Simply put, if an increase in efficiency, ecologically in this case, leads to an increase in consumption then the end result isn't a decrease in energy usage but an increase. One of the reasons carbo-hydrogen consumption has barely fallen totally is because every time we make something more efficient we have the fantastic idea to use it for something other than substituting the old energy sources. Every solar panel put to use for something that isn't turning an old power plant off is slowing the energy transition. The people on HN who rightfully ask why our software is so slow despite our chips being so fast know Jevon's paradox by heart.
It's important to point out that this applies to the infrastructure needed for green energy itself, which is not green. Solar panels, batteries, concrete, steel, rare earths, the downside of that green energy the author blasts so abundantly through is some toxic mining pit in Africa.
It's important to point out that this applies to the infrastructure needed for green energy itself, which is not green. Solar panels, batteries, concrete, steel, rare earths, the downside of that green energy the author blasts so abundantly through is some toxic mining pit in Africa.
This is a bullshit argument because all power generation has to be constructed. If you want to say that solar is especially bad compared to the construction and fuel of a coal or nuclear plant over its lifetime, have at it. But simply pointing out that deployment has an environmental cost isn't meaningful, it's just downerism.
The argument is that due to the paradox new solar capacity only increases demand, and so will be an additional burden.
I don't think this is true, if solar is truly cheaper than it will drive out the more expensive power plants, but I can see this not always being true.
If it WERE true, we'd be using a lot more wood and coal still, alongside petroleum. And you'd need to constantly be finding ways around the horses and carriages on your way into work.
But for all the ways it isn't 100% true, there is still a pointing toward truth in it. It's more like 100 steps forward, 99 steps back. We're not holding still, just progressing a lot slower than it seems like we would be given the advances, and this explains why/how.
> The argument is that due to the paradox new solar capacity only increases demand, and so will be an additional burden.
Is it it a paradox? I've personally reduced a great deal of my consumption over 12 years now, mainly because the CURRENT situation doesn't warrant it when we are seeing the enormous adverse effects to the environment; but my real goal, whether it be in regenerative Ag/energy etc... was to eventually arrive to a post-scarcity World.
One in which clean energy has become so abundant that it comprises the majority of the Earth's total use (I still think fossil fuels will always have some presence, how much is uncertain) and thus we can stop laboring under the tired notion that energy use itself is a net-negative to the World. The only real analysis is to what end is the energy being used to and we can allow energy intensive business models thought to be not viable another visit.
The energy alarmists that are arguing for the opposite are also the same people who are oblivious to the fact that the Bitcoin network, while energy intensive, is making energy re-capturing technology viable and advancing what was thought to be untenable or not economically feasible and that is the long-term goal: to incentivize the building of the infrastructure Humans must have some economic incentive to do so, no amount or finger-wagging or virtue signalling works long term.
This article underscores how quickly a lifetime of habits can easily be undone when the economics change, and that is the crux of the issue.
I think it's hard to argue that energy usage alone is always negative as portrayed in this article, I (subjectively) think it almost always is if the energy usage is derived from fossil fuels with no net-benefit: like running the AC or lights in a building where no ones is in it (like many commercial buildings) and justify it and amortize the costs as a means to an end when WFH is a far better way for a majority of businesses to operate and localizes the costs of energy use to the individual who in turn can be more discerning where and how much they are willing to pay.
In short, I think this underscores the real issue and that the technology is closer to help solving this issue but short-sighted Human emotion is still a major hurdle that is holding us back (mainly political):
Given all the political barriers that renewables face, it might seem weird to talk about their emotional impact.
But emotion drives politics. This is why some renewable advocates are now trying to tout—as loudly as possible—that a world powered wholly by renewables would be an overflowing horn of plenty, with fast, sporty cars and comfortable homes...
The price barriers in the US aren’t labor or materials: “It’s all about regulations,” he says. “It could change quickly if people wanted it to.”
Solar doesn't scale like nuclear. The main reasons why solar is so cheap right now is because the manufacturing is being outsourced in China and you get subsidies and tax reductions for using and trading solar electricity.
It is getting better though, there is research on replacing silicone with less polluting and cheaper materials.
You're right, solar doesn't scale like nuclear, solar scales far better.
As we build more nuclear some places build it slightly cheaper with more experience (South Korea), but most places pay more and more as they learn about it (the US, France).
Whereas solar follows standard manufacturing learning relationships, and turns out to have a fantastic learning rate.
> The main reasons why solar is so cheap right now is because the manufacturing is being outsourced in China and you get subsidies and tax reductions for using and trading solar electricity
This is simply untrue, and shown by manufacturing outside of solar, and also the costs of solar without the subsidies being the cheapest energy source right now, and only getting cheaper.
Jevons paradox has nothing to do with what the article is about.
It only says that technological efficiency improvements in the production of something creates additional demand for it, leading to an overall increase in usage of the thing.
Nothing was made more efficient. He is not using energy from coal or other fossil fuels, so his usage displaces that usage.
