LeSving wrote:
You can also go off the grid completely. Then solar panels will be very beneficial, but a battery would be essential.
The question as it is hyped here in news and papers is not so much of going off grid out of your free will, but we are led to believe that there is a very high probability that we will have massive outages this winter. Given that the same idiots have been pushing electric cars and shutting down nuclear powerplants, they now have a massive problem at their hands which they are incompetent to resolve.
So basically going off grid may not be optional but happen if you want or not.
Internet won’t play much or a role in such a case, at least not home based, however, loosing the capability to freeze or cool food and heat (in my case keep the pump and burner working) would lead to a collapse of society within several days (as also shops won’t be able to sell anything or cool food e.t.c. So the logical thing will be to stock dry and canned foods and to get some firewood for cooking or maybe the odd gas bottle.
I still am in denial that this is a valid scenario for Switzerland, which does not depend on russian gas, but it appears that our power will be taken by the Germans, who apparently are totally screwed over due to their shutting down all their NPP’s and depending 100% on Russian gas. IMHO, we should shut off the power exports in such a situation.
The price can fluctuate a factor 10 or more through the day.
That’s amazing. Never heard of such a thing anywhere. Is there a daily timetable of some sort? How does your electricity meter work??
but we are led to believe that there is a very high probability that we will have massive outages this winter.
It is possible, but I think unlikely. Civilisation is only 1 lunch away from anarchy 
When the communists last ran the UK (the coal mining unions, ~1973) we had power cuts of a few hours, but we managed.
Peter wrote:
That’s amazing. Never heard of such a thing anywhere. Is there a daily timetable of some sort? How does your electricity meter work??
That’s the spot price on the NordPool power exchange. We’ve actually seen fluctuations much larger than a factor 10 this summer. But that is what the power companies pay between themselves. The price is set by the hour in an auction the day before.
Most household consumers (at least in Sweden) pay a monthly average. (Unless they have a fixed-price contract.) But hour-per-hour charging where you pay the spot price plus some profit margin is also offered by some power companies and is getting more common. Most households already have meters which record the hourly (or perhaps even momentary) consumption and transmit to the power company.
If you have solar panels (pv) you can have a contract with the grid who will buy the excess electricity at the market rate. As it is the excess, if the grid goes offline you will not be selling or receiving from the grid. You have to make do with the electricity supplied from your panels.
Not good at night unless you have been able to store some in batteries which is of course possible on such a system.🙂
I disagree totally with Peter about solar water heaters. It does to some extent depend where you live. However, a farmer on Dartmoor UK bored a hole in all the plastic water bottles he seemed to be collecting and ran a black hose through them.
This hose he wrapped around 4 fence posts in a 1 metre square, 1 metre high. He pumped water from a nearby stream through the hose. The outlet from the hose went to a compressor which was powered by an old tractor battery (which he renovated) charged by a PV panel. The water from the compressor on an average day varied between 40° C and 80° C. It was fed through a copper coil to act as a heat exchanger for a hot water storage tank. He claimed he never had to use grid energy for his hot water requirements, and that often there was enough residual heat to warm his radiators enough to keep rooms which were not used at an ambient temperature of 14 °C to 16° C.
He further reckoned that with a little more thought and not at great cost he could make the system much more efficient by using forced air as well. His idea for this came from his discovery that even on very cold days, when he parked his Range Rover outside his house that it was surprising how warm it got inside as the sun shone through the glass.
This is just an brief example of some of the things he has done. He admits that he gets laughed at a lot in the pub until he tells them how much or how little he spends on energy. Most don’t believe him but he doesn’t care.
This is what I pay for today. Not much fluctuations, about 20% perhaps.
Until just a month ago, the prices where I live were super low. About € 0.002 per kWh. The electricity bill was more of a joke. But lately also we far up in the north are gradually beeing affected by the global shortage. Which means I have to start to pay attention
In southern part of Norway it has been wild Texas for some time, 10 times more than the price here today. It’s all due to the brainless way electricity production has been handled in the EU and the UK (to a minor degree) and the senseless way the utility companies in Norway try to profit on this with the blessing from politicians.
I have been, and is, instrumental in the process designing governing systems for powerplants enabling super fast balancing power through sea cables. The intention was to balance power from wind, not to completely empty Norwegian hydropower reserves though!!! (I guess I’m just too stupid myself. In hindsight the result was inevitable). The result is super high prices for households in Norway. In essence we are paying for brainless stupidity in EU through good old Norwegian greed. Putin has not exactly helped, but he is very far from being the cause of the mess.
Now, you could also go for flat rate, average rate and so on. These will however all be substantially more expensive than market rate. Today, almost no one in Norway have these other rates.
For me a Tesla battery and wood heating is the best option. Have to take a closer look at those batteries.
