Maybe the problem isn't necessarily latitude, but light intensity. Any info on that? It's great that countries here and there are considering alternate options.
The mountains are more of a problem. There is a famous Swiss village that only gets a few hours of sun in the summer because the prominence of the mountains around it is so high.
The population density map of Switzerland and the elevation map of Switzerland look like inverses of each other. The famous Swiss villages don’t have many people in them compared to the cities, so the situation you describe, while real, isn’t important.
In the denser parts of Switzerland, apartments are very common. I don’t see how solar works when people are living in a 5 story building. I couldn't see solar working that well where I lived in Lausanne, for example, at least on a person housed/energy unit basis.
Five floors probably isn’t too bad, thought of course that depends entirely on how many people in each apartment and how large they are — e.g. one person in a 50 m² place, divided by five floors, with 20% efficient panels, 25% duty cycle for night/latitude, still implies 500 W, compared to the average electricity consumption in Switzerland of about 900 W per person. It’s not everything but it’s also a pretty impressively large number.
(Something I only found out by looking up Swiss energy consumption: apparently Switzerland produces just over half of its current electricity from hydro power, which makes sense considering the terrain).
I was in the Aosta valley (on the Italian side of the Swiss border, surrounded by the highest mountains in Europe) a few weeks ago in the middle of the winter.
In short: yes there are only about 9-10 hours of daylight but it can get very bright when the sun comes out over the mountains for 3-4 hours. They also grow wine on the south facing parts of the mountains (which requires plenty of sun). And you have to consider that mountains often have clouds/rainy weather.
Another thing to consider is the peaks of the mountains are often above the cloud layers. You can get a sun burn in the middle of the winter in Switzerland quite easily. Just because it's north of most of the US, doesn't mean solar is uneconomical.
So yes, it's not optimal but there's plenty of light. And people do put solar on their roofs there and it apparently makes economical sense to them.
Maine doesn't exactly have usable sunlight, really, ever, between November and March. How Europeans don't freeze to death and go stark raving mad in the dark and cold when they are farther north than our Acadian Nilfheim always leaves me goggling at the wonders of the Gulf Stream.
> How Europeans don't freeze to death and go stark raving mad in the dark and cold when they are farther north than our Acadian Nilfheim always leaves me goggling at the wonders of the Gulf Stream.
You win my certificate of accomplishment for best written description of a feeling that I've read so far this year.
There could be a problem with a roof getting covered with snow. Sometimes Alpine pitched roofs have raised strips to stop snow all sliding off at once, you would lose that if it had PV panels on it.
An important problem is the fog in the winter months. The nights are longer than in summer and the ground cools off. Moisture condenses and fog develops. The Swiss plateau is special that it is essentially a wide valley about 60 miles wide and 200 miles long. The Rhine and the Rhone rivers leave Switzerland through constrictions. So the cold air tends to stay. During the day the sun warms the clear air above the fog such that a temperature inversion manifests itself. Such a situation can be very stable for weeks. Sometimes it even snows slightly under the fog cover. The Swiss living in the plateau complain about the depressing dark and gray weather and try to flee as often as they can by going up somewhere, sometimes the next hill is enough if the fog cover is not very high. Some cities are more affected than others, for example Zurich, Lucerne and Aarau can have months of fog some years.
Google sea of fog switzerland to get some pictures. These are beautiful.
It may supply 40% of electricity demand, but when climate change causes widespread systemic social and economic collapse, I can assure you that your precious solar panels won't be much help. You can't eat photovoltaic cells.
The other thing that would happen that no one talks about is that electricity rates would skyrocket because the power company wasn't making enough money. This is exactly what happened in Ontario, Canada. People started conserving and it caused rates to go up. Same thing happened with water in California (at least the Bay Area). People started conserving better, so to reward us, they raised water rates.
This is exactly what is done in some countries, like Portugal.
The main difference is that a fully variable model subsidizes solar panel owners at the expense of the other clients, which makes solar panels a more attractive investment, whereas here the case for home solar is much weaker, particularly for low energy consumers.
In Norway we pay three different amounts, sometimes to two separate entities.
I pay the company that supplies the electricity per kilowatt-hour for the energy and the company that owns the local distribution network for the rental of the cables and a per kilowatt-hour fee for transporting the energy.
