This is fantastic. Looking at the absolutely massive cost differential between DIY and full-service solar installers, the DIY option looks prettypretty tempting. My main concern was 1) actually getting through the local permitting process, and 2) what a potential purchaser would think of a DIY system when I go to sell the house.
Seeing that somebody has done it is very inspiring, and if I didn't see a high chance of moving in the next 5 years I'd be on it tomorrow.
I have the advantage of living totally off grid and not planning on ever selling the place, so I can have whatever screwy setup I fancy.
Well - I say “off grid” but I’ve built a grid - I now have over a km of buried SWA cable linking the three houses on our land, battery banks at each (60kWh of OPzS down at the mill, 15kWh of LiFePO4 at each of the others), and victron inverter-chargers all over the shop. Two arrays of panels each 8kW, one winter optimised, one summer optimised, and planning on adding a third to make more of the morning sun, as we are in a deep and steep valley with awkward topography. Have mucked around with hydro on and off before landing on a plan for an overshot waterwheel using bits of a burned-out ‘88 hilux, which is my current project. Pessimistically it will give us a constant 1.5kW, but theoretically it should end up nearer 3. Either way, that’s a lot of power. Right now I’m stuck running a Honda generator off our biogas in the winter, and it works, but it’s noisy and I have to go yank the cord to start it, usually in the pouring rain.
Using victron and fronius gear all over, frequency shifting to control where the power goes, and home assistant to automate the whole shebang where it’s beyond what the inverters and chargers can do themselves.
As we aren’t grid connected, the permitting process is… “you do what you want”.
It’s all far, far more straightforward than most people think - the hard bit is the physical install, as you’re inevitably lugging awkward panels onto roofs or up cliffs (going for smaller panels can help with this if you’re doing it without any help), or incredibly heavy batteries to wherever they need to be. The lithium arrays weigh about 150kg each, the lead array the better part of 2000kg.
People assume it must have cost hundreds of thousands of euros, but no - all in it has been about €30k, and our ongoing costs are zero.
DYI if your dad is an electrician. I wonder what the total would be if he tallied his dad’s assistance at market rates - probably not that much less than the initial quotes he got from professionals.
Depending on the jurisdiction you could be saving a whopper amount on taxes. Where I live the service tax could be anything up to 23% and the guys doing the work have to pay income tax. Insurance would also be a factor where I live too. There are massive savings if you can get a friend to do it or if somebody does it for cash (which is considered tax evasion)
It is always surprising to me but small loads that are on 24/7 end up consuming a ton of energy. My 55W idle "homelab" consumes as much energy as my dishwasher, fridge and washing machine combined.
My hard drives alone pull 200W idle and I don’t have that many. Cooling fans (in servers) pull 150W total most of the time but can be up to 300W. Each 10GbE NIC pulls ~40W. PoE switch gives ~30W to each of my APs, and uses ~80W itself, so there’s another 300W. All of my RAM pulls about 250W (admittedly there’s nearly 2TB of it in the rack, but still). Start adding up CPUs idle/average/max power and the numbers get way bigger.
I'm curious, are you getting this with a kill-a-watt (or equivalent), or are you adding up wattage by specifications alone?
(I do have an epyc with a bunch of memory and storage, but never bothered doing the math since my UPS claims to be able to run with the average load for 30+mins)
Measured at the UPS, which has 1W resolution. Confirmed its accuracy with an amp clamp on the circuit when running the UPS in pass-through mode. Efficiency is even worse most of the time since it’s a double-conversion (online) UPS that I normally run in full conversion mode - something like 80-85% efficiency overall, but because I fall back to generator power relatively frequently I just leave it there for convenience (in case I’m not home to switch it when the generator’s turned on).
If I had more than 100 watts in idle hard drives, I'd start aggressively figuring out how to let them spin down. Maybe his drives are actually doing something 24 hours a day? But probably not.
Networking gear taking that much when it's not busy is really unfortunate. Did IEEE slack on adding effective sleep/downclocking features?
It sounds like the 10GbE is not fiber. With fiber, it would take around 5W only, depending on your needs. It's a bit harder to use, but fiber is really the better option if you want a serious homelab.
> Cooling fans (in servers) pull 150W total most of the time but can be up to 300W.
Oxide Computer found that going from tiny 20mm fans to 80mm dropped their chassis power usage bigly: they found a rack full of 1U servers had 25% of its power going to the fans (efficiency is to the cube of the radius).
40W for a 10GbE NIC sounds crazy, my internet router has a dual 10 GbE Intel NIC with one 10GBaseT SFP+ and one 10G DAC and the whole router only draws 24 W (Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny)
My whole “rack” draws about 120W total with: aforementioned router, Synology NAS with 4 drives, 2x10G+4x2.5G PoE switch powering a Ubiquiti AP, 16-port 1G switch, and a PowerBook 540c running AppleTalk routing
My homelab is between 4 and 8 kW continuously, depending on what I have running. Cooling that homelab is another 400-1000 watts depending on outside air temp.
He mentioned that he refuses downsizing for ideological reasons, and I totally get that, but there's a certain amount of rightsizing that doesn't hurt in practical operation, and still let's you keep what feels like an awesome, big, complex model train setup in your garage.
Not all rust has to spin, almost no ports have to be 10GE, and a lot can be virtualized. Consumer CPUs have much lower idle than old xeons, and having less DIMMs with the same capacity also seems to pay off.
I'd be surprised if he couldn't cut that energy usage to 10% with a clear separation between hot and cold storage, and realistic expectations of bandwidth requirements.
But hey, I'm not judging. Solar power is great, and I don't mind waste as long as he can afford it and it makes him happy. Nobody drives the car they actually need either, and that is a much bigger problem.
Well big chunk of the electricity cost are fixed cost, meaning if enough people lower their bill with PV and batteries then prices will have to rise for their connection. In fact some suggest that it would make more sense to let people pay a flat rate.
The grid needs batteries and that’s how they make you buy some. They have good reasons - look at Spain.
Running aircon to burn the excess is better than feeding an already overloaded grid, too. The second best outcome for them, neatly contained in a single euro amount.
Heat up molten salt, or shipping containers full of sand. It’s a surprisingly high density and cheap way to store an awful lot of energy. Don’t have sand batteries here yet, but they’re on my todo for deep storage of excess energy, which I currently just dump as heat into the air.
I don't know. Salt (NaCl) is corrosive. Specific heat capacity is not that high (about 1/5th of water per weight). Suppose you have cubic meter of molten salt at 800°C in a dewar, how do you get the heat out again?
Storage comes at a cost, but storing cheap/free power offsets even bigger generation costs. So the power company should pay to build storage.
There's a point where the grid has so much solar power that we need to start shedding production as a general rule and not just as an intermittent temporary measure, but I don't think we're anywhere near that point.
Technically almost all homes have a wonderful energy storage system already -- their hot water heater tank.
One can imagine a setup where you've got a hot water tank and a mixing valve that allows you to heat your water up to some very high temperature and then mix that down to "safe" hot water for the house. Have that run in "heat from grid if below this threshold, otherwise conditionally heat with surplus energy if the water's below this temperature"
Don't you have energy cooperatives to avoid this in the Netherlands ? According to rescoop.eu i did find hetcooperatie.nl, energiesamen.nu & lochemenergie.org.
Even if you are instead in Newfoundland, maybe ask cecooperative.ca if there us a project to create one in your province.
