Battery backup seems like a great way to divorce yourself from the grid and solve this duck problem, except for the cost.
Whole house backup batteries are, for some reason much, much more expensive than electric vehicles despite not needing any of the car parts (motor, wheels, seats, chassis, etc.)
Comparing the Tesla Powerwall $9,200/13.5kWh ($681/kWh) vs Model 3 Battery: $14,000/75kWh ($186/kWh)
Why is there such a premium for house batteries, when there are even less engineering constraints on them?
Obviously there are inverters to pay for, but that can't explain a 4x difference in price?
Worth bearing in mind that as of 2022, California also has the second highest retail electricity prices in the US [0] (behind Hawaii, which seems fair enough). Their policies are a bit suspicious, they seem to be leading to bad outcomes.
Title: "As solar capacity grows, duck curves are getting deeper in California"
HN title is exactly backwards, but gets at the insight that the operator demand in California is almost at zero -- or neutral -- during the day due to behind the meter solar.
The CAISO (California independent system operator) website has really good visualization that's updated frequently. For example, yesterday (2024-01-25) the net demand in the afternoon dropped to as low as 3.3GW. Then within about three hours the net demand increased to 23GW.
It's also obvious that the net demand trend only subtracts utility-scale solar that is directly visible to the utilities. Home solar has definitely dampened demand and this is apparent in the demand curve.
When solar is abundant, homes should be pre-cooling as low as any occupants can tolerate. Example: 85 degree day, homeowner is at the office, cool the home to 64 degrees when the sun is shining, so that there's less cooling necessary when the owner walks back into the home at 5:30.
Isn’t this the case for energy storage technologies? Store excess generation duri bc periods of low demand and sell them back during peak load?
Look at the Time of Use plans that CA IOUs have on offer and you can see why this is happening. Most of them only have 2 modes: high and low, with only 4-9 as peak. If they actually wanted to manage the duck curve, they could easily put a steep discount at the hours when the problem is most pronounced, and promote EV charging, laundry, etc be done during those hours. This is just another example of the IOUs failing to innovate, their captured regulator doing nothing about it, and ratepayers continuing to pay more for all of it.
This will only increase worldwide. We are moving from a demand driven to a supply driven grid, as predicted years ago by people like Amory Logins etc.
Especially because in most countries the actual cost of electricity is only a small fraction of the actual price. If you can use rooftop solar to charge your car it's several times cheaper.
Hopefully people are looking for productive ways to use intermittently free electricity.
PV solar has been pulling away from CSP in terms of cost, but I wonder if the deepening duck curve means CSP could claw its way back? AIUI one advantage of CSP is that in theory you can heat the working fluid at one point of the day but actually use the energy later.
Dumb question: Why can't we store the excess capacity midday for consumption during the evening?
E.g. using using solar to pump reservoirs to a higher elevation then hydropower during the day? I know they do it with natural lakes[1] but couldn't we simply do this more?
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/05/02/climate/hydro...
Feels like this is an opportunity to offer consumers attractive export rates in the evening peak so they force-discharge excess battery storage
So what's the answer to smoothing out supply and demand peaks here? More and better batteries? Wind, hydro, etc? All the above?
Grid operators need some power intensive process on the demand side that they can switch on in the middle of the day and switch off at night. Something they can switch on only when needed and ramp up quickly.
That or energy storage.
This article is from last June, with statistics on the graph only through May of 2023.
My solar panel inverters have this wonderful bug where they refuse to generate power for the rest of the day after a 5-minute power outage. I hope that's the exception rather than the rule...
Weirdly, it's not seen as a problem at all in Europe while we have same or higher proportion of electricity from variable renewables, and lower from fossil fuels here.
> presenting challenges for grid operators.
Don't worry, they've planned their revenge: https://www.10news.com/news/local-news/state-regulators-hear... At least SDGE (and maybe more utils?) are proposing income based fixed rates so that solar homes will have to pay more. I have no issue with fixed grid access fees so that solar users can pay their part, but grid access fees should be equal for every household and the utilities need to figure out how to stop being so profitable and serve their communities