diy solar

diy solar

New NEC code makes it impossible for DIY systems to be compliant

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Yes that would be my perspective , say nothing and if caught beg for forgiveness. The first rule of dealing with utilities and governments “ no good deed goes unpunished “ ☺️
So true.
I installed my own designed Ultra high efficiency AC system many yeras ago and somehow inspectors found out and came out to two of the locations I had installed them.
I found that even with my limited knowledge of local Codes, I was able to talk circles around them. One even asked to have a unit installed in his own house.
I suspect I could get by electrical inspectors. To become one all they need to do is become a master electrician, which involves years and years of ass kissing and pass a test. No education needed!
Building inspectors are my biggest concern. I was very unimpressed with the available roof top mounting systems. Most of them remind of small pry bars, something one might use if they wanted the wind to blow the panels off the roof. So I used a combination of products which probably would puzzle a building inspector. They too generally have little to no education. I had to pay a structural engineer once to override some building inspector.
You can add education to the list of things that get punished these days.
 
Don’t agree , the stability of the grid is N overriding requirement. Too much adhoc microgeneration causes destabilisation. Other then large scale generators I don’t see why anyone should get paid to be amateur part time hobby electricity generators
This is fun because we understand very similar facts, but see opposite solutions. It is a tendency to look at small contributions as insignificant, forgetting about the power of large numbers. When statistics on plastic pollution (from ourworlddata.org) in 2010 say that the average person in the U.S. discarded 12oz or 0.34kg of plastic per day, that doesn't sound like a very big problem until you mulitply it by 300 million people over the course of a year discarding over 4 million tons of plastic.

Another example in the opposite direction was during world war 2, when the recycling programs were set up to collect metals for industry, they took in huge quantities of metal, a dozen tin cans or bag full of pop bottle caps at a time.

The key word in the quote above is 'adhoc'. Just letting people do what is easiest for them will be chaos. But we know what the protocol for behavior modification of humans is. It is money. So the reason people will choose to store energy and release it to the grid at an advantageous time is to make it financially beneficial for them to have that behavior. Since the value of any one transaction is very small, the behavior has to use automation to make it worth while.
The issue is the electricity supply wants to move to hour to hour tariffing using smart meters. How then does your car know when to start charging. Until we have an industry wide protocol I’m refusing to go smart meter tariffs.

I agree with this statement. The same as humans have a common financial protocol for the most part, automated home power systems must have a common way to communicate with smart meters and the grid to make things work well. However, I can imagine a world where 20 million of the homes in the U.S. have 5kw solar systems with 20kwh of storage and an average of 4 sun hours per day. That is 400,000,000 kwh (400 gigawatt hours) of daily power generation and storage available, which becomes very useful if it can be coordinated (That is enough power get 19,834 Deloreans to time travel per day if they each need 1.21gigawatts for one minute!). The other advantage it has is that the power is available at the point of consumption, so it can actually reduce load on the transmission system.

A final advantage is that distributed systems are more robust against disruption. I thought of this when I saw the news on the missile attack on the power station in Kharkiv Ukraine. Missiles may provide a large impact on a small location, but they are useless against distributed infrastructure.

Power generators will be financially motivated to fight progressing to this system, not because it won't work, but because it might work well.
 
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Everybody and their brother? My brother already has two EVs and charges like I do overnight. I have been driving EVs since 2012 and am not worried. Do you drive an EV? If you are worried, don't buy and EV but please don't put out FUD.
I'm thinking long term and asking the questions. Like I said, I don't know the answer. Sorry, that's not spreading FUD, it is simply asking the question because I don't want to see grid failure due to a silly assumption.

You're statement of "I've been driving an EV since 2012 and my brother does too" is meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Sure the grid can hand you two, and a lot more. Can it handle millions more? Neither I nor you have the data necessary to make that judgement. You're simply assuming it can. I am simply asking the question because I'm assuming nothing.

And no, I do not have an EV. I am not rich enough to afford one.
 
Couple this with disincentives like congestion charging , sky high parking charges etc. the net result is a massive disincentives to own a car.