It’s a true shame that the public utility commission is so corrupt that we lose the obvious economies of scale from grid-scale installations of same in favor of expensive rent seeking by a state-sanctioned monopoly.
I also have 60kWh of batteries in my kitchen, but for the average person who doesn’t want to deal with this stuff, having to admin part of the power grid is a tragic waste.
If the PUC and power company weren’t bastards, this could all be in a giant field somewhere staffed by a tiny fraction of the people who have to waste their lives dealing with it in their garages. So many unnecessary struts, so much caulk and EPO switches, so many inverters.
It turns out that the biggest cost of California energy is not generation, it's distribution and transmission.
Highly distributed energy lessens the peak demands on the T&D system, which means that the T&D system can be smaller, which greatly reduces the fixed cost of T&D. Utility scale solar requires greatly expanding transmission lines, to the extent that lack of transmission is the biggest barrier to adding solar to the grid in most of the US.
So even if installation costs of solar are higher on the grid edge, it usually makes a ton of sense, and this is evident in the payoff times of NEM3 systems that include batteries. As batteries get cheaper, or there's more vehicle-to-home systems out there, it will only increase.
This lessened need for T&D is the true reason that utilities in California hate solar and need to stop it. They can take a guaranteed rate of profit from anything they get to spend on T&D, but the same isn't true of generation. So utility solar, which requires building more lines and beefing up distribution substations more, lets them profit much more than residential solar.
Boy people hated their HOA before, imagine how much they'll hate their HOA (because neighborhood batteries would need to be owned by someone, and that someone is the HOA) when they can cut off your power bc you left a garbage can out too long!
Spinning steam turbine generators also can't just turn on/off instantly. They need to ramp up/down. If you can't ramp up fast enough to meet demand, you have issues. When solar drops off pretty fast, and people come home from work and start turning on appliances, you suddenly have a huge amount of power needed from generators.
The solution of course is more batteries, but you can't really incentivize non-peak generation until you get the batteries. That's part of the NEM3 change that the blog mentions, to change the incentives from just solar to solar and battery.
Big batteries are actually very easy, and getting cheap enough that they account for a significant chunk of new grid assets when there are enough renewables.
Take the Texas ERCOT market, which is the closest thing to a free electricity market that exists in the US. A huge chunk of new grid assets are batteries, becuase they are one of the most profitable things to install right now (see the map at the bottom of the page)
Additionally, many people are now buying EVs, and an EV stores 2-5 days worth of electricity. If big batteries on wheels are commonplace, then simpler and cheaper immobile batteries are pretty easy too.
Peak demand on most electricity systems, including California's, is during the evening hours, typically between 18:00 and 21:00. This does not coincide with peak solar generation.
That's because residential solar is eating up the daytime peak, thus the duck curve. Residential solar is already saving the state tons of money on T&D costs.
(And becuase the Wikipedia for duck curve shows a day in October rather than a summer day where the peak is much higher, yes the annual peak does coincide with when solar is outputting a ton of power.)
You misunderstand the charts, these do not take into account residential solar. The reason the peak is getting pushed into the evening is because residential solar doesn't even show up on the chart.
Look at the difference between gross and net: this is utility scale shaving off the peak. This is what is happening with residential solar too, which is not shown.
Abstracting away from any particular grid regulatory environment, distributed solar and batteries make sense and make more and more sense as the cost reduces.
Another way of saying that, if we were playing a city simulator as a disembodied beneficent dictator you'd want distributed generation and storage as part of your grid.
In reality there's all sorts of complications, compromises, trade-offs, graft and politics but on balance those factors are working against distributed solar which is succeeding despite them.
Some people have a knee-jerk reaction to anything that requires legislation, regulation or subsidies which clouds the issue though.
There’s distributed and then there’s piecemeal. It doesn’t make sense to try to fit large energy storage safely inside every residential building.
You could build fireproof mini storage substations in blocks or subdivisions to load shift, but taking a chunk out of everyone’s garage space and forcing every person to do inverter and battery maintenance is silly.
Yeah nothing about home install solar + battery soundly beating utility power prices even paying retail rates for equipment and labor for years on end, as prices on the equipment falls year after year, while utility power prices keep going up makes any fucking sense.
Having done some work around net zero policy I am increasingly convinced that this is the way forward, and indeed that this will be the way things are done normally maybe 10-20 years from now. The concept is called "distributed generation" and in UK each distribution network keeps an "embedded capacity register" which is basically all the distributed energy resources that are connected to the grid at distribution level (i.e. in the local area). Over here the national grid largely operates at or over capacity, which is a very serious problem for the immediate future, especially as more and more power is drained by compute-heavy infrastructure (data centers and such). Distributed generation is an attractive solution for households regardless of which angle you look at it from.
I personally feel there should be more allowance for small personal wind generators in sub-urban areas. That would offset a bit at least in winter for places like the UK. Not sure what the actual laws are, but I can assume councils wont be too happy about someone putting one up on their home.
I was under the impression that small wind generators at the scale of suburban backyards are really uneconomical and don't produce sufficient energy for anything of practical use.
Laws of physics: maximum power that can be generated is proportional to the swept area of the blades. So it scales exponentially as blade length increases.
Unfortunately I can no longer edit the post, but of course you’re right. Max generated power is proportional to (blade length)^2, therefore quadratic, not exponential.
I assumed that meant that big windmills would be much cheaper per watt than small ones, but according to what I'm finding in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44056971, that doesn't seem to be the case. Small rooftop windmills may actually be cheaper!
There’s another limiting factor though, which is that power is also proportional to (wind speed)^3, and the wind is greater higher up.
Although having said that, I do believe the main reasons we don’t use them in the UK are noise and wildlife concerns. In many ways the total efficiency doesn’t matter if it’s generating enough power.
Yes, so it's puzzling that the small windmills (necessarily designed for low wind speeds) cost less per peak watt. You'd think getting more power per square meter higher up would reduce the cost per peak watt. Wind speeds are more consistent up there, too.
The wildlife concerns are completely specious. The main reason you don't use them in the UK are that the wrong sort of people have political power.
small wind turbines are also horrendously unreliable because of mechanical failure. Same logic as to why pickup trucks are generally more reliable than a smart car.
If the objective is to reduce the number of hours you're not self-sufficient for a given battery size, or reduce the size of your expensive batteries, even a couple hundred watts could make sense.
https://www.amazon.com/NINILADY-Vertical-Generator-Controlle... is a 600-watt-peak wind generator, designed for 11m/s winds, for sale in the US for US$300, presumably much cheaper in countries that aren't descending into kleptocratic tyranny. (I talked to someone who recently bought something similar for US$60. I think it was a 300-watt turbine.) It's a vertical-axis type, less than a meter in diameter. No worries about annoying the neighbors, and it'll probably do a great job of keeping your fridge running most of the time when it's cloudy.
50¢ per peak watt would be a terrible, uncompetitive price if you were a utility company considering how to build a wind farm to sell power for profit. But, if you're a homeowner seeking energy self-sufficiency because your Public Utilities Commission is trying to throw you under the bus because of regulatory capture, it's pretty affordable.
If you have a house, you aren't going to get hate from your neighbors for a tiny turbine like this; it may not be quite as silent as solar panels, but it's pretty quiet.
