The inference being that I have a choice..? =) We don't in Aus.

But you're missing the point, X >= 1 feed in tariffs are being subsidised by other users on the grid. You upload your power regardless of demand peaks (so you could be sending power when it really isn't required). Electricity companies are not going to massively drop production of regular power as it takes a considerable amount of time to spool up/down baseload production, and they are still going to switch on high cost gas turbines during peak load just in case a big old cloud blocks out the sun for an hour or so and solar production falls in a heap...

And peak usage times are usually ~8-9am (schools and business start up, switch computers and air con on etc) before solar production really kicks in, and later in the afternoon when it get's hotter, people are getting ready for dinner. If you have significant daylight savings time shifts, then you can certainly get better production when peak demand in the early evening is occurring. If the panels are facing west rather than east or north (because that's where you maximise production and make the most money... =)

As for "the idea that it might take more energy to produce a panel than it will produce itself is ridiculous", I didn't say that it did, just that it's return on that energy invested is comparatively poor. You coal analogy is patently wrong though. Depending on which source you go to, coal is anywhere from 30:1 to 50:1 for EROEI (energy returned on energy invested). It's cheap to obtain, burn and dispose of the waste, despite being toxic/radioactive.

eg. http://bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/

When you talk about solar PV and the energy required to make it, you're not just talking about the production line, you're talking mining the silicon, purifying, the wasted wafers which aren't up to snuff, the cost of the workers and the power that goes in to building, transporting etc, lifetime maintenance, loss of production over time and disposal. The above link puts PV at the low 1.5-3:1 which is well beneath the roughly 7:1 required to sustain our modern society (and does not cover the massive increases in energy demand and consumption from developing countries). And as the author of the article notes, these are unbuffered values. If you add buffering to load shift, the sums get even worse.

"Put simply, if solar PV is such a bad deal, how are they saving me so much money even without any rebates?"

I didn't say solar was a bad deal, I said it's a poor way to reduce carbon pollution. If the electricity company you are connected to is willing to pay high feed in tariffs to you and you save cash, that's great, but that doesn't automagically (intentional typo mean that solar PV is making any sort of serious inroads in to reducing carbon pollution.

If we're going to fix man made climate change, we need to be prepared to pay a far higher cost and worry less about our hip pockets. Nuke might not be economically viable without causing jumps in bills, but in terms of the energy output it provides over it's life time, it is one of the highest returns in energy for the energy invested in building it, paired with very low carbon emissions.

Obviously, the figures on EROEI depend on which article you read, as it's a very complex number to work out (and will always be an approximation), but it's fairly commonly acknowledged by people who do not have a vested interest in solar PV (vs low carbon power sources in general) that PV is a feel good technology that doesn't actually do a hell of a lot in terms of carbon reduction.

No, my first paragraph attempts to spell out why solar PV is a dud for people who do it the worst way possible, by selling all the electricity produced at drastically reduced rates to the grid, then buying it back at exorbitant rates, you are wasting well over 75% of what you could be saving. Of course it looks bad when you waste that much.
I have no mechanism needed to make it financially viable, and the idea that it might take more energy to produce a panel than it will produce itself is ridiculous.
I didn't 'make time' for anything, it just so happened that my lifestyle was perfect for solar, since I already did my housework during the daytime.
I have what's called a 'time of use' meter, which means it splits the day into 3 time zones, and keeps track of what I produce vs what I use from the grid. That means I essentially do get 1:1 for my production, which never reaches the point where they owe me money, but does offset almost all the juice I use (during the daytime) At night, we use normal grid power at normal grid rates. Too bad Australia doesn't do it that way.

yes, there are costs to an array, but they are one time costs, and FAR less than what's saved. That part is simple math. My system cost around $34K after rebates, maybe $40 without them, and it saves me around $5K per year in electric costs (based on 2007 rates, which have gone up). That includes production costs, installation cost, shipping cost, permit cost, etc.
Here in the US, daytime IS peak power use time. it's when business are using the most power, and when AC units are on, so the grid uses the power I feed in without problem. Industry uses WAY more power than homes. Solar offsets them using the hydro, gas turbines, and ramping up nuclear plants during the day, when they are used the most.
If my bill is lower, it means I used less fossil fuel generated electricity, so it IS working like a charm. How do you think otherwise? it's not perfect, and doesn't erase all other production, and is not a solution to ALL energy production problems, but it is a good part of the solution, unless it's done in the least productive manner possible.

