Voter anger over the cost of living is hurtling forward into next year’s midterm elections, when pivotal contests will be decided by communities that are home to fast-rising electric bills or fights over who’s footing the bill to power Big Tech’s energy-hungry data centers.
Electricity costs were a key issue in this week’s elections for governor in New Jersey and Virginia, a data center hotspot, and in Georgia, where Democrats ousted two Republican incumbents for seats on the state’s utility regulatory commission.
This has been the push I’ve needed to pull the trigger on installing solar. My electric rates have gone from $0.09/KWh to $0.23/KWh in the last 5 years. Just got my bill after reducing as much as I could (my house is all electric sans the furnace). “Surely it’ll be under $100 this month,” I thought. Nope.
I’ve got 800W of PV currently in an ad-hoc setup* but I’m putting together the plan for a 3.2 KW system that can auto switch between battery, PV, and grid without backfeeding. Minus the batteries, the whole setup is going to cost me about $7,000. (Batteries aren’t required and will be added later)
Grid-tie is technically legal in my area, but the hoops you have to jump through are insane and there’s a high likelihood of being denied by the power company over the most bullshit of minutiae (seriously, they treat someone possibly feeding back 400 watts the same as if you were a MW-scale solar farm).
*The ad-hoc setup is just 4x200W panels in a 2S2P config. I charge an Anker PowerStation from that and use it to power random stuff. It’s currently powering my server stack while charging from the panels. :)
What really makes me angry about this is around 35% of Americans rent. That’s a third of people who have no ability to avoid the rapid increase in electricity costs. And I have no idea just how many with their own house have the capital, or legal ability (HOAs), to install solar.
Good luck with your solar install. Signed, a grid tied user with $0.56/kwh power.
You’re very right. Also worth noting that while very limiting, balcony solar is gaining popularity and can be done by some renters. If you have a balcony that gets sun, you can put some panels up over the railing, feed em into a battery or other “portable” system.
Thanks. And yeah, being able to install solar eventually was one of many factors when I decided to buy a house on a whim rather than rent (not so much a whim as “ahead of schedule” due to unforeseen circumstances surrounding the house I was currently renting).
Jesus. My condolences. I hope anything you feed back is credited at retail rate.
We pay up to 60¢ here in California. Why yes, our corrupt governor is a major shareholder of the utility company, why do you ask?
i hear my parents water and electricity rose, and were in norcal.
You as an individual are not a problem. But it is highly likely that when you are feeding back 400W there are 1000 other small producers doing the exact same thing at the exact same time. You are part of a (distributed) MW-scale solar farm.
That’s insane. In the UK most solar installs are grid tied and it’s standard practice to get paid by the utility company for back-feeding since they can reduce their natural gas consumption.
I pay £0.26 ($0.34) per kWh imported and received £0.10 ($0.13) for export. Some utility tariffs are dynamic with demand so if you have a battery system you can do arbitrage with import/export
Cool stuff. I work in solar and build those MW-sized systems, so AMA if you have any questions
A lot of the battery companies are making a gateway appliance that allow you to draw from the grid or a generator as a backup while isolating your system. The idea is that you move all of your circuits to a new subpanel and place the gateway in between. Bluetti has a pretty affordable one.
I think Technology Connections on YT did an episode on that.
Nice. Yeah, that’s what I’m looking to do. Grid is just there when I’m not generating enough onsite.
The good thing is there seem to be plenty of options these days.
You might want to check out ecoflow. They have turnkey battery/auto islanding panel systems in the 10k range that are designed for solar input. The above can handle 4kw solar input, which can be expanded with more inverters.
Yeah, I was looking at Anker’s version of that, but it doesn’t have quite as much flexibility as some of dedicated hybrid solar inverters I was looking at. I haven’t read the specs for the EcoFlow version, but Anker’s is positioned more as a UPS/backup power for your house rather than primary power (unless you’re fully off-grid).
The hybrid inverter I was looking at can be configured in “UPS” mode (backup if your power is out) or only to use utility power if there’s not enough PV and the batteries are low as well as some other combinations.
I’m still in the planning phases since I don’t want to be installing on the roof or burying conduit in the winter lol.
I really need to get on this. Even just a few panels on the garage to run my NAS and PC off of it nothing else.
Yeah, that’s a good place to start. Seeing that it costs almost $50/mo just to run my server/network gear was really eye opening. The stack averages about 290 watts (thank the gods I downsized when I did!) which comes out to:
(290/1000) * 24 * 30 * 0.23 = $48.02/moStill cheaper than cloud subscriptions, though.
I’m thankfully only looking at half that with the upgrade I need to do. My family has realized I’m able and willing to backup all family photos, even scan the physical ones, so my 7 TB is going fast.
I don’t want to think about what my desktop I’m on all day burns. I do graphically intense stuff so gpu running full blast.
And you have full governance of your data.