and efficiency is increasing rapidly. Our installer quoted one panel, but after investigating further realized prices had come down enough to install a higher efficiency panel for the same price.

Posted By Bob I on 25 Jul 2014 02:40 PM
and efficiency is increasing rapidly. Our installer quoted one panel, but after investigating further realized prices had come down enough to install a higher efficiency panel for the same price.

Yep- the panel cost of the ~15% efficiency goods are expected to be under 40 cents/watt by 2017, and ~20% efficiency goods should be under 60 cents/watt by then, according to industry watchers. 

If Solar City's NY production line for high-efficiency modules based on Silevo's process is on line by then, it could be even cheaper, even if Solar City isn't selling their panels through competitors, and using 100% of the production for themselves.  There are numerous thin-silicon technologies coming out that should take about 90% of the silicon out of the cells that should see commercial volumes before 2020 (1366 being just one of them.)    The bottom on panel pricing is still falling away.

One of the first questions home owners should be aware of is how much they are paying per kilowatt from their local power company.

For me in the state of Georgia I pay 0.135 cents per Kilowatt which is a very good price. Going with solar my ROI would be very questionable at that rate.

Power Companies in most states if not all are lobbying against home owners which utilize solar panels and have plans to penalize solar panel owners with line maintenance fees.

Home owners utilizing Solar Panels are disrupting the business model of the power companies and surely the way our government operates will see to it, the power companies get what they want.

What do you think would happen to the power grid it solar panels could be purchased for 0.10 cent a watt?

If 1 out of 3 homes in the US had solar how do you think it would affect your price per kilowatt at night?

Per kilowatt price from the local power company in Louisiana has jumped up at least 35% over the last 18 months.

Posted By Bob I on 25 Jul 2014 09:55 AM
we're doing a 8.7 KW roof mounted system in NH; have quotes for $17-18k after all rebates. Not bad for all your electrical useage, hot water, AC & heat for 25 -30 years+.

Bob, ok so 650 square feet of panels is enough to provide all of that home's electrical (hot water, AC, and heat)? How many square feet of living space is there and how many occupants? Sorry for all the questions, but it's a good chance to see some real life solar numbers.

yes, 650 square feet of panels is enough to provide all of that home's electrical, hot water, AC, and heat. we can predict the heat pretty closely; the electrical useage depends on the occupants, but it is doable.

Two parents, one 5 yr old. House is 2100 SF. It is, of course designed to be a low energy useage building, and the folks are conscious about their energy use, but they are modern people with a normal lifestyle. This will be my first actual ZEH, but there are numerous others in the region where it has been proven to work.

ricky_005
no question that the old technology is frightened by and fighting the new technology, but it is pretty certain they will lose. In Minnesota, the state asked for bids for new electrical suppliers. Four bidders, three of these were natural gas. The winner? Solar. One difference is that Geronimo, the winning bidder, and run by a financial investor, realized that he could avoid the transmission losses incurred by the gas plants sending power over high tension wires, by locating his PV arrays near 65 different substations, thereby feeding directly into local lines. It's this kind of thinking that will do in the old utilities, tied to their old ways.

The price of PV is dropping fast, battery technology is advancing, led by, for one, Eli Musk, whose has a large battery research facility to design and produce batteries for his Tesla cars. It's widely believed that with the advance of electric cars which will all need new batteries at some point, there will be a huge market for used batteries which will be relatively inexpensive and will work fine in homes to store electricity. All of this is coming together and will make non-grid-tied houses practical and affordable. So how does the utility survive then?

Not much of a market for whale oil anymore.

I will do a ground mounted PV, estimating around a 8kW or maybe even a 10kW system. I have the room for a ground mounted system.

Utility companies got a reality check when the residential PV solar installs skyrocketed in the past few years. They saw the writing on the wall and in their pocketbook so they fought back hard. They removed a lot of the rebates and incentives and they raised the kW rates for everyone. They also passed a new surcharge that charges $35 to be connected to the grid. They saw their profits drop and future projections were bleak if more people went to PV solar.

