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Solar Panels!

Discussion in 'Fred's House of Pancakes' started by JimboPalmer, Jun 16, 2020.

  1. fuzzy1

    fuzzy1 Senior Member

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    Looking up the electric provider there, I see that it is city owed. A city of about 15,000 people.

    The poverty rate there is double the national average. The median household income is under $27k.

    With those figures, there is zero chance of the city losing so many customers to off-grid solar to have any meaningful impact on their business model. There are not enough customers who can afford to install solar.
     
  2. T1 Terry

    T1 Terry Active Member

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    That would explain their reluctance to grid tied solar, too many $$ to upgrade the network to allow the solar to flow back into the grid network and be saleable to other users. It also depends on how they generate that power, might be just too hard to balance loads and frequency with rapidly fluctuating input up line from the generator.

    Maybe you could arrange a deal with the local utility to provide grid voltage and frequency stability with a big battery pack and suitable inverter, Tesla does that here in South Australia with a big battery and tied in wind farm to stabilise the rapid fluctuation caused by all the wind and solar generation across the state. We have no coal fired power stations and only a few very small gas turbines owned by private businesses that installed them when the coal fired grid was so unstable. All our power is from renewables and we export power through the grid to the other states that are on the eastern seaboard grid.
    Could you adapt the traction battery in the Prius to act as the storage/stabiliser? Guess it depends what voltage the solar from the roof is that enters the inverter, if the voltages are compatible you could link the traction pack to the solar output/inverter input and have constant supply 24/7.

    T1 Terry
     
  3. fuzzy1

    fuzzy1 Senior Member

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    That cost is exactly $zero. The power will flow out of his house, and into the local grid, just fine without any modification whatsoever. The utility just needs to be certain that when the grid goes down, he doesn't feed any power to it and endanger line workers. But the industry and the National Electrical Code have already covered this.

    Hogwash. Greenwood has 70 MW of its own capacity, compared to Jimbo's 0.006 MW. His power generation fluctuations are no harder to handle than a single ordinary household load fluctuation from an electric range, water heater, or central home AC unit turning on or off or self-regulating. The utility already deals with tens of thousands of these units causing fluctuations.

    The utility won't have any issue until it has many more than a hundred systems of Jimbo's size operating together. It is just scared of something new, something for which technical national standards have already been established, and for which a huge number of other utilities and home solar customers have already figured out.

    Nonsense. That Hornsdale Power Reserve facility has a 100 MW capacity and a giant battery, while JImbo has only 0.006 MW and no storage battery (apart from the car, which he needs take with him for his job). He is far too small fry to have a detectable impact.
     
  4. JimboPalmer

    JimboPalmer Tsar of all the Rushers

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    Well My utility is a government monopoly, so I would have to move to use someone else.

    Since they literally have never had a solar customer before, I do not know the economics, they have no idea what they will decide the charges or benefits are.

    Yes, moving my high loads to daylight will be a lifestyle change. Dishwasher, Laundry, someday charging my car, should all be done in the morning now. If I was clever, I would run A/C before the thermostat said to.

    In Mississippi, if my utility was a private company, then the state Public Services Commission would require Net Metering. Same for a Co-Op. About a 1/4 of the state gets electricity from the Tennessee Valley Authority, a Federal Agency, which offers Net Metering and rebates for equipment.

    I, however, get my electricity from a city owned monopoly, and they are unregulated by any higher authority. And clueless.
     
  5. JimboPalmer

    JimboPalmer Tsar of all the Rushers

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    Greenwood Utilities is trying to find a meter for my house so they know what I put back in the grid. They had never bought one and are asking nearby utilities. It is possible I will have a borrowed meter from Delta Electric Power Association, who does Solar.
    Greenwood Area Chosen for Mississippi’s Largest Solar Plant – Delta Daily News

    Co-incidentally, since I already have a Generac Natural Gas Generator, I had already installed an Automatic Transfer Switch which makes sure I don't try to power the entire Grid with my 20 kWH generator. As you say, that would be unsafe for Linemen. My solar is inboard of the ATS so is also protected. (in a power failure, the solar makes all it can, then the generator makes all I need in excess of solar. Should my electrical need exceed both, the ATS can 'shed' the A/C upstairs and then the A/C downstairs to keep the fridge cold. I have never needed to 'shed' A/C.)

    Generac Power Systems - Automatic Transfer Switch Kits for Home Generators


    Greenwood Utilities 's local generation capacity is an oil fired plant that does not meet EPA standards, it is only used if Greenwood is isolated from the larger grid. Normally they buy coal based electricity under contract, then Natural Gas based spot market electricity.

    Greenwood is an 'old South' based economy, so population is shrinking. (13,000?) It was prosperous when cotton was king, but the 'new' corn/soybean/rice/catfish crops do not enrich the town. The 'new' employers are Viking Range and Milwaukee Tool.