Both my daughters are in very well paid jobs in the centre of two European capitals. Neither owns a car ! Nor has any plans too. Their boyfriends don’t own cars either nor do many of their peer group. They use hop in hop out car rental from time to time.
I agree there is a huge disruption in transportation going on. If autonomous driving ever matures can you imagine the evolution of those hop on hop off car rentals? I also agree the grid needs to be upgraded to handle more biderectional flow from distributed generation.

I still have not seen realistic numbers about how much generation capacity versus distribution capacity needs to be added. In California generation has been deregulated and there are lots of new generation sources being built. Many of those are solar farms which can produce power less expensively than with natural gas. Also because of the intermittency of solar those installations are adding batteries so that stored solar energy can be fed to the grid when needed the most.
 
The grid gets brought down by excessive loads, or failures. We normally draw power open loop, when we want to. Grid and generation costs money to have capacity sufficient for peak demand.
Simply having loads respond to available capacity (e.g. communication with EV chargers) would make grid more robust by knocking a portion of load offline when total approaches available capacity. It would reduce the cost of power by achieving higher average utilization (enable when capacity available), and could shift between high and low cost energy sources.

It is likely that presently unused production capacity could support a very large increase in EV, if they are controlled to utilize it. This may mean burning more fossil fuel in existing plants, and would impact maintenance schedules and calendar life.

California built a natural gas plant that they didn't use all year, until our incident a week ago during a heat wave? While it won't "decarbonize transportation", there's production capacity for ya.

I think "smart grid", really "smart load", will go a long ways. Just internet connectivity to some loads, or pagers.
 
You're simply assuming it can. I am simply asking the question because I'm assuming nothing.
Yes, I am assuming it can until I see numbers that convince me that it can not. There was a lot more FUD from others on this thread and my apologies for venting my frustration at you. Those are good questions to be asked.
 
Simply having loads respond to available capacity (e.g. communication with EV chargers) would make grid more robust by knocking a portion of load offline when total approaches available capacity. It would reduce the cost of power by achieving higher average utilization (enable when capacity available), and could shift between high and low cost energy sources.

It is likely that presently unused production capacity could support a very large increase in EV, if they are controlled to utilize it.
I just got an incentive from PGE to let them control my EV charging station. That is the kind thing I think you are referring to. Those are the kind of grid upgrades I think are necessary.
 
I just got an incentive from PGE to let them control my EV charging station. That is the kind thing I think you are referring to. Those are the kind of grid upgrades I think are necessary.
Is there an override? It would suck to give them control, then they shut it off when you really need it charged because of a trip or something.
 
General assumption here but My response to "the grid can't handle 50 million more EVs" is simple: The grid cannot support 50 million more EVs, The Grid WILL support 50 million and more EVs. This is how markets work. It doesn't make financial sense as a grid operator to build power plants years or decades ahead of demand. That's a large depreciating asset with no revenue.

California had a large recent heat wave which resulted in a few blackouts. So maybe the utilities lost a couple million in revenue by not being able to sell demanded power? Are they incentivized now to build a $7billion plant? Probably not. Sad but somewhat true. They will build more capacity when they feel it's profitable.
 
Too much adhoc microgenetstion causes destabilisation. Other then large scale generators I don’t see why anyone should get paid to be amateur part time hobby electricity generators
I agree with @hankcurt on this issue. The only reason too much micro generation causes grid destabilization is that the grid was not designed for bidirectional flow. We know that physically transformers can handle flow in both directions. The issue is the switching and control mechanisms to handle bidirectional flow need to be upgraded. In some markets it has been demonstrated that home battery packs can be aggregated into Virtual Power Stations..Most modern Hybrid Inverters have the communication protocol built in for this so in the aggregate it is more than just a few hobby electricity generators.
 