I'm using LESS electricity this year than last but my bills are higher due to them adding all these fees and bumping the kW per hour charge.

I believe it will get ugly in the future as more people jump to PV solar and the utility companies see their profits drop. They want their money and will find other ways of getting it. Most likely they will charge a higher monthly connection fee and the kW rate will increase for everyone.

What's the price per kw from your power company Lbear?

Posted By ricky_005 on 25 Jul 2014 11:38 PM
One of the first questions home owners should be aware of is how much they are paying per kilowatt from their local power company.

For me in the state of Georgia I pay 0.135 cents per Kilowatt which is a very good price. Going with solar my ROI would be very questionable at that rate.

Power Companies in most states if not all are lobbying against home owners which utilize solar panels and have plans to penalize solar panel owners with line maintenance fees.

Home owners utilizing Solar Panels are disrupting the business model of the power companies and surely the way our government operates will see to it, the power companies get what they want.

What do you think would happen to the power grid it solar panels could be purchased for 0.10 cent a watt?

If 1 out of 3 homes in the US had solar how do you think it would affect your price per kilowatt at night?

Expect that to go up dramatically when the new-nukes (that you're already paying for on your bill) goes online.

At $4/watt installed price (the average  retail cost of grid tied PV in the US) PV solar at GA style insolation level, the 20 year lifecycle cost of it's output is about 15 cents/kwh. The Federal tax credit alone tips it into reasonable ROI for similarly low-risk investments, and only Georgia's ban on third-party ownership is keeping big solar companies from setting up shop there, since they can install it more cheaply than that, with a lower levelized lifecycle cost of power.

At $2/watt (the average cost in Germany & Australia) it's about 8 cents/kwh.  In Australia they don't even net-meter at retail, and only pay something like 8 cents/kwh for power that is uploaded to the grid, while charging the customers a whopping 35 cents/kwh for any power drawn from the grid- even without net metering it's worthwhile there. That's why a country with a population the size of California has over 2,000,000 rooftop solar installations, compared to California (where net metering is the law, and PV is subsidized) has only 400,000 installations (though the average size of the installations in CA is larger.)

By "... our government..." I presume you're talking about GA.  In the rate-decoupled state VT the largest utility is lobbying FOR a higher penetration rate of PV, to offset expensive peak power imports.  In states like GA where the power company is a vertically integrated statewide monopoly, they view PV as unwanted competition that has the potential (as it has in Australia) to cut deeply into the capacity factor of their peaking power generation assets, which cuts into their rate-financed model of operation, and will potentially strand those assets.  In CA the utilities have fought and lost most private-PV battles in the CPUC, and recently lost on their attempt to bar coupling grid batteries to privately owned PV.  In Hawaii the utility has lost all credibility with the regulators, and may even go bust after their proposals for how to accommodate more distributed generation was soundly rejected by the regulators this past April.  In NY & MA there is massive regulatory changes ongoing, and it's not exactly good news for all utility bond holders. Some of those utility owned generating assets WILL become stranded.

Barclays has down-graded the entire utility biz for good reason.  In less than a decade things have to change, or those with the financial & solar resources will be able to sanely unplug from the grid, as storage & solar become cheaper, which isn't necessarily the best use of those resources from the average ratepayers point of view.  NY sees the writing on the wall and is trying to get out ahead of it. Done right, Grid 2.0 should be cheaper and more resilient than the utility models widely used over the past century.  But done wrong there will be a lot of financial pain by both ratepayers & utility investors.

Posted By ricky_005 on 28 Jul 2014 11:52 AM
What's the price per kw from your power company Lbear?

The bill consists of 33% fees, which are basically fixed (although they do raise them every 2-3 years) and charged each month whether you use very little or a lot of electricity. There are about 15 items on this fee schedule.

The cost is around 9 to 17 cents per kWh, based on time of year, time of day, usage.

