But the solar electricity is still overpriced and taxed. People pay several times more for solar electricity from the grid than what they get if they sell to the grid.
It's not overpriced. If it was, the grid operator would be raking in massive profits because they're selling way above cost. In reality grid operators have small margins, this indicates there is no overpricing.
Do you get paid less for power fed to the grid than power sold at retail? Yes. Because they're different things. You get say 5 cents for a kWh fed back to the grid, while you pay more like 25c. But guess what? Wholesalers also get 5 cents to sell to the grid. It's just that there's an additional 20 cents in grid operation and taxes for a retail price.
Taxes you can't avoid, it's not a 'scam'. It's money you pay that goes into public funds and returns to the public, and is spent by people you can vote to elect to represent you.
Grid costs also aren't a scam, they're just a cost of doing business. Again, profit margins are small, so they're pricing based on cost, not based on scam.
And it's all entirely optional. You can just install batteries yourself. You can do whatever you want. You don't have to use the grid. But surprise surprise, there's no reason to think that a small network is on average cheaper than a big network. The bigger the network the easier it is to share storage capacity and offload excesses from one place to another. It's the reason most states and countries try to build interconnectors to even build international grids, and why islands like Cyprus that don't interconnect and have small markets have the highest electricity prices. It's why anyone who builds a home and has the choice to connect to an available grid or not, does so. And why land and homes in locations without grid-access are valued less, because they're more expensive to set-up.
The cost of a nationwide grid is significant. Depending on the terrain and population density, it usually nets out at somewhere between 30%-50% the overall cost of electricity. Sure, if you run a microgrid among a few houses, you won't pay those costs, but someone has to pay the cost to maintain the km of lines to reach deep into the mountains of Bavaria.
Microgrids also have some black swan events that can result in outage; if you are reliant on solar and storage but then experience a 7-day long period of stormy weather and no production. As you note, off-grid is always an option, and when you seriously look into it, you quickly find that costs to have that 24/7/365 service are many times more than just paying to connect to the grid.
At least in the us - the only way a utility can really make more money is by spending more money (as they get a return from the utility commission on a vested capital - massive oversimplification) but it means utilities are not incentivized to spend less rather than more…
Same in Australia, after they were corporatised (turned into companies run for profit rather than run as a service by some level of government) it was recognised that as natural monopolies there would need to be some sort of regulation on how much money they could recover, it was decided a method based on their costs was best, so they spent bad money agter good im expanding the network hugely (based on crazy projections of growth in demand to nowhere) rather than building resilience into the network and lowering their costs.
And that’s not even the cost of marketisation, that’s just the regulated network costs.
The government employees who approve or deny the utility’s priced have an incentive to not approve higher prices. Their bosses are usually elected, and higher utility prices are very unpopular.
I was told by a former southern company exec that the McKinsey did a study for them and their largest competitive advantage was regulatory capture in the states in which they operate - unfortunately I think the politicians are more beholden to the utilities than their constituents..
If you are selling to the grid, there is probably over-supply. Prices are driven by supply and demand. If you want to avoid selling at lower prices and buying at higher, try and get a battery. Check ecoflow to get an idea of the costs.
Ecoflow is a good example of overpriced American tech. I payed $1500 for a 2 kWh battery. Our Fiberhood coop sells a 16kWh battery for $1800. Prices in China are lower still.
Is that available in the US? Can you share a link? That’s an amazing deal. I’ve been recommending server rack batteries (5kwh for $750) to people but if there is something better I’d love to see it.
Prices have been dropping like crazy as the various battery manufacturers have been competing with each other. They are all pretty similarly priced at this point.
A 2kwh ecoflow now costs $800. Still overpriced, but the gap is steadily narrowing.
Also, $1800 for 16kwh is a great price. That's $112/kWh. That's pretty close to raw cell costs.
Does the battery pack also come with charge circuitry, inverter, bms?
The price for grid power ought to be somewhat higher than the the grid operator(s) pay at the place where the power is delivered into the grid plus their own costs for running the actual grid. So what do you think is a fair price for building/maintaining/running the grid?
