Old Power Gear Is Slowing Use of Clean Energy and Electric Cars

[Zorro]

Some people and businesses seeking to use solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles find they can’t because utility equipment needs an upgrade.

Seven months after workers finished installing solar panels atop the Garcia family home near Stanford University, the system is little more than a roof ornament. The problem: The local utility’s equipment is so overloaded that there is no place for the electricity produced by the panels to go.

“We wasted 30,000-something dollars on a system we can’t use,” Theresa Garcia said. “It’s just been really frustrating.”

President Biden is pushing lawmakers and regulators to wean the United States from fossil fuels and counter the effects of climate change. But his ambitious goals could be upended by aging transformers and dated electrical lines that have made it hard for homeowners, local governments and businesses to use solar panels, batteries, electric cars, heat pumps and other devices that can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Much of the equipment on the electric grid was built decades ago and needs to be upgraded. It was designed for a world in which electricity flowed in one direction — from the grid to people. Now, homes and businesses are increasingly supplying energy to the grid from their rooftop solar panels.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/business/energy-environment/electric-grid-overload-solar-ev.html

[hunter]

1. The whining of very affluent people is annoying.

They should buy some batteries to store this surplus energy for their own use and move on. They could also dump the surplus energy into a large hot water tank to reduce the amount of gas they use for domestic hot water.

I suspect my own neighborhood is exporting power on sunny days and I've seen the power company replacing a few transformers and installing more complex control systems, so it can be done. This is a political problem.

If more people in my neighborhood install photovoltaic panels the hard limit will be the capacity of the underground power lines. Upgrading those would be an expensive nightmare. Who would pay for that?

But that's the problem with solar. Here in California the first solar panels installed displaced power generated by natural gas kilowatt-for-kilowatt. But as solar or wind power approaches the capacity of the system, at the local level or across the grid, additional solar or wind power is useless without storage. Who should pay for that storage is a very good question.

At the moment 55% of my electricity is coming from renewables, mostly solar. 31% of my electricity is coming from natural gas. At times, on sunny windy days with light electric demand, only 15% of my electricity comes from natural gas. That 15% represents gas plants kept running to maintain the stability of the grid.

Those numbers sound great, certainly "better than coal," but it won't save the world.

Unfortunately aggressive renewable energy schemes in places like California, Denmark, and Germany have failed, serving only to increase our long term dependence on natural gas. We've reached the point of diminishing returns where additional renewable energy installations do not displace fossil fuels kilowatt-for-kilowatt. Fully developed hybrid power systems seem to top out around 50% renewable energy for the simple reason the sun is not always shining and the wind is not always blowing. Adding more solar panels or wind turbines doesn't change that.

There's enough natural gas in the ground to destroy earth's natural environment as we know it. It's the most dangerous fuel imaginable because most people still think it's "clean" backup power for their renewable energy schemes, schemes that would not be economically viable without this fossil fuel "backup" power.

An economy powered entirely by renewable energy would look nothing like the economy many affluent people now enjoy.

[NNadir]

2. As usual, NY Times reporters are demonstrating cluelessness

The solution to the "problem" of intermittent power of so called "renewable energy" is not to mine every more copper, refine it and coat it with petroleum based insulation.

The solution is to recognize that the solar industry is an abysmal failure if the goal is to address climate change.

If the goal is to give people with the money to own a home with solar power tax breaks, it's been a spectacular success. If the goal is environmental however, it's a spectacular failure, and an expensive one are that.