Thanks to Lobbying, It's Tougher to Power Your Home with Solar Panels in Florida

Considering the retail cost of 100W and 200W solar panels, an 8-10KW inverter isn't THAT expensive and neither is an array of deep cycle marine batteries. Now if you want something like Tesla's powerwall that's going to cost quite a bit more.

I don’t understand what your trying to get at here.

Is it expensive to build an off-grid solar/battery system? Depends on how you are looking at it and if you are willing to adapt your lifestyle to it or not.

You need more in solar capacity (kWh) than you use in a typical day to go off grid and have it be sustainable. Since solar only runs for about 30% of the day at or near full output, and you need to run your home ~and~ recharge your batteries in that time, multiply your kW size requirement by a factor of 4-5 to get what you need in solar sizing.

A typical home with typical on-grid use patterns use will need on the order of 10kW or more of solar panels. If your willing to adapt your lifestyle, watch how you consume energy, time high/load activities with solar output, monitor and minimize battery cycling - you can get by with less. A single person on a very disciplined power budget might be able to get by with <1000W in panels - but that isn’t typical and it would be a pretty spartan power budget.

Also consider even with deep cycle batteries, your going to have to replace them periodically. About 5 years is average, 2 years isn’t uncommon, you might get lucky and get 7-8 years if you baby them. And your going to need more than 3 or 4 of them if you want to keep things like your fridge powered all night long. Off grid battery systems, to get enough storage to run all night and have decent lifespan, is typically a few thousand dollars worth of flooded lead acid deep cycles. Once you take into account the cycle life and amount of overprovisioning required to keep a useful lifespan and provide peak power/current - that’s where LiPo starts to give a better return than lead acid, even though it costs a lot more up front.

If you get a Habor Freight $199 10kW inverter, don’t be surprised if every appliance in your house starts to burn out on regular basis, or eat a set of batteries every 6 months. A quality off grid inverter, that can handle battery charge Control and utility grade voltage and frequency regulation is going to run about $4-6K for a typical house size (4-10kW).

Unless you really like that RV/camping lifestyle, it costs a good bit more than you would expect to have real, reliable off grid power. For nearly everyone, the utility rate is a pretty good deal. The only reasons solar is financially competitive are incentives/rebates, and Net Energy Metering. You take away either of those and solar all of a sudden has a very long payback compared to utility rates - and that especially includes off grid solar, as it won’t get NEM and has reoccurring storage replacement costs.
 
Nobody is shocked from this. Businesses want to stay in business and they'll flex their money muscle to put in unhealthy restrictions. BTW another fault of capitalism as I make it a rule to point out any fuckery that is the direct or indirect result of capitalism.

Being a NJsian we're had a sharp increase of solar powered homes due to the power company being very unreliable, plus electricity isn't cheap, so it makes sense to install solar. But if they had that sort of bullshit rule I would hook it up the way I want and they can try to stop me. Just make the power company into a public company and problem solved. Worse comes to worse I'll just run extension wires from a solar setup and not use the wiring in my home to distribute power. Would be better that way as I can try to power equipment that's pure DC as having a DC to AC and back to DC conversion is a huge waste of power. I would definitely need a DC PC power supply, which would be smaller and more efficient than the giant 700w hundreds of dollars junks they sell today.

Also this is how a Tesla power wall works and it looks fantastic. Dude even powers his car with this setup. I need this shit.



Except this "fuckery" is a result of Corporatism (statism), not Capitalism.

The power companies have thrown their weight around to influence a negative outcome for their competitors (personal solar panel and single home interconnect system/circuitry manufacturers, in regards to this topic) to essentially regulate those competitors out of consumer feasibility. Throw some Socialism (more statism) into the mix where the government regulates/controls the means of production (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) while hammering these small businesses with exorbitant tax rates and special fees while giving the entrenched big dogs huge subsidies and tax breaks/loopholes, and now we are left with a mere illusion that any/all smaller competing companies can actually provide for the betterment of society.
 
Oil, gas, and coal are just better for everyone though. They suck more subsidies than renewables, they employ less people than renewables, and they're slowly killing us.

It's a win/win/win.
Even better, how about dropping the gas tax from which the subsidies are derived?

How appealing will these alternates be, when they are taxed at the same rate?
 
