WE Energies to Squash Distributed Renewables with their latest rate case.

[ChrisOlson]

Well, I don't have a better idea yet... The system hasn't been quoted. So at this juncture, I have no idea how much more it will cost. I'm actually interested to find out how much of the cost is storage related. I'm guessing its the majority. How close am I on that guess ChrisOlson?

You're pretty close. Our batteries cost us almost double per kWh of storage what you pay for utility power.

Here's the deal though, being you have utility power you don't need a big battery bank like we got if you want to use your system off-grid. There is other ways to look at it, like from the standpoint that utility rates have been going up on average 4-6% per year. Your investment in your own power system can be offset eventually by saving on your bill and hope for a 20 year recovery of the expense. And set up as an off-grid system, provides you with standby power with the addition of a suitable generator for longer power outages.

A better investment in battery-based equipment would be a Schneider Conext XW-series system. They are split-phase out-of-the-box and interface with your 240V system, where the Outback systems have to stacked, or use their Radian units which have had a lot a problems. The XW-series from Schneider is proven - it's been around since like 2006 and costs less money than a Radian. It has advanced load-shaving features that will automatically cut your utility usage during the day when you have peak solar, and reconnect you to utility at night so you don't have to use your batteries, and can "save" them for the event the grid goes down in the night.

The Outback systems were designed for grid intertie and sellback. The Schneider system was designed for off-grid with grid-intertie optional.

As long as you got the system bought you may as well use it. In the long run I'll think you'll find you're happier using it for direct load shaving for your own loads and standby power, use the balance from the utility, and forget the net-metering part. Then you can tell 'em to go suck an egg because you got control of it and you're buying less of their product they sell, and you don't really give a sh!t what they do.

[kwilcox]

...As long as you got the system bought you may as well use it. In the long run I'll think you'll find you're happier using it for direct load shaving for your own loads and standby power, use the balance from the utility, and forget the net-metering part. Then you can tell 'em to go suck an egg because you got control of it and you're buying less of their product they sell, and you don't really give a sh!t what they do.

I'll check into that! Direct load shaving for my server farm while using the balance from the utility/forgetting about net-metering is precisely what I will want to do if the rate hikes go through. I liked the Outback system primarily because I could AC couple it to my micro-inverter based array.

[Sunking]

Cry me a river. It's a regulated monopoly so they sometimes have to do something that's not in line with what a free market robber baron would wish. Bait and switch would be one of those things.

Actually they are standing up for their paying customers. They are guaranteed a profit, and when forced to buy electricity from solar at twice the cost of wholesale, those cost are passed onto customers who cannot afford the luxury of having their blue collar neighbors pay for it. What you see now is the utilities fighting back and exposing the fraud. Those that bought into it knew it was risky, now they got holding the bag and looking for a bailout.

[ChrisOlson]

I'll check into that! Direct load shaving for my server farm while using the balance from the utility/forgetting about net-metering is precisely what I will want to do if the rate hikes go through. I liked the Outback system primarily because I could AC couple it to my micro-inverter based array.

Well, look at it this way - right now they're just going to raise fees and simply take 1/3 of everything you produce with your system. And they will do it because the PSC will adjust their rates and fees to maintain their built-in profit margins. That's what being a regulated monopoly is all about. You can't go broke, there is no competition, and if your bottom line isn't what the investors want, you just apply for a rate increase. The phones are ringing off the hook at the PSC because the investors are telling them EXACTLY what's gonna happen. It's a game you cannot win.

So here's the bottom line; it's going to cost you $6 Grand to put in two charge controllers, a battery-based inverter with control panel and remote monitoring/control (optional), a small 400ah 48V battery bank, and wire everything up. Do you want to do that and use 100% of what you put in for solar capacity, or just keep going like you are and give away 1/3 of everything you make with it? Just swallowing the pill and giving away 1/3 of everything you make will probably still be cheaper - because off-grid power is not cheap. But if it's a matter of principle, having the one of the most capable backup power systems for your server farm you could possibly put it in, and you don't mind the extra work of maintaining a battery-based system, then your $6 Grand will be money well spent. It gets you some independence that you will never have on the grid. And believe it or not, besides the location that most of us off-gridders choose to live, the independence part for us is one of the biggest reasons we do it.

[Sunking]

Server Farm on Solar?

Well this is what I do professionally, and no Telco or Data center uses solar as primary power. Google does but that is just PR, but they rely on UPS with great big diesel generators when power goes off.

[DanS26]

We need a technological breakthrough in either electrical storage or electrical transmission. Where is the future when you need it?......just around the corner for the last 20 years.

[ChrisOlson]

Well this is what I do professionally, and no Telco or Data center uses solar as primary power. Google does but that is just PR, but they rely on UPS with great big diesel generators when power goes off.

That's exactly what the XW inverter does. Power can go out and it will keep the servers lit on battery power until the generator is needed. And there is not even a 1/10th of a cycle glitch when the the power goes out, or the generator comes online and takes over.

The server boxes in question consume 11 kWh/day, so their running load is 460 watts. A small 400ah 48V battery bank on a XW inverter will power those server boxes for 19 hours in the absence of utility AND solar power, with plenty of reserve. All those OfficeMax little battery UPS units do is keep them running long enough to safely shut them down when the power goes out.

XW's are used all over the world for critical load backup power on grid connected systems because they are one of the few that have the ability to sync their sine waves on single phase 230V European, or US split-phase or three-phase systems with both grid and generator, and they have both grid and generator AC inputs.

[kwilcox]

You're pretty much spot on ChrisOlson; My system draws an average of 465W. It's a pretty good match to my array that can produce 5.1mWh/year too. Of course, this is peanuts compared to a real data center. I work at one of those and we have double diesel backup against two independent POCO feeds. I use the home farm as a lab mostly with some low hit-count web hosting.