What are you talking about, 2-3X the energy input? If you actually only count the costs, not the profit made at each stage in selling/installing panels, they probably come in more like 5-10 times the energy input, with little or no carbon footprint (many factories make the panels using power produced by other panels...as in pure solar factories).
My calculations (verified by my bills) put it at <1/2 the cost of buying (mostly coal produced) electricity from the grid at 2007 prices (even without any rebates), so how do you figure coal power production is cheaper, even ignoring all the other costs/problems? Coal may give a 30 to 1 return if you ignore ALL the other costs involved in using coal. If you count them, it's more like 1 to 2, because the effects of coal are so incredibly expensive, as is the cost of digging it up, transporting it, storing it, burning it, and disposing/storing the toxic waste products.

The cost of restoring a river is far more than the value of 100% of the power generated by a dam during it's lifetime.

Put simply, if solar PV is such a bad deal, how are they saving me so much money even without any rebates?

And your first paragraph pretty much spells out why solar PV is a dud investment for small plant/home plant if it were completely unsupported by a plethora of mechanisms designed to make it viable financially (and that's before even considering whether the energy cost is significantly offset by the energy produced), not to mention trying to make time to do things when your PV production is high so that you're not wasting it.

I try to load shift as much as possible, even went so far as to have most of the array facing the west where we'll scrape out some extra power when we're actually going to use it (eg. in the afternoon, particularly for running air conditioners in summer), but without feed in tariffs that are 1:1 with energy purchase prices and government subsidies on the installation of the system, the sums (at least in Australia) just do not ever come close to making sense.

But as I said in the first paragraph, that is all financial dickering, it has nothing to do with actual energy used vs energy generated. There is no free energy, you have to spend energy to make energy. You have to buil a PV array, pay for the wages of the people who install it, transport costs etc etc. They all drain energy out of the system. And most people in places where feed in tariffs are either on parity with the cost of purchasing energy when your PV isn't producing align their solar arrays with the ideal direction for greatest generation of energy that they can get the best profit for, not for generation of energy when energy demands spike.

The consequences of this are that at midday, energy is coursing in to the grid and unless your electricity provider has some capacity for extended storage and load shifting (eg. pumped hydro, large scale battery arrays), it's underutilised. Come peak time in the afternoon when people get home, switch on cooling/heating, start cooking etc when PV's production is very low, the electricity company still has to cycle up gas turbines to provide the extra power to get over that peak demand, and solar does little to offset that.

So carbon still get's pissed away every day, but as long as PV owners get a cheaper bill, it's all seen to be working like a charm... ; )

The energy current efficiency panels return is only on an order of 2-3x the energy input, which is barely enough energy returned to support a subsistence agrarian lifestyle (forget education, art, industrialisation). There's a reason that far better utilisation of coal and oil via steam heralded the massive breakthrough of industrialisation, it's because coal has close to a 30 to 1 return on energy invested. Same with petrochemicals, incredibly high return on energy.

The biggest advances in human civilisation came with the ability to harness energy more effectively, or finding new energy sources which gave high amounts of energy in return for the effort of obtaining them and utilising them. Fire, water (eg. mills etc), carbon sources, nuclear and so on. Even if you manage to get 95% efficiency on the panels for 100% of their lifetime (currently incredibly unlikely), you're only turning that number in to 8-12x the energy invested compared to 25-30x for coal/petro, 50x+ for hydro and 75-100+x for gen IV nuke reactors.

