Quote:
Originally Posted by Rich H
Your writing reflects the two greatest common misunderstandings about the power grid. The first is the perception that pure generation is the most important grid component. Its not. Its the easy part. Transmission capacity and 24/7/365 system reliability are the hard parts.
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Transmission? Solar wants to be distributed be cause the sun doesn't shine hard enough on the power company property. Solar belongs co-located with the user, assuming they have south facing exposure. Not all of them do, but many places have south facing roofs. Doing so reduces pain of transmission; the watts travel many feet instead of many miles. If you mandate that solar to be a solution has to be owned and operated by the power companies and only on power company property, then solar has huge drawbacks beyond price of the panels and inverters.
Reliability? Do you mean what it used to be or the modern, lean-company style reliability? Our solar array has been in service for one year with zero failures. For the first decade we owned the house, we never had a power failure and rarely even took hits that would cause the microwave clock to reset. This last decade, we take hours-long failures every year and monthly hits (one of my computer UPS has died along the way). Here in the midwest we are still having glitches and drops a week after the lights went back on. One user is not statistically significant, I know, but I don't have access to AEP's uptime numbers.
The North American power network does not appear to have the same dedication to uptime that the phone network is known for. The North American phone network went 5 nines reliable back in the seventies, though I don't know if that is still the case.