It's actually a perfect candidate for a primary PV feed because my QOS agreements are best effort. I was down for 2 days this year during a power outage & didn't lose any customers. My wife had to drive the lines herself and call in that a tree branch was arcing on a feeder before they prioritized us and sent a repair crew...

I'll take a serious look into the XW series. If pricing does end up being around 6K then that'll be the same as the 30 year penalty I'll pay to WE Energies if their rate case is ratified and no additional rate hikes occur over that same time period. I'd be an idiot if I believed that was going to happen...

[ChrisOlson]

I suspect, but don't know for sure, that folks with a battery-based inverter on a utility connected system probably have an advantage over off-grid for costs in maintaining the batteries. We've had one cell in our bank that's been "lagging" a bit on SG for the last month. I haven't worried about it much as I figured I'd fix it when I serviced the batteries for the fall. Well, I decided today was the day to service our batteries.

So I started equalizing that string with the lazy cell and ran out of solar for the day and only got that cell up to 1.245. On grid power you could just use your utility power to finish the job. I got a choice - either wait until tomorrow when I'll be too busy to mess with it so the solar can do more EQ on it. Or use the genset. Well, see here?



3 hours, 35 minutes and 32 seconds of genset time and only 5.7 kWh to fix that lazy cell tonight. Now, I'll tell you what - those were some expensive kilowatt-hours with the freaking genset running at just about zero load just to fix a battery cell. I even went into the house and asked my wife, who was real content watching her TV program, "hey - don't you have SOMETHING you can turn on? I got the generator goin." Nope - not tonight - she's busy and don't have time to turn anything on.

I got about two hours of battery cooking out of the solar panels and 3-1/2 out of the genset to get that stupid cell up to 1.265. That's what can make off-grid power really expensive. But you either do it or you end up with a bigger problem later.

[kwilcox]

A true storage breakthrough is going to have you grinning... It's like an Ebola cure. They will develop it when enough people need it. Elon Musk is one big example currently. POCO policy may add more to the mix. Maybe that is why Morgan Stanley and Barclays bank are issuing warnings to the commercial energy sector.

[ChrisOlson]

A true storage breakthrough is going to have you grinning... It's like an Ebola cure. They will develop it when enough people need it. Elon Musk is one big example currently. POCO policy may add more to the mix. Maybe that is why Morgan Stanley and Barclays bank are issuing warnings to the commercial energy sector.

That's true. There's a company that has a saltwater battery that I believe is currently marketing it for grid energy storage. They are huge and heavy, which doesn't make much difference for stationary applications. But they are supposed to be available to the off-grid market soon, although I don't know about price. They have like 7,000 cycle life to 0% SOC and I know one guy that was beta testing one on off-grid and was impressed with it. He can't say much about it due to NDA. But it is coming.

[kwilcox]

That's true. There's a company that has a saltwater battery that I believe is currently marketing it for grid energy storage. They are huge and heavy, which doesn't make much difference for stationary applications. But they are supposed to be available to the off-grid market soon, although I don't know about price. They have like 7,000 cycle life to 0% SOC and I know one guy that was beta testing one on off-grid and was impressed with it. He can't say much about it due to NDA. But it is coming.

Flow batteries? I'm tracking that myself. They also have automotive applications. There is a prototype on the market that uses them today. The low voltage issue is overcome using parallel capacitor based storage. Very expensive now (like any new tech) but a good example of why I believe that the automotive industry is going to have a huge impact on storage tech development.

Hey, are you anywhere near Townsend? My father in law has a cabin there. I end up in Townsend often.

[russ]

A true storage breakthrough is going to have you grinning... It's like an Ebola cure. They will develop it when enough people need it. Elon Musk is one big example currently. POCO policy may add more to the mix. Maybe that is why Morgan Stanley and Barclays bank are issuing warnings to the commercial energy sector.

I see - it is a conspiracy? Like the 100 mpg carb?

Don't get too caught up in the "they are holding it back" BS.

[J.P.M.]

A true storage breakthrough is going to have you grinning... It's like an Ebola cure. They will develop it when enough people need it. Elon Musk is one big example currently. POCO policy may add more to the mix. Maybe that is why Morgan Stanley and Barclays bank are issuing warnings to the commercial energy sector.

Most often when financial slugs and others issue warnings such as that my cynical nature reminds me that such things are done for manipulation purposes, especially when I observe the warnings are not universal or even counter to what other financial slugs are saying.

Still - whoever comes up with a workable, scalable and flexible solution to the energy storage challenge will be the next Bill Gates. Maybe that will me Musk, but his methods remind me too much of P.T. Barnum. Maybe I'll be proven wrong. In this case, I'd like that. I could get my EV quicker.

Perhaps energy storage could be another chance for the utilities to get out in front of an issue after standing around with their thumbs in their collective butt and letting rooftop solar get away from them. Nice foresight on that one.

[SunEagle]

That's true. There's a company that has a saltwater battery that I believe is currently marketing it for grid energy storage. They are huge and heavy, which doesn't make much difference for stationary applications. But they are supposed to be available to the off-grid market soon, although I don't know about price. They have like 7,000 cycle life to 0% SOC and I know one guy that was beta testing one on off-grid and was impressed with it. He can't say much about it due to NDA. But it is coming.

More than likely the energy storage system that does come to market (if ever) will be on the large and expensive side and used by the Utility or Government. The chance of getting something a home can use in a price range that the masses can purchase will still be a long way out.

All I know if that unless Germany gets something real quick they are in deep do-do. As they shut down their nuclear generation they have been increasing the use of their coal fired plants to keep their grid stable.

Nice way to be Green.