Getting a better Energy deal - WHAT A JOKE!

[FenceFurniture]

Having customers less reliant on the infrastructure isn't good for their business. But it does mean they don't have to build as much new infrastructure, which is really where we are with elec - we need some new stuff urgently. We have to play the long AND the short game here.

Plus the infrastructure is required not only services the residential sector but commercial businesses who cannot simply go off the grid/solar as easily (many don't own the building for eg to install solar). Which is the other sad truth, electricity retailers don't care about residential customers as residential customers are the crumbs compared to commercial businesses. Plus they already subsidise the cost of electricity for residential customers so providing further rebates to help consumers become less reliant isn't good business.

I imagine that the vast majority of businesses are in rented properties, which is different to residential (maybe not opposite, but certainly skewed that way). Furthermore, the cost is a tax-ded for a business, which is a considerable help to affordability.

I don't disagree that electricity retailers don't care about residential customers, but not for the reasons you cite. I would have thought that residential elec consumption would be the backbone of the retailers business (ignoring the relatively small amount of super-consumers like Alcoa, BHP etc) because of the sheer numbers involved. Residences use elec 24/7 but businesses are often/mostly just for 8-10 hours for five days, with no showers/baths/washing/drying/pools using the vast majority of juice.

[woodPixel]

I wonder why there aren't long term investment funds, like Super schemes, that invest in solar panels on other people's roofs? (should be rooves, stupid english).

Dont want to put them on yourself? No problem, Solar Super will do it for you! They are ours and when you sell, the rights stay with us for the life of the building.

If needed, the panels and inverters can be moved back into the pool and put on other homes if it is demolished.

Im sure the Chinese would do a deal on 30 million panels!

Maybe, just maybe, as super schemes start losing colossal dollars (as they are soon to report, given negative bond yields) that they dont start investing in direct revenue streams (not company shares). This scheme may just be mandated... e.g all funds must invest X% in this, this and that.....

[tonzeyd]

[/B]

I don't disagree that electricity retailers don't care about residential customers, but not for the reasons you cite. I would have thought that residential elec consumption would be the backbone of the retailers business (ignoring the relatively small amount of super-consumers like Alcoa, BHP etc) because of the sheer numbers involved. Residences use elec 24/7 but businesses are often/mostly just for 8-10 hours for five days, with no showers/baths/washing/drying/pools using the vast majority of juice.

I used to think this was the case, but after working as a consultant in the area there is a massive gap between residential customers vs businesses. Yes there are significantly more residential customers than commercial, but collectively commercial businesses use alot more.

Yes i agree businesses are open 8-10 hours a day but the electricity consumption habits are significantly different. Just think of your typical electricity consumption at home, how often is every light in your premises on? whereas the first thing a business does is turn on every light in the premises, plus businesses have an OSH requirement to have lighting at a certain amount of lumens, whereas residential customers just purchase globes that they are "happy" to live with. Then you've got machinery which often times are made to perform rather than save electricity. Plus alot of the functions that residential consumers have businesses have but at a commercial scale, eg washing machines, drying, hot water systems, electric doors, lifts, escalators, heating/cooling which is often on irrespective of outdoor temperature, and then theres lighting at night time simply to balance the load on the grid. i can go on but i digress.

Plus the other reason why retailers don't care about residential customers is because residential and a good chunk of businesses (in WA) don't have a choice. Whereas as a business when you purchase a significant amount of electricity (~$10k pa) you can choose your provider and therefore retailers are very keen to keep your business.

Also the proof is in the pudding, if you want to know if your retailer cares next time you contact your retailer try calling the line for a commercial businesses and try calling the line for residential customers. I'll be surprised if you get better service calling the residential customer line.

[FenceFurniture]

If this "aside" post kicks off any longer discussion then I may ask to get it moved to its own thread, but in the meantime....

I had cause to do a couple of house designs recently, and obviously Solar Panels would be part of this. So that means that the roof needs to be designed to make the best use of things for a particular block of land.

This proved to be quite challenging, and with many things to consider.

Conventional wisdom says:

1. Panels should be elevated to the same degree as your latitude. This is the best compromise angle. I say "Tosh" to this.
2. Panels are best to be flat against the roof - this is cheaper than elevating them beyond the roof pitch. I say "Yes" to this.
3. Panels should be North facing to make the most use of the available sun (in the southern hemi). I say "Maybe, but it depends..." to this.

Looking at point 2 first, this means that the roof pitch should be whatever the panels pitch should be.