As a person who has solar on their roof, our bills have shown a slight decline (and I live in a tropical location with no obscuring of the panels), but that doesn't offset the cost of production (both in labour and energy input which is mostly supplied by carbon based sources). I run a 6 KW/h array which is slightly overclocked as we are capped at 5 KW/h input to the grid (at 8c KW/h sell, 36c KW/h buy). I'm looking at a ROI in ~11-15 years

There are also many studies (and not just from people who are pro nuke or anti-climate change) showing that solar PV in general, and rooftop solar specifically, is small potatoes in terms of energy returns, even when considering possible future gains in panel efficiency and storage technology.

I am not bashing solar because I don't like it, I spent the money to get an array on the roof because I think we do need to do something, but I'm not kidding myself in to believing that we're saving the planet when the vast majority of solar PV going out these days is manufactured in countries that emit enormous amounts of carbon and pay people peanuts to do the work... When, as you say, solar is heavily subsidised or has rebates offered to drive take up.

Nuke is expensive, but it returns far more energy than is invested to build it. Hydro, similarly (although Cali etc shows why hydro might be a dead end in this changing world climate). We can invest an enormous amount of time in half measures, or we can do it right, at least until we crack large scale fusion power production.

If it worked as well as it's hyped to do, huzzah, happy days. But so far, the boom is mostly hyperbole. At the very least, f#ck off subsidies/rebates etc to households and instead build huge solar PV farms with helio tracking arrays which make a better return on energy invested and basically give far more bang for buck. Or sink it all in to wind and cut back on PV. It's a feel good technology with hidden baked in carbon costs that is lulling us in to a false sense of security.

I'm intrigued by the different strategies they seem to have taken with regards to different markets.

The US market has been covered here already. Living off the grid, buffer for power outages, etc.

But they appear to market the Powerwall as a decentralized buffer system for our regional/national grid, as a means to shave off the spikes in power usage at times when both wind and solar fail to meet expectations. Seems like a virtual power plant of Powerwalls would be an alternative to gas turbine plants. Add some pumped-storage hydroelectricity in Norway and the Alps, and the need for standby power plants would be vastly reduced.

Additionally, they are probably aiming at the time when diminishing feed-in tariffs for PV panels make it more attractive to charge batteries instead of feeding into the grid.

However, even if they manage to sell only a handful of Powerwalls, it'll force all the other players to get off their fat asses for once. Politics managed to kill the local solar industry and the big players came up with fuck all in terms of meaningful innovation over the last years.
Yes, I'm looking at you, Siemens!

Inspired by this announcement, I started looking at solar panels yesterday. Actually I learned that there are also "solar shingles" that replace regular shingles, and blend in better, but are not as efficient as PV panels.

I signed up to be notified on the Tesla site - would be neat to own.

I also learned that northeast USA has more average sunlight (~4 kWh/m^2/Day) than Germany, which leads the world in solar adoption. Obviously places in southwest are better suited (~6.5 kWh/m^2/Day)

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by blackfox42.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by blackfox42.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by blackfox42.

Fucking ridiculous video hiding a somewhat significant point.

The human race can't break up with fossil fuels...

All the wonderful renewable tech we're banking on just isn't capable of supplying enough energy to support our modern post developmental lifestyle. Sure, solar thermal, PV etc are interesting, but unless you have some developing country (aka China atm, but might be India in the future) absorbing the carbon cost of building the panels and tech, the sums don't work out for people personally, and the return on energy invested doesn't work out for the planet.

If you've seen the current state of the Chinese air quality or general environment, you'll understand that for every clean tech device we set up in the west, there is a terrible hidden cost being dumped somewhere else in the world. Except "global warming" is global, so sweeping this shit under a foreign rug isn't going to save us..

With 1.8bn ppl with zero power and another 700+m with intermittent, unreliable power, and a bunch of countries switching off their nukes (and replacing the load mostly with gas/coal), no matter how much we want to break up with the lousy bitch, we can't and won't...

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by eric3579.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by eric3579.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by eric3579.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by oritteropo.

The thumbnail image for this video has been updated - thumbnail added by oritteropo.