California was just fine until deregulation and privatization in 96.

Since then, it’s gone to shit, culminating in almost zero maintenance that caused billions in wildfire damages, more outages, and much higher prices. We even had Enron here, they deliberately shut down plants at peak demand time to artificially raise prices repeatedly.
Are you under some delusion that California doesn’t have private electricity companies? Look up PCG on the nyse. Lol! Privatization CAUSED all the problems we have today. Derp.

🤦‍♂️

Well, allow me to respectfully say that you (and he) are wrong.
Absolutely I would still save money without the grid. I already have paid to have a small battery bank in my system (>1KWH), so it wouldn't cost me much more to be completely grid free. As it is I barely send power to the grid, as I use most of my electricity as I produce it by doing housework during the daytime. (EDIT: If @Asmo did that, maybe just by using timers on large appliances to run them during the daytime, he would save a lot more, like up to 4.5 times as much as he saves today.) In the short run I would not save as much as I do currently, because I would need to buy more panels and a larger battery bank, and the batteries would need replacing sooner, but it would still be a huge savings in the end over buying grid power. The suggestion that it's not economically viable without the grid is simply wrong.
Once flywheels become popular, it will be far cheaper than it is today to store your own electricity, I'll probably get one to replace my batteries when they eventually die.
EDIT: A micro-hydro system could also store the power cleanly, but requires 2 large storage tanks, one raised as far as possible above the other, and a pump/turbine to move the water. For those with the space, that seems a good solution for power storage, and it's how some electric companies do it on a large scale already.

EDIT: I did the math, and to be completely grid free would cost me about $3000 more, and the upgrade would pay for itself in 2-3 years. Hmmm, now you've got me thinking.....Oh yeah, I forgot, my system can't run my large welder, the electric oven and stove together, or the hot tub directly, that's why I stuck with a grid tied system in the first place, I use too much electricity at once sometimes. Solar systems DO have some limitations, mine can only put out 6500 watts at once, max.

What part of "do not have a choice" do I not understand? How about the subject of the 'choice' you are denied. Now that you have clarified that you don't have a choice about how the electric company pays you, or how solar works, I'll reiterate, you still DO have a choice about how to use the power you generate. Making better use of that choice would serve you well, but you seem intent on claiming it's all out of your control (and that you're forced 'at gunpoint' to sell all your production cheap and buy it back expensive rather than find a way to use it directly). I'm intent on making the best use of the choices available to me (and I bet to you) in order to make intelligent choices about my energy, choices that have saved me thousands to date, and should save me tens of thousands in the long run, and save uncounted tons of CO2 from being produced. You have instead invested in a system that now serves your needs terribly, and now want to tell others how solar is not economically viable or green, both of which are absolutely backwards from my experience and research.

You were not kidnapped, you walked into that guys home and put his gun to your own head. I wonder if you've even investigated 'net metering' in your area, it could make your system work for even you.

OK, so energy cost VS energy produced is ALL you want to compare. Then you MUST include all energy costs to be reasonable, including the energy cost of cleanup of coal waste failures (that right there already totally tips any scale against coal, it can't come close to making the energy that cleanup takes), the energy used in upkeep of coal waste storage for centuries, the energy costs of habitat destruction/reconstruction by coal mining itself, the mining itself, transportation of the coal, power plant operation (construction, upgrading, and maintenance), and the cost of mitigating the 20-40 times the amount of CO2 pollution, health issues, loss of sunlight (solar dimming is real), etc. The list of energy costs goes on and on for coal, while the list for the energy cost of solar panel production and use in some cases is damn near zero (where it's made with leftover chip wafers in solar powered factories it barely takes any extra energy at all, but I do understand that most aren't made that way now).

Double return VS coal, because you get twice as many KWH per dollar with solar PV, or better.

Again with the 'spend more energy to produce one KWH of PV than with coal', show me some data. Everything I can find shows you're 100% wrong if you look at the lifespan of panels which become energy neutral in well under 3 years on average (some much sooner) and last 20-30 years, while coal continues to need more energy to produce more (filthy) energy. Perhaps in the extremely short term you have a point about cost/production, but any time period over 3 years puts PV ahead of coal in energy costs/energy produced, and in their 20-30 year lifetime they do much better.

Coal made power is NOT cheaper than solar made power. If it was, I would not save money with a solar system. I have already saved money with solar VS buying the same amount of coal produced power, therefore solar PV is cheaper than coal. Period. If it wasn't, our electric companies would not be 'farming solar' here as fast as possible, they would be building more coal plants.

Some people support coal because they have been misinformed about alternatives. That's why I have continued our discussion here, because your information is wrong based on my personal experience and research, and I fear you might convince someone to not even look into solar enough to see how wrong you are, how much money they could save (if they do it properly), and how much pollution they could not create.