In my case it is just one company but the energy supplier could be separate from the infrastructure owner.
Usually it's one bill. But even if it weren't it's not a problem because the bill goes straight to my bank and I pay by direct debit. The bank notifies me in plenty of time by email. We don't use paper bills and invoices much in Norway any more. After the first one or two from a new supplier most people switch to email billing and direct debit (eFaktura and Avtalegiro).
This kind of "free market" for electricity tends to drive up infrastructure costs needlessly (see Australia), while incentivizing bad behaviour by generation suppliers in the market (see Enron).
Public utilities generally provide a higher caliber of service at a lower price, with less administrative bloat.
Depends on the state, but in Vic the 'poles and wires' component, both in distribution (suburb) and transmission (pylons) costs are built into the fee that is charged for electricity supply (cost of connectivity) in a positive feedback loop: the more the companies invested, the more they could charge.
This was designed to avoid the 'run it into the ground's privatisation mentality, but it went the other way. Sadly, there was no price component for improving the network with new ideas, so it is still the same design as 100 years ago.
A system designed by accountants has done things accountants love, and nothing for electrical engineering or the citizens. Surprise.
The old SEC wasn't innovative or cheap, and neither is the privatised system. For incentives to be effective they have to be broken down to be smaller components rewarding specific conduct, and tweaked in response to system performance.
It’s more important to subsidize new technologies. Now that solar panels have a foothold, the economic case has gotten dramatically stronger because they’re cheaper. Even if electric bills change, I thinks uptake would continue.
A lot of the infrastructure is a variable cost. The system is built/upgraded to support a peak demand, and your contribution toward that peak is variable.
And when things fail, demand can often be blamed.
And if you lump everything into the variable fee, at least you have more incentive to conserve.
> A lot of the infrastructure is a variable cost. The system is built/upgraded to support a peak demand, and your contribution toward that peak is variable.
That can be solved by implementing time-of-use pricing and incorporating the "peak demand" infrastructure cost into the price. You would calculate how much infrastructure is needed to provide a "baseline" load (the trough on a demand graph), and divide that among the "fixed" portion. Perhaps you also add some sort of locality adjustment so rural/urban areas pay their "fair share". The rest of the infrastructure cost would be added the variable electricity price.
>And if you lump everything into the variable fee, at least you have more incentive to conserve.
That in itself isn't a bad thing. The problem is that with solar panels/wind power, you're also shifting the cost from people who can afford to install renewables (usually richer people with money to invest) to people who can't (usually poorer).
The problem is that electricity costs would spike to insane levels (as seen on wholesale spot markets) and consumers should have price certainty and confidence in supply, otherwise you get lots of costs in other parts of the economy. See e.g. California, where diesel gen sets are proliferating like crazy, or other markets where high CO2, high cost gas is the game theoretic optimum, eventually leading to an all-peak supply side.
In the UK a lot of the cost of distribution and transmission infrastructure is charged based on your consumption during the three highest demand half hour periods in the year (triad charge). This only applies to large users on half hourly billing, standard domestic consumers just get a distribution fee included in their bill.
Ah, I didn't really explain that well. The three half hour periods are selected based on the system wide demand. You are then charged for your demand during those periods. So you pay a lot for using capacity when the network is strained. Also, for distribution charging (rather than transmission) there is a half hourly congestion charging mechanism. Every HH period gets put into a red, yellow, or green band and you pay more distribution charge during the red and yellow periods.
I live in Baltimore and have solar panels. I get a bill for around $15 IIRC even in months when I make more electricity than I use. I assume that’s an infrastructure fee.
They also usually try to find a way to weasel out of the payments that were promised to be paid for the excess electricity generated by residential solar, so that the return on investment is much worse than projected when they are installed.
Which then makes it more economical to produce your own electricity so more systems get installed, until the power grid just shuts down entirely and everyone is self sufficient....
If we're talking solely about solar, it's not that simple, since on-the-grid residential solar systems only generate power during the day (and not even always the entire day), and then pull power from the grid at night. For full self-sufficiency, you'd need to install battery systems in every house, and ensure that you have enough panels to pull in enough power during daylight hours to charge the batteries enough to cover all the no-sun hours.
