Hurricane Sandy seems to have brought out the latent stupidity in just about everyone in their zeal to get in on the climate alarm resurgence. I laughed out loud when I read this op-ed in the NYT by DAVID CRANE and ROBERT F. KENNEDY Jr. published, December 12, 2012, because it becomes immediately obvious that these two “experts” don’t have a clue about how grid-tied solar actually works, and their ideas actually can cause deaths, injury, and additional property destruction if people try to follow their lead and then try to circumvent safety features when they find out their solar system won’t do what they claim. How embarrassing for them.
Excerpts:
[…]
Residents of New Jersey and New York have lived through three major storms in the past 16 months, suffering through sustained blackouts, closed roads and schools, long gas lines and disrupted lives, all caused by the destruction of our electric system. When our power industry is unable to perform its most basic mission of supplying safe, affordable and reliable power, we need to ask whether it is really sensible to run the 21st century by using an antiquated and vulnerable system of copper wires and wooden poles.
Some of our neighbors have taken matters into their own hands, purchasing portable gas-powered generators in order to give themselves varying degrees of “grid independence.” But these dirty, noisy and expensive devices have no value outside of a power failure. And they’re not much help during a failure if gasoline is impossible to procure.
Having spent our careers in and around the power industry, we believe there is a better way to secure grid independence for our homes and businesses. (Disclosure: Mr. Crane’s company, based in Princeton, N.J., generates power from coal, natural gas, and nuclear, wind and solar energy.) Solar photovoltaic technology can significantly reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and our dependence on the grid. Electricity-producing photovoltaic panels installed on houses, on the roofs of warehouses and big box stores and over parking lots can be wired so that they deliver power when the grid fails.
That last sentence in bold is my emphasis, because it shows just how clueless these people are when it comes to real world solutions. They want to give readers the impression that they can use their grid-tied solar power system after a storm to get electricity, I’m here to tell you that claim is absolute bunk.
Full disclosure. I have a grid tied solar power system on my home. I had one on my previous home, and I orchestrated the first ever solar power system for our local school district. I know a thing or two first hand from an engineering and use standpoint. Here’s my current home installation:
Top: the solar panels. Bottom: the DC to AC inverters and the grid tie and SmartMeter.
Note the red labels, particularly under the SmartMeter. They are required by law. The red one under the meter (along with the new yellow one added by the utility company after inspection for the grid tie certification) reads:
“Possible danger of electrical back feed” is the key phrase, one completely lost on the NYT, Kennedy, and Crane.
The issue is this, if you have grid tied power sources running in your neighborhood, and they are producing power, anyone who isn’t careful doing electrical work could get electrocuted thinking that after they pulled the main breaker, there is no power in the wires. Imagine if you have a bunch of these pumping power into power poles laying on the street after a storm; it becomes an instant fire starter.
But that’s been taken care of too, because the DC to AC inverters won’t function due to this (also required by law and code) safety feature built in. Here’s the relevant code from the inverter installation manual:
Electrical conformity according to U.S., Canadian and
international safety operating standards and code
requirements:
– UL 1741 – Standard for Inverters, Converters, and
Controllers for Use in Independent Power Systems
And this:
4.2 Protective concepts
The following monitoring and protective functions are
integrated in blue planet inverters:
– BiSI grid monitoring to protect against personal
injuries and avoid islanding effects according to UL 1741
What is “BiSI grid monitoring”? According to E DIN VDE 0126, which is a year 1999 standard developed in Europe specifically to address the problem:
The automatic disconnection device is used as a safety interface between the generator and the public low-voltage distribution net and serves as a substitute for a disconnecting switch accessible at all times by the distributing network operator. It prevents the unintentional supply of electrical energy from the generator into a subnetwork disconnected from the rest of the distribution grid (islanding), thereby offering additional protection to the measures specified in DIN VDE 0105-100 (VDE 0105-100), 6.2 to
– operating staff, against voltage in the disconnected subnetwork
– equipment, against inadmissible voltages and frequencies
– consumers, against inadmissible voltages and frequencies
– equipment, against the feed of faults by the generator.
In a nutshell, when the power poles go down, the inverters lose connectivity to the grid, sense this automatically, and shut themselves off.