Looking at point 3 next, (coz Point 1 could be lively ) I would be inclined to put up about 50 panels if I could. The rebates are good and are about to start diminishing from Jan 18 at 1/14th per year for 14 years, and as a long term investment I think it is sound. Electric cars will be a thing of the future and when batteries are viable we will need significantly bigger batteries that they think we do now - especially depending on how far we drive each day. The reasons why I think 50 panels would be good are:

• It is a cold climate, so heating levels are increased (although proper insulation, design and passivity should help greatly with that)
• There would be someone at the premises virtually all day/every day so heating or air-con could be running a fair bit (esp heating)
• There would be a juice hungry bunch of machines in a large workshop . These also produce heat so air-con comes into play even more.
• Electric cars are coming - probably at about the same speed as decent affordable batteries
• Until batteries are viable (maybe 4-5 years) enough juice needs to be sent back into the grid during the day to largely offset the usage in the low/non elec production hours (and these are largely the peak usage hours). When batteries are hooked up the feed-in tariffs will just be more bonus for any excess power generated
• Having 50 panels means that some could be devoted to North-East and North-West presentation to make more elec earlier and later than with just North facing. This might account for 16 panels (8x NE, 8x NW). This of course depends on the specifics of the block and shading etc from other houses/hills/whatevers.

Noo then. Point 1, the elevation of the panels, which could provoke some discussion......I'll make that a separate post.

[FenceFurniture]

Also the proof is in the pudding, if you want to know if your retailer cares.....

What? You think I don't know the answer to that alright already? After what I have been through?

Not sure what sort of professional aspect you are coming from (i.e within elec industry or not), but I have no doubt that fletty would have the numbers of the large industry/small industry/residential mix in his head.

[FenceFurniture]

Conventional wisdom says:

1. Panels should be elevated to the same degree as your latitude. This is the best compromise angle. I say "Tosh" to this.

Roight den. Let the games commence.


Some givens:

1. The latitude here is 34°
2. therefore Equinox zenith is 34°
3. The tilt of the Earth is 23½°
4. Summer solstice zenith is 10° (34 - 23½)
5. Winter solstice zenith is 57° (34 + 23½)

So panels at 34° are optimised for maximum production at the two Equinoxes, around March 22 and Sept 22. However, these are in fact periods where no heating or cooling may be necessary, or it could be some of each (we've had a fireplace going Xmas Day). Certainly it is unlikely that either system would be run extensively around the equinox - it is probably the most energy "lite" part of the year.Let's define that as 1 month either side of each Equinox.

That gets me to thinking that perhaps there should be two angles of panels set up, particularly if there are around 50 panels. That would then cater for optimising for 4 periods of the year in which there would be higher demands for heating and cooling, rather than optimising for just 2 periods that have much less energy demand.

So 4 months of low draw have been knocked out, which leaves 8 months to satisfy - one angle each for two periods of 4 months will do it. These 4 month periods will straddle the Solstices, so if an angle halfway between the Soltice Zenith and the Equinox angle is selected it will get covered twice (on the way into each Solstice, and on the way out). They would also provide better solar capture for the Solstice periods (and therefore maximum and sustained heat/cool draw), rather than the 34° compromise.

The angles should be:

• (34 + 10)/2 = 22° for Summer and
• (34 + 57)/2 = 45° for Winter

Now given that Winter elec producing hours are much shorter than Summer the number of panels should probably be split accordingly

The 50 panels might be split like:

• 8 facing east, 8 facing west (or perhaps northeast and northwest to again skew it towards winter). Maybe on a 34° roof?
• 20 on the 45° roof (because there are a great many heating days)
• 14 on the 22° roof (because there are not too many air-con days.....yet)

It makes designing the roof somewhat.....ah.....tricky, to say the least. Particularly when you have to take in the aspect of the land, the desired floorplan, location of other houses, trees, Council requirements. You get the idea....eez difficult.


Incidentally, for those who don't know, Solar Panels don't work on heat - they work on light, and in fact heat makes them less efficient (colder temps allow for a higher voltage to be produced). I think that light is specifically UV (IIRC) so they work best at altitude for two reasons: colder with higher UV.

[FenceFurniture]

....Oh alright so it doesn't BUT it does create more usable electricity for those without a battery. Think about it - the elec producing hours are shifted forward an hour, into the peak draw time. So you lose an hour in the morning when the draw is low but you get an extra hour in the late arvo when the draw is high.

[Chris Parks]

Remember that the poorest households will almost certainly be tenants, so they won't have much chance of talking the landlord into it. Just recently I attempted to do exactly that with my excellent and reasonable landlord. My argument was very well reasoned and cogent, with the correct -ve gearing figures put in, and it showed a very low longer term investment (esp considering that this is her retirement home in 8-10 years from now). The answer was a flat "No" - even with a modest rent increase thrown in to help, so I reckon I know how virtually all landlords would react.

As I said in a previous post, not all houses have a roof shape/aspect etc that is suitable, so those people miss out too, through no fault of their own. That is another reason why it has to be a community based approach.

My comments were directed at the new householder who in the first ten or so years of ownership generally find they have no discretionary money to spend on big capital improvement items cash poor could be a better term.