And for non-Californians, you also need to do something about the problem of not having enough sun power at all during winter, while having greatly increased power needs. Right now, you can work around this problem relatively easily by installing a propane or fuel oil tank, and making up winter shortage of sun with fossils, but as I understand it, the long term plan for society is to get off the fossils altogether.
Solar hot water heaters are currently the solution to that problem. They end up reducing a homes winter energy needs dramatically without the need for fossil fuels at very low costs. Longer term I’d panels keep getting cheaper and more efficient having a significant excess for most of the year is just going to become the norm.
That sounds ideal, but it fails for a few reasons:
1. When upper middle class people go off grid, it drives up electricity prices for poor people (fewer people paying for the infrasturcture), making them poorer. Adelaide, Australia is a good anecdote for this.
2. People are addicted to near 100% reliable electricity supply. It is far cheaper to achieve this on a regional scale than on a household scale millions of times.
3. The power grid still needs to service all industry and commercial end-users.
4. Individual self-sufficiency is not necessary if we are already sufficient on a regional scale. It only makes sense to do so if your grid electricity is too expensive or unreliable. Self-sufficiency in and of itself is selfish (I got mine!)
This is not a function of regular market economics, but rather the extremely monopolizing regulatory capture that Hydro One has in Ontario where they charge huge $$$ for distribution.
Hydro One has a zillion regular folks earning >$100K (see the Sunshine list), working-class retirees earning huge incomes for life after retirement.
A regular line manager in rural Ontario without a college degree and not a huge amount of responsibility can earn $80-100K, which is 3x the national average, in an area where cost of goods and housing is very cheap.
Hydro One exists to support the historical cabal of line managers and pensioners and to maximize their income. They will charge whatever they can force you to pay - since they are a monopoly, that will be a lot.
Electricity will never be cheap because those that have the power to control distribution will 'set prices' and take massive surpluses.
Government/Quasi-Government workers (natural gas distribution is similar to Hydro) have a privilege that few in the private sector have, which is job security, which is an extremely valuable benefit never really put into the calculation. The average person has to change careers or is put out every few years, not only is this structurally costly, but it means from age 45-65 it often means massive pay cuts or worse - no income.
Energy transmission is a big roadblock to the entire energy equation, it'd be amazing if somehow we could get around this. Imagine if we had high-efficiency hydrogen generators, and homes (or neighbourhoods) simply had to maintain them, abnegating the need for complex transmission. It would change market dynamics quite radically.
FYI is the HydroOne 'Sunshine List' of those earning > $100K [1] at HydroOne (Ontario)
Here is 2018 different format for all Ontario [2]
Hey, how would you like to be a 'lineman' earning $120K in rural Ontario? Or a 'line maintainer' for $150K?
Their salaries are massively inflated, and this doesn't include benefits.
There were 4,279 people earning >$100K (of which only 664 are managers) - according to Wikipedia, they have 5500 full time, about 2500 part-time - and 7500 pensioners.
This means that the majority of the staff, who are doing mostly work that doesn't require a college education, are earning >$100K. People with technical training and those who work in more difficult conditions should be compensated, but this is ridiculous.
Consider that there are 120% more pensioners than there are actual employees, many receiving gracious, lifetime benefits, and you have your answer to why the 'transmission fee' is considerably greater than the actual cost of the electricity.
If you create a startup, and can just magically allocate everyone a +$100K salary, even if market rates would be less than half that, and can magically force everyone in the country to pay through the teeth no matter what, then you have a good business.
Now imagine if there was efficiency in this system, and considerable numbers of those workers could be out installing windmills ...
Any contemplation of renewable energy that doesn't' factor in the political and operational realities of these systems is almost pointless. These systems are where probably most of the hurdles are.
Same for Hydro-Québec but power is cheap. Would be much cheaper if you took some of the fat out, but at least the management doesn't get mega corp salaries. Too cheap really -- dynamic dispatch power used for base load, no incentive for other renewables, could sell more of it to NY.
But it's also subsidised $500M by the QC government and the rest of Canada.
If Quebec elected to provide direct subsidies to citizens, then that would have to be paid for by QC gov. and nobody else.