You are on the right path, however I wanted to add a little information to your post.
1. You can purchase a Harbor Freight Predator Generator (7kw) new for $500 or so, even cheaper when it is on sale. I have one and it has operated flawlessly for 3 years. Just change the oil regularly.
2. harbor freight even sells a halfway decent 100 watt solar system that comes with 2 LED lights and a charge controller. (you just add batteries). Now this is cheap shit, so be warned.
3. 4 Deep Cell batteries are expensive and you have to be careful not to drain the batteries all the way as this will shorten the life of the battery. Research this.
4. Know what you want to power with your system. find the current draw of everything and do the calculations.
5. Do not purchase a low power 1000 Watts inverter, as most equipment has a higher power demand at startup.
 
You have some good points. I might just get me a gas generator instead. We don't have power outages that often and a decent one would do what I want.
Not sure how good they were, but I was seeing some deep cell batteries from a place called Rural King (?) for about $80. I don't know much about them beyond the ad that listed them. Harbor Freight sells them, but I know the quality of their stuff...

You can't drain deep cycle batteries like you can your iphone. I don't think you are supposed to discharge below 40 or 50%. So take your estimated battery purchase, and mulitply by 2 or 3.

Generator is much cheaper.
 
Do you not need sunlight for electricity?

I have solar and don't have a battery system. For places with a tiered pricing systems, you will want to have a battery unit so you can store your electricity to use during periods when your electricity costs are high, like from 5-9pm. If you live in an area where the price of electricity is the same the whole day, you just use the grid at night and sell to the grid during the day, not worth it to store the electricity.
 
You can't drain deep cycle batteries like you can your iphone. I don't think you are supposed to discharge below 40 or 50%. So take your estimated battery purchase, and mulitply by 2 or 3.

Generator is much cheaper.

Fuel-powered generators are much cheaper, and if you only need them occasionally, a much (financially) better investment. If you are planning on off-gridding/running full time, the fuel costs start to ramp up pretty quickly, and your $500 generator isn't built for that much wear and tear. What is called a Prime Power generator will cost more, but they are typically more fuel efficient, require less frequent maintenance, and are much more reliable. Granted, you can buy an awful lot of $500 Harbor Freight units and just stick them in your garage until you need them for the price of a prime power duty generator, but realize your going to need them, and if that generator craps out when your not around to replace it, it could get expensive - so depends on how much reliability is worth to you. Solar pricing is competitive with prime power pricing on a per-kW basis; the tradeoff being that solar only has a capacity factor of about 40% and needs over-provisioning and storage to work when the sun isn't shining, but the prime power generator requires fuel and maintenance to run. So it's a weighted decision, and the answer isn't always the same for each household/customer (and often a smart combination of all three: solar, storage, and generator).

You are also correct about battery cycling - lead acid is commonly recommended 50%, LiPo (depending on the chemistry) can go much lower, which is a large part of what makes them so attractive compared to cheaper lead acid. It's called Depth of Discharge in the industry, and something that most people don't account for. Battery life (measured in charge/discharge cycles) is drastically cut the deeper you discharge each cycle. A deep cycle lead acid is typically only rated for about 200-400 cycles if you allow it to deeply discharge, but can often do 2000+ if you install twice the capacity and limit the discharge to 50%. LiPo will do the same, but the cycle counts are closer to 2000 and 5000, respectively.

I have solar and don't have a battery system. For places with a tiered pricing systems, you will want to have a battery unit so you can store your electricity to use during periods when your electricity costs are high, like from 5-9pm. If you live in an area where the price of electricity is the same the whole day, you just use the grid at night and sell to the grid during the day, not worth it to store the electricity.

I know at least in our utility territory (Pacific Gas & Electric) - if you install a battery system that is running grid-connected and capable of time shifting and your on Net Energy Metering, the utility also requires that you install provisions for metering the battery separately (at your expense) - so the utility can ensure that you are expressly ~not~ time shifting utility-provided power (a fault of the TOU structure that the utility does not allow you to exploit legally). You have to prove that the energy you are time-shifting comes exclusively from your solar system. Once you factor in the price of the metering to do that and the batteries themselves, it doesn't pay out on the difference in peak and shoulder TOU rates - your better off just NEM exporting all the time and not bothering with time shifting.
 
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And get charged with manslaughter when you kill a lineman to keep your margarita maker working.



And then drive around for a week trying to figure out what asshole is backfeeding electricity?

My mother and uncle were without power for 6 days because of Irma, mother stayed with us and other family were coming here to take showers etc. If I found out it took that long because of one dumbass backfeeding the lines, I'd find their house and remove the solar for them.

No, that is only for when the Lineman are working on the transmission lines.
 
