Solar Energy and "the grid?" Can Someone Explain?

[vanlassie]

My Right wing father has taken to telling people something he probably heard on Rush or Fox....something about the "grid" only being able to support so much solar energy...thereby minimizing any mention of solar power being a viable source for energy....

What the heck is he talking about?
Thanks,
vanlassie

[wtmusic]

1. That is so nonsensical it's hard to respond to

but at face value it's just not true.

Rush is usually not worth responding to.

[dkf]

2. It has something to do with a/c vs. d/c

Robert Kennedy explained it well and it is why in order to use solar energy, we need to upgrade the grid.

http://209.85.141.104/search?q=cache:eodyDZQnv5cJ:www.truthout.org/docs_2006/041208Y.shtml+robert+kennedy+grid&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a

There's a second thing the next president should do, and it would be a strategic masterstroke: push to revamp the nation's antiquated high-voltage power-transmission system so that it can deliver solar, wind, geothermal, and other renewable energy across the country. Right now, a Texas wind-farm manager who wants to get his electrons to market faces two huge impediments. First, our regional power grids are overstressed and misaligned. The biggest renewable-energy opportunities - for instance, Southwest solar and Midwest wind - are outside the grids' reach. Furthermore, traveling via alternating-current (AC) lines, too much of that wind farmer's energy would dissipate before it crossed the country. The nation urgently needs more investment in its backbone transmission grid, including new direct-current (DC) power lines for efficient long-haul transmission. Even more important, we need to build in "smart" features, including storage points and computerized management overlays, allowing the new grid to intelligently deploy the energy along the way. Construction of this new grid will create a marketplace where utilities, established businesses, and entrepreneurs can sell energy and efficiency.

The other obstacle is the web of arcane and conflicting state rules that currently restrict access to the grid. The federal government needs to work with state authorities to open up the grids, allowing clean-energy innovators to fairly compete for investment, space, and customers. We need open markets where hundreds of local and national power producers can scramble to deliver economic and environmental solutions at the lowest possible price. The energy sector, in other words, needs an initiative analogous to the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which required open access to all the nation's telephone lines. Marketplace competition among national and local phone companies instantly precipitated the historic explosion in telecom activity.

Construction of efficient and open-transmission marketplaces and green-power-plant infrastructure would require about a trillion dollars over the next 15 years. For roughly a third of the projected cost of the Iraq war we could wean the country from carbon. And the good news is that the government doesn't actually have to pay for all of this. If the president works with governors to lift constraints and encourage investment, utilities and private entrepreneurs will quickly step in to revitalize the grid and recover their investment through royalties collected for transporting green electrons. Businesses and homes will become power plants as individuals cash in by installing solar panels and wind turbines on their buildings, and by selling the stored energy in their plug-in hybrids back to the grid at peak hours.

[sandnsea]

6. Thanks very much

I didn't know all of that about the dissipation of wind power, etc. I knew there were problems with how to get the power to market, which was the original purpose of Enron, but I didn't know there were grid problems too. It's a shame RFK Jr doesn't have more of a national following. Rush Limbaugh ought to be flogged for what he's done to this country.

[vanlassie]

9. Ahhh. This makes sense. And of course...

a Republican would only want to point out the "negative" with no acknowledgment that the problem is actually solvable...with, as RFK states, "roughly a third of the projected cost of the IRAQ war."

vanlassie

[drmeow]

3. I can't answer your R-W father's claims

but I can say this - I live in Arizona and am currently getting bids to install a PV system on my roof. The local electric company will reimburse me $3/watt for up to a 10 or 20K system! They will buy back from me any additional power I produce during the day and during the times that my energy use is less than what my system produces, my meter will run backwards! Why do local electric companies do this? 1) there is a mandate that a certain percentage of the power sold in Arizona come from renewable sources and 2) using the rooftop systems that residents put in prevents the electric company from having to build new renewable power generating plants, 3) lots of solar panels putting energy into the system prevents brown outs if something ever happens to the existing generators (as did a few years ago when there was a massive fire at a generating station). Send your father these links and ask him if electric companies would be willing to pay people to put their grid at risk!

http://www.srpnet.com/environment/earthwise/solar/Default.aspx
http://www.aps.com/main/green/choice/choice_23.html?source=hme
http://www.tep.com/Green/Home/Solar/electric.asp

[XemaSab]

4. I'll second what the above poster said... that doesn't make sense

I know they have to build some new transmission lines for solar thermal and wind projects out in places where there are no existing lines, but they're have to do that for coal or nuclear or whatever, so I can't imagine anyone could find that a compelling argument. :shrug:

[BlooInBloo]

5. I assume he means electrical grids....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission

But the rest of it is bullshit.

[DCKit]

7. Distributed power - solar on everyone's roof - shouldn't require a grid upgrade.

What isn't used in your own house goes to the neighbors in an ever widening circle. Additionally, the production of solar electric should be easy for utilities to estimate and load balancing (to avoid over or under-loading the grid) should be easy.

In the southern states, electricity demand is highest when the sun is shining, especially in the summer. With all those heat pumps and AC units running during the peak business hours, it would be virtually impossible to overload the grid - even if nearly every house had solar.

The incentives available in California reduce the payback on a solar system to ~10 years. Given that the warranted life of most systems is 20+ years, that's over ten years of free electricity - at current rates. As the rates go up (pretty much guaranteed) the payback grows shorter.

As usual, Rush Limbaugh is wrong. He's probably living in fear that someone will find a way to generate cheap energy from fat gasbags and he'll spend the rest of his life in servitude to the unwashed masses.

[kristopher]

8. Sounds like a garbled version of the problem with wind intermittancy.

Wind has, until recently, been thought to be limited to about 5-10% of generating capacity because it causes too much fluctuation in the grid. That has been shown to be wrong. There is a cost to integrate wind, and there is a need for different power management strategies. You can expect about 30% of our power to come from wind within the next 20-30 years, if not sooner.