But what they do is sneaky - they merely give Hydro Quebec $500M directly every year to 'invest in energy' - which they do, but they also operate magically at a $500M loss. But because 'energy investments' are part of equalisation payments - the other provinces have to help pay for this subsidy.
FYI I'm not perfectly sure of the $500M figure, I think it's more.
Also, it's not 'management' necessarily where the pay problem is at Hydro One. I think the CEO was making $1M a year, and that's not a lot. It's the thousands of linemen making >$100K and the massive pension costs.
Provincial equalisation is too big a can of worms to open in this thread!
But HQ is a pillar of working class socialism, much like the auto industry or national airlines used to be in the age of tariffs and extreme regulation, but it has the benefit of monopoly power based on geography and infrastructure sunk costs.
HQ does a lot right, and they are starting to innovate with demand pricing, digitalnload control etc. Might be the comfort factor of no retail competition will allow them to do things others can't. A number of ultra remote communities where there are micro grids, and trying to move off diesel.
Californians were conserving because the state government told them to everywhere, higher rates were their reward for listening. All so the state could have an easier time dealing out water to big business. The state is basically a bunch of rich interests surfing on a wave of gullibility.
That's great until there's cloudy weather (and/or a snowstorm) for an extended period of time. Suddenly, everyone has a much larger bill for that month. Also, what about all the people living in apartments?
You're getting downvoted but you're right. Getting cheap energy when the sun is shining or wind is blowing is great, but we can't ignore the value of reliability, which skyrockets when it's in short supply.
This is why all NREL and OECD studies into deep decarbonization with intermittent resources show grid integration costs skyrocketing above 50-80% variable penetration in electricity markets.
Whole-system costs should be modeled. Better modelers than these should do the job.
Look at their Table 2 of cost assumptions. They show overnight costs for onshore wind farms at $2000/kW, 30% capacity factor and nuclear at $4700/kW overnight, 100% capacity factor. If those numbers were valid for the US, we'd already have a nuclear renaissance here and wind would have remained a small niche source. Texas and Oklahoma didn't build all those wind farms because of pressure from Greenpeace.
New wind gets a Federal production tax credit, of course. Nuclear also qualifies for a smaller production tax credit. I think that the nuclear PTC and wind PTC should have been equal all along, but I don't actually think that would have changed much about the growth curves in the US. The main problem with new nuclear projects is that they are badly estimated and take a very long time to build, so they don't even reach the part where they can collect those tax credits.
Nuclear needs more frequent builds if it's ever going to get costs and project estimation uncertainty back down to reasonable levels. The US doesn't have a political system that can really commit to a plan longer than 8 years. We couldn't commit to an American Messmer Plan even if a really pro-nuclear President and Congress were in office this year. It looks to me like small modular reactors, executed well, are the last good path forward for nuclear reactors. I'd like to see some built soon. I've been reading proposals for them my whole adult life.
Sure. That's great if you can use less. Hopefully you aren't just above the poverty line in a drafty rental with and old electric force-air heating system, a 20+-year-old electric water heater, window air conditioners, and an old electric stove that was provided with the rental.
The bits that folks have actual control over are small and are often taking up less and less electricity: For example, light bulbs. New bulbs mean it doesn't always make a noticable difference when you turn lights off. You can probably use the television and computers less, but this isn't likely. You can possibly turn down the heat,but only to an extent and even less so if you have an infant in the house or if someone is elderly or otherwise sick. You can't use less refrigeration.
Even for folks that can afford it, there are actual limits to how much you can save on electricity. If you go low enough, you wind up paying a minimum monthly fee and few will stop using it altogether.
Grid prices going up leads to more clean energy solutions being installed, not less. It's not a problem for consumers but for monopolistic grid providers relying on obsolete and hopelessly noncompetitive means of generating energy. I.e. Nuclear, coal, and gas (in order of $/kwh). California has no excuse for power outages or water shortages as it plenty of untapped clean energy (sun, wind) to power the state and desalinate all the water it could ever need. All that takes is investing a few percent of the revenue of any their resident trillion $ mega corporations. Grid and water prices are high only because the local government there is a mess. It's the same reason it has a homeless problem & widespread poverty, the roads are bad, etc. These are governance issues, not technical problems.