> It's important to point out that this applies to the infrastructure needed for green energy itself, which is not green.
IMHO this is an indication that the adjective "green" is too vague and contradictory that it's counterproductive to use it in current discussions.
Different types of "non-green" have very different properties, different types of pollution are not interchangeable and we have to be specific about which we're talking about.
If global warming is a serious crisis, then it implies that trading off some greenhouse gases for a toxic mining pit might be a good deal, a net win from the environmental perspective, as the environmental damage to these few mining locations are far outweighed by the decrease in environmental damage throughout the planet. The same applies for nuclear waste - their environmental issues must always be considered not in absolute risk, but in comparison to the environmental cost of the generation of an equivalent (immense) quantity of fossil fuel or the environmental production costs of the immense scale battery+solar equipment to replace gigawatts of nuclear power.
Anyone who actually wants to effectively advance environmental goals has to consider possible tradeoffs of one "not green" thing versus another, and be willing to accept compromises that trade off a small harm to reduce a much bigger one; and anyone who insists that anything with an environmental cost is taboo is effectively advocating for even greater harm to the environment.
Part of this is driven by the end of net metering in lots of places. People are getting 10% or even 5% of the price for their energy that they themselves have to pay, which is why they'd rather consume it themselves.
Depending on when your local grid hits peak demand, and how much solar is already present, the excess electricity provided to the grid by solar power might be extremely valuable.
In particular, if your local grid's annual peak demand occurs on summer afternoons, when air conditioning is at peak use, then solar provides extra capacity exactly when it's most valuable. This, in turn, means that your power company can avoid building extra peaker plants that are only run for a few hours a day during a few weeks per year.
In this case, net metering is an extremely good deal for the power company and for other rate payers, and it may actually be a bad deal for the people with the solar panels.
How often does a scenario like this occur? Apparently, peak annual demand in many markets occurs during either summer afternoon cooling, or during winter morning heating. In the latter case, obviously, solar is not helping with peak demand. Similarly, this effect is only true until a region reaches a certain level of installed solar, and a few regions may already be well beyond that point.
Even if solar provides extremely valuable peak capacity, this doesn't guarantee that a residential solar owner will have any negotiating leverage. Most residential solar is unable to detach from the grid or to store significant amounts of power locally without US$7,000 to 20,000 worth of upgrades. So the utility could say, "Yes, the solar power that you're providing might be extremely valuable at market rates, even more valuable than the rate provided by net metering. But we've decided to pay you far below market rates, and there's nothing you can do about it."
This is one reason why major power plants often have signed Power Purchase Agreements in place before they can even be financed. This obligates the power company to pay a guaranteed rate.
So, the end of net metering might represent a blatant rip-off of the people generating solar power. Or it might accurately represent the fact that a local grid already has a surplus of solar power, and further capacity is fairly worthless.
Yeah, if distributors are not going to pay fairly for what you produce (much of these by legislation lobbied by themselves) then too bad, you deal with stabilizing the grid
(though of course, household generation can destabilize the grid - but you could deal with this with variable purchase pricing)
Jevon's paradox isn't a law, and it's been really clear that it hasn't applied to electricity.
We care about cold beer and hot showers, and only want them so cold and so hot respectively. Jevon's paradox does not apply to most consumption that we are trying to modify.
One place where Jevon's paradox really does apply is driving. Which is why we need a stronger movement to at least legalize planning that allows people to live without cars. Note that I'm not even saying we must force carlessness, simply make a careless life legal. Allow people to choose to build housing and businesses such that one doesn't have to use a car. Things like removing parking minimums, etc.
I don't think that's what makes carless existence unrealistic for most people - the fact is our cities have evolved on the assumption we all have cars, hence we think nothing of making decisions that force us to travel significant distances for shopping, work, dining out, visiting family/friends. That's not going to change by removing laws requiring parking minimums (though I certainly agree doing so is low hanging fruit).
Are you making the argument that we should be striving for a decrease in consumption? Because I can see no compelling argument that that should be so. In fact, we should be using way more energy. It should be green, but trying to tell people to use less is a guaranteed way for any kind of climate action to fail. Cheaper, cleaner, more abundant, is the only way we are going to move forward, people are just not going to sign up to a future we're we use less than our parents generation.
>Are you making the argument that we should be striving for a decrease in consumption? Because I can see no compelling argument
Yes. The compelling argument is that we're late on the clock when it comes to even fulfilling the modest measures we've set ourselves and that if we don't act faster we're going to destroy our ecology for both future generations and countless of other species on this planet. That's not compelling or clear enough? You want to sit in 50°C degree summer heat and ration your food because crops aren't sustainable rather than ration some energy now? Because you don't get to 'sign up' for anything, you'll have to pick one.
If the energy is clean, what difference does it make how much we use? Should a break through happen in fusion tonight, and clean limitless green energy became available cheaply, would you still argue we should use less?