Never mind the fact that grid-tied solar power doesn’t work at night when you need it most, never mind the fact that during and after the storm, solar insolation is drastically reduced due to rain and cloudiness, and never mind the fact that all electrical systems, solar or otherwise, are just as susceptible to storm damage as conventional power infrastructure, there is one important point that kills the entire idea.
Assuming the solar panels aren’t ripped off the roof by the hurricane/storm, they are of absolutely no use because the grid-tie is broken, and the mandated grid-tie safety features prevent the homeowner from using the inverters to get power locally.
You’d think “experts” like Kennedy and Crane would understand this basic concept…but they probably never got any closer to a solar power system than a photo op.
Some might claim that a battery backup with an automatic transfer switch might solve the issue. But, battery systems double to cost of most solar installations, and need to be replaced about every four years on average (for lead acid batteries, the most common solution), and they need to be maintained, checked, etc, plus require significant space. Compare all that to a $699 generator available from a local hardware outlet that has none of these problems and you’d understand why that is currently the solution of choice for most homeowners that want backup power after a storm.
Hopefully people following their lead for solar systems won’t try to hack their solar power system inverter safety features in time of crisis. The first person to try defeating this safety feature after a storm may get themselves or others killed or injured, either by electrocution or fire. Hopefully the solar power industry will join me in condemning this foolishness propagated by Kennedy and Crane.
h/t to WUWT reader Charles Carmichael for the NYT story link.
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@Paul Westhaver
“Power Generation and delivery to load is similar to the UPS Delivery Company problem. A package can come from anywhere and the package can end up anywhere, yet they do it everyday very well.
Seems to me that the UPS pick-up and delivery math model (which is quite a feat) should be adaptable to a chaotic wind/sun/coal/nuke power apportioning model.
I don’t expect it to resolve the supply/demand imbalance, but it could express the enormous demands on delivery system required.”
Except the supply/demand imbalance is everything for the power grid.
Power In must equal Power Out on a sub-second basis or something somewhere will explode.
Any solution for handling chaotic generation at grid scale must solve supply / demand balancing in real time or it’s useless. This is why grid scale wind/solar installations require full nameplate capacity spinning reserve backup from fossil sources.
Kennedy should stick to bootlegging, they were at least good at THAT !
Billy says:
December 13, 2012 at 10:46 am
“Diesel and gasoline generators have governors and voltage regulators or inherently stable winding designs to allow stable independent operation. PV solar systems have no stability so they rely batteries or a grid connection to stabilise voltage. Without batteries, when load is less than output, voltage will rise out of control. ”
It would be possible to program an inverter’s DSP in such a way that even in the absence of batteries it could build up a micro grid (for one household) as long as available solar power is bigger or equal to the load.
The inverter stores a small amount of energy in capacitors and inductivities; and can shift the power point (power = voltage times amperage) into “bad” territory when too much solar power is available.
In practice, this would result in a smaller duty cycle for the IGBT’s (semiconductor switches that switch on and off thousands of times a second) on the incoming end. (they’d be “ON” for a smaller percentage of time.
So, it would be doable. The digital signal processors can stabilize the inverter under these circumstances. Nobody would really design something like that without a battery though – as your intent would be to maintain a micro grid when the main grid goes down, you would obviously add a few bucks worth of battery at least. After all, the solar panels and inverters already cost some tens of thousands of Dollars so it would be very stupid not to add batteries.
Anthony, do you have an emergency generator, too? Is it similarly disabled in event of grid shutdown?
REPLY: No, I don’t. But my home has underground power service and we don’t have hurricanes or much in the way of tornadoes here – A
Matthew W says:
December 13, 2012 at 9:39 am
During NORMAL or REGULAR conditions, everyone does a good job. What counts is not that, that’s the ground state, you damn well better be able to handle that.
What counts is how you do when the excrement intersects with the air-circulation device … and in that regard, some electric companies do better than others.
w.
David Crane’s company – NRG is the largest operator of nuclear power plants in the USA. It also owns more solar capacity than any other company. NRG owns the solar panels on my roof.
