bites over 12 years. Naturally the industry howled that regulators killed solar in the state. That claim is laughable. Nevada is home to some of the largest utility-scale solar construction projects in the US. They benefit when higher cost, less efficient rooftop solar loses its preferential treatment. The market is working in NV.

Your results will vary. Here in PA, net metering is a nonissue because solar anything is a nonstarter. Caution is still warranted. A rooftop solar array is a rowboat, metaphorically speaking. I'd look around first for ocean liners.

Only under pressure (from NV Energy, the governor and those second-amendment advocates) did the PUC sort-of grandfather the existing distributed PV installations back in. It's not clear that they're done yet- too much politics and gored-oxen allegations. The uncertainty injected into the market was the biggest threat to the distributed PV market, not the 9 cents or whatever it was they wound it down to. Would 9 cents be fair price-to-value-received deal for non-PV granny when rooftop PV hit's a buck a watt and 50% of all buildings in NV have rooftop PV, and used EV batteries are ubiquitous?

The NV PUC folks are apparently idiots, putting forward just another intermediate-term patch on it (with political backspin on it, no less!), rather than defining a structure on how it will be valued going forward, such as Minnesota's legislated VOST approach. In states like MN the methodology has been defined in advance, which avoids the sturm und drang of Nevada's reactionary approach.

The grid cost of utility scale solar is still non-zero and claims that it can meet the summer peak load half the price need to be substantiated with the full cost adder of the additional grid resources required to get it to the load. This is not a simple calculation to make, and it's a moving target.

The claim that "The market is working in NV." regarding any regulated monopoly utility environment stands the notion of a free market on it's head. There's room to argue that the Nevada PUC's compensation for distributed PV going forward is fair (or not) to all stakeholders, but the notion that it's anything resembling a working market is absurd on the face of it.

Oy. Nevada regulates the distribution of electricity. The generation of electricity there is a competitive market except in the case of net metering's thou shalt. The NV PUC did devise a formula to price rooftop solar purchase and it does include line losses from large-scale generators.

"The NEM ratepayers' net excess energy is set at a value that captures the variables that make up the possible value/detriment of NEM during each general rate case. The Commission will set a value during each future general rate case by using a methodology that considers both the positive and negative effects of: 1) avoided energy; 2) energy losses/line losses; 3) avoided capacity; 4) ancillary services; 5) transmission and distribution capacity; 6) avoided criteria pollutant costs; 7) avoided carbon dioxide emission cost; 8) fuel hedging; 9) utility integration and interconnection costs; 10) utility administration costs; and 11) environmental costs."

The value of most of the line items changes over time and location within the grid system- it will have to change with every general rate case. The numbers that they came up with right out of the gate only reflected the avoided energy and line losses, ignoring the rest, and they came up with a number even lower than their ballyhooed 20 year PPA for grid scale solar.

""These variables must be known and measurable positive and negative effects internal to the utility; these variables cannot be speculative or unquantified. For other than the avoided energy and energy losses/line losses, there is insufficient time or data in this proceeding to assign a value to the other nine variables, but other information can be vetted in future general rate cases."

In other words, they're admitting that they haven't a clue how to actually run the calculations, and they're kicking the can down the road. They have a credibility gap of their own making.

The MN VOST approach uses a snapshot in time estimate to determine a grandfathered rate for a fixed period and the NY REV approach has much greater potential for actually getting it right locationally & dynamically. The NV approach is/was simply a bad piece of policy, and their machinations over the past several weeks to "correct" the original blunder miss the mark too.

Ummm, NV NEM customers get 9.2 cents/kwh today, or recent grid scale solar contracts times two. It winds down to 2,5 cents in 2028, but there should be plenty of rate cases under the bridge before then. And pv will be too cheap to meter 12 years hence, eh?

I'm not sure anyone can price the warm and fuzzies in renewables. Suffice it to say there's no need if solar replaces solar.

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/02/20/why-sunpower-is-expanding-in-nevada-as-solarcity-l.aspx

So, in 2028 not even 2/3 through the 20 year contract for grid scale solar they'll be paying about twice for that less-valuable grid scale stuff than what they'll be paying the existing distributed PV owner. (And don't forget they're still sticking the distributed PV folks with stiffer connection fee than no-PV granny.)

And who is to say that 2.5 cents won't actually be too much in 2028? Grandfathering the existing systems and defining the methodology for setting long term prices for future distributed prices rather than setting a future price makes more sense.

Lot's of people (including the Minnesota legislature) have figured out a methodology to price the "warm and fuzzies". And since when did" 3) avoided capacity; 4) ancillary services; 5) transmission and distribution capacity" or " 8) fuel hedging; 9) utility integration and interconnection costs; 10) utility administration costs" end up on the warm and fuzzy list? Say what you like about the harder to value enviro line items, this is hard cash, not impossible to calculate, and that value is not zero.

The NV PUC just made the 11 point list of value, but opted to use only two of them. The other 9 points they valued at zero rather than taking a stab at it. If any engineers in my office had a eleven point problem to solve and opted out or assigned a zero for 9 of the 11 because they deemed it too hard to figure out they wouldn't be working here for very long.

