This is fine and all, but each individual having a solar panel introduces a lot of issues.
Your energy bill is about 1/4 or 1/3rd distribution. As you take less power from the grid because of the solar on your roof, that proportion grows larger and larger.
At the same time, the power company makes less money off of you, because you are using less power. Therefore, they have less money to invest in distribution, which means they must increase distribution fees further to stay a going concern. This is to say nothing of the ballooning costs of distribution in general (nimbyism, permitting fees, can't build jack shit in this country for no good reason etc.).
Therefore: in the hypothetical where everyone has solar rooftops, we all effectively pay the grid operator only for dirty/offpeak power. This makes the grid operators look bad to everyone (they're using dirty power, aren't we trying to fight climate change!? Why is my electricity bill astronomical, even though I only use a tiny bit of power!?) and puts them in an impossible situation -- they're stuck between capped profits, creating expensive clean power at off-peak hours, and limited cash in general, since their expensive power plants are dormant half the time. Yet they still must deliver power to their customers, 24/7.
People have to have 24/7 electricity, even though the solar on their house does not cover them 24/7. It's illegal to sell a house that is not connected to the grid in most areas. Therefore, consumers must pay for the option of using electricity in off-peak hours. Everyone will be upset. The grid operator, who is constantly thrashed by politicians who insist on their using clean power, their customers who are enraged at them for the seemingly exorbitant electric bills (which are mostly distribution).
The upside is that the grid is more resilient, but as others have mentioned, only if significant investments in local distribution are made (i.e. the ability to very dynamically/granularly pump power back up, from house to grid). Which is a big capital investment that the grid operators will not be able to afford.
All this is downstream of the fact that it is hugely inefficient to put a ton of tiny solar panels all over the place, where they cannot be installed, cleaned, maintained, replaced cheaply. It's just way less expensive per watt to put a bunch of solar panels in one spot on cheap land in the desert and pipe it through the existing distribution network.
Everyone will pay for that resilience, in their electric bill, one way or another.
> "It's just way less expensive per watt to put a bunch of solar panels in one spot on cheap land in the desert and pipe it through the existing distribution network."
If that were true people wouldn't be buying solar panels for their homes because grid electricity would be "way less expensive" and it wouldn't be worth it. Which means either it isn't true, or the grid companies are too busy profiteering and it's not "putting the grid operators in an impossible position where everyone unfairly hates them" it's "grid operators putting themselves into an impossible position where everyone deservedly hates them".
No. People put solar panels on their homes, but crucially, they still receive power from the grid when their solar panels are not producing electricity.
People who don't have solar panels pay for electricity at 11:00AM. That's lucrative for the grid operator between 11:00-3:00 only -- when the duck curve is low. When demand peaks at 5-6pm, the grid operator pays boatloads of money to import power from elsewhere, burn expensive fossil fuels to service the demand.
Crucially, the grid operator is limited on pricing: they cannot "gouge" consumers at 5pm -- they must keep prices below a cap. Utility pricing is extremely regulated, it's set essentially by the state.
What you're doing when you set up solar panels on your home is actually freeloading. Your electric bill is less than it should be: you take power (at an artificially low rate) when it's super expensive, and don't take it when it's super cheap. This is very very bad business for the grid operator. They're also mandated by law (!) to keep your house hooked up to the grid and run distribution lines all over the place. Just in case you want to plug your car or run your AC at 5pm. Try getting a permit to build a new transmission line anywhere and see whether that's good business. If you have solar panels on your house, you are being subsidized by them -- not the other way round!
Timing is everything here. The United states has on the order of minutes of energy storage across the electric grid.
Valid points. Is there a known solution to this, even if it's too expensive today?
Would it make sense for local electricity companies to go full solar with large battery backups? Or are batteries too expensive, or don't last long enough, for this to be feasible?
What about a wind+solar combination? Both of them are unlikely to go offline at the same time.
I see articles that the cost of wind and solar keep going down every year at a rapid rate, and the same for battery tech too. How far are we from where the costs are low enough for cities to have their own reliable grids composed of renewable energy?