EVs aren't the main threat to the grid in my opinion. It's actually solar. Hear me out:

Solar is so plentiful during the day in California that it is actually outpricing traditional means of power generation. CA and other states are producing TOO MUCH solar. Why is this bad? Traditional power plants are having to scale back and lower their output except during small windows because solar is cheaper and plentiful (and cleaner) during daylight hours. At some point unless they have massive government subsidies, these power plants are going to have to shut down because they're only being utilized for shorter periods of time, mostly during the off-peak of 4pm through 10pm. There is simply no economic incentive to build a nuclear power plant that only is needed for a few hours a day, and even then batteries are starting to become so competitive in price and rollout timeline that nuclear will soon not be needed except for cloudy days. If bi-directional grid with EVs become a thing, allowing everyone to have a 80+ kWh battery in their garage.... that could spell the end of centralized utility power production. Let's hope it never gets cloudy.

On a residential scale, as more homes get their own solar systems, there needs to be some kind of economic incentive for the power company to maintain the existing grid. If 10% of homes switch to solar, that's a massive loss in profitability for the utilities that will have to result in cuts somewhere in the operations.
 
Is there an override? It would suck to give them control, then they shut it off when you really need it charged because of a trip or something.
LOL

That made me think of this line from MST3K Time Chasers episode. Read my contract!
 
California had a large recent heat wave which resulted in a few blackouts. So maybe the utilities lost a couple million in revenue by not being able to sell demanded power?
The California market is deregulated so the generation is by for profit entities. The trend I am seeing is more solar farms are being built because they are easier to build and more profitable than natural gas plants. However there is so much daytime solar that curtailment of generation became a risk for these investments. They responded by adding batteries that allowed them to store their solar generation instead of curtailing it. Then later that stored energy can be sold into the market when rates are higher. Also the amount of utility grade storage was doubled in the past year. Recent reports suggest because of that battery capacity major brownouts were averted.
 
EVs aren't the main threat to the grid in my opinion. It's actually solar.
I agree with your statement. You don't hear about the utilities opposing the adoption of EVs. That is clearly one of the areas of revenue growth for them where as too much roof based solar is a death spriral.

On a residential scale, as more homes get their own solar systems, there needs to be some kind of economic incentive for the power company to maintain the existing grid. If 10% of homes switch to solar, that's a massive loss in profitability for the utilities that will have to result in cuts somewhere in the operations.
Yes that is the challenge. Fortunately we have seen some solutions emerging.
 
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Is there an override? It would suck to give them control, then they shut it off when you really need it charged because of a trip or something.
Yes, there is an override. The irony is that they will only shut me off during peak periods. I never charge during peak periods. Most of my longer range trips are usually planned more than 24 hours in advance. I always keep enough range charge in my EVs for short trips to my grandkids.
 
EVs aren't the main threat to the grid in my opinion. It's actually solar. Hear me out:

Solar is so plentiful during the day in California that it is actually outpricing traditional means of power generation. CA and other states are producing TOO MUCH solar. Why is this bad? Traditional power plants are having to scale back and lower their output except during small windows because solar is cheaper and plentiful (and cleaner) during daylight hours. At some point unless they have massive government subsidies, these power plants are going to have to shut down because they're only being utilized for shorter periods of time, mostly during the off-peak of 4pm through 10pm. There is simply no economic incentive to build a nuclear power plant that only is needed for a few hours a day, and even then batteries are starting to become so competitive in price and rollout timeline that nuclear will soon not be needed except for cloudy days. If bi-directional grid with EVs become a thing, allowing everyone to have a 80+ kWh battery in their garage.... that could spell the end of centralized utility power production. Let's hope it never gets cloudy.

On a residential scale, as more homes get their own solar systems, there needs to be some kind of economic incentive for the power company to maintain the existing grid. If 10% of homes switch to solar, that's a massive loss in profitability for the utilities that will have to result in cuts somewhere in the operations.
I imagine the future for the grid will be more transporting energy and less producing energy. I don't see them getting that "hurt".

Utility companies have the power (jk their regulators do). They can time of use charge you for sending them power during 12pm and 2pm, they can give you super great rates from 10pm to 4am. I hope people don't get wrapped up too much in all these "problems" and "crisis". The grid and operators are doing just fine.
 