The grid is a nationwide electrical circuit with requirements to connect to most buildings, and with demanding uptime and safety requirements. How much ought building and maintaining that to cost?
It’s really not - we built a rather large solar plant for one of our facilities offsetting like at most like 15% of demand, but because we were paying high utility rates it was a low double digit ROI project just on the spread between us it commercial rates and our cost of production (even higher when you added in the tax incentives) if you can build solar at utility scale costs and defray commercial or retail rates it’s a pretty good deal the problem is getting those utility scale cost structures when the projects are small…
The value of electricity is extremely time dependent. You can easily overproduce solar power for your house during the day fairly cheaply. However batteries + gas generators for cloudy day quickly make the cost significantly higher.
The grid gives you expensive guarantees about reliability. Just giving power does not do that.
You can sign up by becoming a member of the Fiberhood cooperative for free. Send an email to Fiberhood at icloud dot com. We must have your address and map location link or Google map address code so we can draw maps and make a website for your neighborhood to sign up and form an Enernet.
We will do a small survey and put up a detailed map of your neighborhood (like openstreetmap, see the slide in this talk [1]). We hand out door to door flyers and organise a weekend barbeque neighborhood party where everyone can come see how the cable between neighbours goes roof-to-roof, window-to-window or garden-to-garden between power routers. See our cost price bifacial solar panels and the large batteries.
We find that within a few weeks a few hundred people signed up for the cooperative and we start installing the first 10 houses. Most people invest in solar panels and batteries at wholesale prices installed by volunteers. Others get a loan to pay for this. You wind up getting payed for the panels you bought or paying around 1 dollar cent per kWh, saving a few thousand dollars per years for decades.
In the US the Rocky Mountain Institute and its founder Amory Lovins describes this as 'grid defection' and it happens on a large scale now.
Fiberhood has cooperatives forming all around the world, both rural and urban: Ukraine, Peru (near Iquitos by the Indian tribe on the Amazon River Bank, Southern Spain, Slovenia, Finland, The Netherlands, Australia.
Hi, I tried to find more details of this initiative which sounds quite interesting (I'm living in Belgium) but it seems there is no website or summary info available - is the only way to learn more about the model a 4h lecture recording? Would you have any kind of package or info you can share on how this really works, wha the financing model is, etc?
We used to have a public website but Enernet is a technical and political solution for whole communities, companies and factories, not for single individuals.
Please send an email to Fiberhood at icloud dot com with the location of the proposed Enernet smart grid and we'll find out if there is enough interest in your neigborhood (around 10 participants) to set it up.
Enernet is a high tech solution for getting the best ,cheapest, sustainable energy, internet, mobile phone, transport (cars, busses, trucks) and housing in a neighborhood for people and companies.
If you wire up all buildings with fiber and cables to each other you can replace the national grid, its laws, taxes and always high prices with a solar energy system at cost price, saving several thousand euro's per house per year. Instead we put an abundance of solar cells up and install insulation, thermal and electrical storage tailored to the local situation. We fund it from the large savings we create. The participants will decide what will be installed, so every Enernet smart grid is different. Our Fiberhood coop has special electronics that make batteries a lot cheaper and safer and replace the National AC grid with a DC grid that has almost no transmission losses. We also distribute 25 Gbps internet and establish a small datacenter to heat water cheaply with the waste heat. The savings from all your utility bills pay for the installation and upkeep of the Enernet network.
The Fiberhood planner maps are in the first slides in the first minute of the video. We used to have an interactive zooming map of Fiberhoods for every house in the Netherlands online but now we only have them available for Fiberhood members because of privacy rules. On the maps you can see where the batteries, solar panels and power routers are located in a Fiberhood version of Google Streetview.
Yes and no, not really. There are many smart grids and more not-so smart grids around the world, but only a few are non-commercial or owned by the members.