The real solution is the dynamization of electricity prices. This needs some adjusting from your average consumer but not a lot if done right. In Germany there are startups like 1.5C, Enpal etc which will sell you a heat pump, solar, ev charger pack with some "smarts", switch you over to a dynamic pricing electricity contract and then claim to optimize the overall cost (i have no direct experience of my own). If you are willing to take a small amount of temperature swing your house is a big thermal battery (even more so if you have a heat pump to water with a big, well insulated reservoir), your ev is a battery with vehicle to grid. With this you can shift your main loads a good amount. Washing machines and dryer as well as cooking/baking might be slightly more problematic/harder to shift, though the car battery should be more than enough for average evening cooking and i have seen washing machines/dryers which can take an external signal as to run when the price is low/there is excess electricity...
The most sensible solution in the short term is to keep the distribution that we have in place and aggressively invest in large solar plants coupled with very large battery systems to ease the duck curve.
Individual homeowners can do their part with solar + heat pumps to shift that duck curve. Power rates should see way more wild swings: 0c at the trough around 11am-2pm, $.50 at the 5pm peak. That aligns consumers to make sensible investments, either the energy they use or the energy they produce/store.
Smart charging of cars, so that those car batteries can help shift the load? But that requires global coordination that is nonexistent today.
Solar is no doubt the energy solution, there's really nothing better. It's low maintenance and lasts a long time, capital scalable, and can be deployed basically anywhere. Solar is far and away the cheapest thing for about 70% of our energy needs. For the last 30% that is very tough to squeeze out -- that baseline power for 24/7 stuff like aluminum smelters, datacenters -- you basically have: high voltage transmission (only available if you have land to your west), big battery banks (tenable, but only if batteries follow solar's dramatic reduction in cost), or nuclear (but requires a big culture change that I cannot really imagine). Or fossil fuels but those are not good obviously.
Basically any of the other green stuff (hydro, wind, geothermal) can't be built at any price most places.
Sorry, capex for crypto -- let alone llm (datacenters must be on 100% of the time to pay nvidia) -- is way too high. It must see high utilization for amortization to be favorable.
You only see crypto in areas that have really cheap, 24/7 power. Big crypto mining operations are only built near remote hydroelectric power stations, or worse, natural gas or coal rich areas. Places where fossil fuels are made but that don't have easy/cheap access to refineries, rail lines, or pipelines.
You are probably right about LLM because barely anybody tries to use distributed compute (like folding at home was using).
But crypto is running 24/7 because energy price is still positive so people buy latest, most efficient hardware to be as efficient as possible. But latest hardware is expensive. You can buy prev gen mining hardware for peanuts comparatively. It can make you money if you run it when you have more energy than you can use or sell.
Your energy bill is about 1/4 or 1/3rd distribution. As you take less power from the grid because of the solar on your roof, that proportion grows larger and larger.
At the same time, the power company makes less money off of you, because you are using less power. Therefore, they have less money to invest in distribution, which means they must increase distribution fees further to stay a going concern. This is to say nothing of the ballooning costs of distribution in general (nimbyism, permitting fees, can't build jack shit in this country for no good reason etc.).
Therefore: in the hypothetical where everyone has solar rooftops, we all effectively pay the grid operator only for dirty/offpeak power. This makes the grid operators look bad to everyone (they're using dirty power, aren't we trying to fight climate change!? Why is my electricity bill astronomical, even though I only use a tiny bit of power!?) and puts them in an impossible situation -- they're stuck between capped profits, creating expensive clean power at off-peak hours, and limited cash in general, since their expensive power plants are dormant half the time. Yet they still must deliver power to their customers, 24/7.
People have to have 24/7 electricity, even though the solar on their house does not cover them 24/7. It's illegal to sell a house that is not connected to the grid in most areas. Therefore, consumers must pay for the option of using electricity in off-peak hours. Everyone will be upset. The grid operator, who is constantly thrashed by politicians who insist on their using clean power, their customers who are enraged at them for the seemingly exorbitant electric bills (which are mostly distribution).
The upside is that the grid is more resilient, but as others have mentioned, only if significant investments in local distribution are made (i.e. the ability to very dynamically/granularly pump power back up, from house to grid). Which is a big capital investment that the grid operators will not be able to afford.
All this is downstream of the fact that it is hugely inefficient to put a ton of tiny solar panels all over the place, where they cannot be installed, cleaned, maintained, replaced cheaply. It's just way less expensive per watt to put a bunch of solar panels in one spot on cheap land in the desert and pipe it through the existing distribution network.
Everyone will pay for that resilience, in their electric bill, one way or another.