    Made in America: Viking Range Corp.; Revitalizing Greenwood, Miss. One Kitchen Product at a Time - ABC News
    Are Milwaukee Tools Made in the USA? - All American Reviews
     
  6. ETC(SS)

    ETC(SS) The OTHER One Percenter.....

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    There's a pretty good chance that Greenwood Utilities has no generating capacity, but rather they buy their kWhs from one of the bigs.

    So....
    One of the ways you might be more of a pebble in their shoe is to find out who their supplier is and see if there's a way to incentivise THEM to make one of their larger customers a little 'greener.'
    If you're more of a carrot type of a person than a 'stickler' there might even be a little dot.gov cheese that is looking for the right mouse.
    Otherwise?
    There's always woke-scolding.
    Find out what options are available to you from the PSC.
    Greenwood may be dot.city.dot gov, but the Public Service Commission is dot.STATE.dot.gov.
    It's a chain of command thing, and it might very well BE that they're not in compliance with some deeply buried rule or edict.
    Sometimes.....in some states, PSC paper is somewhat like nucular waste.
    Far easier to generate than it is to dispose of properly.
    Back when I worked for a utility company instead of a content provider, PSC was a four-letter word, and I personally SAW individual dial tone customers move bureaucratic mountains with PSC complaints.

    Finally.....
    There's city council meetings and your local fish wrapper - probably now a bi-weekly or a weekly.
    Have some fun with THAT!
    There's a 99.44 percent chance that Greenwood's bird cage liner sell obits by the line - and, living in the deep South you KNOW that most people read the "over-65 sports pages" before even checking news, weather, and the otha sports page.
    For some reason, Southerners have a deep relationship with obits that even after living there for decades I never quite understood.
    Kinda like grits.

    Write a satirical obit about a quaint southern town's untimely prosperity demise....but tread carefully here and maybe enlist the help of the 'more than likely' issue friendly editor.
    I know little about Greenwood MS, but there's a Greenwood district in Oklahoma (Tulsa) that's at a tender emotional state this time of year, and there's a 100-percent chance that the city seal of Greenwood features a cotton boll.
    (I looked it up, it does....for now.)
    Timing.....is everything.

    There's an old saying that the early bird gets the worm, but it's the second mouse that gets the cheese.

    For Greenwood MS....it sounds like that might be YOU. ;)
     
    #26 ETC(SS), Jun 18, 2020
    Last edited: Jun 18, 2020
  7. hill

    hill High Fiber Member

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    funny you should say that. In Vegas, highest temperatures in USA, giant AC loads, they chill watter during the night - making huge amounts of ice, that then cool the hotels during the daytime. Now that's load shifting.

    .
     
  8. Leadfoot J. McCoalroller

    Leadfoot J. McCoalroller Senior Member

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    congrats Jimbo! Hope I get to install a set someday. Thanks for sharing details about yours!
     
  9. JimboPalmer

    JimboPalmer Tsar of all the Rushers

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    Sadly, the state PSC explicitly has no authority over TVA as a Federal agency. or City owned power. They regulate Private and Co-Op (REA) power.

    I think of computer languages. The first generation answered the question "Can it be done at all?" and Dr Batman is doing that.
    The Second generation asked "Can it be done well?" and I am working on that. We have not gotten to "Can it be done correctly?"

    Some day it won't take 6+ months to get an inter-connect agreement from the Utility. I am just trying to get one at all.

    And today is another sunny day, so I am doing laundry and Windows updates (2004) 7 PCs down, 3 to go.
     
  10. ETC(SS)

    ETC(SS) The OTHER One Percenter.....

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    Well....
    Good Luck my friend.

    Still having to do Windows updates, huh?
    That's a shame.
    Also....
    Kinda appropriate for this thread, I think.

    And I SAY that as something of a former solar skeptic and former Windows user. ;)
     
  11. JimboPalmer

    JimboPalmer Tsar of all the Rushers

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    [I am ignoring RJE and pretending I never knew it.]
    I started in 1980 on Apple DOS 3.1 then had to switch to MS DOS 2.2 and VAX VMS for College.
    My first employer made me sign that all programming I did that COULD be on company computers, (IBM S/36 and Windows 3.1) was theirs.
    So I used MacOS until 9.1, then my clents hated Vista and I had to switch to get them working.
    My second employer used Solaris brand Unix.
    I am currently all Windows 10 but oddly, have been buying Chromebooks for others.

    I do not really have 40 years of computer experience, it is truer to say i have 2 years of experience 20 times in a row.
     