Um...I DO grow my own vegetables in my backyard too. It's cheaper, and I get far better produce with zero carbon footprint. Another statement you've made that I take personal exception with. It's not a HUGE effort, but is some effort, but the returns are great and totally worth it. I think many people stopped subsistence farming because they're lazy, overworked, and/or live without any place to farm. I've been doing it since I was 12 and ate my first self grown corn, and I've never had reason to question that decision. I've read about people spending $50 to grow $5 in tomatoes...I'm not one of them. I spend $50 on manure to grow >$1000 in produce yearly, and have enough to give >1/2 of it away.

Not a single one of your examples are 'more viable' than PV in every situation, and private owned home solar doesn't take public dollars away from public power projects. I looked into wind-it's way more expensive for the same generation power along with numerous other issues, nuke-also far more expensive with other long term major issues, solar thermal-hardly working as hoped yet in the few, hyper expensive plants in existence, wave-not yet but fingers crossed, hydro-DISTEROUS for the environment and short lived. (You left out geothermal, which is excellent where it's possible.)
Also, most of your examples are not viable for residential use (what we're talking about here), as you said are more expensive (so are bad economic choices), and/or have other serious ecological issues that PV does not.

Money is the only reason to stick with coal or nuclear, and that's only because the companies that use it get away with not paying for most of the true long term costs, and even with that it's now FAR more expensive to buy that coal/nuke power than it is to make your own with PV, leaving NO real reason to stick with coal or nuclear....so what are you talking about?

You certainly have a choice in how you use the electricity.

I think YOU missed the point, if you can only sell your power for 8 c perkwh, and pay 36c per kwh, and you sell ALL the power you make, then buy it back later, YOU are subsidizing the power company, who makes 28c on every kwh you sell them. No one is subsidizing that 8c they pay(I would hope, 350% profit is already insane) so what "high feed in tariff" are you talking about?

The power grid is fairly smart, and takes into account the amount being produced by ALL sources, and shuts/ramps down those not needed. For you to be sending power when it's not required would require more PV generation than the entire grid uses, because ANY other generation could be put on hold until night. The certainly DO do this on a 'few hundred times per second' basis, at least here in the US. Solar generation may jump up and down on individual systems, but the total amount fed to the grid by all solar systems in an area is fairly stable, and doesn't jump radically from a cloud...come on.
Here, peak power is at peak temperature time, mid-late afternoon, when businesses turn up the AC and people get home, exactly when PV makes the most power, I can't speak for AU.
The point being that the grid CAN and DOES adjust rapidly to account for all generation methods, and it does already shift production because some of the need is supplied by PV.

Not so, the return on energy invested is at least double the return on coal in the long term...for the consumer, that's why you save money VS the electric company in the long term.
It's certainly not cheap or easy to deal with the waste in the US where the company(s) (and the taxpayer when it goes bankrupt) has to pay for destroying major river systems because of inevitable waste releases...as happened recently and repeatedly. Only if you ignore most of the actual costs of coal can you think it's cheaper, if you count all the costs, it's FAR more expensive.

ALL the power/energy needed to produce PV panels is reflected in their cost...100%.
Again, to be a bad way to reduce carbon pollution, you MUST assume it takes more carbon to make a panel VS the amount of carbon pollution it saves VS coal power production of the same amount of KWH. That's simply not the case by a long shot, so it does significantly reduce CO2 production, by around 20-30X vs coal. Even in Germany and Denmark, where it's often overcast, they found ....
"solar PV works out to about 50g of CO2 per kWh compared to coal's 975g of CO2 per kWh, or about 20x "cleaner."" In places with better weather, it can be up to 40X.
http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/blogs/how-much-co2-does-one-solar-panel-create

Once again, my electric company doesn't pay me a dime, it trades me power based on peak and non peak hours. Yours on the other hand makes 350% profit on every kwh you produce. I save cash because making (and USING) my own power is FAR cheaper than buying (mainly) coal produced power from the electric company. No "high feed in tariff" required at all. No feed in tariff at all, in fact.
It obviously makes an inroad on reducing carbon because, beyond the panel's production and shipping, there's ZERO carbon, unlike coal which produces more carbon per 10 KWH than it likely took to make each of my 20 panels, meaning they pay off their carbon debt in about 100 hours of sunlight, and are total carbon savers for the rest of their 20 year lifespan.
If we're going to fix climate change, we need to be HONEST about energy production, not compare 150%-350% of the cost of one production source with 5% of another production source to be able to say the 5% source is better.

HAHAHAHAHA!!!! Nuke requires a jump in your bill (even with the HUGE government subsidies the nuke industry gets at every step), but it's better than home mounted PV which SAVES you >50% off your 20 year power costs without a taxpayer cent?!?!? Please think about that.