Fiberhood is unique in that we have our own Enernet power routers (a software controlled multi-port bidirectional AC-DC-DC inverter peer to peer network) that can share large amounts of DC current, has special power aggregation to enable megawatt EV chargers in every house, battery nano-inverters that make cheap batteries last up to 20000 charge/discharge cycles, integrate (free) discarded solar panels and has a range of software defined networking options including 4 x 25 Gbps internet ports per house. Most smart grids are just a different meter and payment scheme, not a radical rewiring of the entire electricity system in the neighborhood without a commercial company or government controlling what citizens pay. Other smart grids raise the cost of grid defection, Fiberhood tech makes it possible to have abundant redundant solar energy at its cost price $0.01 per kWh, many times cheaper than national AC grid pricing anywhere in the world. The tech was made to prevent making money on energy but incentivize solving the climate crises by making Solar by far the cheapest option. Stop almost all carbon and methane greenhouse gas emissions by going 100% solar.
Thank you for pointing out I need to improve the explanations.
We made seven different implementations of Morphle Logic, some of which are lower power, use less transistors, different ways to do asynchronous logic or are based on superconducting josephson junctions instead of transistors.
In this particular case the two tokens probably consume the same amount of power regardless of their value, but only measurements will tell.
The RoarVM [1] is a research project that showed how to run Squeak Smalltalk on thousands of cores (at one point it ran on 10,000 cores).
I'm re-implementing it as a metacircular adaptive compiler and VM for a production operating system. We rewrite the STEPS research software and the Frank code [2] on a million core environment [3]. On the M4 processor we try to use all types of cores, CPU, GPU, neural engine, video hardware, etc.
$6500 depending on VAT. But 10-12 times M4 Mac mini's with 100 Gbps networking gives you triple the cores and 160 GB with 2.5 times the memeory bandwith if the sharding of the NN layers is done right.
$6500!! You may as well buy 5x3090s for $1000 each for 120GB ram, spend the extra $1500 on the sundries.
Like, I'm sure Nvidia is aware of Apple's "unified memory" as an alternative to their cards and yet...they aren't offering >24GB consumer cards yet, so clearly they don't feel threatened.
Don't get me wrong, I've always disliked Apple as a company, but the M series chips are brilliant, I'm writing this on one right now. But people seem to think that Apple will be able to get the same perf increases yoy when they're really stretching process limits by dumping everything onto the same die like that - where do they go from here?
That said Nvidia is using HBM so it does make me wonder why they aren't also doing memory on package with HBM, I think SK Hynix et al were looking at making this possible.
I'm glad we're headed in the direction of 3d silicon though, always seemed like we may as well scale in z, I imagine they can stack silicon/cooling/silicon/cooling etc. I'm sure they can use lithography to create cooling dies to sandwich between everything else. Then just pass connections/coolant through those.
As an Apple developer for 42 years I tried all permutations I could think of and found there is no way around the walled garden:
Apple Invites requires a mandatory iCloud+ account (minimal 0.99 euro/dollar per month) and a non-anonymous Apple ID requirement with credit card or bank account. It probably has a perpetual lock-in of your invite groups and tracking of all participants as well but I couldn't test this properly without paying 12 Euros.
In these comments there is a distinction between between activating the private personal Starlink accounts of user morphle and activating the Starlink accounts of other people by the same person on behalf of a rural internet coöperative in other countries.
We also helped rural Spain, rural Ukraine and on other continents and islands with setting up optical mesh and satellite internet, most of which had Starlink links as backup.
Our main project is an asynchronous wafer scale integration, a 1000 core asynchronous processors with 300 Megabyte of asynchronous SRAM (300 Kilobyte per core) and a huge Morphle Logic, our ‘asynchronous’ gate array.
A $600 supercomputer running Squeak Smalltalk and a GUI.
The second is a $5 10 core processor with 6 Megabyte memory for IoT, gigabit ethernet and Morphle Logic to compress video streams Squeak Smalltalk over ethernet. Much faster than a Raspberry PI 4 with a 4K camera, but not $100 but just $5 total cost.
> though more as a spectator than a participant in recent years,
That is a pity, I was hoping you would be a grad student or similar that could do a Masters or PhD thesis writing our software for the asynchronous manycore processor and the ‘asynchronous’ gate array.
Maybe you can help me locate another student who would do his masters with us?
Any volunteer would be helpful, it's just that we don't pay any salaries. But we do hand out samples......
I had a lecture on a larger version of this, a million core wafer scale integration running Smalltalk: https://vimeo.com/731037615
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