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GardenLetter27 parent
Yeah, having gone through the blackout in Spain this would be really useful (using phones).

Then only one person needs a generator and/or Starlink to provide some connectivity.

moffkalast
It's interesting how we're generally headed towards general self sufficiency, off grid solar and wind power with batteries because the grid won't pay you to sell it electricity, mesh networks and satellite internet to get around lazy local ISPs. All we need is a field where robots grow food and we're back in the middle ages but with modern tech. We've even got tech billionaires to stand in as feudal lords and crazy right wing populists instead of inbred kings with weird chins.
edent
Where in the world are you? In the UK I get paid to sell my excess solar back to the grid.
moffkalast
That's usually the case if there's only a few people with solar or if your local infrastructure is overbuilt, since grids typically aren't designed to handle residential power generation.

If there's too much solar in your area (which will be the eventual end result everywhere) you get net billing, where you don’t get charged for the energy you use, but they won't pay you a dime for anything over what you use or will even disconnect you if you overproduce so the local substation doesn't explode because it wasn't specced for any of this shit.

The end result is that you don't get paid for any of your daily overproduction and still get billed at night, the worst of both worlds. It incentives people to buy batteries and store the peaks, with grid power being mostly optional.

Aachen
> they won't pay you a dime for anything over what you use

In some places. If you're dumping excess energy onto their network, in some regions they'll also charge you for that

bigfatkitten
> That's usually the case if there's only a few people with solar or if your local infrastructure is overbuilt, since grids typically aren't designed to handle residential power generation.

Australia has the highest density of residential rooftop solar in the world, making up about 11% of the grid supply. Feed-in tariffs are standard there.

bigiain
Also in Australia, and yeah feedin tariffs are a thing, but during midday "off peak" times when solar has excess energy, they're down around 1-2% of the retail cost of electricity and that's been going down for years.

Anecdotally, amongst my social circle, people are buying house batteries because the feedin tariffs are so low it's worthwhile spending $10k or so to store your daytime solar for use in evenings/night - because it costs 40 or 60c per kWHr to buy electricity off the grid in the evening, and they only give you a cent or two to if you feed it on during midday solar peaks. It's way better value to charge your house battery (and you car if you can) than to sell solar generated electricity back to the grid.

bandoti
Good premise for a cyberpunk novel. I recommend keeping the weird chins though, because plastic surgery makes anything possible!
moffkalast
Yeah solarpunk is probably the most neglected out of all existing sci-fi punks, probably cause it's actually kinda nice and doesn't make a good setting for a gritty depressing story?
pyrale
> It's interesting how we're generally headed towards general self sufficiency, off grid solar and wind power with batteries because the grid won't pay you to sell it electricity

The grid will definitely pay you to sell it electricity if you fulfill the industrial standards it expects.

The issue in your assessment is that the quality of service provided by someone just setting up solar panels and inverters and plugging that on the grid is the equivalent of starting a skyscraper building company based on your experience building your garden shed. It's not safe, you won't understand why, and eventually you or someone else will get hurt.

pmontra
I'd agree with you if I'd setup my solar panels. But if I'd ever install solar at home I'd hire a company to do all the setup. I believe that it would fulfill industry standards.
pyrale
It wouldn’t. Just like hiring the best pros to make an extremely fancy kitchen wouldn’t make it equivalent to a restaurant kitchen.
bigfatkitten
It does if your local regulations specifically provide for small scale generation.
pyrale
Local regulation on that topic usually revolves around easing the requirements for small scale/residential production, not around making them respect the same standards as large electricity producers.
ahartmetz
Probably taking the "someone gets hurt" part too literally, but inverters do turn off their outputs when the grid goes down. It would take a lot of inverters to make all the other inverters believe that the local part of grid hasn't bee disconnected. I wouldn't be surprised if they had special logic to detect even that case. Of course, there is the case of simply having too much unregulated input to the grid, causing instability. But AFAIK that has never happened anywhere, at least not in a way bad enough to make the news. It is bound to happen if current trends continue, but appropriate actions will be taken at that point and have been taken in large solar installations.
pyrale
First off, I’d like to state that the following post is about the challenges of handling residential production, not about industrial renewable setups.

The grid going down is game over. Once you’re at this point, there are already people going hurt. The way inverters react to this is irrelevant.

The thing making home setups not a source energy utilities would want to pay much for is that they bring no service to the grid (frequency and voltage management, ability to be turned off when the grid manager wants, reactive production management).

The part where people get hurt is that in overproduction events, the grid manager has no way to cut that production or even single homes, so they sometimes have to cut whole neighborhoods. That did happen already, even if it’s not a common thing.

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