Community energy makes sense for 2,000,000-watt windmills like the ones in your first article, but not for a 600-watt rooftop windmill that's less than a meter across. The 2,000,000-watt windmill ought to cost less per watt, but it requires successfully coordinating the community to support it (cf. the note in your third link about a "de facto ban on new onshore wind projects" being lifted). And looking at https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/wind/chart-wind-turbine... it looks like over the period 02015 to 02022 the prices of big windmills consistently stayed in the range of 80¢ to 130¢ per peak watt, which is actually more than the 50¢ per peak watt of the mail-order Amazon rooftop windmill. (The rooftop windmill will probably enjoy significantly lower capacity factors, but it's clearly in the same ballpark.)
This was surprising to me, since I thought big windmills were much cheaper per watt, so I dug a bit further. The figures check out. The current https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c80kv5d7lp7o says a £40 million (US$52 million) onshore Manx wind farm might have "up to 5 turbines", and thus up to 10 megawatts, putting the total project cost closer to US$5/Wp. https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost... from 02019 has a capital cost breakdown of a 200MW hypothetical wind project costing US$253 million, consisting of 71 2.8-MW windmills, totaling US$1265/kW (127¢/Wp). About 60% of that (80¢/Wp) is "WTG [windmill] procurement and supply". A 50MW hypothetical wind project in the next section comes in at 168¢/Wp, and a 400MW hypothetical offshore wind project in the next section is 438¢/Wp.
So it's not at all clear to me that community wind energy, or utility-scale wind energy in general, is even cheaper or more efficient than mail-order rooftop windmills. It might be more expensive!
Correction: according to what I found in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44056971, 50¢ per peak watt would not be a terrible, uncompetitive price if you were a utility company considering how to build a wind farm. In fact, it's significantly cheaper than the prices they actually pay for big windmills.
Uneconomical and the sort of thing that really annoys the neighbors. We only just got onshore wind unbanned entirely, and Reform are heavily against permitting renewables at all.
Every reply is talking about how wind doesn't make sense, how its uneconomical, or how its a nuisance. I can offer an opposing take:
My father has been using wind power in a semi-suburban area in the Uk for close to 20 years now. They have a large wind turbine now but had a much smaller one for a long time. Outside of cookie-cutter estates, there's sufficient tree and building cover that its barely visible to the neighbors. It provides most of their home power.
No, having more power isn't a problem for solar; unlike coal or nuclear, solar can curtail production instantly and without suffering wear and tear. The problem is that in the UK in the winter there is an order of magnitude less power from PV than in the summer.
However, the implied meaning is significant. This site is full of engineers who, if they're good, invest a lot of time into understanding the implied meaning of what's said.
One of those areas where policy action is desperately needed but no attention is paid due to media dysfunction. I think the UK would benefit from region-specific pricing, to move the datacenters closer to generation rather than urban environments. It would also encourage more embedded generation in expensive areas.
Yeah. It would be more accurate to say that newspapers hate local government as a concept, but a lot of the public are happy to go along with that and get peeved about any difference which is pointed out to them.
(nobody ever describes house prices as a "postcode lottery"!)
Talk radio and TV are just as bad, as are the opposition. If Tories proposed it, Labour would be up in arms about postcode lottery. If Labour proposed it, exactly the same from the other side.
Doesn't matter how sensible it is, the other side will use it to score points. I can't believe for a second that Liberal Democrats think that James Dyson or Andrew Lloyd Webber should be able to avoid inheritance tax by buying tens of millions of pounds of farmland, but it's politically beneficial for them to do so.
Love to see housing developments, rather than just adding an overbearing HOA, would instead consider neighborhood power grids (and perhaps a collective ISP while we're wishing for things).
I feel like they overpaid maybe because they got direct to consumer rates for the gear. If you would have went through a full on solar installer that solar system would have come out to less than $15k, throw in having to get the subpanel and a reroof you would maybe be looking at $30k all in. (Not including the batteries, but by the time he got to the batteries I feel like his budget was way overboard even going the non-microinverter route).
Make sure you are buying and not leasing from the company, have that all rolled into a single loan and then you claim the tax credits to help pay for the reroof.
To add to this, they take care of getting the certified roofers, the city permits for both the roof and solar and handle the PTO for you, which from what you called out is even more costs.
No way, man - yes, they overpaid for some of their gear, but the labour cost of an installer ends up being most of what you pay.
No, the smart move here is to find out where the installers buy from, and buy from them. I never explicitly stated I was or wasn’t an installer, they just assumed that I was, as I was buying pallets of panels and kilometres of cabling.
The one advantage of going with a professional installer is that it makes it a lot easier to get grants - I had to spin up a company and invoice myself to get my rebate.
This is brilliant. Energy self-sufficiency often associated with off-grid eccentricity,looks engineerable for city homes. Goes to show that the more "personal" our energy solutions become, the more they reflect institutional failure. Wonder how this scales and if it does what are the political implications?
Funnily enough back home along the equator, having a solar setup still is a social signal of luxury!
Ah yes...because the simple solution is always "just pack up your life, leave behind your family and friends, and relocate half way across the country".
That's the most ridiculous claim I've seen in a while.
Giving up one foot of space along one garage wall is not a big deal. And if you're worried about physically getting the batteries into place, hiring people would still be cheaper than movers.
Also, a basement that removes cooling costs for the home lab would not make a big difference. If the 800W A/C unit runs 8 hours a day for 4 months out of the year, then it's only about 10% of the home lab power use. Since it's not needed at night it's probably even less.
Yeah sorry but thats the most insane take anyone could have. You're again quite litterally saying upping sticks and moving across country, so new job, losing friends and family, etc is the best option, vs losing a big of garage space...
Unironically that is what cost-of-living is forcing a lot of people to do in coastal cities. If you have a cushy six figure salary you aren't faced with that reality, but it's different for median-income.
It’s a public utility, possibly with monopoly pricing power. There are other well known economic models around for managing public utilities, that mean profits don’t get prioritised above everything else
Okay I finally did this earlier this year too and it took quite a bit less than that. Started with impulse buy of invert at an online auction end of January. Installed last panels end of April. 3 months. Quite a bit of it was waiting for third parties or just me being lazy and not ordering parts I needed. I've wanted them for years beforehand so I did some research.
For actual labor - it's about half days to install roof racks (I have shingle roof so quite a bit of time on angle grinder). Another half day to put panels on (requires 1 or more helpers), run a cable thru roof space. I've installed 12 panels on 2 facia.
My hack was hiring electrician to install inverter so I can export to grid (I'm in New Zealand).
> I found three companies and gave them my PG&E usage for the past year (about 16,000 kwh) and got three quotes ranging from ~45 — 55k.
Wow these rates are crazy. A 10kW setup costs you maybe €10.000 all-in here in the Netherlands.
What's going on with these rates? Do they already include the ridiculous tarrifs?
A new battery setup for a 20kWh LFP battery + 10 kW inverter + installation is €7000 now.
And dropping, fast.
Assuming batteries and PV come from China, someone in California is making a lot of money or the government is straining the process with bureaucracy costing $30.000 per setup.
- Greed kicks in because capitalism: prices rise again, maybe not back to pre-subsidy levels, but they rise.
- Subsidy gets axed: prices rise to above pre-subsidy levels.
(Note: I'm personally entirely pro "subsidize things you want more of". But that requires a stable, trustworthy government that plans on longer timescales.)