The fact remains that what people say they care about, and what they are prepared to sacrifice for, are two totally separate things. What you are suggesting is essentially an enforced recession ( drop in consumption and quality of life).
Politicians are never rewarded for having a recession on their watch. It's just never going to fly. It's as realistic as we can end war if everyone would just be nicer to one another.
Classify their feelings as deep, unassuageable guilt and it all begins to make sense. In their minds, we're all sinners, and there is no penance except to suffer.
> If the energy is clean, what difference does it make how much we use?
I think OP argues that if that power isn't going into the grid, it does make a difference, specifically to how much dirty energy is used by everybody else:
> Every solar panel put to use for something that isn't turning an old power plant off is slowing the energy transition.
If anything increasing energy production is the solution to climate change. Abundant clean energy literally enables terraforming. How we terraform will be important, but at a minimum we can terraform the climate into stagnation.
As a lover of science fiction and an optimist I agree with your
position, and sound logic. The measure of a civilisation is correlated
well with how much energy it can command. Inter-planetary travel will
need another factor of growth in our capacity, and it will come from
clean sources like fusion.
But that's living in the future. We're 100 years premature if we think
that way. We must deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to
be.
The world as it is, is bleak. We fucked up. We took a wrong turning
down 50 years of late capitalism fuelled on unsustainable and toxic
resources. There's really no alternative in the immediate plan than
reducing consumption.
My way of coping is to embrace that challenge as a new vision of a
positive future. Taking pride in using less is it's own journey and I
will leave colonising Mars to the great-grandchildren.
With enough energy we can pull CO2 out of the air, and turn into a myriad of useful things[1], not just making $$ off the things produced, but also lowering CO2 concentrations. The biggest cost input is energy itself. We need MORE energy, not less, to solve the problems we have created.
Technology got us into this mess, and only new better technology can get us out of it, asking people to live worse lives just seems to me to be a political non starter.
> asking people to live worse lives just seems to me to be a political
non starter
I agree that if you ask people to live a "worse" life for the sake of
future generations most people are too selfish and insecure to
cooperate. My disagreement is that it is necessarily worse.
If you factor out agriculture, essential goods transport and building
maintenance, which admittedly are big factors, then a period of zero
growth, a life with less gratuitous material goods, helicopters,
jet-skis, and a tenth gold iPhone is a hardly undesirable except to a
few,
A life where I can walk to work, shop and meet people in my local
community, take vacations within 200 miles by public transport, eat
locally grown food, and where we all spend much less screen time
plugged into the Matrix is a much better life as far as I can see.
Mostly, I think it will be worse for all the people who want to sell
things that nobody really needs.
If this is to succeed, through choice and markets, without some sort of
communist World Economic Forum telling us we'll have to "own nothing"
then the most important thing we can sell is a mature vision of a
better life. Therefore we ought to stop equating reduction of
consumption with a "worse" life.
The funny thing is you’re talking about a huge restructuring of everything and that process will require a lot of excess energy.
Don’t forget about the energy required to modify all our current systems. To fight against the current system and overcome the inertia to change it.
Also - that’s your vision of Utopia. Maybe others want to colonise the solar system ? Which is not possible by reducing our energy consumption.
Why are you so motivated to make sacrifices that don’t need to be made ?
The article talks about someone generating more electricity from solar panels, than they can use. What does it matter if they increase consumption of energy with respect to harming the climate by burning fossil fuels ??
While running, there is no additional "waste" heat: Without solar panels, 100% of the sun rays heats the earth; with solar panels, 20% is converted to electricity, and then converted to heat again.
Not quiet 100%×(1-albedo) heats the earth. So solar panels have a lower albedo then some surfaces so it just might heat the earth more but the CO2 not emitted reduces the isolation (green house effect) of earth and can therefore lead to a net reduction in temp.
This is a race against time. We need to put out the fire right now with whatever we have to prevent damage to this building and spread to other buildings. This might buy us some time to work on better fire prevention in future.
Aren’t they? I see swathes of young voters in UE, everywhere I go, who claim that we should consume less, and who align their actions with their beliefs with:
- Not having travelled more than 200km from home for the last 10 years,
- A friend who is CEO of renewable startup in Paris and is worth 60m€ today (the company is ~300m€), spent his wedding trip in France instead of Maldives,
- Not eating meat,
- Using blankets instead of heating at home,
- Suffer through 40°C rather than use A/C,
- Buy organic at the local market.
It’s enough voters that the entirety of Europe cheers Macron & Merkel’s decision to cut off our gas supplies from Russia in 6 months. Sure it’s about the war, but people’s mindset is that we’d have to do it anyway for ecology, so why not now. And when you do speak with partisans, they acknowledge that we’ll half-replace with other sources, but they also tell you that the goal is to consume less in absolute numbers.
At least this (majority) of people in Europe is mentally prepared to use much less energy than their parent’s generation, and the little remainder should be renewable. They accept the deflation that it represents. They’d be happy to be poor for those political ideals of leaving a healed earth to the next generation.