The grid needs to be able to adapt to being needed much more sporadically. The only places where this is a problem is where the grid is a for profit monopoly relying on the ability to dictate prices. Most of the US used to be like that which is why they are running so many costly and out of date coal and nuclear plants. Lots of these are going bankrupt lately because of decades of just sitting on their hands while increasing prices and lobbying to prevent people from even being allowed to install solar on their roofs (e.g. Arizona until not so long ago) or refusing to buy excess capacity has failed to prevent the inevitable. Operating a coal plant in Arizona is like selling ice cream on the North Pole. I.e. not a great business plan. 2 out of the 5 remaining ones have scheduled closing dates in the very near future. I doubt the remaining 3 will survive the decade and it's in any case only a few percent of the total grid capacity.
Now that the proverbial shit has hit the fan in terms of people figuring out they can spend 5-10K dollars on upgrading their house and still get a return on investment in grid savings, grid providers are getting a reality check. All this means is that they are forced to adapt and compete on price. In most places that means investing in wind and other clean solutions with a very low variable cost. Anything that requires you to spend money on tons of fuel even when there is no demand just because spinning up and down capacity takes time is a problem because it means you are burning money for energy that you can't sell.
The key technical challenge here is to find a way to monetize the vast overcapacity we will inevitably end up with. If the grid is the only place you can sell excess energy and demand for grid is going down and you are investing in solutions that generate more energy than you need most/all of the time, finding a way to soak up that energy in a way that can generate revenue is the key thing to do.
Here's some cool stuff you can do guilt free with cheap clean energy:
- desalinate water (again, California: the pacific has plenty of H2O) or condense it from air (by chilling it)
- generate hydrogen or other fuels from air, water, etc.
- turn biomass into coal (yep, that's a thing).
- charge batteries, pump up water, power industry, transport, etc. Whatever amount of twh. capacity we need.
- exporting it to places that still have a shortage.
- run the AC 24x7 at ridiculously low temperatures or heat your place at a ridiculously high temperature.
We are about to enter an era of vast of excess energy production capacity. That's not a problem but an opportunity. People are talking about covering 100% of our current needs when they need to be thinking in terms of 1000% our current needs. The market for clean energy is magnitudes our current consumption. There is no upper limit.
It doesn't make sense to have all those excess using systems at the consumer level though. Suburb level batteries/hydrogen/desal/etc makes much more economic and safety sense, but utilities are unwilling to try that, and regulation is extreme.
The only thing missing there is an easy way to get the average sunpower for some place in the world. I made a small app to calc that from the nasa website but unfortunately did not yet have time to put it online
Do solar panels wear down in extreme weather? Eg if it regularly drops below -30C in winter, will that have a negative impact on the solar panel's lifespan? Because if it does then that's another factor to consider.
Panels are typically extremely hardy and are rated for decades (although I don't know about icy conditions). The rest of the electrical components are typically the weakest link.
I understand that solar panels are hardy, but these kinds of icy conditions even impact things such as asphalt - literal rock. I find it somewhat difficult believe that there's no wear and treat associated with icy weather, but I can't find any information on it. It's all promotional material that assuages all worries.
Asphalt is bitumen, a liquid, it is about as far removed from literal rock as possible. The reason asphalt roads break down in very cold weather is water which gets into tiny cracks, and which then expands when it freezes.
Solar panels are encased in a fairly thick layer of glass. Just like the windows in your house, they don't break from a bit of frost. If there are cracks where water can enter, they can break for the same reasons as asphalt.
So all this study actually did was estimate roof coverage in Switzerland using a new method?
The figure is pretty easy to estimate anyway, but they used the Machine Learning OMG method?
> What if half of Switzerland's rooftops produced electricity?
What would be interesting if someone did some work and actually worked this out, no?
How would infrastructure change?
What backups would be needed?
Could surplus, if any, be used for anything?
Could you connect to other countries in new ways?
How would employment be effected?
Supply chains for materials?
Reflected and absorbed energy would change city heat sinks how?
Would smog change at all?
Except they're not, for the vast majority of them.
Yes, it might be true in the ski resorts, but most people leave in the plains.
Zürich has barely had any snowfall this year.
Even in snowier years, it's a few days per year at most.