[fletty]

In response to earlier posts;

• About 80% of outages by time lost, occur at the 11kV level and therefore have nil to very little to do with generation. It is mostly to do with critical equipment failure even though the majority of Australian networks are designed to N-1 standard. 'N-1' means that any single piece of equipment can fail without causing an outage but if 2 pieces fail, then......? The second biggest outage mode is inadvertent damage such a vehicles hitting poles, accidental cable dig ups, animals and vandalism.
• Re outages due to lack of generation, (In NSW for example) by far the bulk of electricity is transmitted to the 3 distribution utilities by Transgrid, the transmission utility. Their Control room is constantly monitoring the input into their system from the generators and the output to the 3 utilities (plus (I think) 2 mega customers. If it looks like the required output is going to exceed the input, Transgrid advise the 3 utilities who will implement very well planned and rehearsed load shedding actions. IF THIS DIDNT HAPPEN, then the whole network can collapse, as happened in the North East USA about 20 years ago. The consequence of a complete collapse is horrendous and requires what is known as a 'black start' to get the network up again. A 'black start' is also planned and rehearsed but can obviously only be a virtual exercise. The problem is that you require electric power to start a generator and, if you don't have that power, then.....
• Back in the 'old days' there would have been less than a dozen inputs to the system (= generators) and that made the monitoring of the system as above fairly easy BUT there are now thousands of input points some of these are effected by no wind, others by no sunshine, flat seas, low water levels etc and so the constant matching of input to output is infinitely more complicated and hence has had to be automated. Don't forget that you have to exactly match input to output + losses. There is no such thing as surplus electricity or at least there isn't until storage becomes significant. That is the reason why storage is so essential to stabilise a network that has thousands of inputs and millions of outputs many of which vary by environmental and human factors that can't be controlled nor forecast by the network operators.
• The fact that we can flick a switch and 99.998% of the time there is power available, is a minor miracle!

[Bushmiller]

Brett

Roof pitch may not be viable. Remember that solar is already an expensive form of power at the moment. The additional costs involved in making either the roof a different pitch (1/4 pitch or 22 1/2 degs is fairly standard in Australia) or adjustable angle would probably price it out of the market. One day solar tracking might solve this problem and large scale installations will have that facility already. The Solar thermal has to have that, but if the reflectors suffer a malfunction many can be blinded!

Solar PV loose their efficiency as the temp climbs above 25 degs C so not that hot in Australian conditions. You make a good point about Autumn and Spring. These are traditionally the quiet periods where the big generators organise their scheduled maintenance with one or more units down for extended periods. Of course a sudden and unexpected heatwave causes high prices.

One other point: Go back thirty years and winter was the peak electricity useage period, but with the commonplace advent of air conditioners summer has taken over that spot easily.

Regards
Paul

[FenceFurniture]

Cockups & incompetence are now officially on an industrial scale.

Way back in post #1:
I had not had my regular Gas bill issued after 16th Sept

yap

yap

yap

What's next, I wonder?

there IS more......

yap

yap

yap

I think there must be about 6-8 cockups in that lot above, which makes a mere dozen or so for the day. A superb effort indeed!

Not even a WHISPER of sympathy (AND it was back on topic)

[FenceFurniture]

Roof pitch may not be viable. Remember that solar is already an expensive form or power at the moment. The additional costs involved in making either the roof a different pitch (1/4 pitch or 22 1/2 degs is fairly standard in Australia)

Yeah, and 45° is hell difficult to work on once it's built. Not to mention having different parts of the roof at different angles being a probable eyesore.

So I think the answer there is to make the roof ¼ pitch at 22½° and then just lift up the "Winter" panels with the extenders that they have. They add a little cost which would be easily offset by the cheaper roof (and probably just in terms of less sheet steel apart from anything else).

[Bohdan]

...just lift up the "Winter" panels with the extenders that they have. They add a little cost which would be easily offset by the cheaper roof (and probably just in terms of less sheet steel apart from anything else).

Looked at this option when I installed my system but for the extra cost in the tilt increase you can just add more panels and get the same output in winter with lots more in summer.

[Bushmiller]

Funnily enough I have gone down the adjustable angle path, but not with our Solar PV installation (5KW). A while back we decided to put in a small pond. i wanted to pump the water to avoid stagnation and a mossie haven so I bought a pump, panels and planned on using a battery. I made up adjustable frames so that I could increase the angle for winter and maximise my capture of the sun. It is an amazing idea, but completely untried as after two years there have been any number of projects that have taken priority.

The point of this is the principle, sound, but in practice not so good unless it was automated ( and some clown got off his {posterior} and did a bit.)

Regards
Paul

[fletty]

Not even a WHISPER of sympathy (AND it was back on topic)

Sorry, will send suitably sympathetic emoji.....

uhhm, no...

nah

probably not

maybe......

that's it!