Question on California UL rating requirement for SMA / effective April 1st 2023

[Mike 134]

Oh and we get people from NY that complain Florida is not the same as where they use to live but they did move from there for some reason.

off topic here but is it true interstate 4 is a pothole filled trashed eyesore except where it was under the control of Disneyworld?

[SunEagle]

off topic here but is it true interstate 4 is a pothole filled trashed eyesore except where it was under the control of Disneyworld?

Not necessarily. Most of the roads around here have pothole issues.

[Calsun]

The oil and coal and natural gas suppliers and utility companies are threatened by private generation of energy by home owners. Utility rates have doubled over the past 10 years as the companies have a monopoly on providing power to homes. This hits the poor the hardest who are now having to decide whether to buy medicine or buy food or pay the utility bill. People are dying from the cold and dying from the heat when they cannot afford to pay their utility bills.

The utility companies want to have very large scale energy production by wind farms and solar farms and do not care that this requires transporting energy thousands of miles to consumers of that energy. Their monopoly only becomes stronger and so they can raise rates and increase profits for their management and shareholders. Far less costly and far more efficient to generate electricity at houses and avoid new high voltage transmission lines altogether. Millions of small inverters also smooth out the power grid and prevent spikes that damage equipment and lead to brown-outs and blackouts. The power industry has long known of the benefits of this low output inverter feeds in stabilizing the power grid.

When PG&E was challenged in court in the 1970's the Sierra Club and others demonstrated from the company's own numbers that energy conservation was far more effective than continuing to build new power plants. Overlooked is that a power plant does not operate 24/7 and when a plant is only able to provide 85% of what is needed during periods of peak demand, it is prohibitively expensive to add extra capacity for those short periods when more power is actually needed. That second power plant is going to sit idle 90% of the time but the consumers are charged for 100% of the operating costs regardless. It is even crazier in places like Georgia and Florida are charged to fund nuclear power plants that have not even been built. In California the consumers will be paying for the cost of nuclear plants long after they have been shut down as the radioactive fuel needs to be stored for centurier and guess who is going to have to foot the bill.

[jflorey2]

France does Nuclear for a far higher percentage, but at the cost of leaving expensive nuclear plants idling.

Exactly. And nuclear power plants are the most efficient (best fuel burnup, lowest cost per mwhr) when they are run 100% all the time.

Pumped storage, battery storage, CAES etc can help with that, by storing that energy for when it's needed. But if you are going to go for storage anyway, solar/wind is a much cheaper source of power for recharging than nuclear.

Ideally a future power system is going to look like: (energy sources)
20-30% nuclear power (for base load, and they always run at 100%)
40-50% renewable (wind/solar/hydro/geothermal)
30% natural gas (primarily peakers)

That gets us the benefits of all of the above with few of the benefits. Natural gas is easy to store, so it's used for peaking plants. Nuclear is reliable and steady, so that supplies our base load. Wind, hydro and solar are cheap, so they provide the energy to charge those storage systems.

[jflorey2]

If you chose to live the way you are then I would hope you and others stop complaining when their electric costs sky rocket.

I solved that particular problem with solar for me. I also volunteer for a local company that installs solar for low income people. Which is a drop in the bucket, but helps solve the problem for a few people at least.

Oh and we get people from NY that complain Florida is not the same as where they use to live but they did move from there for some reason.

Yep. Sort of human nature.

[SunEagle]

I solved that particular problem with solar for me. I also volunteer for a local company that installs solar for low income people. Which is a drop in the bucket, but helps solve the problem for a few people at least.

Yep. Sort of human nature.

Look can we agree to disagree with how CA is handling power distribution. I don't want to argue and take up posts that the OP did not ask for.

IMO people are moving out of states that are too expensive to live in and going elsewhere.

How POCO's decide to increase their rates is based purely on financial commitment to their shareholders. The problem is a lot of poor people either can't invest in a POCO or purchase solar or EV's for that matter and are being forced by the CA government to go Green. If they can't live in CA they will eventually move.

[solardreamer]

I solved that particular problem with solar for me. I also volunteer for a local company that installs solar for low income people. Which is a drop in the bucket, but helps solve the problem for a few people at least.

This is exactly why NEM3 got approved. Only the privileged few can get solar. The solar companies are focusing resources on higher end market instead of making entry level products cheaper to broaden adoption in the low end market. The current incentives are to blame to some extent. There is little justification for tax payer funded incentives to subsidize wealthy people building large (>10kW) vanity solar systems. The recent changes made to the EV incentives should be made for solar/renewable incentives.

[jflorey2]

Only the privileged few can get solar.

Agreed that that is a big problem.

[J.P.M.]

This is exactly why NEM3 got approved. Only the privileged few can get solar. The solar companies are focusing resources on higher end market instead of making entry level products cheaper to broaden adoption in the low end market. The current incentives are to blame to some extent. There is little justification for tax payer funded incentives to subsidize wealthy people building large (>10kW) vanity solar systems. The recent changes made to the EV incentives should be made for solar/renewable incentives.