What if we just build another nuclear plant instead? Lets just go China or South Korea to build one for us. Or even better plan on some next Gen designs that are gone be coming out in the next 10ish years.
75 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadI guess that's roughly the latitude of Maine is you live on the states. So shorter days than Florida, but not crazy short either.
(Something I only found out by looking up Swiss energy consumption: apparently Switzerland produces just over half of its current electricity from hydro power, which makes sense considering the terrain).
In short: yes there are only about 9-10 hours of daylight but it can get very bright when the sun comes out over the mountains for 3-4 hours. They also grow wine on the south facing parts of the mountains (which requires plenty of sun). And you have to consider that mountains often have clouds/rainy weather. Another thing to consider is the peaks of the mountains are often above the cloud layers. You can get a sun burn in the middle of the winter in Switzerland quite easily. Just because it's north of most of the US, doesn't mean solar is uneconomical.
So yes, it's not optimal but there's plenty of light. And people do put solar on their roofs there and it apparently makes economical sense to them.
You win my certificate of accomplishment for best written description of a feeling that I've read so far this year.
You may be thinking of Sweden
Google sea of fog switzerland to get some pictures. These are beautiful.
The main difference is that a fully variable model subsidizes solar panel owners at the expense of the other clients, which makes solar panels a more attractive investment, whereas here the case for home solar is much weaker, particularly for low energy consumers.
I pay the company that supplies the electricity per kilowatt-hour for the energy and the company that owns the local distribution network for the rental of the cables and a per kilowatt-hour fee for transporting the energy.
In my case it is just one company but the energy supplier could be separate from the infrastructure owner.
Public utilities generally provide a higher caliber of service at a lower price, with less administrative bloat.
The performance of utilities is more a function of regulatory power and willingness to regulate rather than utility ownership.
This was designed to avoid the 'run it into the ground's privatisation mentality, but it went the other way. Sadly, there was no price component for improving the network with new ideas, so it is still the same design as 100 years ago.
A system designed by accountants has done things accountants love, and nothing for electrical engineering or the citizens. Surprise.
The old SEC wasn't innovative or cheap, and neither is the privatised system. For incentives to be effective they have to be broken down to be smaller components rewarding specific conduct, and tweaked in response to system performance.
And when things fail, demand can often be blamed.
And if you lump everything into the variable fee, at least you have more incentive to conserve.
That can be solved by implementing time-of-use pricing and incorporating the "peak demand" infrastructure cost into the price. You would calculate how much infrastructure is needed to provide a "baseline" load (the trough on a demand graph), and divide that among the "fixed" portion. Perhaps you also add some sort of locality adjustment so rural/urban areas pay their "fair share". The rest of the infrastructure cost would be added the variable electricity price.
>And if you lump everything into the variable fee, at least you have more incentive to conserve.
That in itself isn't a bad thing. The problem is that with solar panels/wind power, you're also shifting the cost from people who can afford to install renewables (usually richer people with money to invest) to people who can't (usually poorer).
Really should have a reward for users that can reduce their demand when asked, or use time of day pricing.
1. When upper middle class people go off grid, it drives up electricity prices for poor people (fewer people paying for the infrasturcture), making them poorer. Adelaide, Australia is a good anecdote for this.
2. People are addicted to near 100% reliable electricity supply. It is far cheaper to achieve this on a regional scale than on a household scale millions of times.
3. The power grid still needs to service all industry and commercial end-users.
4. Individual self-sufficiency is not necessary if we are already sufficient on a regional scale. It only makes sense to do so if your grid electricity is too expensive or unreliable. Self-sufficiency in and of itself is selfish (I got mine!)
Hydro One has a zillion regular folks earning >$100K (see the Sunshine list), working-class retirees earning huge incomes for life after retirement.
A regular line manager in rural Ontario without a college degree and not a huge amount of responsibility can earn $80-100K, which is 3x the national average, in an area where cost of goods and housing is very cheap.
Hydro One exists to support the historical cabal of line managers and pensioners and to maximize their income. They will charge whatever they can force you to pay - since they are a monopoly, that will be a lot.
Electricity will never be cheap because those that have the power to control distribution will 'set prices' and take massive surpluses.
