Re: Thoughts on a possible country solar initiative referendum?

From: Chris Torek (nospam_at_torek.net)
Date: 06/20/04 

Date: 20 Jun 2004 17:12:02 GMT

(I took out "alt.building.law" -- a group I never heard of before --
since this has nothing to do with laws now.)

In article <40d554bc_2@newspeer2.tds.net>
Don Libby <never.spam@tds.net> writes:
>The reductions in residential grid power demand you have gotten in
>(Southern?) CA might also be gotten in AZ, NM, NV, UT, and interestingly,
>southern WY, but that doesn't really add up to "all residential" (in the
>US), does it?

Definitely not.

The amount of light we get here in Salt Lake City (and most people
who live in UT live in the metropolitan SLC area :-) ) is similar
to that gotten in Davis CA. But while PV is marginally economical
in much of CA, it is not at all so in UT: Californians pay up to
$.25/kWh residential retail while Utahns pay under $.10/kWh, and
larger users in CA are hit with demand charges of about $1.23/kW
(if I recall correctly) while Utah's demand charges are about
$.51/kW. AZ, NM, and NV also have good light-levels but -- while
not as cheap as Utah in terms of energy and demand charges -- are
also far below California's rates. (Much of this information comes
from an article I read recently about Utah attempting to draw jobs
into the state by describing its lower business costs. The other
significantly lower cost was worker's compensation, where the
ratio was even better/worse than 2.5:1.)

>Ironically, some of the biggest coal plants in the world are
>located in those same places (which is where CA gets it coal-fired
>electricty when home-power hobbyists want to get their PEE VEE juice back
>from the grid late at night).

They are not really "getting it back" -- all they are doing is
shaving off the summer daytime peak caused by themselves and their
neighbors. That is, they are selling their excess daytime PV
production to the houses next door, not "to the grid" in general.

The net-metering system is not *quite* fair (ok, "not at all fair")
in accounting for "real system costs". If you wanted it to count
correctly, what you would need to do is split up a grid-tied-PV
customer's bill into these parts:

  - bill for wiring into the grid (connection & maintenance) and
    metering
  - bill for energy used, real-time priced
  - credit for energy sold to neighboring houses, also real-time-priced

Since summer peak energy costs (in Calif) anywhere from 100 to 400
mills, while nighttime ebb energy prices are often down to 15 mills,
any excess energy the homeowner produces at 2 PM would bring in up
to $.40/kWh, while energy purchased at 2 AM would cost as little
as $.015/kWh. (The averages are not quite this extreme -- a typical
"average sell" price from the PV system would probably run about
$.20/kWh, while a typical "average buy" would probably run about
$.04/kWh.) The metering and grid-tie fee would probably run about
$5/mo, and as long as you sell 1/5th as much summer daytime energy
as you buy in summer off-peak, your summer bill would then be $5/mo.

PG&E does have Time Of Use metering (TOU -- rate schedule E-9),
which can be combined with net-metering and gives almost the same
result. The ratio is not 5:1 ($.40:$.04) but rather just above
3:1 ($.33:$.09), because the E-9 rates were set before Enron etc
ran up the bills. (Enron's energy trading arm is of course now
dead, but "the evil that men do lives after them" as the saying
goes.)

We are just now starting to get into more typical summer patterns
for CA; take a look at www.caiso.com/SystemStatus.html occasionally
on weekday evenings over the next few months and you will see why
summer peak energy is so much more expensive. Note that the
"sundown kink", which is quite pronounced in the winter and easily
visible on summer week*end* days, turns into the "sundown decrease
in rate-of-decrease in load" on summer weekdays.

I also recommend http://currentenergy.lbl.gov/index.html (again,
look at it on weekdays to get "high load" events -- weekends are
always considerably lower loads). I find it interesting that
the New England ISO's loads have already run above their generation
several times this year, and PJM's came close. Texas is in the
best shape, generation-wise. 

-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Wind River Systems
Salt Lake City, UT, USA (40°39.22'N, 111°50.29'W)  +1 801 277 2603
email: forget about it   http://web.torek.net/torek/index.html
Reading email is like searching for food in the garbage, thanks to spammers.

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