No, greed is a necessary component. Because under capitalism both parties don't execute the trade, rationally at least, unless both are greedily better off.
Without greed it goes from a positive sum system to a destructive system because you no longer have the parties being better off from the transaction. From a cursory standpoint that might be ok (the economy won't implode if some small fraction does this like a minority of commercial activity being charity functions) but you basically lose most the information conveyed in prices and cost causing complete loss of productive allocation and it is an economic implosion.
Trading for wants is no different to trading for needs from a capitalism perspective. It just removes the need for a central bureaucracy that decides what counts as a need.
This is a redefining of terms classic in capitalist analysis.
An example I'll take from Cory Doctorow: Google search isn't getting worse. We know this because nobody's toppled Google's monopoly on search. Because of the magic of the market, if what you perceive as search being worse was actually search being worse, then, Google would no longer dominate.
Since google continues to dominate, actually, search isn't worse.
Capitalist analysis requires QED circular logic to justify its inherent contradictions.
Capitalism may occasionally reward value, but very, very rarely does it reward value more than greed.
Proof: teachers are some of the worse paid jobs in our society despite being essentially the backbone of our nation. A single teacher in the course of a year can completely alter the course of history for a classload of kids. Multiply over a two decade career... And that's just elementary school. Highschool teachers will influence hundreds of kids each semester.
Yet their wages in many states cap out at around what a recruiter makes. Recruiters being nothing more than middlemen between a labor market and a hiring market - as a former recruiter, trust me, that multi billion dollar industry creates essentially no value.
Of course the capitalist analysis means the entire system is immune to criticism - "actually, teachers don't get paid much because they don't add much value, if they added more value, they'd get paid more." QED. Circular logic.
"The multi tens of billions of dollars American health insurance industry adds value. If it didn't, it wouldn't be worth multi tens of billions of dollars."
Capitalism rewards greed, and the greediest are the most capitalistically rewarded.
> Customer might be willing to pay 10k, but if there's two identical quotes, one for 10k and one for 9k they'll go for the 9k
But you see the point. There's a comfortable cushion where everyone can make more money off the taxpayer and have an easier time of it. Spend a bit of it on better marketing to elevate yourself and justify the higher price in people's minds.
government incentives help to reduce the externalities
You seem to think that two companies selling product A will rather sell 50 for $10 per unit profit than 100 for $9 per unit profit because it's easier.
> You seem to think that two companies selling product A will rather sell 50 for $10 per unit profit than 100 for $9 per unit profit because it's easier.
If the numbers are closer, then that's exactly what happens.
Would you rather sell 50 units for $19 per unit or 100 for $10 per unit? Option 1 gives you way less overhead and headache with cheap-o customers.
There was a study in France showing that for rent subsidies.[1]
In France, the state pays max(rate * rent, cap) for apartments for students, unemployed and poor workers. Usually people don't qualify for ratio of the rent, because it's way over the cap for the subsidy. To keep up with inflation, the state re-evaluate the cap of the subsidy almost every year.
A french economist showed that there was a correlation between the cap of the rent subsidy and the rental market prices for small apartments. Of course, correlation is not causation, it could just be that the rental market follows the inflation as much as the cap. But this correlation doesn't happen for bigger and more luxurious appartments. Her explanation is that your poor household is only ready to afford €100 per month, as an example, the subsidy cap is €500, so the rental market prices these apartments to €600 (= 100 + 500). When the state re-evaluate the cap to €550, the rental market goes up to €650. (= 100 + 150)
The key difference in the markets is that it takes a very long time to build more apartments and houses, especially in France. There also isn't an option to not have housing. (Low elasticity) That keeps the short term supply effectively static. Same amount of supply, increase in money spent, inflation.
In a market like solar, there is production of more solar systems. There are also multiple readily available substitutes. (e.g. on-grid power) The effect of the subsidy should drive increased volume from manufacturers, keeping net price stable.
Costs are also high for solar installers in the US. It is a relatively dangerous job (on par with roofers) which makes health insurance premiums unaffordable. The permitting process is also quite onerous in a great many localities, involving multiple parties (your installer, the HOA, the city, the county, the power company) and multiple inspections. US installers also tend to provide generous warranty plans, 15 years parts and labor is typical, and have to make sure they have the capital to honor them. This is especially a problem as some solar hardware manufacturers have had some serious quality control issues, especially on the inverters, and have resulted in quite a lot more warranty work than was initially expected.
The other issue was just plain pent-up demand. Installers could charge what they wanted because there weren't enough of them to go around, even as everybody and their dog started their own installer business. Many of those businesses were poorly run and have since gone under, leaving the homeowners high and dry when the inverter craps out and they're told by every other installer that they will not work on someone else's install and also told by the inverter manufacturer that if they attempt to replace the hardware themselves it will result in their warranty being voided.
For comparison, my 10 kW solar install completed last week cost 24k CAD (15k EUR). That's just panels, inverters and installation. The incremental cost was likely in part due to the ~160% tariffs on solar panels imposed by the Canadian government, but not all.
Ouch. My 7.8kW system fully installed was 13k CAD ( a bunch was DIY)
Had it for a year now. Generated 7.7kWh which is worth $950. Took out natural gas, power bill for the entire year (heat pump, elec hot water) was $1000.
Crazy stuff. Ten years ago I paid £5.5k GBP for a 3.7kW system. Since then I would expect the labour component to have gone up but the panels to have come down. I guess the skilled labour shortage in the US is having a very real effect on prices.
Under the subsidy rules for feed-in-tariffs at the time, that had to be done with an MCS approved installer. All work in England would require an approved "Part P" signoff anyway. However it did not require council planning approva, nor grid approval for that size of system.
There's not a shortage of skilled labor so much in US as there is a shortage of people able to go through the racketeering process of getting a contractor license, which also requires being a half-slave to someone with a license for a number of years. It's straight up mercantilist style shake-down to benefit prior entrants. It is easier in US to become an electrical engineer than it is to become a guy who adds a new outlet to a room addition, but that has nothing to do with skill.
In fact when I was first hired as an engineer, it was actually someone that wanted an electrician but hired EEs instead because they are cheaper and more readily available.
One of the worst is something like installing HVAC stuff. I got an EPA refrigerant license in 2 days of studying and then did my own myself. If I wanted to install it for a profit for someone else, I would have to spend 4 years working for someone else with a license first to get the contractor license! The end result is it legitimately cost like $700 to have a single capacitor replaced on an air conditioner, and in places like Florida if you do it for someone else without years of 'training' you're now a felon.
I always found solar farm engineering intensely interesting and looked seriously into becoming an electrician as a second career as something to "retire into" once I got sick of working in tech. And like you say, it turns out it's not something you can just make a lateral move into, no matter how quickly you can learn and how hard you're willing to study. "Becoming an electrician" is a young person's game.
There are a few places where you can work as an electrician without a license. Might be the same bumfuck places where solar or wind farms are. I think most of them are in the midwest or plain states.
Where I live you can't but go figure you can become a licensed finish carpenter with a simple test.
One loophole I looked I might look into some day is moving to another state with the least requirements for a license, then getting it, then transferring it to another state, which is allowed at least here.
I see 7k€ for 12kWp, retail, for a diy ground install set for our summer house. That's before 4k€ in subsidies. No net metering, and feedin compensation is capped at 0.02€/kWh. But at 3k€ net, who cares? Even with the low electricity rates here, this makes sense. Even for a summer house!
