What’s the issue? Electrons flow both ways… Just have to synchronise the AC signals of the inverter to the grid, have good limits on frequency and voltage fluctuation, and monitor for faults properly.
It’s not even really an issue with DC either, like a lot of people’s battery systems have multiple DC loads and multiple sources (e.g. DC MPPT solar controllers) going to a busbar connected directly to the battery.
Current load pulls the voltage down, sourcing current pushes it up. No bother, as long as your sources cut out if the voltage goes too high, and your loads cut out if it goes too low.
That’s absolutely crazy, in Australia you could probably get a 30 kW commercial system installed for that. On my house I paid about US$6.5K for a 6.6 kW of panels and a 5 kW inverter, years ago. You’d get the same thing for a bit under US$5K today here.
For the price you’re talking about, you could also get a system with 15 kW of panels with a good 20-30 kWh of battery storage too!
It's the regulation cost that's really hurting us.
Just the required paperwork for the permit in my region cost ~2.5k. structural engineer was 800, architecture diagram was 800, certified electrician stamp on the plans was 800.
Add in the extra cost to facilitate RSD (~5k after mlpe devices, and extra wiring) and tack on the cost for utility interconnection agreements.
Then deal with the NEC requiring UL listed items with no/very little cross certification with things like CE which effectively means you can't buy equipment from China, at least not without a US shop taking a huge markup for branding/certs.
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Overall, it's just a mess. I walked away from the project (completed, all approved) with a huge dose of skepticism for the permitting/certification/approval process.
This is, as you say, absolutely bananas level of regulation. Here in the UK most panels are "permitted development" (bypass all the local government permitting entirely, as for small sheds and fences etc). There are two utility schemes, one for <3.6kW which costs £30 (G98) and a more complicated one that costs a few hundred £ for larger ones (G99).
"Balcony solar" (<800W) with absolutely zero paperwork (edit: I'm wrong, still needs G99) has just arrived to the UK.
Currently in the U.K. they have to have U.K. appeal not just standard eu approval. Hopefully this will be fixed by next year and prices will
Be more reasonable.
Hopefully too regulators will
Change to allow battery
Storage as long as it’s not pore than 800W inverter.
"Plug in solar" (as "Balcony solar" is called in here in the UK) needs G98, not G99 approval and is free for plug in (<8kw). This is just one form to fill out, and the DNO can't refuse approval (assuming you fill out the form). Think of it more as registration than approval.
Current lowest costs from national retailers that I've found (been looking today as it happens!) is City Plumbing - £336 for 475w, £480 for 1050w (panels with 800w max inverter).
A lot of people in the U.S. are trying to innovate. I think the problem is the fossil fuel industry has been paying government, probably for decades, to implement legal roadblocks at all levels, from individual homes up to states and regions, to non-fossil fuel energy. I think they've also had a hand, at least at the propaganda level, in pushing back on electric vehicles.
Personally, I'd love to see the United States, and the rest of the world, decrease its reliance on oil. We won't get off it in any of our lifetimes, but we should move in that direction. I like diversifying. Any bit helps. Solar in Australia and Arizona. Maybe less so in northern Maine. Wind turbines where there's wind. I personally don't have any aesthetic objection to them. I think they look kind of cool. And certainly better than smokestacks. And so on.
Were there any parts of the process you felt could be reasonably chipped away at through improved beaureaucratic processes or lightweight advocacy?
I've been doing some advocacy work related to balcony solar mostly from a conceptual standpoint but am a renter and don't know much about the actual costs and process behind installing roof panels. I'm curious to know whether there are any low-hanging fruit we could organize around to reduce the regulatory burden on the consumer.
Sealand is a structure within Britain's territorial waters (since they were expanded in 1987)... From what legal analysis I've seen, a structure just wouldn't ever be considered as a 'nation' in any sense, and if anything happened there that the UK was really concerned about they would remove the occupants anyway... So unless they had a navy that could go up against the UK's...
They'd need satellite internet anyway to get connectivity that didn't go through the UK so not going to be great latency.
Highways often have powerlines nearby at least every now and then. With those you can take power from roofs many kilometres away!
And what you say about apartments is wrong, it’s definitely not impossible. I’ve heard of plenty of apartment blocks installing chargers, they have load management systems to manage the load and believe it or not, not every single apartment occupant will need to charge their car every day at exactly the same time as everyone else!
My building looked into it (a complex of several buildings sharing one giant underground carpark). Installing 300 chargers (one at each spot) would cost millions and take years to radar and cut the channels in the concrete. Even if done, the city connection to the facility would need a million-dollar upgrade too going all the way to the local substation. And then the local fire department had an opinion: they were not happy at the concept of 300 EVs in one underground structure. There are no rules limiting such things today (also on car ferries) but we are one bad fire away from some firecode regulation about EVs underground.
Yes and no, I mean many of the parts were off the shelf and the vertical integration did slowly happen over time, but on the other hand iPhones never used off-the-shelf processor silicon. While they were Arm-designed CPU cores and PowerVR GPU cores at that stage (Apple would switch to designing their custom designed Arm-compatible cores with the A6 in 2012 and their own GPU design with the A11 Bionic in 2017), the SoC of the first few iPhones and iPod Touches were custom designed for them by Samsung.
Nokia did seem to rely more on off-the-shelf SoCs so having a custom design I think did contribute in some part to the iPhone's success. It's true that the software was a massive part but Apple were able to make different trade-offs with power consumption, CPU power and GPU power that enabled that software to work that might not have been as practical with off-the-shelf SoCs at the time.
These tend to work fine down to -25° C or so ambient temperature (you lose some efficiency below -5° C or so), so should always be outside. Obviously you need an alternate source of water heating if you live somewhere where it routinely gets below that, but even in a lot of places like that you could set it up to use the heat pump 90-95% of the year and a cheap but far less efficient resistive heater for the very cold days, and still come out far ahead.
I have a heat pump that uses R290 (propane) (as well as an CO2 one for hot water) and would take that any day of the week over ammonia! The charge of propane is pretty tiny and the safety standards extremely strict, so not really concerning in terms of flammability, ammonia I would consider far, far more dangerous.
Profit cap would be unworkable, Hollywood is already famous for creative accounting… No work would ever reach it on paper (while actually making many times more).