Whether or not you believe in their vision, their vision is certainly not to replace-and-increase energy consumption.
> At least this (majority) of people in Europe is mentally prepared to use much less energy than their parent’s generation
Do you have a source for this because I've lived here all my life and in 3 different European countries and this is not really something I've seen, other than some young people caring about green energy, it's definitely not the majority and definitely varies a lot country to country. Your average Pole has a very different stance to your average Dutch.
> The community around you seems to be more progressive than most other populations
Or more than likely they are better at hiding their consumption habits: I agree that all of those things help, many of which I do myself, but chances are they are buying new devices every new product release cycle (because why not?) and likely spend lots of times on social media showing off that quinoa salad they had for lunch, all if which require immense amounts of energy in servers alone that make all of things they do on the individual level moot.
I think the sooner we realize we are all culpable because the system is designed that way the sooner we can analyze this situation is untenable if all we focus on such low hanging fruit that not able to address the crux of the issue: self-serving politics holds back the major amount of progress.
Germany is perhaps the biggest example of how Green-window dressing is ultimately setting you up for catastrophic failure when you align your energy dependence to an authoritarian despot in an attempt to outsourcing the dirty parts that keep your economy working.
> At least this (majority) of people in Europe is mentally prepared to use much less energy than their parent’s generation, and the little remainder should be renewable. They accept the deflation that it represents. They’d be happy to be poor for those political ideals of leaving a healed earth to the next generation.
I've lived and farmed in Eco-communes and Agro tourism in EU, and I can guarantee you this is not a widely held value system; most of the business models rely on people's conspicuous consumption habits, and while it's true most are Boomers age wise, the younger cohorts (like myself) also enjoy traveling and experiencing other things that are quite energy intensive. I accept this fact, and have reduced my consumption in order to justify these things in addition to have spent a lot of time focused farming and building my startup to support and advancing carbon sequestration as well as worked in making my activism profitable by working for farm to table kitchens etc...
It's easy for me to justify any overt consumption habits for most of my Life as I'm likely carbon negative on an individual level, but the truth is that I derive no pleasure from consumption but I ultimately I accept that denying these externalaties is how we remain stagnant and rationalize things into indifference.
>At least this (majority) of people in Europe is mentally prepared to use much less energy than their parent’s generation, and the little remainder should be renewable.
I'm mentally prepared in the sense that the reality is being forced upon me, it is not something I want and it is not virtuous. You wonder why Europe is stagnating? This is it.
We would not be in this situation if you green maniacs hadn't turned off the nuclear plants and prevented more from being built. You've created an artificial energy famine. And buying organic will not work for a global population of 8 billion, as we are finding out in Sri Lanka.
Suffering through 40 degree temperatures does not make you virtuous. AC is good, it saves lives, it is not a luxury. It's the nearest thing we have to terraforming technology, a top 10 invention of the 20th century.
I don't want to be in your self-flagellation climate cult. I don't want to be poor. Fuck you.
This observation is detached from reality in so many ways it should be a copypasta.
Merkel is not even in office anymore and you can be sure Macron wouldn’t be either if it wasn’t for French nuclear power and that he just won an election before these decisions.
Germany doesn't even know if they will make it through the winter properly.
The claim that deflation is largely accepted is wrong and in conflict with EU leadership statement and goals.
A segment of the EU is cheering on the decision due to the war first and foremost. The environmental benefits are laughable because they have already turned to restarting coal plants that were previously shut down.
No, the youth are great but this is a deluded view.
My thoughts also. Greed has no limits. I have lots of absurdly rich family members and friends and all they do is talk and think how to have more (I once witnessed a coversation where someone was complaining that he have to drive 2 hours to his favorite golf course while his brother takes his private helicopter and is there in 15 munutes - I kid You not!)
They are for the most part interlinked. Even with solar. Also, we have more problems than CO2.
Buying an AC isn't climate-neutral even if electricity is free (and that is also without taking into account that "free electricity" doesn't come for free, and additionally, in time needs maintenance and replacing as well).
Producing a billion electric vehicles and enough solar to sustain them isn't either.
What are you talking about? If the energy is from clean sources use away, there’s no downside. The means of generating may not be produced completely cleanly but it’s something we can bear and causes a fraction of the damage fossil fuels did.
Kids today don’t understand why I call Java a posh language because of the Garbage Collector. At the time of C++, memory was scarce, and cumbersome to clean up. Well, now they don’t have to touch garbage, with posh languages, the GC does it… at the price of 2x RAM.
Then they invented NPM. And they don’t see a problem. Feels like we should reduce data centers by a factor of 7x if we removed NPM from Earth.
I think the point of this article is to reach the doubters from another angle than the usual doom-and-gloom eco-disaster or climate apocalypse approach.