In my town in NY state USA, they require a stamped engineering drawing for a ground mount system and it has to be rated for wind and snow load. Most of the ground mounts which come with stamped drawings have run about $1/W total cost which will meet my local needs for a set of panels in the 5kW to 20kW size range. This cost includes concrete, all support structure, and the racking that the panels attach to. This cost does not include panels, wiring, nor inverter.
If you're able to get a 12kW rated full system, including racking, panels, and inverter for the equivalent of $1/W that's an amazing deal! I wish prices here were like that.
Batteries are dropping fast in price, but for the USA, they might be going up because of tariffs. Neatly sidestepping that:
I have a powerwall 2 with 5kw panels, which I've had since about 2021. At the time it was the biggest, cheapest, had a grid isolation mode, and could be mounted outside. (I didn't trust tesla back then, and I sure as shit don't now. Moreover, once it catches fire, that shit aint going out anytime soon)
It still cost about £7k installed.
From about march/april to end of october, we are power sufficient (london, even with rainy days, gas hot water though.)
If I were to get a new system, 13kwhr of battery is something like £2k, plus inverter/charger.
The panels are dirt cheap, to the point where the scaffolding costs more than the panels. (and the mounts.)
I posted above about the price because when we've gotten quotes – and this is over a year back – they were really high! Not sure what the deal is because the graphs all show the cost of green electricity cratering; but somehow on the residential side of things here in the U.S – even in rural areas with very relaxed restrictions – it's super pricey!
This solar installation is quite large and quite expensive.
There is a whole cottage industry of DIY 48V 15kWh batteries based on LFP prismatic cells (16x) and special battery case resulting a price of around 1500 Euro for 15 kWh.
A DIY setup is quite doable, Deye (EG4) or Victron make suitable inverters.
The continuous 1 kW power draw I find Ludicrous, probably especially as a European. I would realy rethink what is absolutely necessary. Huge data storage was my hobby but the storage server is only turned on when required, saves a lot of power.
Guy claims he's tired of paying for electricity because of the "ludacris" (sic) costs so he's going to "DIY". Yet, first thing he does is pay a guy to do it.
I did build my own solar system too. In Switzerland.
Took me 1-2 month planning and then 3 month building it alone nearly each day. Sept 2023 til Xmas 2023. Got all the hardware from a PV dealer friend on his purchase price level. Even 24 panels I have put myself alone onto the roof. With two persons it was a bit better.
I've got: 420w x 71 Trina solar panels and two SolarEdge inverters. SE10K Hybrid and a SE17k. Also a 24kWh BYD LFP battery.
All prices without state funding:
Offers from local installers for 56*410W Panels without battery were around 65k CHF.
I've paid now 44k CHF including every kind of cost associated with building it.
Just for comparisons sake, our 8.6kwP setup with a 10kwH battery cost us (after subsidies from governemnt) appr. ~€11.5k. Haven't received all the subsidies yet, so the total will be lower by about 1.5k (I think). Everything was done through installers, we didn't lift a finger (also couldn't, because when it comes to electricity I have as much experience as the dog next door).
If I had more due diligence before I would have scaled up the panels up to at least 10kwP, for future proofing probably to 12kwP. This is mostly just to make sure winter is covered better, as our production is really low as we have a 10° flat roof installation.
We’re living in a big river valley where we have fog from October until March. On some days in November the fog is so dense that the whole system does not produce any kind of energy. On the other days the produced kWh are enough to charge the battery.
We have a heat pump (extrem efficient), servers, one electric car, etc which consumes all together around 13MWh per year.
The solar system produces around 27.5MWh. Most of the energy gets fed back into the grid.
We’re currently investigating to connect the neighbour houses physically to us. But that takes even more time here :-(
Great to see DIY early adopters getting great savings here. I think the bigger trend here is lower cost, commoditization, and it eventually becoming a no-brainer for people that have the opportunity/space to be running their own micro grids for cost reasons. The cost of what you need here is still quite high. But making things easier to plug together helps. And of course component cost is coming down.
For example, you can buy kits on amazon for powering your shed or boat and it's essentially a smaller version of what you would put on your house. No electricians needed. No permits required. Here in Germany you can buy balcony solar kits in the supermarket. They only deliver a few hundred watts of power but it's plug and play. And you can get a nice little subsidy to do that. Some of these kits only cost a couple of hundred euro.
I could see that eventually adding a microgrid to a building is not going to break the bank. Car batteries are much larger than what goes in a house and kwh prices are trending well below 100$/kwh now. Meaning it should not cost tens of thousands to get a couple of tens of kwh to store energy. Inverters shouldn't break the bank either. The going rate for solar panels is around 200$.
Mostly current prices for home setups are much higher than the component cost mainly due to regulations, labor cost, certifications, etc. If you go off grid, you can just DIY and you end up much closer to the component cost. But of course long term both component cost and other cost are coming down. With the exception of labor cost probably. Though the skills needed will become more common and you might be able to do a lot of work yourself.
Am interested in the DC-AC—DC- Battery-AC vs DC-DC-Battery-AC efficiency argument. As in there must be a DC-DC conversion happening to charge batteries appropriately.
I have a minor interest in this subject as well, and after some thinking I realized that my personal solar interests are best served by electro-mechanical harvesting of solar energy, first and foremost .. since a full-blown EV solar rig would require the purchase of components I cannot myself personally make very easily.
This summer I'm building a solar oven to cook bread and veggies with .. and if this works well, I'll build a solar death ray to play with while I wait for lunch.
It seems to me that this is a potential route for the popularization of off-grid/local-energy-harvesting movements to gain more traction. Sure, its nice to have a whole roof full of PV panels and a battery bank to sip juice from now and then, but this still requires a heavy investment in foreign-originated parts and materials.
A solar oven/solar death ray, however, is a lot more feasible to produce locally.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 364 ms ] threadAnd not a cosmic solar system.
Seeing that somebody has done it is very inspiring, and if I didn't see a high chance of moving in the next 5 years I'd be on it tomorrow.
Well - I say “off grid” but I’ve built a grid - I now have over a km of buried SWA cable linking the three houses on our land, battery banks at each (60kWh of OPzS down at the mill, 15kWh of LiFePO4 at each of the others), and victron inverter-chargers all over the shop. Two arrays of panels each 8kW, one winter optimised, one summer optimised, and planning on adding a third to make more of the morning sun, as we are in a deep and steep valley with awkward topography. Have mucked around with hydro on and off before landing on a plan for an overshot waterwheel using bits of a burned-out ‘88 hilux, which is my current project. Pessimistically it will give us a constant 1.5kW, but theoretically it should end up nearer 3. Either way, that’s a lot of power. Right now I’m stuck running a Honda generator off our biogas in the winter, and it works, but it’s noisy and I have to go yank the cord to start it, usually in the pouring rain.
Using victron and fronius gear all over, frequency shifting to control where the power goes, and home assistant to automate the whole shebang where it’s beyond what the inverters and chargers can do themselves.
As we aren’t grid connected, the permitting process is… “you do what you want”.
It’s all far, far more straightforward than most people think - the hard bit is the physical install, as you’re inevitably lugging awkward panels onto roofs or up cliffs (going for smaller panels can help with this if you’re doing it without any help), or incredibly heavy batteries to wherever they need to be. The lithium arrays weigh about 150kg each, the lead array the better part of 2000kg.