    #31 JimboPalmer, Jun 18, 2020
    Last edited: Jun 18, 2020
  12. T1 Terry

    T1 Terry Active Member

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    OK, that answers a lot, I had misunderstood the size of the supply grid applicable. In Australia there are actually very small supply grid in remote areas where it may be the local fuel station come nearly everything else supplier including the travelling public's over night accommodation, restaurant and pub/bottle shop. They run generators 24/7 and sell power to the local community so a system that fed power back in would really throw a spanner in the works, were a back up battery would be a real benefit to them.
    The problems that are surfacing in Australia is local area grid voltage. With so many taking up solar feed in to offset huge power bills the line voltage often swings above the 254vac that is the limited output voltage for feed in inverters. It ends up, the biggest and fastest get first bit and any after that or output limited to stabilise the over voltage problem. The inverse happen on a hot cloudy day, the voltage drops severely causing issues with appliances etc.
    To fix the problem the grid responsible private enterprise for that area would need to add more transformers to move the excess on any single phase back up to the high voltage 3 phase distribution network so it could move that excess to a part of the grid that could utilise that electrical energy .... and that is not likely to happen any time soon. They would prefer to buy from the big electricity generators than adapt to use multiple smaller electricity generators, so the are happy with the way the smaller solar output grid tie set up just get shut down when they don't need them, that way they don't have to pay them for the power they supplied yet get to charge high prices when the solar can not meet demand for the individual houses.

    T1 Terry
     
  13. fuzzy1

    fuzzy1 Senior Member

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    I should clarify that the bulk of North America is on one of just three major grids. Jimbo is part of the Eastern Interconnection:
    [​IMG]
    (There are a few minor and many tiny grids just beyond the borders of this chart.)

    While his city has 70 MW of its own generators (if they are even fired up), everything in a region is interconnected and runs at the same frequency. For him to change the system frequency, his 6,000 W would have to push or pull the entire 600,000,000,000 W Eastern system. Ain't gonna be measurable.

    Because of local impedance matters, he would have greater impact on local voltage. But still negligible beyond just a few homes.

    Each Hawaiian island is its own grid, and they also have lots of solar installations, so they suffer some of the same issues as your small isolated grids, though not to the same degree. Alaska and Northern Canada have many very small isolated grids, but I don't know if they have enough solar to have much impact.
     
    #33 fuzzy1, Jun 19, 2020
    Last edited: Jun 19, 2020
  14. John321

    John321 Senior Member

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    We live in a small community also.

    Our electric company office though part of a much larger company is locally run. If you went in to the office you know most everyone there as they are all from the community.

    I think the way you are working with your Utility is a good way to handle it. It sounds like you are on the cutting edge of technology in your area and you may be one of the first that is having situations that the Utility hasn't faced before.

    I bet the way you are handling it - with understanding and patience will pay dividends in the long run and achieve your goal of making it easier for the next guy.

    Appreciate you sharing- if I am fortunate enough to complete our solar project I would expect to face similar situations you have described with our utility, your experience will help me.
     
  15. fuzzy1

    fuzzy1 Senior Member

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    Do they really want to measure your gross export to the grid, not simply the net as is used for net metering?

    Before smart meters arrived here, I had two regular old-fashioned mechanical meters. One was the original house regular billing meter. It would roll backwards just fine when I'm exporting, so it fully met the needs of "net metering". (Certain models can be set to never roll backwards, so can't be used for net metering when so configured.) The second was put on the PV system to measure its gross production, necessary for the state production incentives. There was nothing to separately measure gross export and import, that isn't necessary with net metering.

    The newer smart meter is programmed to total up export and import separately, so now the billing statement comes with 3 line items instead of the previous 2. But this is necessary only for pricing systems where the house export is priced different than import, e.g. 15 cents coming in and only 2 cents going out. But this pricing system is NOT "net metering".
     
  16. hill

    hill High Fiber Member

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    IIRC - Tesla installed a mega battery power pack & solar panels to the northern island of Kawaii - which pretty much lets run free of its older dino juice powered - generator system - so that now the generator is just a backup system.
    [​IMG]
    This - coupled with the many homes that are running solar there, makes for mighty clean power production.
     
  17. fuzzy1

    fuzzy1 Senior Member

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    Kawaii?? o_O Mashup of Hawaii and Kauai?

    Searching for information, I find that the island of Kauai was Tesla'ed in 2017. Now there is a proposal to do a similar big project on the island of Oahu next year. And also four smaller storage projects on Oahu, Maui and Hawaii island.

    When I was installing my home PV, back before any of these energy storage projects existed, the equipment I was using had to use a different firmware version for units shipped to Hawaii, due to its dirtier (electrically, not environmentally) power grid. Mainland firmware installed in Hawaii would trip out too much, so they needed to program Hawaiian units with wider voltage and frequency tolerance limits before they would self-disconnect. And home solar installations, while reducing the need for diesel fuel, had made the grid electrically somewhat more dirty.

    It is wonderful that one of the many Islands has been able to clean up its grid now. Let's hope that the others can do the same fairly quickly. I suspect the Big Island may take longer to get it done.

    upload_2020-6-20_11-1-59.png

    [​IMG]