I’m in Las Vegas a couple times a year. Lots of new housing being built. Oddly, from my perspective, I don’t see solar installations on this new housing. If there was ever a locality where solar would be practical, Las Vegas would be it.
The only explanation I’ve heard is that electricity is so cheap, there’s no point in buying panels. True?
The simple reason is: people don’t buy houses based on life-cycle costs.
If you have two identical houses, one of which has R-40 insulation but costs $10K more than the other that has R-16, which do you think will sell?
First, solar panels are practical in most locations.
It looks like NJ is 15.78¢/kWh which is terrible. 7th worst in the Nation. My rate is 13.50¢/kWh. With that rate my panels paid off fairly quick in terms of the life of the panels.
With the extra generation that Las Vegas would have and the air conditioner load it requires, panels would pay off probably in 8-10 years of a 25-30 year life. If anything else would help defray the costs, like tax incentives, rebates or CO[sub]2[/sub] credits, the payoff would be quicker.
There appears to have been some back-and-forth regarding net metering rates in Nevada these past few years. Perhaps it makes people wary.
Think Las Vegas is bad? Try Hilo Hawaii. Highest in the USA!
Residential Electricity in Hilo
The average residential electricity rate in Hilo is 42.47¢/kWh.[1]
This average (residential) electricity rate in Hilo is 13.74% greater than the Hawaii average rate of 37.34¢/kWh.[2]
The average (residential) electricity rate in Hilo is 257.49% greater than the national average rate of 11.88¢/kWh. Residential rates in the U.S. range from 8.37¢/kWh to 37.34¢/kWh.[2]
That’s why we went completely off grid when we built our home just north of Hilo. And love it!
HELCO (Hawaii Electric Company) is appropriately named! 
I’m on Oahu and just got my electric bill today. $233 which is down from $300 during the summer!
Many people want solar power because of the environment, and Las Vegas is getting more and more of its power from the Sun these days.
Las Vegas gets very little power from Hoover Dam. Most of Hoover Dam’s output goes elsewhere these days. Most of the power for Las Vegas comes from natural gas and coal fired plants, but most of those plants are phasing out or at least scaling back fossil fuels and are adding solar power, mostly photovoltaic generation.
The problem with photovoltaics is that they don’t put out any power when the sun isn’t shining. This often means that as more people switch to solar power, the power company is forced to have a fossil fuels plant sitting at idle so that it can pick up the load when the sun goes behind the clouds, and fossil fuels have to be used at night as well. This reliance on fossil fuels negates a lot of the environmental benefits of solar power.
Some folks are experimenting with batteries and others are doing things like pumping water uphill during the day for energy storage, then converting that back into electricity at night by running the water through gravity-fed hydroelectric generators.
One interesting thing that was done first in Nevada is a molten salt power plant. Basically, they focus the sun onto a big pile of salt and melt the salt. Then they run water through the molten salt and the heat turns the water into steam, which then runs a conventional steam turbine generator system. All you need to do for continuous power is heat up enough salt that it stays molten all through the night. Then you have steam power even when the sun isn’t shining, just from the residual heat in the salt.
This is a much better solar power system since it doesn’t rely on fossil fuels to pick up the slack when the sun goes behind the clouds.
Unfortunately, the Crescent Dunes power plant in Nevada never put out as much energy was it was planned for and it’s had a metric crap-ton of financial problems. That might make some folks reluctant to invest in a similar type of plant in the future.
A lot of folks like rooftop photovoltaics, but until they come up with better energy storage methods, you’re burning fossil fuels to handle the inconsistency of sunlight. And since fossil plants can’t just start up and shut down anywhere close to instantly, those fossil plants have to sit there and idle, wasting fuel and getting nothing for it.
Ninja’d on some of my points by engineer_comp_geek while I was composing this post!
I posted in another thread about how solar panels don’t always increase the value of a home, essentially as beowulff stated. If a home with PV is $10K more than one without, some buyers will buy the lower cost home with the logic that PV costs will come down, allowing the homeowners to save or spend the cash on something else in the interim. For investment buyers or those looking to rent, it makes less sense to spend the extra money because the cost is heavily front loaded.
