is the free ride over for grid tied solar?

[AlbertaFarmer5]

It will be in Western Australia trial, where solar is destabilizing the grid and escalating costs, so price will now be 8 times higher during peak demand vs price at peak supply(midday).
As we have been trying to explain to Chuck, freeloading off of other power users by using the grid as storage is not sustainable, and the market will have to punish this practice until supply and demand get back into balance. At which point the grid tied solar(or wind) without storage will be a liability not an asset.
This must be included in any solar installation budgets. This is not an anomaly, it is inevitable as solar penetration gets to unsustainable levels.

Spoiler alert, in Canada's climate, we will reach unsustainable levels long before they did in Australia's climate, where AC demand is peak when the sun is shining.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-16/wa-government-power-market-trial-to-protect-grid/12986348 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-16/wa-government-power-market-trial-to-protect-grid/12986348

[tweety]

According to the Minister, "smoothing" this demand from customers would help to make more efficient use of the system and reduce costs for everyone.

"We're trying to test whether there's a better way to charge for electricity … whether there's a way of creating a tariff that rewards people's behaviour when they support the grid," Mr Johnston said.

"This is designed to reflect the new circumstances of the electricity system where energy is falling in value during the middle of the day but rising in costs during the peak in the evenings.

"We're now in a situation where we really want people to be using electricity between 9:00am and 3:00pm as a preference to any other time of the day."

Mr Johnston said the trial was a "genuine experiment" and there were no plans to make time-of-use tariffs mandatory.


Reading is hard.

[AlbertaFarmer5]

A
Mr Johnston said the trial was a "genuine experiment" and there were no plans to make time-of-use tariffs mandatory.

Welcome back Tweety.
Can you propose a workable solution to a sustainable grid when everyone tries to emulate Chuck's grid ties solar panels. Everyone will be generating 100%of their annual needs, feeding it into the grid, primarily on sunny summer days. Then expecting to get it all back at the same price in December before dawn?

And yes, I acknowledged that it is a trial in my original post. Why do farmers perform trials with new technology or products or varieties before adopting them full scale?

if something can not go on forever, it will stop

My first question is serious, provide a better mechanism for making full scale adoption of grid tied solar workable. I'm open to suggestions. So far the only solutions put forward by the greens are severe restrictions on time of day use. That may be somewhat practical (if a major step back in progress) in California or Australia, try that with block heaters and cattle waterers in our climate and see how well it works.

[tweety]

Welcome back Tweety.
Can you propose a workable solution to a sustainable grid when everyone tries to emulate Chuck's grid ties solar panels. Everyone will be generating 100%of their annual needs, feeding it into the grid, primarily on sunny summer days. Then expecting to get it all back at the same price in December before dawn?

And yes, I acknowledged that it is a trial in my original post. Why do farmers perform trials with new technology or products or varieties before adopting them full scale?



My first question is serious, provide a better mechanism for making full scale adoption of grid tied solar workable. I'm open to suggestions. So far the only solutions put forward by the greens are severe restrictions on time of day use. That may be somewhat practical (if a major step back in progress) in California or Australia, try that with block heaters and cattle waterers in our climate and see how well it works.

Only because its you

Well I think what they are doing here is fantastic! When power is both being dumped on the grid and being produced, get people using it at that time. When it's costly to produce (gas coal .... ) charge more. It is a great mechanism to get people thinking about when they use and produce grid tied power.

The block heaters are part of the 24 hr grid, so no matter what you do, it is expensive during the dark. Not even power companies want to build expensive gas plants anymore

[sumdumguy]

I’m not cool with freezing in the dark every afternoon and evening-unplug the snowflakes at 3 pm.

[AlbertaFarmer5]

Only because its you

Well I think what they are doing here is fantastic! When power is both being dumped on the grid and being produced, get people using it at that time. When it's costly to produce (gas coal .... ) charge more. It is a great mechanism to get people thinking about when they use and produce grid tied power.

The block heaters are part of the 24 hr grid, so no matter what you do, it is expensive during the dark. Not even power companies want to build expensive gas plants anymore

Thanks for responding, I agree.
Now, do you propose that all consumers get burdened with that cost, or just the irresponsible ones such as Chuck, who were hoping for a perpetual free ride on our backs?

Do you see any way that any energy intensive industry could function under this scenario, or will they all have to continue moving to China or elsewhere?

[tmyrfield]

sooner or later the immutable law of simple physics is going to catch up...

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/12/13/grid-stability-basics/ https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/12/13/grid-stability-basics/

[AlbertaFarmer5]

To bring this out of the theoretical and into the here and now real world; on top of our regularly scheduled climate crisis, we are in the midst of an unscheduled Covid crisis. With people in hospitals, in ICU, on ventilators, plus we have a vaccine that needs to be kept in freezers at -70 degrees.
So according to the above mentioned method of rationing demand so that it matches supply, hospitals will need to find a way to shut off the ventilators when the sun goes behind a cloud, or sets, the vaccine freezers will just have to thaw out every night.
This is how it works with unreliable electricity in most of the 3rd world. People especially babies die in hospitals when their power randomly goes out.
Or is one crisis more of an emergency than the other?

[bobofthenorth]

Or is one crisis more of an emergency than the other?

From what I've been told the climate is an "existential" crisis while the China Flu is just your run of the mill ordinary health crisis. Most Canadians can't explain what a brownout is so its not surprising that they don't give a damn.

[snap]

I thought the vaccines were stored in liquid nitrogen? Last I checked, I didn't have to plug in my dewar....and the semen seems to work ok 👌