I'm not basing my figures or thoughts on any study, but on my own personal, long term, economic experience with a system.
As someone who purchased a solar system for purely economic reasons, and has found it to be a HUGE cost saver over buying coal/nuke power from the electric company, all without counting subsidies at all, and even considering I paid top dollar for my system and have battery backup (that produces nothing but cost thousands), I'll simply say you're completely wrong in your assessments based on my own dispassionate, no child having, purely economical experience and leave it there.
I'm happy saving 50% of every power/dollar, you are accepting of giving away around 80% of your power/dollars to the power company. That doesn't make solar unworthy, non-"green", or economically unviable, it makes it a TERRIBLE choice for YOU because you're doing it wrong, and your electric company is punishing you rather than incentivizing you.

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.

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.

I have also never seen this 'data' about how windmills are frivolous, and I've looked. All I can ever find are individuals that have no personal knowledge of the systems making unfounded claims. Certainly there are instances of poorly planned 'windfarms' that, because of lack/over abundance of wind don't work properly, or because of regulation and electric company resistance are cost prohibitive. Personal/home units (where they can be erected, and have proper wind conditions) can be great, especially for off grid living. It magnifies the possibilities of a solar system because it generates when the sun isn't out (like when there's a storm) using the same battery system and inverter/converter system the solar uses, so there's little added cost. If you got into solar early enough, the rebates available made the systems a great deal (in some cases, nearly free after the rebate). My system, which cost me a ton of cash, has paid for itself in under 8 years (if you don't consider that electricity rates have gone up considerably since I bought it, if you do count that it was closer to a 6.5 years for full payback, with a minimum 20+ year system lifespan) thanks to rebates and tax breaks...and the systems are far cheaper today than when I bought mine. I've also not lost hundreds (or thousands) of dollars worth of food due to numerous week long power outages, like my neighbors have.
I often consider adding a smallish wind turbine so I have more generation power, especially needed when the power goes out during a storm, which is exactly when a turbine could shine. My issue is jackhole neighbors that would likely not give 'permission' to erect the mast, or would complain about the turbine noise (reasonably or not).
So, in my semi-educated opinion, turbines CAN be a great solution when done right, and can also be economical, especially when compared to the electric company. Of course you can find instances of poor planning making them poor performers, but that's not the norm.

You can print plastic or bio matter, but printing hardened materials like steel or even carbon fiber is not even on the radar yet.

Thinking that you would be able to print anything you need if you only had the materials is likely impossible.

It is like dreaming that everyone could have their own nuclear reactor in their house so that they wouldn't have to pay the electric company for power anymore.

Yes, that was a thing in the 60's when no-one understood much about nuclear energy. Just like that technology, something better and safer will likely come around that will supplant the need for that crazy idea.

@Trancecoach @enoch

Enoch's questions:

1. People should be producing something if they are getting paid for it - whether that is a good, service, etc. If someone else pays them to create or perform they are owed exactly what they have been promised to be compensated.

2. Enoch I think you are misunderstanding what a free market is. A free market is not a marketplace without regulations. A free market is not anarchy - there are still rules. Instead a free market is a market without a centralized or directing authority. To clarify a free market is one in which government policy does not set pricing.

3. You don't believe or disbelieve in democracy. It isn't a religion, it is a form of government. There is nothing inherently wrong with regulations. The devil is in the details. Regulations can be good or bad for a marketplace.

4. Enoch, I think that is a gross oversimplification of why corporate profits have been as high as they are. Many things have led to large corporate profits including globalization, expanding markets, etc. Yes, here in the USA corporations exercise influence on government, but its only one part of the bigger picture.

5. Completely incorrect. A free market has nothing to do with the existence of copyrights or patents.

6. Democracy is a form of government. A Free Market is a type of market structure. You could have a dictatorship and a free market. A monarch and a free market. A republic and a free market. A Theocracy and a free market.

Furthermore you could have a "Free Market" for automobiles but a "regulated" or "controlled" market for electricity within one country.

For example:

In the USA I would argue automobiles operate in a "Free Market". Yes there are certain standards the government sets (safety, fuel efficiency, etc) but the pricing is determined by the automakers. You can argue about the restrictions. Do they go far enough? Do they go too far? etc.

Conversely, most electric companies prices are regulated by the government and they are required to provide services to certain areas.

Lastly, a free market does not mean the market operates without laws. Copyright and patent law being just a small part of those laws.

I hope this clarifies some of these questions for you.


Best,

Kgrr

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In reply to this comment by kulpims:
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Thank you very much for the promote kulpims!!!

*shcool>> ^BoneRemake:

70s! thats old skool ~!

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