I agree with others that they have glossed over the details. Some things I would be interested in:
– Is the notion here to create smaller grids (perhaps at the substation level) where solar capacity could be shared within that grid?
– Would these smaller grids manage energy storage and possibly provide local backup capacity?
– Could a local grid operate intermittently (many places in the world get power for a few hours a day)?
– How would a local grid shed load? For example – could air conditioning be turned off but refrigeration be supported?
I disagree with their assertion that the economics pencil out. It probably works in Arizona with its expensive electricity. It appears to me that they have not priced in the paradigm shifts and required non generating infrastructure investments to make this notion work. At least not with natural gas at current prices.
From the article: “by using an antiquated and vulnerable system of copper wires and wooden poles.”
This was my first indication these people have no clue. The grid stopped using copper wire decades ago. It’s all aluminum now. I have a small PV array and enough batteries and inverter to run my refrigerator in the event of grid loss. But I live in the desert, where weeks of no sun are not likely, and I have a backup backup in the form of being able to charge the batteries from my car.
When the grid power goes off the Inverter no longer transforms the 12 V DC to 110 or 240 V AC.
What use is 12 V DC when trying to run your fridge, washing machine, stove, TV, computer etc ?
The only way to make solar “stand alone” is to have battery supply to run the Inverter – then the system can run whilst there is charge in the batteries.
Such systems are prohibitively expensive and usually are only viable where there is no grid supply.
My sister lived with such a system for years and let me tell you if she could have had the grid supply she would have jumped at it.
Hi Anthony
Nedap, a Dutch company make the PowerRouter inverter that has “Island Mode” which isolates the grid but maintains power to the house (and a battery bank if you have one) in the event of a power outage.
I nearly bought one for my 5 Kw system in Cairns (Aus) but they were about $6000
so I got the standard inverters instead. Look up PowerRouter on Google, very impressive.
BrianJay says: @ur momisugly December 13, 2012 at 9:35 am
…..
REPLY: you and I can manage these things, but how about Joe Blow, homeowner under stress? Do you really trust people to be able to figure out how to connect/disconnect safely, or to evaluate if their solar system is damaged? First injury/fatality kills the idea, and I doubt any company wants the risk – Anthony
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
In answer to the question
“Do you really trust people to be able to figure out how to connect/disconnect safely, or to evaluate if their solar system is damaged?”
The answer is not no, it is HELL NO!
We live in farm country and I can not tell you how many friends and neighbors have come to my husband (physicist) to help them get a very simple electric fence wired correctly.
I can not think of anything in electricity that is simpler except maybe plugging in an electric cord, but the creative ways it gets mucked-up is truly incredible.
For those not familiar with electric fences:
The circuit is from a copper ground rod driven ~ 6 ft into the ground connected via an insulated wire to the clearly labeled terminal on the box. Then from the other terminal (also clearly labeled) a second insulated wire goes to the electric fence wires (naked) mounted on insulators.
Plug in the box and the check light should blink. Fence testers can be used to check the actual fence too.
Much much better that people use the diesel or gas generators and just plug in what they want to run. There is normally plenty of time to stock-up on diesel or gas. If you are living in an area prone to flooding then you best bet is to get the heck out of dodge until the storm is over.
I have no comment on the praticability or safety of the proposed installation.
However, as a resident of coastal NJ who lost power for a little under 7 days during the recent … ‘event’, I would like to point out that solar panels were essentially useless for about two weeks afterwards.
The sky was completely overcast for about a week, so no power for that week, and then we had foot of snow which took another week to melt. My neighbour across the street has a solar installation and his little generator was up and running *before* the storm hit.
Mike.
Read N. N. Taleb on the differences in the learning of doers and writers. He teaches also the differences among fragile, robust and anti-fragile. Infrastructure varies between fragile and robust, as Fukushima Daichi was robust to the expected stressors.
Totally correct analysis, Anthony. The Solar Cells on our roof work in exactly the same way and cut off when the mains supply stops. They save us about $400 a year, but that’s it. They don’t work in the dark!
RHS says:
December 13, 2012 at 10:21 am
Is this the same Kennedy who nixed off shore windmills because they blocked the view from his beach front property, his harbor, and other properties? Or was that a different Kennedy?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Nephew.