Government/Quasi-Government workers (natural gas distribution is similar to Hydro) have a privilege that few in the private sector have, which is job security, which is an extremely valuable benefit never really put into the calculation. The average person has to change careers or is put out every few years, not only is this structurally costly, but it means from age 45-65 it often means massive pay cuts or worse - no income.
Energy transmission is a big roadblock to the entire energy equation, it'd be amazing if somehow we could get around this. Imagine if we had high-efficiency hydrogen generators, and homes (or neighbourhoods) simply had to maintain them, abnegating the need for complex transmission. It would change market dynamics quite radically.
Here is 2018 different format for all Ontario [2]
Hey, how would you like to be a 'lineman' earning $120K in rural Ontario? Or a 'line maintainer' for $150K?
Their salaries are massively inflated, and this doesn't include benefits.
There were 4,279 people earning >$100K (of which only 664 are managers) - according to Wikipedia, they have 5500 full time, about 2500 part-time - and 7500 pensioners.
This means that the majority of the staff, who are doing mostly work that doesn't require a college education, are earning >$100K. People with technical training and those who work in more difficult conditions should be compensated, but this is ridiculous.
Consider that there are 120% more pensioners than there are actual employees, many receiving gracious, lifetime benefits, and you have your answer to why the 'transmission fee' is considerably greater than the actual cost of the electricity.
If you create a startup, and can just magically allocate everyone a +$100K salary, even if market rates would be less than half that, and can magically force everyone in the country to pay through the teeth no matter what, then you have a good business.
Now imagine if there was efficiency in this system, and considerable numbers of those workers could be out installing windmills ...
Any contemplation of renewable energy that doesn't' factor in the political and operational realities of these systems is almost pointless. These systems are where probably most of the hurdles are.
[1] https://www.sunshineliststats.com/Employer/9/2015/?n=hydroon...
[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-sunshine-list...
But it's also subsidised $500M by the QC government and the rest of Canada.
If Quebec elected to provide direct subsidies to citizens, then that would have to be paid for by QC gov. and nobody else.
But what they do is sneaky - they merely give Hydro Quebec $500M directly every year to 'invest in energy' - which they do, but they also operate magically at a $500M loss. But because 'energy investments' are part of equalisation payments - the other provinces have to help pay for this subsidy.
FYI I'm not perfectly sure of the $500M figure, I think it's more.
Also, it's not 'management' necessarily where the pay problem is at Hydro One. I think the CEO was making $1M a year, and that's not a lot. It's the thousands of linemen making >$100K and the massive pension costs.
But HQ is a pillar of working class socialism, much like the auto industry or national airlines used to be in the age of tariffs and extreme regulation, but it has the benefit of monopoly power based on geography and infrastructure sunk costs.
HQ does a lot right, and they are starting to innovate with demand pricing, digitalnload control etc. Might be the comfort factor of no retail competition will allow them to do things others can't. A number of ultra remote communities where there are micro grids, and trying to move off diesel.
Which is perfectly fine, because you're using less.
It's a fantastic feedback loop until you're not using any at all!
This is why all NREL and OECD studies into deep decarbonization with intermittent resources show grid integration costs skyrocketing above 50-80% variable penetration in electricity markets.
E.g.: https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2019/7299-system-costs.pdf
Look at their Table 2 of cost assumptions. They show overnight costs for onshore wind farms at $2000/kW, 30% capacity factor and nuclear at $4700/kW overnight, 100% capacity factor. If those numbers were valid for the US, we'd already have a nuclear renaissance here and wind would have remained a small niche source. Texas and Oklahoma didn't build all those wind farms because of pressure from Greenpeace.
New wind gets a Federal production tax credit, of course. Nuclear also qualifies for a smaller production tax credit. I think that the nuclear PTC and wind PTC should have been equal all along, but I don't actually think that would have changed much about the growth curves in the US. The main problem with new nuclear projects is that they are badly estimated and take a very long time to build, so they don't even reach the part where they can collect those tax credits.
Nuclear needs more frequent builds if it's ever going to get costs and project estimation uncertainty back down to reasonable levels. The US doesn't have a political system that can really commit to a plan longer than 8 years. We couldn't commit to an American Messmer Plan even if a really pro-nuclear President and Congress were in office this year. It looks to me like small modular reactors, executed well, are the last good path forward for nuclear reactors. I'd like to see some built soon. I've been reading proposals for them my whole adult life.