Considering the retail cost of 100W and 200W solar panels, an 8-10KW inverter isn't THAT expensive and neither is an array of deep cycle marine batteries. Now if you want something like Tesla's powerwall that's going to cost quite a bit more.
Well looking at these systems
https://www.wholesalesolar.com/off-grid-packages#ranch
Shows a 10kW system is about $23k, and doesn't look like they have the batteries either. But fine lets say you cludge together 10kW worth of solar panels at at about $1/watt and throw in a 10kW capable inverter for $3500. That's at $13.5k already, which in the grand scheme of things is fairly cheap. Batteries are going to cost $250-400 each based on brand/capacity/etc, so depends how much power you want to be able to use.

Now the kicker though is much like most things in life, if you can't install/build it yourself, that's where the cost comes into place, figure multiply that cost by at least a factor of 3 for labor, permits, etc and you're in the range where people no longer want solar.
 
how would legislation prevent it at all?
If the nursing home invested in a battery backup, then their lives *may* have been saved.

That isn't what I was saying and it isn't the point of my comment. The author has a beef with FPL and current government regulation of solar power. The author is trying to pull at people's heart strings and use the deaths at the nursing home and the little girl's death to elicit support for his agenda. The author wants to make it sound like these people died because of government regulation that is in place due to FPL's greedy controlling lobbying efforts. But even if the legislation were different and solar power was regulated perfectly to how this author thinks it should be, it would not have saved any of these lives because neither the nursing home or the kid's home had solar in place.

This is what I have been saying. Perhaps I have expressed myself better this time.
 
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And get charged with manslaughter when you kill a lineman to keep your margarita maker working.



And then drive around for a week trying to figure out what asshole is backfeeding electricity?

My mother and uncle were without power for 6 days because of Irma, mother stayed with us and other family were coming here to take showers etc. If I found out it took that long because of one dumbass backfeeding the lines, I'd find their house and remove the solar for them.


This ^^^, because ignorance abounds.

Ignorance alone isn't so bad, but stupidity in the face of ignorance gets people killed.

I am not an electrician and I don't even pretend to know what I am doing around electricity when it comes to household and commercial type current. I did replace a couple of lights in our house the other day, found the right circuit breakers, killed them, tried to be careful wiring it all back up. Everything seems to be good. But like here at work we have a dead UPS in a server rack and the power cable is hard wired to the UPS and goes up through the rack and into the roof. I think it's hardly likely that the electricians here on base wired up a 20 foot long pig-tail so I am thinking that this line runs all the way to the panel. No damn way I am fucking with that and if I did and messed up, even if I didn't hurt myself or someone else, my company would be perfectly justified in firing me because .... I'm not a damned electrician, and that's really just the end of it so yea, I agree with you completely because when it comes to power, I know damned well that there is too much that I don't know and that shit can fuck someone up.
 
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I don’t understand what your trying to get at here.

Is it expensive to build an off-grid solar/battery system? Depends on how you are looking at it and if you are willing to adapt your lifestyle to it or not.

You need more in solar capacity (kWh) than you use in a typical day to go off grid and have it be sustainable. Since solar only runs for about 30% of the day at or near full output, and you need to run your home ~and~ recharge your batteries in that time, multiply your kW size requirement by a factor of 4-5 to get what you need in solar sizing.

A typical home with typical on-grid use patterns use will need on the order of 10kW or more of solar panels. If your willing to adapt your lifestyle, watch how you consume energy, time high/load activities with solar output, monitor and minimize battery cycling - you can get by with less. A single person on a very disciplined power budget might be able to get by with <1000W in panels - but that isn’t typical and it would be a pretty spartan power budget.

Also consider even with deep cycle batteries, your going to have to replace them periodically. About 5 years is average, 2 years isn’t uncommon, you might get lucky and get 7-8 years if you baby them. And your going to need more than 3 or 4 of them if you want to keep things like your fridge powered all night long. Off grid battery systems, to get enough storage to run all night and have decent lifespan, is typically a few thousand dollars worth of flooded lead acid deep cycles. Once you take into account the cycle life and amount of overprovisioning required to keep a useful lifespan and provide peak power/current - that’s where LiPo starts to give a better return than lead acid, even though it costs a lot more up front.

If you get a Habor Freight $199 10kW inverter, don’t be surprised if every appliance in your house starts to burn out on regular basis, or eat a set of batteries every 6 months. A quality off grid inverter, that can handle battery charge Control and utility grade voltage and frequency regulation is going to run about $4-6K for a typical house size (4-10kW).

Unless you really like that RV/camping lifestyle, it costs a good bit more than you would expect to have real, reliable off grid power. For nearly everyone, the utility rate is a pretty good deal. The only reasons solar is financially competitive are incentives/rebates, and Net Energy Metering. You take away either of those and solar all of a sudden has a very long payback compared to utility rates - and that especially includes off grid solar, as it won’t get NEM and has reoccurring storage replacement costs.