People assume it must have cost hundreds of thousands of euros, but no - all in it has been about €30k, and our ongoing costs are zero.
Out of curiosity, have you ever calculated the cost of the batteries over their expected lifetime ?
I draw 1-1.5kW for my servers in a spare bedroom. It’s not a lot of spindles/cores, just a few dozen.
Your toaster draws 1kW for maybe 5 minutes a day, which is maybe 30kWh per year.
The power in this comparison is not important, it's the total energy consumed (which is what you are billed for in the end).
Odd argument. A cheetah can run up to 110kmh, but that doesn't mean they can cross 110 kilometres in an hour.
If all he’s pulling is 1kW I’m jealous.
(I do have an epyc with a bunch of memory and storage, but never bothered doing the math since my UPS claims to be able to run with the average load for 30+mins)
Networking gear taking that much when it's not busy is really unfortunate. Did IEEE slack on adding effective sleep/downclocking features?
Oxide Computer found that going from tiny 20mm fans to 80mm dropped their chassis power usage bigly: they found a rack full of 1U servers had 25% of its power going to the fans (efficiency is to the cube of the radius).
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTJYY_Y1H9Q
My whole “rack” draws about 120W total with: aforementioned router, Synology NAS with 4 drives, 2x10G+4x2.5G PoE switch powering a Ubiquiti AP, 16-port 1G switch, and a PowerBook 540c running AppleTalk routing
My homelab is between 4 and 8 kW continuously, depending on what I have running. Cooling that homelab is another 400-1000 watts depending on outside air temp.
He mentioned that he refuses downsizing for ideological reasons, and I totally get that, but there's a certain amount of rightsizing that doesn't hurt in practical operation, and still let's you keep what feels like an awesome, big, complex model train setup in your garage.
Not all rust has to spin, almost no ports have to be 10GE, and a lot can be virtualized. Consumer CPUs have much lower idle than old xeons, and having less DIMMs with the same capacity also seems to pay off.
I'd be surprised if he couldn't cut that energy usage to 10% with a clear separation between hot and cold storage, and realistic expectations of bandwidth requirements.
But hey, I'm not judging. Solar power is great, and I don't mind waste as long as he can afford it and it makes him happy. Nobody drives the car they actually need either, and that is a much bigger problem.
Running aircon to burn the excess is better than feeding an already overloaded grid, too. The second best outcome for them, neatly contained in a single euro amount.
There's a point where the grid has so much solar power that we need to start shedding production as a general rule and not just as an intermittent temporary measure, but I don't think we're anywhere near that point.
One can imagine a setup where you've got a hot water tank and a mixing valve that allows you to heat your water up to some very high temperature and then mix that down to "safe" hot water for the house. Have that run in "heat from grid if below this threshold, otherwise conditionally heat with surplus energy if the water's below this temperature"
As an American I welcome you to our national pastime: burning kWhs on aircon! :P
Even if you are instead in Newfoundland, maybe ask cecooperative.ca if there us a project to create one in your province.
I also have 60kWh of batteries in my kitchen, but for the average person who doesn’t want to deal with this stuff, having to admin part of the power grid is a tragic waste.
If the PUC and power company weren’t bastards, this could all be in a giant field somewhere staffed by a tiny fraction of the people who have to waste their lives dealing with it in their garages. So many unnecessary struts, so much caulk and EPO switches, so many inverters.
Highly distributed energy lessens the peak demands on the T&D system, which means that the T&D system can be smaller, which greatly reduces the fixed cost of T&D. Utility scale solar requires greatly expanding transmission lines, to the extent that lack of transmission is the biggest barrier to adding solar to the grid in most of the US.
So even if installation costs of solar are higher on the grid edge, it usually makes a ton of sense, and this is evident in the payoff times of NEM3 systems that include batteries. As batteries get cheaper, or there's more vehicle-to-home systems out there, it will only increase.
This lessened need for T&D is the true reason that utilities in California hate solar and need to stop it. They can take a guaranteed rate of profit from anything they get to spend on T&D, but the same isn't true of generation. So utility solar, which requires building more lines and beefing up distribution substations more, lets them profit much more than residential solar.
This solves the T&D problem too, as generation remains distributed.
It’s the money.
Large neighborhood batteries seem to make a lot more sense to me than batteries in every home.
Boy people hated their HOA before, imagine how much they'll hate their HOA (because neighborhood batteries would need to be owned by someone, and that someone is the HOA) when they can cut off your power bc you left a garbage can out too long!
Even has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve
The solution of course is more batteries, but you can't really incentivize non-peak generation until you get the batteries. That's part of the NEM3 change that the blog mentions, to change the incentives from just solar to solar and battery.
Take the Texas ERCOT market, which is the closest thing to a free electricity market that exists in the US. A huge chunk of new grid assets are batteries, becuase they are one of the most profitable things to install right now (see the map at the bottom of the page)
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586
Additionally, many people are now buying EVs, and an EV stores 2-5 days worth of electricity. If big batteries on wheels are commonplace, then simpler and cheaper immobile batteries are pretty easy too.
Keeping capacity ready is probably the expensive bit.
Peak demand on most electricity systems, including California's, is during the evening hours, typically between 18:00 and 21:00. This does not coincide with peak solar generation.
You can see this even as far back as 2018 via CalISO's own data. https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook
(And becuase the Wikipedia for duck curve shows a day in October rather than a summer day where the peak is much higher, yes the annual peak does coincide with when solar is outputting a ton of power.)
Gross peak demand is in the late evening, well after the solar peak. Solar noon in western California is around 13:00.
https://www.caiso.com/documents/gross-and-net-load-peaks-fac...
Look at the difference between gross and net: this is utility scale shaving off the peak. This is what is happening with residential solar too, which is not shown.
Another way of saying that, if we were playing a city simulator as a disembodied beneficent dictator you'd want distributed generation and storage as part of your grid.
In reality there's all sorts of complications, compromises, trade-offs, graft and politics but on balance those factors are working against distributed solar which is succeeding despite them.
Some people have a knee-jerk reaction to anything that requires legislation, regulation or subsidies which clouds the issue though.
You could build fireproof mini storage substations in blocks or subdivisions to load shift, but taking a chunk out of everyone’s garage space and forcing every person to do inverter and battery maintenance is silly.
The difference between quadratic scaling and exponential scaling is earth-shatteringly enormous; this is not some minor detail.
With quadratic scaling, if f(1) = 1 and f(2) = 4, then f(10) = 100.
With exponential scaling, if f(1) = 1 and f(2) = 4, then f(10) = 262144, a 2600× difference. And the difference gets bigger from there on out.
Although having said that, I do believe the main reasons we don’t use them in the UK are noise and wildlife concerns. In many ways the total efficiency doesn’t matter if it’s generating enough power.
The wildlife concerns are completely specious. The main reason you don't use them in the UK are that the wrong sort of people have political power.
https://www.amazon.com/NINILADY-Vertical-Generator-Controlle... is a 600-watt-peak wind generator, designed for 11m/s winds, for sale in the US for US$300, presumably much cheaper in countries that aren't descending into kleptocratic tyranny. (I talked to someone who recently bought something similar for US$60. I think it was a 300-watt turbine.) It's a vertical-axis type, less than a meter in diameter. No worries about annoying the neighbors, and it'll probably do a great job of keeping your fridge running most of the time when it's cloudy.