It makes using solar attractive to the consumption-hungry among us, and presents it as a money-saving device: all of which will appeal to a completely new demographic than the usual environmentally-aware crowd.
Exactly this - once people are onboard, or at least interested, then they're ready to learn. Breaking the "it'll never work" dismissiveness is an important first step.
In places with net metering, it doesn't matter when you use it.
In places (like CA, under NEM2.0), where you get credits proportional to when you generate, you're still better off charging your car at night because you're getting multiplier effect when you generate during peak hours and consume at off-peak hours.
Everyone says to buy a bigger system than you think you'll need because your consumption goes up slowly over time. We're a net consumer despite our solar. I've gotta say, having solar has done something of the opposite to me. It's made it clear that the power you generate is not really yours; if you're grid-tied, the more you get into the minutia of what you make when you generate, what you're charged when you consume, grid interconnection fees, tiering, lack of grid sync when the grid is down, etc, the more it becomes clear that owning rooftop solar is NOT generating your own power for your own use, it's merely an arbitrage scheme where you're really trading your rooftop real estate for cheaper power.
Seems like a great deal to me. I get the benefits of solar and none of the cost or downside of energy storage.
I sometimes wonder if rooftop solar + fossil fuel generators is the future for electric micro grids in more remote areas. Probably cheaper than maintaining expensive distribution lines in fire prone areas.
I get the cost isn’t always worth it; the burning part is solved by putting the battery away from the home or using the proper battery chemistry; and they’re not so big.
I think it would be best to have a local community battery that covers a neighborhood’s needs rather than huge ones for a region or single home batteries.
Even with net metering and all you have is solar, it still does matter when you use grid power. California peak rates are 3 PM to midnight, and you’re not getting any offset when the sun is down and then you’re conscious about peak rates.
The calculus only changes when you have solar production + battery storage. Then you have freedom.
Agreed. The fact is, even with solar, generating way more than I consume during peak hours, I STILL want to conserve, because that means I get more credits for charging the car overnight. It's not really "free energy" during the day if using it means I end up paying more for what I use overnight.
There is a shocking amount of ignorance of the actual functioning of the electric grid and where costs actually come from for non demand resources like solar and wind (and run of river hydro and a bunch of others) in this thread. Power grids require supply to equal demand at all times within a small margin of error or else the grid blacks out. Grid operators keep within the margin of error with ancillary services constantly ramping generators up and down by small amounts to keep supply equal to demand across the grid. The uncosted and huge cost of solar and wind is that they cannot provide ancillary services (until storage gets a lot better and cheaper, which is a long time away, likely decades) and they increase ancillary demand because enough ancillaries have to be available to cover wind cutouts or clouds rolling in. This cost increases exponentially as percent of power from non demand resources increases because you have to run the other generation increasingly at min gen just to be able to ramp them to Max gen if needed. This is no big deal when these resources are a couple percent of your grid but hugely costly as they stop being a rounding error in your generation profile. So yes, solar is way cheaper than most other gen to install right now but it causes an externality that isnt being priced correctly right now and that per unit externality increases as the grid gets more of these resources.
AC is easy, because it is needed when there is a lot of sun. The challenge is heating. Feeding to the grid during summer and buying back during winter does not solve any problem.
For non-heating use day/night cycles can be solved by batteries. For non-heating use over-provisioning to catch ambient light could even make it work during winter, no grid needed.
But for heating, over-provisioning to run a heat-pump on ambient light does not seem viable. Year-cycle storage is complex (e.g., hydrogen, maybe high-temperature to store heat, ...).
A solution can be collectors to create electricity which is then stored by a second system. An alternative might be collectors that don't produce electricity but something that can be stored directly.
Difficult choice to go all-in on PV for planned use of 25 years today when there might be a more storage-friendly solution available in 10 years.
Here in the Netherlands where we have relatively easy access to the ground and ability to drill, we are starting to make more use of ground temperature. With either narrow 50m deep installs to reach a place with a steady 12 degrees Celsius, or more top layer but wider installs. A heat pump is then used to exchange the heat of ground to the heat of the house. For both heating and hot running water.
Then an additional option is to cool the house in summer by extracting the heat from the house and pumping it into the ground to be extracted during winter.
This is interesting because, especially in combination with floor heating, this can heat a house on the solar generation in winter.
Sadly these systems are expensive to install after building the house. But it can be done, especially the less specialised wider top soil solutions.
This mirrors my experience. I was offgrid for over six years and we had enough solar panels and batteries to produce all the power we needed and then some (even in the Winter as this was in South Europe). But for heating we used wood. I suppose we could have run a 1-2kw heater for a few hours every night but it would have reduced the batteries life which were quite expensive.
> AC is easy, because it is needed when there is a lot of sun.
This isn't universally true and I think shows a lack of intuitive familiarity with climates that aren't North America or Europe.
Where I live the over night low will be 26c (79f). With high humidity that's a "RealFeel(r)" of 31c (88f).