I've never been a fan of solar incentives, but full disclosure, I've taken them so that makes me a hypocrite.
Still, from what I've seen they only serve to increase prices by about the same amount as the incentives/tax credits.
The buyer thinks they're getting government money that in the end mostly goes to vendors and manufacturers selling at prices inflated to the same degree as the tax credits/incentives and pitching what's usually a phony save story of free gov. money to their customers.

Those inflated prices also allow otherwise shoddy and unqualified vendors and manufacturers to stay in business buoyed up by inflated prices. That harms everyone including honest and quality vendors who get dragged down as the industry reputation suffers from the bottom feeders of the type that show up on consumer segments of local news shows.

Since the beginnings of solar incentives - in the U.S. at least - I always thought that a perhaps better way to run such programs would be to incentivize residential solar in a way that was in some fashion inverse to a taxpayer's income with the little guy getting the most incentive/credit and the well off getting none.
And/Or, turning part of such a program into a kind of welfare to work system that would take the un/under employed and turn them into trained installers and/or alternate energy technicians/engineers.
Government incentive programs for a lot of enterprises/market segments have always been at least and often largely about starting a segment of business that is new.
EV incentives are a good example and are producing the same screwing of consumers while lining the pockets of the vehicle manufacturers.

My guess is that about the same percentage of EV's are bought by the well off as residential PV.
The poor/economically disadvantaged have always taken it in the shorts. Some things never change.

[SunEagle]

I've never been a fan of solar incentives, but full disclosure, I've taken them so that makes me a hypocrite.
Still, from what I've seen they only serve to increase prices by about the same amount as the incentives/tax credits.
The buyer thinks they're getting government money that in the end mostly goes to vendors and manufacturers selling at prices inflated to the same degree as the tax credits/incentives and pitching what's usually a phony save story of free gov. money to their customers.

Those inflated prices also allow otherwise shoddy and unqualified vendors and manufacturers to stay in business buoyed up by inflated prices. That harms everyone including honest and quality vendors who get dragged down as the industry reputation suffers from the bottom feeders of the type that show up on consumer segments of local news shows.

Since the beginnings of solar incentives - in the U.S. at least - I always thought that a perhaps better way to run such programs would be to incentivize residential solar in a way that was in some fashion inverse to a taxpayer's income with the little guy getting the most incentive/credit and the well off getting none.
And/Or, turning part of such a program into a kind of welfare to work system that would take the un/under employed and turn them into trained installers and/or alternate energy technicians/engineers.
Government incentive programs for a lot of enterprises/market segments have always been at least and often largely about starting a segment of business that is new.
EV incentives are a good example and are producing the same screwing of consumers while lining the pockets of the vehicle manufacturers.

My guess is that about the same percentage of EV's are bought by the well off as residential PV.
The poor/economically disadvantaged have always taken it in the shorts. Some things never change.

+! I agree. The poor are always last

[solardreamer]

I've never been a fan of solar incentives, but full disclosure, I've taken them so that makes me a hypocrite.

I am guilty as well but I had hoped it would help broaden adoption of solar and lower cost for the mass market.

EV incentives are a good example and are producing the same screwing of consumers while lining the pockets of the vehicle manufacturers.

My guess is that about the same percentage of EV's are bought by the well off as residential PV.
The poor/economically disadvantaged have always taken it in the shorts. Some things never change.

I would agree that was the case for EV incentives but the recent changes (price and income caps) are already showing positive impact as multiple EV vendors have made significant price reductions to qualify and put more focus on affordable offerings for the mass market. This needs to happen with the solar/renewable energy incentives. I remember there used to be lots of discussion about achieving $1/W installed solar but that seems to have stopped in the last few years. I hope that becomes a key goal for incentives.

[brycenesbitt]

The shortfalls you are reading about are from 5PM until 9PM and it has already been demonstrated last September that batteries prevented brownouts.

There was a short lived rebate for people who faced solar panels West -- for lower overall production at the benefit of timing. Any sign that will return, or are we all meant to put combustible batteries and gasoline generators on our property ?

[Ampster]

There was a short lived rebate for people who faced solar panels West -- for lower overall production at the benefit of timing. Any sign that will return, or are we all meant to put combustible batteries and gasoline generators on our property ?

I do not know of that rebate. I have seen a lot of panels facing west on small installations along Interstate 5. That is not a representative sample.
You are free to use combustible Lipos, NCM or any other battery ontaining Cobalt. I for one only use LFP which have very little probability of combusting.

I have chosen to face any new panels I install with a West facing azimuth for several reasons. The rates are better and I have exceeded the limit in my NEM agreement and in order tderisk and possibility it will show up on my daily generation I have the peak kW generaton skewed to latter in the afternoon. Since some of these panels are used i am tryinging to optimize my overall kWhs generated over the year versus having a large kW peak or optimal panel output.