APS Solar Rate Hike

The utility companies want to see increasing profits each year and with more people going solar their budgeted forecasts are starting to scare away investors. In turn, the utility companies will demand more money from everyone to make up for the loss in revenue from those customers who are going solar.

The APS fee per kilowatt of installed solar is based on the argument the value of solar to the other ratepayers is negative, a net COST to the other ratepayers, whereas at current AZ penetration rates the opposite is true: The net value of the distributed PV is lowering the wholesale cost of peak power (load peaks in AZ always occur during daylight hours), and the presence of distributed generation relieves substation congestion, delaying/deferring the need to invest in distribution upgrades.

It'll get even more interesting when coupled with grid storage, and people can opt out of drawing from the grid during peak grid loads, drawing on their storage instead. This has real potential for putting the gas/oil fired peaker operators out of business.

IIRC in AZ (like GA, and Australia) the utility capital expenses are rate-based, and their financial viability is thus dependent upon kwh sales- they NEED to make capital expenditures and see growth in kilowatt-hour sales in order for their bottom line to grow. But efficiency is still VERY cheap compared to the retail cost of electricity, and electricity sales have been flat to falling in almost every US region. (Even as people plug in more gadgets, the residential gadget load has gone down something like 12% in the past 5 years- the newer computers & TVs are just plain lower-power, refrigerators are too.) Solar is an existential threat to utilities using that business model (a model engraved in regulatory stone in some locations.)

In the wilder freewheeling ERCOT grid (Texas), power consumption is continuing to grow, but not faster than the output of wind & solar- even baseload generator capacity factors for fossil plants is being eroded, and the effect has been REDUCING the cost of power to the ratepayers, since the marginal cost of power from wind & solar is $0/kwh, whereas the marginal cost per kwh of the fossil fired peaker power the renewables are displacing is substantial (far more than the fossil & nuke baseload generators.)

In states where rates have been decoupled from kwh sales, the transition is slightly less disruptive, but only slightly. The regulations are slow to change, and it's not clear if they are capable of moving fast enough to avoid grid defection in the coming decade. As yet unenacted (but in the wings), the current proposed changes in MA regulations will preserve net-metering at retail, even expanding it (no percentage cap, previously capped at 10% of all kwh going onto the grid), but will impose a minimum-bill during months when PV output exceeds the monthly site use, but carrying forward the net metered power generated into subsequent months. The amount of the minimum billing is tbd, subject to change by regulators as the needs & sources of the grid evolve. MA has been a rate-decoupled state for a couple of decades now, and much/most of the peaker power or even baseload power is from merchant operators, not utility owned, and the ratepayer isn't on the hook for the costs of any assets that get stranded in the face of a distributed generation tsunami.

The average voter isn't going to do without utility power for a very long time. So the monopoly utilities will insist on and get a ROI that is attractive to investors and/or banks - no matter what happens with renewable energy. So the only interesting question is how their costs will be allocated among non-RE customers, grid-tied customers and off-grid "customers" (they have it available even if they don't tie into it).

Posted By jonr on 28 Jul 2014 07:40 PM
The average voter isn't going to do without utility power for a very long time. So the monopoly utilities will insist on and get a ROI that is attractive to investors and/or banks - no matter what happens with renewable energy. So the only interesting question is how their costs will be allocated among non-RE customers, grid-tied customers and off-grid "customers" (they have it available even if they don't tie into it).

Their is no doubt that line maintenance fees will be the norm. Cost per kw will naturally scale up also, it will be a slow process but in the end the power companies will be doing less yet collecting more.

From the power companies perspective, I'm sure they wont mind collecting fees for doing nothing.

Posted By ricky_005 on 29 Jul 2014 07:18 PM

Posted By jonr on 28 Jul 2014 07:40 PM
The average voter isn't going to do without utility power for a very long time. So the monopoly utilities will insist on and get a ROI that is attractive to investors and/or banks - no matter what happens with renewable energy. So the only interesting question is how their costs will be allocated among non-RE customers, grid-tied customers and off-grid "customers" (they have it available even if they don't tie into it).