Most people find that uncomfortable to sleep in, especially if they didn't grow up in it. Most people I know have their air conditioning on overnight.
There are plenty of places where night time temperatures, especially when combined with humidity, still result in air conditioning -- assuming the country is rich enough to afford it. Which increasingly many are.
Heck, today is overcast with no sun but it is still 33c with a "RealFeel" of 40c.
Is your house so badly sealed that if you air condition during sunlight hours it will become uncomfortable got at night? A 3 degree temperature differential between inside and outside will take a long time to equalize.
My parents old house had wood heat. In other words it took a lot of effort, so we'd start the fire as rarely as possible. Which was every second or third day when the outside temperature was -20c. You don't have 12 inch walls like my parents did, but you don't have a 40c temperature differential either...
There's no such thing as whole house air conditioning here. Running air conditioning in the living room during the day isn't going to do anything for the bedroom at night.
Also houses are often empty during much of the day due to people being at work/school. So they get home at 6pm and turn on the air conditioning. They certainly wouldn't leave it running all day when no one is home.
Heating (and AC) are not problems solved by pouring more energy in your home but with insulation.A passive house is a reality even for cold climate, and they don't need storage for cooling/heating. Then you are left with your appliance that have to run outside of production time, but this is rather small.
Insulation alone doesn't necessarily solve for AC / cooling. Modern houses with more insulation than ever are some of the most prone to overheating. So much so that the UK's latest update to building regulations, Part O, are specifically targeted at overheating.
Insulation slows the transfer of heat so in theory it should help on hot days as well as cold. The problem is modern houses lack thermal mass to smooth out temperature changes. They're quick to heat up whether wanted or not.
So, you have solar gain heating up rooms on a sunny day, better insulation reducing heat transfer, and high levels of airtightness trapping the indoor air.
Building design has to adapt for a changing climate.
Many existing homes will need air conditioning to maintain a comfortable environment regardless of how well you insulate them.
I'm from Spain, have panels and a bit of this mentality. The thing is the electric utility sells at market price (say 30 cents), but buys at incredible low prices (about 5 cents). That makes them a net earning of 25 cents for an energy they didn't invest a dime to produce, and in fact I have to pay to distribute (about 5€/month).
My target is to net zero, but never net negative (put more in the grid that I consume), because that would be working for the utility. If I'm selling too much, a unneeded oven pyrolisis or AC it is.
Pay me 80% of the market prices and I will contribute more to the grid. Also that I'm no hardcore hippie: I'm doing my part investing around 60K in PV, so I want my returns either as €€€ or in comfort, not in virtue. And I'm not taking ethical climate lessons from people who doesn't have any panel.
It's like "oh, you bought a Tesla, you should give rides to your neighbors that still run gas vehicles. But Uber keeps 80% of the earnings".
I don't know in other countries. Here in Spain I sell at a fixed price. Right now, and you can check it at esios.ree.es, pool price if you're buying (i.e. a regular consumer without panels) is 24.4 cents. My panels are producing at peak right now at noon. I can't consume it all, and selling at about 3 cents. Obviously, at night, I have to buy, currently at 35 cents.
This doesn't make any sense. In fact, there's a law that makes me meet a minimum kWh sold per year (which I carefully plan to meet in october) or I get fined. Once the minimum is done, I close the faucet until february. E.g if I'm not at home for the weekend, the extra energy goes to heat the house.
If they paid 80%, would they still have a viable business as more people ran solar?
They have to pay to run and maintain the grid. That money has to come from somewhere.
For people on solar and battery power, the grid is a backup, but I don't think we can have this incredibly expensive backup system running to our houses for low cost.
I could see a future where the grid is no longer viable, and people run solar and batteries with diesel backup.
Because people buy things for themselves usually. E.g. they bought the solar system to give themselves power, not to benefit other people, so that it's had this weird side effect of abundance is something that they openly admit they can't process.
1 GW into the grid allows us to do maintenance of a nuclear reactor during summer, so it be ready for winter. It’s temporally displacing energy, not unlike a battery.
Yet short sighted, think about solar becoming mainstream and most households being in the same situation - who are you going to be giving the energy to if everybody around is in surplus feeding back?
We'll soon realize that batteries, hot water and other forms of energy storage should be shared/communal.
To be fair, you’d need really big backyard and a lot of work to feed an entire family year long with a balanced diet while having a sense of abundance.
Even getting a good return on a standard backyard space takes a lot of work dealing with pests. Where I am, the fruit trees get hassled by birds, possums, rats, beetles, fungus, etc. Other plants cop it from slugs/snails, caterpillars, etc. I planted seeds for easy things like beans and snowpeas the other week and forgot to sprinkle slug pellets - absolutely nothing but weeds survived. If I don't net fruit trees, I will get nothing to eat as every single fruit will get attacked by birds from above, rats from underneath, etc. Not to mention weeds swamping everything. It's time consuming.
