Contributors

Friday, May 01, 2015

The Personal Computer Revolution and Personal Energy Independence

Elon Musk, the billionaire who started Tesla Motors, SpaceX and SolarCity, announced a new battery system yesterday that will allow homes to store large amounts of electricity generated from solar power. This may herald a new era of personal energy independence.

Tesla has been testing these power systems in companies like Walmart and Cargill, and a pilot project in 300 California homes.

Most homes with rooftop solar panels feed their electricity back into the grid, and then draw power from the grid when it's dark. But with Tesla's Powerwall battery system, all that excess solar power can be stored in your garage. It can supplement your household power when the grid is overloaded, or recharge your electric car, or allow you to go off the grid completely. This could be very bad for electric utilities, especially in sunny southern climes.

For months Hawaiian Electric (HECO) had been stonewalling customers who wanted to install solar panels on their houses. HECO complained that the grid isn't up to the task, and that it just isn't economical to change it. Since HECO doesn't control the output of home solar panels, they said, they couldn't predict how much power they will produce. That makes it very hard to balance the various sources of power, which could destabilize the grid. This is a completely valid concern, but this mindset may ultimately doom utilities like HECO.

Why are Republicans propping up government-sanctioned monopolies?
A great many utility monopolies have been making the same claims. A lot of states make it very difficult to install rooftop solar.  Curiously, these states are mostly in the south, where photovoltaics could generate a lot of power. These states are generally controlled by Republican majorities, who are in turn controlled by the Koch brothers, who with their legislative arm ALEC have been fighting solar power tooth and nail. This seems contradictory to the basic Republican ideology of independence and self-reliance. Why are Republicans propping up government-sanctioned monopolies?

Though they had been delaying since last October, recently Hawaiian Electric approved all the rooftop solar applications on Maui and Hawaii, and is working to remove the backlog on Oahu. Why?

Maybe Hawaiian regulators turned up the heat after citizens who invested in solar panels complained. Maybe HECO resolved their technical issues. Or maybe HECO saw the writing on the wall, and realized that if they didn't hook these customers up, they might lose them completely.

Hawaii is really the perfect place for people to go off the grid. It's warm and sunny, but not too hot, so it doesn't need as much energy for heating and cooling as the rest of the country does. Hawaii has to import all its oil, coal and natural gas across the ocean, making it much more expensive: electric rates in Hawaii are about two and a half times higher than the US national average.  That means rooftop solar is already much cheaper in Hawaii than fossil fuel-generated power.

The technologies that made the Internet and mobile revolutions possible are doing the same for power generation.
But now the same technology that made the Internet revolution possible is starting another revolution in power generation. Solar cells are essentially the same as the computer chips that go into our computers and cell phones. Production efficiencies have now made photovoltaic cells as cheap as any other kind of chips. That has made power from rooftop solar is almost as cheap as power from coal and natural gas, and it's only getting cheaper.

Similarly, high-density lithium ion batteries developed for the mobile phones and tablets have revolutionized battery technologies, making electric cars and home power storage technologies possible.

Going off the grid isn't limited to tropical paradises. Buildings designed to the Passive House standard use almost no energy for heating and cooling. They are super-insulated and airtight and use heat exchangers in their ventilation systems to minimize energy use. The Passivhaus standard was developed in Germany -- almost all of which is further north than the Canadian border -- and is applicable anywhere in the United States. Germany also generates almost 7% of its electricity from solar, producing power even when it's cloudy. About the same amount of power is generated by wind turbines.

The fossil fuel industry likes to paint wind and solar as being "unpredictable" and "unreliable" sources of energy. But as we've seen in the past, oil prices are extremely unpredictable and supplies are unreliable, subject to wild swings. The availability and price of oil and gas fluctuate based on turmoil in the Middle East, closures of refineries, ports and rail lines (due to strikes, maintenance and explosions), or the whims of terrorists and tyrants in Libya, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iran.

Instead of fighting wind and solar, power utilities like HECO should be working closely with companies like Tesla and SolarCity to free themselves from the vagaries and manipulations of the international energy markets. They should be working with homes and businesses to install rooftop solar so that they can integrate those systems into the grid more reliably.

Because, although they have no idea what the price of fossil fuel will be in two weeks or two months or two years, they know exactly what time the sun is going to rise, every day.

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