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.
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?
Of course it comes with our charge and discharge circuitry which is the inverter and also acts as the bms. As far as I am aware as a scientist, we are the only one in the world who charge each battery cell in parallel and slower or pulsed without maxing out or overheating, that's why we get 20000 discharge cycles versus the 5000-8000 the battery manufacture quotes.
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.
Fiberhood has an office in Tucson Arizona and will ship to the US if you want to to pay Trumps tariffs. I'm not aware of reasonably priced good battery or inverter makers in the US, besides ourselves (we are a non-profit so we are cheaper).
It is however not that simple to just give you a link, we need to hear from you for what electronics the software system needs to be fine-tuned. We need to understand what battery and electronics you need for each situation. As a scientist I know for a fact that no one in the world makes good battery systems yet, they are all wrongly designed (especially the ev and car batteries). You can easily spot that yourself, no one charges each individual battery cell individually in parallel. Everyone, including the scientists, charges battery packs in series and has battery management systems and ac-dc or dc-dc inverters that are not designed for the particular battery type and brand. Not a single one. If you ever find one that does charge and discharge each cell in parallel and slowly between 50% and 80%, please tell us and we'll tell the world. Right now only Fiberhood electronics charges cells correctly with specially made charger circuitry. The $0.50 to $2 networked printed circuit boards per battery cell we currently sell are the prototypes for the $0.10 battery charging microcontroller chips that we are making.
You can find dozens of Youtube influencers who test and or build cheap serially charged battery packs and your server rack batteries and inverter systems that you can find on professional China business directories, Tabao, Aliexpress and the like. But they are not exactly what you need and they damage your cells by charging them wrongly. No service, no warranties, no insurance, no buyers protection, buyer beware.
Be aware that ordering such systems directly in China is fraught with difficulties, its easy to lose your money.
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?
>So what do you think is a fair price for building/maintaining/running the grid?
Zero. I think we do not need the national grid and its vastly overpriced (order of magnitude) electricity anymore. A local DC grid, an abundance of solar and huge batteries is all you need.
For example in the Netherlands, 18 million people, 9 million houses or buildings, the national grid needs to triple in size and 1 million houses and almost 20.000 large companies are on a 10 year waiting list to get a connection (so the move abroad or build their own solar grid).
And even if you are on the grid, you pay 50% taxes and €0,31 to €0,78 per kWh. If you are on our Enernet, you only pay around €0.0044 per kWh ($0.0051756/kWh). That is 70 times to 177 times overpriced!!! (calculations in this thread lower down).
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.