I get hassled by pests as well, though I try to add things into the local ecology that would eat or mitigate them. My backyard chickens cover a lot of insect pests. Where I am is too dry for snails, otherwise I'd get some ducks.
Fungus is key to building a healthy, perennial food forest, so it really depends on how it is planted, what the species needs, etc. Pesticides and herbicides tend to kill off the beneficial fungus. Some drought-tolerant species, like pomegranates, get invaded by fungi when soil conditions are too wet. Another is if you are using the right root stock / scion combination for your fruiting trees.
As far as weeds goes, there's a way to incorporate them. It depends on the "weed" species. Some, like dandelions, are pioneer species that help rebuild soil and should be left where they are. Others may need more drastic strategies like resetting the soil ecology using aggressive sheet mulching.
Generally though, if you have something occupying (1) all ecological functions, and at (2) all canopy layers, it would be difficult for weeds invade because that role is already taken up by something.
Soils gradually get infested and weeds take root as seedlings start. Clean soil is expensive enough to negate value in having your own garden. Chickens attract more rats. If snowpeas do get past the slugs, they soon get black spots. Zucchinis get powdery mildew. The stone fruit trees and apples get assaulted by lorikeets or cockatoos. It's relentless.
I have a typical suburban block (bit under a quarter of an acre) with seven 1x2m raised garden beds and six espaliered fruit trees, plus a couple free standing. I really should've established better netting infrastructure from the start plus I should never bother starting seeds/seedlings without some effort in pests/weeding/mulch - unfortunately they're worst in winter when I'm busy working inside and least inclined to go out and deal with them.
Mh, after I've "gone solar" i felt a sense of abundance in some hours of many sunny days BUT I see from my "smart meter" (Home Assistant + Victron inverter + Carlo Giavazzi meter, to state another thing [1]) logs that I also need energy when the Sun NOT shine an as a result instead of sense of abundance I've developed a sense of "keep watching" to choose what to run or not depending on the Sun state...
Unfortunately I've realized how much is unfeasible living on renewables... I've realized that without damn real scalable, cheap and long lasting storage we can only spend money to made an almost zero-sum (in the best case) game. At MINIMUM we need storage to power TWO-THREE ENTIRE DAYS and enough peak power to recharge it in 3h. A thing that in most latitude/homes means something from the cost of a not so cheap car to the cost of a home alone, for ~10 years of usable life due to the most expensive part: the battery.
To really being able to live on renewable we need year-long storage, something that can power a home for six month, being recharged in the other six to have enough charge/discharge margin during an year. To be clear I'm NOT unhappy of my investment because it pay back in term of blackout protection (thanks to a small but capable enough to pass a night on essential services lithium storage) and in term of yearly amortization costs BUT, while for a mix of reasons (some definitively artificially made by some humans, acting as cancer of humanity) I suggest others to do the same I'm FAR LESS optimistic...
[1] that IoT development in the SOLE area where IoT is meaningful, useful for the user is utterly developed and crappy limited.
More like 40k financed over 7 years with a $500 payment. Except your electricity use goes into negative and you can recoup some of those costs. Meanwhile like the article said you start to use $400 worth a month and with batteries you end up fully self sufficient when the grid goes down.
Honestly on a tech salary it's a bit of a luxury but not much for the peace of mind of never having your power go out. Basically $120 more a month. And then when it's paid off it does become free.
My 21kw $52k system with a 26% federal tax credit costs me $270/month pre tax credit ($178/month after applying the tax credit to the principal), financed at 3.9% for 25 years (inflate that debt away!). There is a bill in Congress to restore the tax credit to 30% retroactive to the first of the year, and extending it 10 years further, possibly improving the economics if passed.
It was cheaper than my average utility bill, and my electrical rates will never go up as the cost of fossil gas burned by my utility rises. Any excess power I generate beyond what I consume my utility must cut me a check for at the end of year when we true up.
The credits and whatever feel like just-another-way to give money to people “lucky” enough to buy a house that they own-something that looks less feasible by the month for the majority, even making plenty, as rates and prices go up. And rent? Well, there’s a meme for that.
I can’t install PV panels even if I want to, but I certainly would not be doing it or even trying for a rental owned by an investment firm who would use it as an excuse to raise rates due to the improvements.
> and with batteries you end up fully self sufficient when the grid goes down.
My understanding is that the majority of installs are not capable (allowed?) to run when the grid is down. I do know that at the very least you'd need a transfer switch to ensure you're not backfeeding the grid when it's not expecting it, like with a generator.
Now that I think about it, I wonder if a generator could provide the reference signal for the inverters to synchronize against. You'd still be burning fuel at whatever the generator's idle consumption is, but that'll be less than actually using it for power.
Nah. It’s a standard feature of most battery systems to run when the grid is down. Solar without battery doesn’t, (and the solar itself cuts out) but if you have battery systems involved for storage, you’re already capable of them interoperating with the grid, or without it.
As for getting reference from a generator, no need. You can get all that from the batteries and they’re increasingly planned to be used for grid scale black start.