In the PUC case there's nothing wrong with taking a WAG at a valuation and testing it in the marketplace (of ideas, or actual markets), but perhaps they felt the potential for political blow back was too high? Hard to say, but it would be hard to have come up with something with MORE blow back than how they handled it.

Under Hawaii's new-improved solar remuneration options Solar City has stepped up with a package that should serve both the owner and granny:

http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/SolarCitys-System-For-Self-Supply-in-Hawaii-Includes-PV-Storage-Water-He

A lease option at 26 cents/kwh is pretty good in that market, where retail residential is currently running about 30 cents, down from the stratosphere on lower #2 oil pricing this yea- (last year it was about 37 cents, which was still lower than the absolute peak. This package is a re-tuning of what they've been selling in Australia in recent months. It beats grid retail, doesn't backfeed the substations, and lowers the peak draw, with potential for providing even more ancillary services built-in, if the regulators can make it worth their while.

Giving the utility access to the battery for providing ancillary services is something that Solar City would like to do, but in most areas compensating the distributed PV owner for those services would take some regulation adjustments- that won't happen without some changes. In Texas they're talking about letting small time distributed resources play in the LMP markets, but still no hint of letting them into frequency regulation etc. Smart hot water heaters could also conceivably play in those markets (at a lower cost than batteries), but SFAIK that's not currently happening anywhere in the US (though there are plenty of programs set up for peak shaving with less smart but utility-controlled hot water heaters.) If utility scale solar replaces grid scale solar the congestion and grid capacity valuations are still going to be different.

Selling SolarCity's packaged system at $4.50/watt is less than what many no-battery-no-water-heater-no-smarts systems were going for in 2015 in many parts of the US (the $3.50/watt national average notwithstanding.) As both batteries and PV continue to walk down their learning curves this type of package will be competitive in many US markets by 2020. If the whole package (and not just the PV) is eligible for the income tax credit it's at grid parity in much of New England right now even without SREC type subsidies. With any market penetration at all it'll be half that price (or less) in 10 years. Having granny subsidize some of those installations instead of rate-basing grid capacity upgrades will be a discussion worth having at some price point.

Love it or hate it, it's coming. (No, wait, it's already here!) It's up to the regulators & utilities to monetize and unlock the potential value of those ratepayer-capitalized distributed resources for granny as it becomes cheaper than the 20th century way of running the system.

You truly are tiresome. It perhaps has escaped you attention that MN is no NV. MN prices the social cost of carbon because it needs incentives in a crappy climate for solar. NV doesn't. Solar is getting built at more attractive rates wthout ratpayer subsidies. You still want granny to underwrite Biff and Muffy's green badge of honor and pretend they're improving the grid rather than cobbling up how to pay for much needed upgrading.

I repeat a good deal in a sunny climate with expensive electricity may not last.

Note that I've not been making ad hominem characterizations of toddm or his arguments.

The non-social costs of the other 6 or 7 non-carbon non-enviro line items that the NV PUC said had value, but were not included when they made their valuation can be calculated- they just didn't bother. That means they're not really doing their job.

The valuation of all aspects in NV won't be the same as in MN (or any other place), but to do a half-assed job of it was a breathtakingly bad move. Even the affected utility and the governor who appointed the PUC seem to agree. Having twisted the tail of Darth Solar, the NV primary became a referendum signature harvesting event:

http://lasvegassun.com/news/2016/feb/24/nv-energy-part-of-group-challenging-solar-ballot-m/

Granny gets screwed when Biff & Muffy can provide more actual value per ratepayer dollar than the utility capex but are barred from doing so. Until the valuations are at least remotely correct it's just more market monkeying by the market regulators.

Granny gets screwed even harder when Biff & Muffy can leave the grid more affordably than staying with it. If the regulators & legislatures don't figure how to deal with it, that can and will happen, and nobody wins ('ceptin' Biff & Muffy, and Darth Solar.)



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdOhGs_VwV8

So what part of having 12 years to refine NEM rates don't you get? The PUC said they'd address the other variables in future rate cases. Why isn't the SEIA sharpening No. 2 pencils instead of circulating petitions?

And it's not ad hominem to call blather when it is blather. In this tangent you've written that the puc ignored line loss. (It did not.) You've cited Minnesota as if utility-scale solar is getting built there too. (It is not.) Now you want us to believe that solar at 9.2 cents/kwh serves granny better than solar at 3.87 cents, which is dumb on its face. You argue concurrently that NV killed residential solar and that granny will be in deep doo when rooftop solar growth reaches a tipping point.

C'mon. Rooftop solar exists because of taxpayer and ratepayer subsidies. That those gimmes aren't needed in favorable climates proves your point about falling costs.

BTW, the 17k NVans with residential solar (yes, 17k) still get roughly half of their power from the grid. Between solar hot water, passive solar and firewood, my energy use is more like 90 percent renewable.