Hopefully what's dying is the concept of privately owned utilities. Everyone knows that, unless they're properly regulated, these eventually turn into a rent-seeking behemoths that corrupt the government (or vice-versa).
However, what will likely happen is that these private utilities will see the writing on the wall and instead do what PG&E is doing in CA and just start charging "transmission fees" to keep their rates even higher despite massive daytime solar abundance.
Everywhere there is state/municipal owned utilities it's almost always considerable cheaper than private.
The two girds they talk about were not doing that great before solar either.
Eskom South Africa:
>CEO and the cyanide-laced coffee...dramatic example of how criminality has seeped into South Africa’s state...organised theft, mainly of copper, on an industrial scale https://www.ft.com/content/5fe8291d-9895-4272-9e0a-eefa27911...
Pakistan:
>Pakistan's energy shortfall refuses to abate amid scorching heat, load-shedding...Pakistan's urban centres are now suffering up to six hours of load shedding...Calling it a "crisis of leadership and coordination", a former PEPCO head criticised... https://energy.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/oil-and-gas...
Not sure you can blame solar for that. The rest of the world seems to manage solar without death spirals.
Lots of threads lately about power utilities making bad decisions and barriers to starting public utilities, indirectly which can lead to fires and home loss.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42971311
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42975492
If the privately owned utilities are left to their own devices when solar comes in and eats their lunch, expect more "climate change driven disasters," right?
This reminds me that utilities can limit the size of your rooftop solar system, which locks you into whatever your usage you had at install time. Because of that it's difficult for me to actually achieve net zero electric usage and it's more cost effective for me to remain on a gas furnace instead of upgrading to a heat pump. This is such a shame. I wish I could just get 2 more KWh.
The existing comments here already capture most of my thoughts on the subject: users reap benefit + shareholder loose revenue = disaster!
Disaster for who? Not the users that's for sure.
Another aspect of this in the US electric utility context is that if more power is genrated locally, and exxcess is distributed as locally as possible, then long distance distribution is reduced. THere aren't as many needs, and certainly this reduces planned expansion of long distance distribution.
However, this is also a "disaster" as defined above, since construction of those long distance transmission facilities are also payed for with public bonds and therefore direct taxpayer funding.
The economist never ceases to amaze in this twisted logic...
Weird how when the rapacious whims of capitalists destroy things people value the economists posit that "those things weren't viable in the market, we have to be realistic" but when business models that capital finds valuable are under threat from technological commodification the line is "disaster, death spiral"
I have to say, my days of not taking economics seriously as a science are certainly coming to a middle
I built a garage with a flat roof to accommodate a solar system. I assumed it would make sense. However between the city rules on setback and the extra cost of a grid-connected system, it didn't make sense. Since then I've been strongly considering an off-grid setup. I'd like to see those get more uptake because there are so many fewer dependencies and regulations.
One Jack Rickard, RIP, who was quite an opinionated jerk imho, coined the concept of "selfish solar." The idea was that solar was on its way to becoming so cheap that one should just install enough panels and batteries such that you basically never use the grid, it's just a backup for uncommon events. Basically grid use drops to that 1 or 10% of the time the sun doesn't shine for days. I think we are there on the panel side, and will be there soon on the battery side. Selfish solar could make sense but it would change the economics of solar and electric grids substantially. If everyone went selfish solar, grid electricity and infrastructure would become prohibitively expensive. We are decades away from that or at least one decade (IMHO), but we need thoughtful regulation on this point. Will we get it? I suppose time will tell.
I mean, what power grid provider makes it easy to work with them to sell solar back to the grid? Bogus fees, negative rate metering, and lobbying against the consumer drives consumers to ever-cheaper solar and storage options.
This is self inflicted behavior from monopolies that ignore user research.
Just make roof solar panels with tiltable shades that limit the incoming sunlight for this kind of situations. This is when there is no battery storage involved.
If the solar-roofed house can involve home batteries, problem solved.
The Economist, a journal that speaks for the British millionaires
Anyone who paid some attention saw this coming.
You can't run a grid with maxed out cheap renewables. It's like having a society where the police and prisons staff closes shop and goes home when the sun sets and still expect law and order to persist.
> "lots of self-generated power will ultimately be wasted."
This is sunlight falling on a roof. If you convert it into electricity but then don't use that electricity, is it really a waste? It's like saying that the overflow from my water tank that collects rain water off the roof is 'wasting' water.
It could be argued that it's a waste in the sense that the generated electricity could have gone to someone else if there was a grid, but if the grid operator isn't allowing excess to be put back into the grid (e.g. because there's no demand at that time because it's sunny and everyone is using solar), then the grid operator needs to solve that with some form of energy storage (e.g. batteries).