50¢ per peak watt would be a terrible, uncompetitive price if you were a utility company considering how to build a wind farm to sell power for profit. But, if you're a homeowner seeking energy self-sufficiency because your Public Utilities Commission is trying to throw you under the bus because of regulatory capture, it's pretty affordable.
This was surprising to me, since I thought big windmills were much cheaper per watt, so I dug a bit further. The figures check out. The current https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c80kv5d7lp7o says a £40 million (US$52 million) onshore Manx wind farm might have "up to 5 turbines", and thus up to 10 megawatts, putting the total project cost closer to US$5/Wp. https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost... from 02019 has a capital cost breakdown of a 200MW hypothetical wind project costing US$253 million, consisting of 71 2.8-MW windmills, totaling US$1265/kW (127¢/Wp). About 60% of that (80¢/Wp) is "WTG [windmill] procurement and supply". A 50MW hypothetical wind project in the next section comes in at 168¢/Wp, and a 400MW hypothetical offshore wind project in the next section is 438¢/Wp.
So it's not at all clear to me that community wind energy, or utility-scale wind energy in general, is even cheaper or more efficient than mail-order rooftop windmills. It might be more expensive!
My father has been using wind power in a semi-suburban area in the Uk for close to 20 years now. They have a large wind turbine now but had a much smaller one for a long time. Outside of cookie-cutter estates, there's sufficient tree and building cover that its barely visible to the neighbors. It provides most of their home power.
magnitude more power from PV than in the winter
That is a tautology.
Democracy really limits governments
https://www.gbnews.com/money/energy-bills-rise-postcode-lott...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/energy-prices...
(nobody ever describes house prices as a "postcode lottery"!)
Doesn't matter how sensible it is, the other side will use it to score points. I can't believe for a second that Liberal Democrats think that James Dyson or Andrew Lloyd Webber should be able to avoid inheritance tax by buying tens of millions of pounds of farmland, but it's politically beneficial for them to do so.
Make sure you are buying and not leasing from the company, have that all rolled into a single loan and then you claim the tax credits to help pay for the reroof.
To add to this, they take care of getting the certified roofers, the city permits for both the roof and solar and handle the PTO for you, which from what you called out is even more costs.
No, the smart move here is to find out where the installers buy from, and buy from them. I never explicitly stated I was or wasn’t an installer, they just assumed that I was, as I was buying pallets of panels and kilometres of cabling.
The one advantage of going with a professional installer is that it makes it a lot easier to get grants - I had to spin up a company and invoice myself to get my rebate.
Funnily enough back home along the equator, having a solar setup still is a social signal of luxury!
Giving up one foot of space along one garage wall is not a big deal. And if you're worried about physically getting the batteries into place, hiring people would still be cheaper than movers.
Also, a basement that removes cooling costs for the home lab would not make a big difference. If the 800W A/C unit runs 8 hours a day for 4 months out of the year, then it's only about 10% of the home lab power use. Since it's not needed at night it's probably even less.
There are benefits to being in the bay area, too. This happens to not be one of them.
Living in "a part of the country that has basements" is no utopia either.
Also: my house, in the bay area... has a basement.
There are plenty of more efficient ways of doing things, but I still stuck solar on this old, energy inefficient house.
Not the detract from the rest of the article, but - it's a company, what did you expect?
Eg basic environmental care/policies or how they handle staff and customers.
For actual labor - it's about half days to install roof racks (I have shingle roof so quite a bit of time on angle grinder). Another half day to put panels on (requires 1 or more helpers), run a cable thru roof space. I've installed 12 panels on 2 facia.
My hack was hiring electrician to install inverter so I can export to grid (I'm in New Zealand).
Wow these rates are crazy. A 10kW setup costs you maybe €10.000 all-in here in the Netherlands.
What's going on with these rates? Do they already include the ridiculous tarrifs?
A new battery setup for a 20kWh LFP battery + 10 kW inverter + installation is €7000 now.
And dropping, fast.
Assuming batteries and PV come from China, someone in California is making a lot of money or the government is straining the process with bureaucracy costing $30.000 per setup.
Markups due to subsidies are a part of it.
- Greed kicks in because capitalism: prices rise again, maybe not back to pre-subsidy levels, but they rise.
- Subsidy gets axed: prices rise to above pre-subsidy levels.
(Note: I'm personally entirely pro "subsidize things you want more of". But that requires a stable, trustworthy government that plans on longer timescales.)
the Netherlands had a net-metering subsidiy + good competition + frictionless install and as a result we have 3,5 solar panels per person installed.
- Demand drops due to increased price to buyers.
- Prices drop so manufacturers can remain profitable.
There were no greedy people before capitalism. Of that we can be sure.
Capitalism, on the contrary, rewards it. The best way to be under capitalism is greedy (sneakily so, if necessary).
So yes, it is uniquely new to have a value system that rewards greed.
Without greed it goes from a positive sum system to a destructive system because you no longer have the parties being better off from the transaction. From a cursory standpoint that might be ok (the economy won't implode if some small fraction does this like a minority of commercial activity being charity functions) but you basically lose most the information conveyed in prices and cost causing complete loss of productive allocation and it is an economic implosion.
It's a pointless conversation if you're willing to do that. You're just changing definitions before arguing them.
An example I'll take from Cory Doctorow: Google search isn't getting worse. We know this because nobody's toppled Google's monopoly on search. Because of the magic of the market, if what you perceive as search being worse was actually search being worse, then, Google would no longer dominate.
Since google continues to dominate, actually, search isn't worse.
Capitalist analysis requires QED circular logic to justify its inherent contradictions.
Capitalism may occasionally reward value, but very, very rarely does it reward value more than greed.
Proof: teachers are some of the worse paid jobs in our society despite being essentially the backbone of our nation. A single teacher in the course of a year can completely alter the course of history for a classload of kids. Multiply over a two decade career... And that's just elementary school. Highschool teachers will influence hundreds of kids each semester.
Yet their wages in many states cap out at around what a recruiter makes. Recruiters being nothing more than middlemen between a labor market and a hiring market - as a former recruiter, trust me, that multi billion dollar industry creates essentially no value.
Of course the capitalist analysis means the entire system is immune to criticism - "actually, teachers don't get paid much because they don't add much value, if they added more value, they'd get paid more." QED. Circular logic.
"The multi tens of billions of dollars American health insurance industry adds value. If it didn't, it wouldn't be worth multi tens of billions of dollars."
Capitalism rewards greed, and the greediest are the most capitalistically rewarded.
Customer is willing to pay 10k, state is willing to pay 5k. Supplier will charge 15k.
Assuming the base cost is 8k
Supplier A and Supplier B charge 15k and have 100 customers between them, making 350k each
Supplier B decides to undercut Supplier A, and charge 14k, and get all the customers, making 600k profit
Customer might be willing to pay 10k, but if there's two identical quotes, one for 10k and one for 9k they'll go for the 9k
But you see the point. There's a comfortable cushion where everyone can make more money off the taxpayer and have an easier time of it. Spend a bit of it on better marketing to elevate yourself and justify the higher price in people's minds.
You seem to think that two companies selling product A will rather sell 50 for $10 per unit profit than 100 for $9 per unit profit because it's easier.