The end result of all this is a gradual transition to off-grid solutions. This is perhaps a good thing, I don’t know. A perfectly functioning grid like we had 20 years ago is much cheaper overall, and perhaps an order of magnitude more efficient. Things will eventually return at some point, but not without nuclear power, lots of nuclear power. It will take a long time.
the prices where I live were super low. About € 0.002 per kWh
No wonder people are talking about battery storage. This is a totally artificial situation. So, as with every artificial / market manipulative situation, it will be exploited. And they even tell you when the price will be low imminently… this is wonderful; like insider dealing (the only easy way to make money on the stock market) but 100% legal and with guaranteed profits
It is like a subsidy where you pay say €0.10/kWh for drawing power but get €0.30/kWh for feeding back into the grid. That has actually existed on the mainland; I forgot where. It is nonsense, unsustainable (to use the fashionable word), but everybody will install solar panels. Especially if they get a 50% grant. Even better – guarantee them at least €0.30/kWh for next 20 years. It’s a totally fake situation.
Things will eventually return at some point, but not without nuclear power, lots of nuclear power. It will take a long time.
I hope so. Russia is not going to go away anytime soon, its leaders will always be dictators bent on domination of surrounding countries (Russia has since ~1920 defined itself in terms of war and violence, and it is a natural and constant trait in most of the Russian population to accept this kind of “leadership” as normal), its natural resources will not go away and they will always need to sell the stuff, and morally corrupt European politicians will continue to build their multiple-of-4-years careers on prosperity which was purchased by supporting that evil regime.
Peter wrote:
This is a totally artificial situation. So, as with every artificial / market manipulative situation, it will be exploited.
It depends on what you mean by “artificial”. This is an unregulated market without government intervention. Obviously that market is not working very well and the EU is preparing regulation of it right now.
How can € 0.002 per kWh represent anything in the real world?
Peter wrote:
It is like a subsidy where you pay say €0.10/kWh for drawing power but get €0.30/kWh for feeding back into the grid. That has actually existed on the mainland; I forgot where.
We had something like that in Germany in the early 2000s, it was called “Einspeisevergütung” (roughly: “feed-in reward”) for renewables. Germany became world leader in the solar panel industry back then. The same industry collapsee when the Merkel government drastically lowered these subsidies. Nowadays PV panels are mostly made in China.
This is a totally artificial situation
Very far from it. Look at it as an auction. It’s the exact same thing as buying/selling oil and gas, or steel or whatever.
What IS artificial is flat rates, average rates and so on.
The consumer does not participate in the auction. But unlike oil and gas, the consumer have a choice of paying the exact cost at the exact time, or go flat rate, average rate etc. Clearly the best choice is market price, because with any other option, the utility will put on some factor due to the unknown future price. You could get lucky of course, but in the long run you will lose money, especially with flat rate.
This has worked just fine for 20 or so years. But, as explained, it doesn’t really work for the benefit of the consumer, when there is a huge shortage of energy. That isn’t correct. It still works, its more that the shortage is human made, and this shortage benefits the utilities and not the consumers (in Norway).
To understand how it works, to understand electricity production and distribution at all, you have to first understand the difference between power and energy in a physical sense, in s market sense, and in a grid sense. Reading and talking to people, especially proponent of wind, my impression is that not even half of them have a clue whatsoever.
A thermal power plant, be it nuclear or whatever else, is an immensely stable producer of energy. What it lacks is the ability to follow the demand, the consumption. To do that, you need the ability to vary the production fast, accurate and efficiently. This means the ability to produce power on demand. Power is needed to stabilize the grid. Thermal power can only do that to a small degree. Power is both positive and negative in this respect.
A hydropower plant (with a reservoir) is in the unique position to produce stable energy as well as producing power on demand.
Traditionally a mix of thermal and hydro (could also be pumped storage), is the best of two worlds. Stable energy and lots of it + the ability to produce power on demand.
Market vise energy is much cheaper than power. To produce and absorb power is a much more refined product than energy. This is important, both the ability to produce and absorb power on demand are highly valuable products. The price of power is typically a factor 10 or more compared to the equivalent cost of energy. The price is reflected in the value it has in the grid.
Wind is neither. Wind is in reality an erratic production of power. It has a net negative value. You can look at it from an energy perspective also, and then you see that the entire energy production must be equalled with the exact same energy equivalent in the form of this refined ability to produce/absorb power on demand. It’s doable, but the cost of that energy will equal the cost of that power.
Look at how the cost of wind power is normally estimated. One wind turbine cost X amount of currency. It will produce on average Y GWh per year at operational cost of Z per year. It’s easy to find out what’s the price of that energy is, right? Wrong. It’s wrong because it has nothing to do with reality. The process of refining that erratic power into usable energy on the grid is not included.
This is one of the main reasons for the high prices on electricity. The more wind turbines we get, the worse it will become.
Solar is much better. One reason is because it can easily be scaled down to each household where it could make perfect sense economically.