The bits that folks have actual control over are small and are often taking up less and less electricity: For example, light bulbs. New bulbs mean it doesn't always make a noticable difference when you turn lights off. You can probably use the television and computers less, but this isn't likely. You can possibly turn down the heat,but only to an extent and even less so if you have an infant in the house or if someone is elderly or otherwise sick. You can't use less refrigeration.
Even for folks that can afford it, there are actual limits to how much you can save on electricity. If you go low enough, you wind up paying a minimum monthly fee and few will stop using it altogether.
The grid needs to be able to adapt to being needed much more sporadically. The only places where this is a problem is where the grid is a for profit monopoly relying on the ability to dictate prices. Most of the US used to be like that which is why they are running so many costly and out of date coal and nuclear plants. Lots of these are going bankrupt lately because of decades of just sitting on their hands while increasing prices and lobbying to prevent people from even being allowed to install solar on their roofs (e.g. Arizona until not so long ago) or refusing to buy excess capacity has failed to prevent the inevitable. Operating a coal plant in Arizona is like selling ice cream on the North Pole. I.e. not a great business plan. 2 out of the 5 remaining ones have scheduled closing dates in the very near future. I doubt the remaining 3 will survive the decade and it's in any case only a few percent of the total grid capacity.
Now that the proverbial shit has hit the fan in terms of people figuring out they can spend 5-10K dollars on upgrading their house and still get a return on investment in grid savings, grid providers are getting a reality check. All this means is that they are forced to adapt and compete on price. In most places that means investing in wind and other clean solutions with a very low variable cost. Anything that requires you to spend money on tons of fuel even when there is no demand just because spinning up and down capacity takes time is a problem because it means you are burning money for energy that you can't sell.
The key technical challenge here is to find a way to monetize the vast overcapacity we will inevitably end up with. If the grid is the only place you can sell excess energy and demand for grid is going down and you are investing in solutions that generate more energy than you need most/all of the time, finding a way to soak up that energy in a way that can generate revenue is the key thing to do.
Here's some cool stuff you can do guilt free with cheap clean energy:
- desalinate water (again, California: the pacific has plenty of H2O) or condense it from air (by chilling it) - generate hydrogen or other fuels from air, water, etc. - turn biomass into coal (yep, that's a thing). - charge batteries, pump up water, power industry, transport, etc. Whatever amount of twh. capacity we need. - exporting it to places that still have a shortage. - run the AC 24x7 at ridiculously low temperatures or heat your place at a ridiculously high temperature.
We are about to enter an era of vast of excess energy production capacity. That's not a problem but an opportunity. People are talking about covering 100% of our current needs when they need to be thinking in terms of 1000% our current needs. The market for clean energy is magnitudes our current consumption. There is no upper limit.
His conclusion: 'This is about 7.3 TWh or 11.5% of the 63.4 TWh of expected Singapore’s electricity consumption in 2030'
He also made an interesting tool to calc easily the output of solar panels on your rooftop: https://sausheong.github.io/solarest/
The only thing missing there is an easy way to get the average sunpower for some place in the world. I made a small app to calc that from the nasa website but unfortunately did not yet have time to put it online
[ed: isn't the panels basically a slab of glass? With some wires inside?
Mayby blunt trauma (hail storms, strong winds with debris is a problem? ]
Asphalt is bitumen, a liquid, it is about as far removed from literal rock as possible. The reason asphalt roads break down in very cold weather is water which gets into tiny cracks, and which then expands when it freezes.
Solar panels are encased in a fairly thick layer of glass. Just like the windows in your house, they don't break from a bit of frost. If there are cracks where water can enter, they can break for the same reasons as asphalt.
The figure is pretty easy to estimate anyway, but they used the Machine Learning OMG method?
> What if half of Switzerland's rooftops produced electricity?
What would be interesting if someone did some work and actually worked this out, no?
How would infrastructure change? What backups would be needed? Could surplus, if any, be used for anything? Could you connect to other countries in new ways? How would employment be effected? Supply chains for materials? Reflected and absorbed energy would change city heat sinks how? Would smog change at all?
Even in snowier years, it's a few days per year at most.