BAKU, Azerbaijan (AP) — Maxim Timchenko, who runs the largest private energy company in Ukraine, pulls out a piece of paper with bar charts showing how much new electricity his company has brought online this year in the country versus how much Russian bombs have destroyed.
This needs a full analysis, but I suspect it is far more costly than the grid while being less reliable overall. Ukraine because they are at war is a partial exception, but even in their case it probably makes sense to fix the grid where possible and when the grid is down greatly reduce energy use to minimize the need for local power.
Batteries are expensive. Solar is expensive. By having a grid you can trade energy around. When your sun is shining you send some someone elsewhere (very far away) under clouds, then when you have clouds you get energy from them. In this way you both need much less batteries and/or much less need for solar cells (that sometimes will not produce used energy because your batteries are fully charged)
I think their point was not that the grid should be abolished, but that when energy generation is decentralized, the grid becomes less susceptible to single points of failure.
Please explain. PV is cheap AF.
Several thousand dollars (including labor) is not cheap. Now scale that to every house.
Still the cheapest source of energy long term but when you need to come up with the money up front it is expensive.
OK, now the argument makes more sense.
Some bodies came up with requiring newly built housing to have planned in a renewable energy source. The idea is that those who build are investing into the future already and gathered large amounts of capital anyway. The disadvantage is the creation of a mid-term disincentive for housing construction, so keeping the housing supply in control might be more crucial. This method is also slow.
At this point, definitely no. At present, you can buy panels at 0.12 € / W if you choose where to shop. (This autumn, I’m considering adding 10 panels, 380 W each, for a price of 46 € each - in fence configuration, so minimum installation cost too). It’s the cheapest source of power, if you have sunlight (unfortunately, in winter I don’t have a lot, too far north).
Batteries do cost a fair bit.
As for resilience, panels are fairly resilient. A panel punctured by some shrapnel will keep working at reduced power, unless it hit the junction box. Living in a peaceful area, I didn’t need a missile to find out - I found out using a storm which made plywood fly at considerable speed.