I mean, it's a view, sure.
If the numbers are closer, then that's exactly what happens.
Would you rather sell 50 units for $19 per unit or 100 for $10 per unit? Option 1 gives you way less overhead and headache with cheap-o customers.
In France, the state pays max(rate * rent, cap) for apartments for students, unemployed and poor workers. Usually people don't qualify for ratio of the rent, because it's way over the cap for the subsidy. To keep up with inflation, the state re-evaluate the cap of the subsidy almost every year.
A french economist showed that there was a correlation between the cap of the rent subsidy and the rental market prices for small apartments. Of course, correlation is not causation, it could just be that the rental market follows the inflation as much as the cap. But this correlation doesn't happen for bigger and more luxurious appartments. Her explanation is that your poor household is only ready to afford €100 per month, as an example, the subsidy cap is €500, so the rental market prices these apartments to €600 (= 100 + 500). When the state re-evaluate the cap to €550, the rental market goes up to €650. (= 100 + 150)
[1] https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/fichier/1376573/es381-3...
In a market like solar, there is production of more solar systems. There are also multiple readily available substitutes. (e.g. on-grid power) The effect of the subsidy should drive increased volume from manufacturers, keeping net price stable.
The other issue was just plain pent-up demand. Installers could charge what they wanted because there weren't enough of them to go around, even as everybody and their dog started their own installer business. Many of those businesses were poorly run and have since gone under, leaving the homeowners high and dry when the inverter craps out and they're told by every other installer that they will not work on someone else's install and also told by the inverter manufacturer that if they attempt to replace the hardware themselves it will result in their warranty being voided.
Had it for a year now. Generated 7.7kWh which is worth $950. Took out natural gas, power bill for the entire year (heat pump, elec hot water) was $1000.
Snowy mountain town in a tight valley in BC.
Under the subsidy rules for feed-in-tariffs at the time, that had to be done with an MCS approved installer. All work in England would require an approved "Part P" signoff anyway. However it did not require council planning approva, nor grid approval for that size of system.
In fact when I was first hired as an engineer, it was actually someone that wanted an electrician but hired EEs instead because they are cheaper and more readily available.
One of the worst is something like installing HVAC stuff. I got an EPA refrigerant license in 2 days of studying and then did my own myself. If I wanted to install it for a profit for someone else, I would have to spend 4 years working for someone else with a license first to get the contractor license! The end result is it legitimately cost like $700 to have a single capacitor replaced on an air conditioner, and in places like Florida if you do it for someone else without years of 'training' you're now a felon.
Where I live you can't but go figure you can become a licensed finish carpenter with a simple test.
One loophole I looked I might look into some day is moving to another state with the least requirements for a license, then getting it, then transferring it to another state, which is allowed at least here.
If you're able to get a 12kW rated full system, including racking, panels, and inverter for the equivalent of $1/W that's an amazing deal! I wish prices here were like that.
I have a powerwall 2 with 5kw panels, which I've had since about 2021. At the time it was the biggest, cheapest, had a grid isolation mode, and could be mounted outside. (I didn't trust tesla back then, and I sure as shit don't now. Moreover, once it catches fire, that shit aint going out anytime soon)
It still cost about £7k installed.
From about march/april to end of october, we are power sufficient (london, even with rainy days, gas hot water though.)
If I were to get a new system, 13kwhr of battery is something like £2k, plus inverter/charger.
The panels are dirt cheap, to the point where the scaffolding costs more than the panels. (and the mounts.)
A $45k quote would correspond roughly to 14k euro of materials.
New subsidies this year for batteries mean I can get a 15kwh battery installed for around 2-3k AUD
There is a whole cottage industry of DIY 48V 15kWh batteries based on LFP prismatic cells (16x) and special battery case resulting a price of around 1500 Euro for 15 kWh.
A DIY setup is quite doable, Deye (EG4) or Victron make suitable inverters.
The continuous 1 kW power draw I find Ludicrous, probably especially as a European. I would realy rethink what is absolutely necessary. Huge data storage was my hobby but the storage server is only turned on when required, saves a lot of power.
1 https://www.backyardboss.net/asparagus-fern-guide/
Took me 1-2 month planning and then 3 month building it alone nearly each day. Sept 2023 til Xmas 2023. Got all the hardware from a PV dealer friend on his purchase price level. Even 24 panels I have put myself alone onto the roof. With two persons it was a bit better.
I've got: 420w x 71 Trina solar panels and two SolarEdge inverters. SE10K Hybrid and a SE17k. Also a 24kWh BYD LFP battery.
All prices without state funding: Offers from local installers for 56*410W Panels without battery were around 65k CHF.
I've paid now 44k CHF including every kind of cost associated with building it.
Should write a blog post about it :-)
Next project is a solar fence with 6kWp.
When I charge the car via battery then only down to ~75% for now. The remaining energy is needed by the house during winter months.
Just for comparisons sake, our 8.6kwP setup with a 10kwH battery cost us (after subsidies from governemnt) appr. ~€11.5k. Haven't received all the subsidies yet, so the total will be lower by about 1.5k (I think). Everything was done through installers, we didn't lift a finger (also couldn't, because when it comes to electricity I have as much experience as the dog next door).
If I had more due diligence before I would have scaled up the panels up to at least 10kwP, for future proofing probably to 12kwP. This is mostly just to make sure winter is covered better, as our production is really low as we have a 10° flat roof installation.
We’re living in a big river valley where we have fog from October until March. On some days in November the fog is so dense that the whole system does not produce any kind of energy. On the other days the produced kWh are enough to charge the battery.
We have a heat pump (extrem efficient), servers, one electric car, etc which consumes all together around 13MWh per year. The solar system produces around 27.5MWh. Most of the energy gets fed back into the grid.
We’re currently investigating to connect the neighbour houses physically to us. But that takes even more time here :-(
See eg https://www.swissolar.ch/fr/connaissances/nouvelle-loi-sur-l... (post written in French)
For example, you can buy kits on amazon for powering your shed or boat and it's essentially a smaller version of what you would put on your house. No electricians needed. No permits required. Here in Germany you can buy balcony solar kits in the supermarket. They only deliver a few hundred watts of power but it's plug and play. And you can get a nice little subsidy to do that. Some of these kits only cost a couple of hundred euro.
I could see that eventually adding a microgrid to a building is not going to break the bank. Car batteries are much larger than what goes in a house and kwh prices are trending well below 100$/kwh now. Meaning it should not cost tens of thousands to get a couple of tens of kwh to store energy. Inverters shouldn't break the bank either. The going rate for solar panels is around 200$.
Mostly current prices for home setups are much higher than the component cost mainly due to regulations, labor cost, certifications, etc. If you go off grid, you can just DIY and you end up much closer to the component cost. But of course long term both component cost and other cost are coming down. With the exception of labor cost probably. Though the skills needed will become more common and you might be able to do a lot of work yourself.
This summer I'm building a solar oven to cook bread and veggies with .. and if this works well, I'll build a solar death ray to play with while I wait for lunch.
It seems to me that this is a potential route for the popularization of off-grid/local-energy-harvesting movements to gain more traction. Sure, its nice to have a whole roof full of PV panels and a battery bank to sip juice from now and then, but this still requires a heavy investment in foreign-originated parts and materials.
A solar oven/solar death ray, however, is a lot more feasible to produce locally.