Their is no doubt that line maintenance fees will be the norm. Cost per kw will naturally scale up also, it will be a slow process but in the end the power companies will be doing less yet collecting more.

From the power companies perspective, I'm sure they wont mind collecting fees for doing nothing.

That's not the way it's looking to shape up in MA or NY, so I'd hazard there is at least SOME doubt.   In Austin TX and the whole state of MN the compensation for the distributed PV operator is on a "Value of Solar Tariff', (VOST), which looks at all aspects of what the PV operator is taking/adding to the grid.  The VOST will necessarily evolve with the evolving grid, but it's nothing like a line maintenance fee.  In NY the utilities will be evolving into a grid-services company, and the amount charged any given customer will be relative to the level of service they need/want, which may even end up being intermittent service to those who don't care, or maintain storage on their side of the meter to tolerate the intermittencies.

Commercial sites subject to demand surcharges can cost-effectively add smart storage RIGHT NOW to avoid the surcharges, and there is enough arbitrage in the demand rate and the lifecycle cost of intelligent storage that at least one company will install the systems for $0 down, and making it up on the difference. (This is a common practice for PV in states where third party ownership is allowed.)  It's only a matter of time before this model for smart storage systems becomes viable at the residential scale, allowing people to buy power under power purchase agreements from merchant generators (renewable or otherwise), but only load the storage during periods when the grid-distribution costs are low. (This is roughly the model NY expects to be using in 10-15 years.)

With distributed PV + storage the stress on the grid is in fact lower, and with widely distributed storage leveling the peak draws, the grid as-is would be overbuilt. (Which is arguably true in much of Australia.)  The transmission & distribution grids in the US are built to manage the peak loads, not the average, but with distributed power & storage those peaks are going away, and growth in raw kwh use may even fall, since efficiency is still a lot cheaper per kwh than any power source.  Total grid power growth has been decaying for decades, but has yet to go negative on a nation-wide basis, but that's not to say that it can't/won't. Greentech Media's analysts believe growth in grid power use will be on the order of 1%/year over the next couple of decades:



But there's reason to believe that PEAK power in the US will be shrinking, due to "demand response" programs, and smart storage on the ratepayers side of the meter.  This means that the already-existing distribution grids are going to oversized for the actual loads going forward, and the capital budgets for grid upgrades should shrink.

Maintenance costs are a relatively small fraction of the cost of the grid operation in most utilities- the real money is in increasing grid capacity, capacity that we probably won't be needing, if Grid 2.0 plays out on the anticipated NY model.

Power companies have to answer to their regulators- only if the regulators buy-in will they be able to  collect fees for doing nothing. What remains to be seen is how hard the regulators will push them on writing-off the sunk costs of all the generation assets that will never operate at the planned-upon capacity factors (or anticipated lifecycle).  If they're allowed to rate-base their sunk costs on underperforming assets forever, the price of power will go up, and grid defection by the well-off becomes more likely, and it becomes a vicious cycle, dubbed the "utility death spiral".  At some point the shareholders & bond-holders are going to have to take a bath- sticking it to the ratepayers simply won't fly when the costs of PV & storage are falling this rapidly.

Truly gargantuan bets like Georgia Power's nuclear projects seem ultra-risky in that scenario- they'd probably be better off never fueling & operating the new goods, thus avoiding the very substantial decommissioning costs once the thing has been heated up even once.