> My understanding is that the majority of installs are not capable (allowed?) to run when the grid is down.
Capable, IIRC. I seem to remember that you need to have a type of inverter that is quite a bit more expensive (several kilodollars) if you want to be able to run disconnected from the grid.
Most people opt for the cheaper inverter as there's not a lot of difference if you don't also have a battery storage system.
Most offgrid inverters have a generator input to which they will switch when you start the generator. If you replace the generator with the grid (and you have batteries) and the grid goes down they switch seamlessly to the batteries - well, within a fraction of a second, some applainces "blink". I am actually using this system as a sort of UPS for our office
Separate outlets means running cable that you won't use most of the time, and having to remember which outlets go to which circuit.
A transfer switch allows you to isolate and switch between two power supplies so that your house circuits are only ever connected to one of them, and the two supplies are never in the same circuit[1]. They can be had for a few hundred depending on the load[2].
[1] this is a break-before-make switch. There exist make-before-break switches for when you need uninterrupted power supply, but they're not appropriate for this case as you'd be backfeeding into the grid which is dangerous and illegal.
I paid 60K, but it was 15 years ago. Half of the price was the structure that nowadays is not needed. Today the same installation but on a fixed roof + 20% power to offset inefficiency would cost me about 10K.
In the UK we have asymmetric pricing so produced solar goes to the grid at 5p and electricity comes at 27p. At night you can buy electricity for 7p for about 5 hours. So - batteries can make sense in that you can charge them during the day and then discharge them at night. If you find that there is not enough in the battery you can put in some charge at night and then top it up during the day.
How big do these arrays have to be to hit self-sustainability?
I bought a new build house in the UK a few years back which had solar panels pre-installed on the roof (IMO that should be a requirement for all new houses). It’s a 1kW array facing west so I’m far from experiencing the abundance this article describes.
a 1kw array is realistically going to provide 300-900watts. which in summer is going to get you about 6-9kwhr a day.
I have a 5.6kw array and a battery. It has provided 99.8% of our power since march. (only 60% of our power was from solar in january though.)
We've generated ~3 MwHr this year, with 1.5 net going to the grid.
We don't have a feed in tariff, so any power we generate and export is free to the supplier. This means that we put on the washing machine & dishwasher on during solar peak, so that we stop the power companies making as much money.
But. We have gas heating. even with external wall insulation we using about 500kwhr a month in febuary. (Im not sure that acutally all, as the smart meter has stopped reporting properly.)
The article missed one very critical element: depending on the tariffs it may be a net zero sum game for a consumer, but solar energy is super tricky grid wise. When clouds pass over the country, when it is night, when it is winter there is no abundance of energy in the grid. Winter could be baseline compensated by nuclear but the variations summer and winter beyond buffers have to be compensated by energy sources can startup very quickly. And that is mostly natural gas.
So while I can totally follow the article positiv argument (as a proud owner myself I experience the same sentiments), in the larger picture, that feeling only works in summer daylight and only if the grid is already on 100% renewables at the given time (which in parts of Europe we are).
Put all the other factors aside, the author at least ignored quite a few critical variables:
1. Decaying of the panels. I'm wondering if the panels can retain 50% of designed output after 7 years.
2. Maintenance. If the inverter go busted in 7 years, hopefully the warranty would be still valid by then. Also, the extra load panels put on roof was never factored when the house was built, it's not uncommon to see issues caused by that.
3. Variance of feed-in tariff. So if the tariff wasn't locked in, I'm pretty sure there would be surprises on how fast it can drop.
Considering the sun produces 1370 Watts per square meter (solar constant). I cannot imagine an average homeowner in Brooklyn having enough rooftop space to accomodate the number of panels required to power their home for 100%. Especially when taking heating / air conditioning into account.
I don't understand why so many people who care about greenhouse gases (and so love renewable energy sources) refuse to acknowledge that producing the equipment that generates "renewable" energy required massive energy investment (that came from fossil fuels).
And so there are two payback periods: one financial and the other environmental. This person extended their environmental payback period to achieve "abundance".
I have no problem with that, but the fact that it's considered "free" on the very same dimension that they originally sought to optimize--when it's clearly not free--baffles me.
Simply put, if an increase in efficiency, ecologically in this case, leads to an increase in consumption then the end result isn't a decrease in energy usage but an increase. One of the reasons carbo-hydrogen consumption has barely fallen totally is because every time we make something more efficient we have the fantastic idea to use it for something other than substituting the old energy sources. Every solar panel put to use for something that isn't turning an old power plant off is slowing the energy transition. The people on HN who rightfully ask why our software is so slow despite our chips being so fast know Jevon's paradox by heart.
It's important to point out that this applies to the infrastructure needed for green energy itself, which is not green. Solar panels, batteries, concrete, steel, rare earths, the downside of that green energy the author blasts so abundantly through is some toxic mining pit in Africa.