At some point unless they have massive government subsidies, these power plants are going to have to shut down because they're only being utilized for shorter periods of time, mostly during the off-peak of 4pm through 10pm. There is simply no economic incentive to build a nuclear power plant that only is needed for a few hours a day, and even then batteries are starting to become so competitive in price and rollout timeline that nuclear will soon not be needed except for cloudy days.

Perhaps that would be the case if population and power consumption was not growing, if existing power plants were not being retired.

In the old days, we paid a low price for power most of the time. If we also wanted power during occasional outages, we paid a premium for a backup system.

In the coming days, PV will provide all needed power during times of good sunshine. Batteries will provide some power during the night. If conventional generator power plants cost less than batteries, they will be competitive. If they cost more, they can contract to produce power during low battery situations, for a premium price.

The key will be a mechanism to shut off power to consumers who did not contract for premium priced power during times PV/batteries are insufficient.
 
The California market is deregulated so the generation is by for profit entities. The trend I am seeing is more solar farms are being built because they are easier to build and more profitable than natural gas plants. However there is so much daytime solar that curtailment of generation became a risk for these investments. They responded by adding batteries that allowed them to store their solar generation instead of curtailing it. Then later that stored energy can be sold into the market when rates are higher. Also the amount of utility grade storage was doubled in the past year. Recent reports suggest because of that battery capacity major brownouts were averted.
What do you mean by deregulated? There is plenty of regulation in CA for utilities. Yes I see the same trends, I feel as a whole the sector is adapting and solving problems. I don't see major issues with the grid, there is just opportunities arising with the chaging energy consumption and plenty of people jumping on board to better the system as a whole.
 
The grid gets brought down by excessive loads, or failures. We normally draw power open loop, when we want to. Grid and generation costs money to have capacity sufficient for peak demand.
Simply having loads respond to available capacity (e.g. communication with EV chargers) would make grid more robust by knocking a portion of load offline when total approaches available capacity. It would reduce the cost of power by achieving higher average utilization (enable when capacity available), and could shift between high and low cost energy sources.

It is likely that presently unused production capacity could support a very large increase in EV, if they are controlled to utilize it. This may mean burning more fossil fuel in existing plants, and would impact maintenance schedules and calendar life.

California built a natural gas plant that they didn't use all year, until our incident a week ago during a heat wave? While it won't "decarbonize transportation", there's production capacity for ya.

I think "smart grid", really "smart load", will go a long ways. Just internet connectivity to some loads, or pagers.
While we are talking about the grid, we need to remember that this entire issue is mainly about greenhouse gas. So much of my point on this is we either need to build and reinforce the grid or start generating clean energy near the main consumption areas.
 
EVs aren't the main threat to the grid in my opinion. It's actually solar. Hear me out:

Solar is so plentiful during the day in California that it is actually outpricing traditional means of power generation. CA and other states are producing TOO MUCH solar. Why is this bad? Traditional power plants are having to scale back and lower their output except during small windows because solar is cheaper and plentiful (and cleaner) during daylight hours. At some point unless they have massive government subsidies, these power plants are going to have to shut down because they're only being utilized for shorter periods of time, mostly during the off-peak of 4pm through 10pm. There is simply no economic incentive to build a nuclear power plant that only is needed for a few hours a day, and even then batteries are starting to become so competitive in price and rollout timeline that nuclear will soon not be needed except for cloudy days. If bi-directional grid with EVs become a thing, allowing everyone to have a 80+ kWh battery in their garage.... that could spell the end of centralized utility power production. Let's hope it never gets cloudy.

On a residential scale, as more homes get their own solar systems, there needs to be some kind of economic incentive for the power company to maintain the existing grid. If 10% of homes switch to solar, that's a massive loss in profitability for the utilities that will have to result in cuts somewhere in the operations.
I have never thought about that concept, but it is fascinating and will change the power supply world in a big way. Life and your electrical needs used to be so simple, now I wonder if we will all end up with batteries someday. Time to invest in something!
 
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