He is son of Robert F. Kennedy. (he had 11 legitimate kids) He is the nephew of President John F. Kennedy and Senator Ted Kennedy.
http://www.vjel.org/news/NEWS100203.html
Anthony is absolutely correct! Anyone who works in the solar power industry, as I do, should know these basic facts. The safety features pointed out by Anthony are crucial to any such installation. The company I work for installs 2kW to 3.8kW and soon, 5kW, solar inverters all over the world. It’s standard practice (http://www.enatel.net/).
Most boats now have a combination Inverter/battery charger with transfer switch/relay.
While you have shore power,batteries are being charged and DC loads are supplied by the charger.
Lose shore power and the transfer switch cuts of the shore power plug and turns on the inverter.
Never enough power to think about supplying to the grid.
meh.
I’m thinking of installing a coal fired steam electrical generator for my house. I’m told it’s a promising technology.
http://reliablesteam.com/RSE/RSEengines.html
We will need new entitlements, cant expect the poor to pay for these upgrades to their houses
Dennis Cox says:
December 13, 2012 at 11:16 am
….. Here’s one of two solar racks on the property.
______________________________________
Yes but what was your cost? (Ball park)
The ONLY reason these people think that “underground power lines” can work is because New York City used $2.00/day untrained “raw-meat” immigrant labor without OSHA and EPA and pay and retirement conditions and today’s sick leave and today’s restrictions on work permits to tear up Manhattan’s streets for years in the very early years between 1895 and 1903. New York’s unique congestion but simplicity of evenly gridded evenly-sized North-South and East West streets and a much-simplified single all-powerful (though all-corrupt) government “permitted” the disruption to be tolerated as telephone and power cables were buried after the massive snow storms in winter 1888. (Power came to NYC in 1882 with Edison’s first Pearl Street power plant. The controversy (and expense and disruption of burying cables) began soon after, and continued even for several years after the 1888 blizzard, but that was the tripping point as far as public opinion changed.)
The following is copied from the Christian Science Monitor: Look at the WASTED costs required to replace today’s millions of miles of working power lines with less-reliable and harder-to-repair buried cables!
Now. consider the trillion-dollar estimate in the Christian Science Monitor story for the very small (geographically) state of Massachusetts. There are 10,800 MILES of power lines (most now with digital cable service lines plus telephone lines on the same poles!) in my single county ALONE! So, to bury 32,400 equivilent MILES of wires and cables and fibre-optic lines – throwing away all of the old wires – (because they cannot be used underground, nor serviced/replaced/repaired underground, nor hooked up to new/changes customers) and adding hundreds of of thousands of NEW underground access manways) is going to do what?
Improve what?
Just added up last year’s entire electric bill: We are in north GA (US) just above 1200 foot elevation in the Appalachian foothills. County population is 700,000 people. Heat and hot water are natural gas, power is electrical. Oven is electric, as is clothes dryer. Biggest electric load in the summer is the air conditioner. Winter electric bills are just under $100.00 per month. Summer bills, May through Sept, are obviously higher. March and April, September through Nov, are the lowest of the combined gas + electric bills.
Total power used last year was 10050 kilowatt-hours
Total cost for electricity for the entire year was $1215.84
Actual average rate for the year was $0.12 per kilowatt-hour.
The cost to install a (with a two day reserve) electric stand-alone solar system was (in 1998 dollars) $22,000 dollars.
How many of your neighbors (Heck, how many grandmothers in the fifth floor apartments in New Jersey or out-of-Manhattan New York City) do you trust to install 12 or 18 50 pound lead-acid batteries in their basements or attics or back-bedrooms, compete with hydrogen monitors, battery re-chargers, battery monitors to detect/prevent hydrogen explosions after charging all night, H2 fans and vents, DC-to-AC converters, and line trip sensors ……
Hook any of those up wring and you get fires, flames, arc and sparks, ….
Anthony: OK let’s assume the local big box store/warehouse has live solar power, with the power pole infrastructure wrecked, how do you propose to get that power out to the neighborhood? – Anthony
____________________________________
In Europe, we have not had wires on poles for more than 80 years, except in some really rural locations. I still cannot understand why ‘rich’ America, which suffers from many hurricane/tornado events, still insists on putting electrical wires on poles. Its so, well, 19th century.