The person I was quoting made it seem the person was already in possession of a full-house solar system, but that the cost of adding a battery backup was going to be a large additional expense. My point was that if you've already shelled out all the many, many thousands of dollars for a full solar array, an additional inverter in the better than harbor freight category and enough deep cycle batteries to power major appliance and central air to go off-grid at will were not that much more compared to the original cost of solar panels, home wiring, panel addition, and labor.
 
The person I was quoting made it seem the person was already in possession of a full-house solar system, but that the cost of adding a battery backup was going to be a large additional expense. My point was that if you've already shelled out all the many, many thousands of dollars for a full solar array, an additional inverter in the better than harbor freight category and enough deep cycle batteries to power major appliance and central air to go off-grid at will were not that much more compared to the original cost of solar panels, home wiring, panel addition, and labor.
I'll just throw out some numbers:
20-40k for a solar installation on your house
5-7k for a powerwall 2 for at least a few hours as emergency power which charges via your solar installation.
If you're going to spend that much money on a solar installation on the roof, might as well get an alternative power source.

I mean the whole thing about solar is kinda silly when you can get a generator for 1-3k that'll probably run your essential stuff for 5-10 hours. If you're in an area like florida that's prone to hurricanes and damages that'll knock out the grid for a few days and you rely on having power for medical reasons, it would only seem reasonable you take some precautions and get a generator.
 
That isn't what I was saying and it isn't the point of my comment. The author has a beef with FPL and current government regulation of solar power. The author is trying to pull at people's heart strings and use the deaths at the nursing home and the little girl's death to elicit support for his agenda. The author wants to make it sound like these people died because of government regulation that is in place due to FPL's greedy controlling lobbying efforts. But even if the legislation were different and solar power was regulated perfectly to how this author thinks it should be, it would not have saved any of these lives because neither the nursing home or the kid's home had solar in place.

This is what I have been saying. Perhaps I have expressed myself better this time.

I agree - those deaths had nothing to do with solar or legislation, it had to do with incompetent and negligent staff
 
I agree - those deaths had nothing to do with solar or legislation, it had to do with incompetent and negligent staff

I wouldn't even be so quick to put it into such a simple statement. Nursing homes frequently double as hospices and people there can already be living their last days. Having the power go out would only be speeding up an already very short clock and in some cases where the people are suffering, a mercy. I'm not say all of them, I'm just saying it might not be so cut and dry for all the cases.
 
I wouldn't even be so quick to put it into such a simple statement. Nursing homes frequently double as hospices and people there can already be living their last days. Having the power go out would only be speeding up an already very short clock and in some cases where the people are suffering, a mercy. I'm not say all of them, I'm just saying it might not be so cut and dry for all the cases.

I can understand that maybe part of their backup generator failed, and their HVAC failed, and 911 was swamped, and many of these people were old and frail and sensitive to the situation already, and a million other factors that made this entire situation horrible and worse.

But despite all of that - no, it is really that cut and dry - the front door of the facility was very literally just across the street from not only a real hospital, but one of Florida's largest hospitals that had working backup power and was fully functional. Even if the patients were on Death's doorstep - there is no excuse someone shouldn't have noticed a person in undue distress, and wheeled them across the street. Not to mention that it happened not to just one person who's time had come, but to nine different people at various times over the course of several days. The staff didn't do anything other than provide wet washcloths and water, until a nurse from across the street just happened to wander over and check because he/she is a good Samaritan.


In a separate statement, the Florida Department of Health's Mara Gambineri wrote "this facility is located across the street from one of Florida's largest hospitals, which never lost power and had fully operating facilities. It is 100 percent the responsibility of health care professionals to preserve life by acting in the best interest of the health and well-being of their patients."

Police have launched a criminal investigation.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/florid...y-called-gov-rick-scott-36-hours-before-irma/

Sorry to derail. Just trying to point out it's really not about solar legislation - the nursing home doesn't even have solar in the first place.
 
The nursing home is part of the sensationalist aspect of the article which still makes some valid points. Solar has upfront costs that a nursing home would almost certainly be unwilling to pay. Who do you think they are, the Kentucky coal mining museum?
 
I can understand that maybe part of their backup generator failed, and their HVAC failed, and 911 was swamped, and many of these people were old and frail and sensitive to the situation already, and a million other factors that made this entire situation horrible and worse.