The Edison Electric Institute is banking on boosting sales of electric cars as a way to stave off negative growth in grid demand (or to even ramp growth up). For that to be effective you have to ship roughly one electric car for every residential rooftop system installed. PV system growth in the US is exponential, and with $0/down deals for third-party owned PV it's financially a lot easier for people to get into a rooftop PV system than an electric car. As the cost of Lithium ion batteries falls, enabling growth in electric car sales, the same technology also enables affordable behind-the-meter storage, and outright grid defection.  Whether EV sales will increase fast enough to boost grid demand remains to be seen, but the view from 40,000 feet in 2014 isn't super-sanguine for the utilities on that.  Tesla founder Elon Musk is also chairman of the board of SolarCity, and Tesla building a massive battery factory right now.  SolarCity is also installing storage coupled with PV in CA now, having won their fight against utility objections in front of the regulators. You can bet they see the connections more clearly than most, and not planning to go easy on the utilities.  If they see a developing market for it, grid-defection kits aren't a stretch.  Standalone PV car-chargers are already old news, and the average daily power use of an EV is comparable to the daily use of a single family house.

San Diego's local utility is also taking on a nuanced way to compensate all stake holders, steering away from the dumb grid-use gouge/fee designed to stifle PV and ratepayer owned storage:

http://blog.rmi.org/blog_2014_7_30_...ean_Energy

Strange thing is that Solar City will NOT do ground mounted systems. The phone operator said that it requires like a 20 kW system for them to even consider a ground mounted system.

Posted By Lbear on 31 Jul 2014 01:35 PM
Strange thing is that Solar City will NOT do ground mounted systems. The phone operator said that it requires like a 20 kW system for them to even consider a ground mounted system.

That may change. In the past year or so they have acquired a racking system company, as well as a solar cell manufacturer. It's speculated that they will be pre-racking  and wiring stuff in larger array assemblies than the traditional 2.5 x 4' panel at the factory, trading $50/hr rooftop labor for $15/hr factory labor (and better quality control.)  When it comes pre-racked in kilowatt chunks it should be pretty easy to do ground mounting.  There would likely be a cost adder if they're building the foundation and structure for the ground mount though.

If you build yourself an open shed or detached carport with a properly solar-oriented & pitched roof that meets code I can't imagine why they wouldn't go for that with their current system, even on a third party ownership basis.  Of course the shed would be a cost adder, and just more sunk costs unless you have a use for it beyond mere propping up your PV array.

Didja hear that APS decided to join 'em if they can't beat 'em and is trying to get into the third-party ownership residential rooftop solar biz? (Or maybe that is more rightly termed "second party ownership", since it's the utility that owns & charges for it, not a third entity.) The Solar Energy Industry Association isn't so convinced that under the current rate-based compensation model for utilities in AZ that they should be allowed to take that route. Ken Johnson, speaking on behalf of the SEIA is quoted as saying:

"This latest tactic by APS has a ‘Trojan horse’ smell to it. Our member companies welcome fair and equal competition, but this move would stack the deck in favor of a company which can rate-base solar with a guaranteed rate of return. How is that fair?" 

(emphasis mine)
 
Methinks he has a point- this would not be a level playing field for other solar companies if APS can simply soak all ratepayers for the cost/risk.  The utility may be a regulated monopoly, but that's not to say that regulated monopolies make much sense anymore, now that the economies of scale for PV don't give them such a big discount over what it costs others to install it that the utility is entitled to financial protection on those investments.

Under the new managment the re-start of the LIPA (Long Island Power Authority) in NY has now expanded the drive for more distributed solar on their grid.  (This is in part what a  difference in business model and regulatory environment can bring.)  The financial rationale for the non-solar ratepayers is that the grid on Long Island is fairly congested, with peak loads approaching (sometimes exceeding) the substation capacity.  Subsidizing distributed solar in specific congested areas to relieve peak congestion is cheaper than upgrading the substations or buying/maintaining/fueling multiple peaking generation to relieve the load, leading to substantial cost savings for the utility, and by extension, the other ratepayers. 

If their business model was old-school utility business that was just rate-basing of capital costs it would be in the interest of the shareholders/bondholders for them to fix it by building out their own assets rather than targeted subsidizing where others are putting up the bulk of the money. 

Dana - whats your take on the push for more new England natural gas pipelines?