.
As someone who designs industrial electrical inverters for a living (and who spent the morning reviewing the safety and robustness of one new design to the sudden removal and application of grid power), I will add my voice to those who say there is no engineering reason why a home solar power system could not safely and reliably be disconnected from the grid when the grid goes down and yet still be able to supply electrical power to the house. (Utility rules are a different matter…)
The designs that Anthony describes automatically disconnect the solar panels from the DC side of the inverter when the grid goes down – that is, they disconnect at the input to the inverter. It is also possible to automatically disconnect the AC side of the inverter from the grid – that is, to disconnect the output of the inverter from the grid, but leave it connected to the house’s internal wiring. (AC disconnects are actually more reliable than DC disconnects because they can pull out as the current passes through zero.)
The real issue is that a typical solar system designed to work when tied to the grid will not be able to handle the inevitable, and often unpredictable, swings in both supply and load that will occur. Significant storage capability is required, even to handle something simple like a passing cloud. This vastly increases the cost of what is already a fundamentally uneconomic system, and very few people would be willing to pay for it.
This is the first I’ve seen the term “grid-tied”, so maybe it has implications different from what I’d expect.
I’m not an expert, but know a little about it. My father was a power plant operator and I used to sneak his manuals and read them. A few decades back I took a serious look at solar, decided the cost and efficiency just weren’t practical or likely to be for a long time. Then I worked for a couple years for the state Publick Disservice Kommissariat as I like to call it (as a software developer and maintainer, not an electrician, but you pick things up). More recently, I’ve been reading some residential electrician books.
Co-generation systems have been around since at least the late 1970s. There were some problems with early switch-over systems, for changing between drawing power from the local electricity monopoly to feeding power to the local monopoly, which created the kinds of problems Anthony mentioned. Ditto on home emergency generator systems; the simplest have a switch that cuts off from the monopoly, then cuts on the lines to the emergency generator. But newer automatic and manual switch-over systems, under the NEC standards, have, the best I can tell, worked around those problems, though they do seem very expensive from my POV. They do not throw power onto the local monopoly’s lines when an outage is detected. (The other day on a walk I noticed, outside their offices, they have a set of emergency generators and diesel fuel tanks and switching systems, all in a neat package amidst the landscaping. In Chicagoland, they have big, ugly, diesel generators at some of the sub-stations.)
But then I haven’t read any recent material on them for solar panel systems. All of the old solar generating systems books assumed you had to have a bank of batteries.
How do store-bought UPS (uninterruptible power supply) systems handle the switch-over from line current to the battery?
I’m sure it could be done. Oh, and storm damage does not damage everything, nor is what is damaged equally damaged. In the middle of a hurricane area, you can see a neighborhood with some houses leveled and others hardly touched. Of course, tornadoes are infamous for this. So, yes, it might tear some solar panels from the roof, or not. Power lines go down here fairly often. (Not like the old days, when we used to pre-emptively shut down the super-computers every time a thunder-storm was approaching to avoid disk crashes, but, in any one part of town, once or twice a year. And they still use manually re-set circuit breakers next to each transformer so that a crew has to cruise around searching each time one is kicked… another 2-3 outages per year; no GIS-linked outage triangulation systems and automatic re-setting breakers here.) The monopoly blames the squirrels.
According to the article “The Last Days of Mary Kennedy” on the Daily Beast, an article clearly endorsed by the Kennedy family, the green house RFK Jr and his wife Mary built was very expensive to maintain and the solar panels were falling apart, just a few years after it was built (of course, the article alludes to the failings of the project as being Mary’s). If this is in fact his personal experience, why push others to take on this unnecessary expense, too. From the article:
“Though their marriage seemed to be ending, Bobby wanted to give his wife a purpose and their relationship a final chance, so he agreed to let her redo the house. Like so many other things in Mary’s life, it was on the surface a splendid achievement, so much so that a book was written on the Kennedys’ green house. But it had cost double the original estimate, and now, half a dozen years after starting the project, the solar panels were already falling apart, and it was costing $40,000 a month to maintain the house and staff.”