But despite all of that - no, it is really that cut and dry - the front door of the facility was very literally just across the street from not only a real hospital, but one of Florida's largest hospitals that had working backup power and was fully functional. Even if the patients were on Death's doorstep - there is no excuse someone shouldn't have noticed a person in undue distress, and wheeled them across the street. Not to mention that it happened not to just one person who's time had come, but to nine different people at various times over the course of several days. The staff didn't do anything other than provide wet washcloths and water, until a nurse from across the street just happened to wander over and check because he/she is a good Samaritan.




https://www.cbsnews.com/news/florid...y-called-gov-rick-scott-36-hours-before-irma/

Sorry to derail. Just trying to point out it's really not about solar legislation - the nursing home doesn't even have solar in the first place.


Was exactly my point, the author mentioning the nursing home was a low blow, and irrelevant to his argument.
 
This is an uninformed story written with a point of view & axe to grind. Every utility has basic interconnect rules for generation - which is what solar is. You can run your solar if you have a positive disconnect from the system - ie a visible, lockable disconnect switch. If not, it is extremely dangerous for the workers. The first thing outside of your house is a transformer, which will step your solar panel voltage up to 13,800 volts. If there are downed lines, you have just energized those lines - without any protective relaying, ground faults, etc that the utility provides on their end. Backfeeds get more workers killed & injured than any form of electrocution.

And you'd trust Florida Man to do the right thing here? (disclaimer, I'm in Florida).

You mean a light-on-facts story with an agenda was posted by HardOCP's resident snowflake SJW? You don't say...
 
The nursing home is part of the sensationalist aspect of the article which still makes some valid points. Solar has upfront costs that a nursing home would almost certainly be unwilling to pay. Who do you think they are, the Kentucky coal mining museum?

The author may indeed have valid points, I don't know, I am not up on the subject. But while I don't know if his argument holds water, I can definitely smell some bullshit regarding the deaths, so from my uninformed point of view, the article is just trash and I am not motivated to recognize that any of it is credible.

A more informed person like yourself may see some good points, but for the rest of us, it's just horse shit .... or was it bull shit? Well it's certainly shit, I'm sure of that :sneaky:
 
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The nursing home is part of the sensationalist aspect of the article which still makes some valid points. Solar has upfront costs that a nursing home would almost certainly be unwilling to pay. Who do you think they are, the Kentucky coal mining museum?
Yeah the nursing homes of this country are basically seeing elderly as a constant source of income, BIG TIME income. Many of them use rather low wage staff as the full time health and then the homes in the area all share on a nurse or two who goes from place to place doing various things.

Story of old people dying = tragedy
Family of said old person who put them in the nursing home = doing backflips because they won't have to pay $4k a month for someone to look after gamgams and potential litigation money too!
 
Except AFAIK FPL wants to make it illegal to be off the grid, so you're forced into a position where damned if you do, damned if you don't.

it's a code violation (illegal) to not have electrical service in Miami-Dade... guess who pushed for that? there's a reason they call FP&L Fucking People & Loving it
 
I can understand that maybe part of their backup generator failed, and their HVAC failed, and 911 was swamped, and many of these people were old and frail and sensitive to the situation already, and a million other factors that made this entire situation horrible and worse.

But despite all of that - no, it is really that cut and dry - the front door of the facility was very literally just across the street from not only a real hospital, but one of Florida's largest hospitals that had working backup power and was fully functional. Even if the patients were on Death's doorstep - there is no excuse someone shouldn't have noticed a person in undue distress, and wheeled them across the street. Not to mention that it happened not to just one person who's time had come, but to nine different people at various times over the course of several days. The staff didn't do anything other than provide wet washcloths and water, until a nurse from across the street just happened to wander over and check because he/she is a good Samaritan.




https://www.cbsnews.com/news/florid...y-called-gov-rick-scott-36-hours-before-irma/

Sorry to derail. Just trying to point out it's really not about solar legislation - the nursing home doesn't even have solar in the first place.

Time to find some new facts, I think someone has been feeding you some bad ones.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/prosecutors-unsure-nursing-home-deaths-involved-crimes-49997366

The staff borrowed portable A/C units from the hospital on day two before any deaths had occurred. There is much more in this article and it makes it all sound very different then your account. I think these old people were on the edge and that good and honest care was what was keeping them alive when everything was otherwise normal. Add a natural disaster, fear, and a little additional stress along with interruptions to the staffs' normal routines and any of these people who are hovering near their natural end can easily be pushed beyond their endurance. I think the third day simply was hotter than the last few days and proofed too much additional stress after a couple of days of increased stress.

They are already talking as if there are no grounds for criminal charges and that only a civil suite might succeed, but you can win a civil suite in court on many things that you really shouldn't win over, I've seen it personally.
 
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