There’s also saturation limits by neighborhood. I didn’t understand it at first, but in Oahu, Hawaii, there was/is a 15% saturation limit, even in new neighborhoods. The reason is, the utility has to be able to make up for the electricity no provided by PV in the event the panels are offline. Extended periods of rain or clouds are not likely in Las Vegas, but other events like high winds can destroy the panels.
Here’s an article about how Hawaii is leading the push to 100% renewable energy by 2045 and the issues, both current and future. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/as-hawaii-aims-for-100-renewable-energy-other-states-watching-closely/
Then there’s costs.While placing the onus of build out costs on homeowners and businesses, through PV installation, utilities can build more cost efficient solar or wind farms themselves. What happens in 25 years when the warranty expires and homeowners and businesses choose not to replace their PV? The panels themselves will still work, though at a lower efficiency estimated anywhere between 50 to 95% as panel technology improves. But what about the inverters (especially new micro-inverters) and wiring that hasn’t been through the test of time.
To be clear, though it may seem I’m anti-solar, not at all. Just that I realize it’s not the magic bullet solution to renewable energy that many people think it is.
Actually, contrary to popular belief, direct unfettered sunlight in places like Nevada can actually reduce panel efficiency due to excess heat as discussed in this article: https://www.theecoexperts.co.uk/solar-panels/how-it-works, which is one of the reasons panels are canted on the roof, to allow airflow to cool panels. The west coast of Oahu, Hawaii (Waianae) is almost always sunny and hot, but people who have PV installed there are often surprised that due the heat, they may actually need more panels because of the heat.
Even on cloudy or partly rainy days, panels can still generate power because of the solar rays, just as you can still get sunburned under those conditions.
I worked in accounting for a couple of solar companies and it was fascinating to see the designers account for panels in partial shade at various times of day. Just as panels that can’t be oriented due south, they’re in a less than ideal placement, but still generate energy.
Solar has been a political football in Nevada. We lived there for five years and spent $30,000 to put solar panels on our roof. But just as we did, the Republican legislature voted to eliminate the net metering provisions that made such installations financially viable. We got in just under the wire, and were grandfathered in under the earlier rules.
We were able to afford a mortgage to purchase the panels outright, which would have paid for themselves in about ten years if the rules hadn’t changed. With the rule change, the break-even point was pushed back several more years.
But most people installing solar didn’t do that. Instead, they contracted with companies that installed panels at no cost to the homeowner through leases that turned over the income from net metering to the solar company. I believe most home solar installations used this model. And thanks to the new rules, a large and growing industry was shut down across the state, overnight. Hundreds of jobs were lost.
Then, when we sold the house, the appraiser didn’t add anything to the home’s value for the solar panels. We expected a $10,000 increase, which would have put us in the black. Our real estate agent was stunned, and we suspected it was politically motivated on the part of the appraiser, but there was nothing we could do. Installing solar ended up as a net $8,000 loss to us (and a $10,000+ bonus to the buyers of our house) because of the rule change.
I agree that a lot of the hesitancy in residential solar installations in Nevada has been due to the changing regulatory landscape. The net metering fiasco threw a huge wrench into the whole market which has taken years to recover. Especially the PPA leasing companies, who immediately lost their ability to grow that market.
No developers are building houses with solar panels on them because they just aren’t enough of a value-add. If you show a prospective home buyer two equivalent houses and one has solar panels and costs $15,000 more, which one are they going to buy? Most are going to get the cheaper one; it’s not worth it to spend that much more upfront waiting for the panels to pay for themselves in smaller utility bills each month. So you’ll never make a profit selling houses with solar panels on them. The only people buying now are those who want to pay the upfront cost for cheaper utility bills in the future, or those in the sticks who want off-grid capabilities.
Now that battery technology is starting to catch up, Nevada is moving towards Hawaii’s model where they want everyone to do local storage instead of net metering. That works really well, but it’s still very expensive, especially now that you have to buy a giant battery pack in addition to solar panels, inverters, and transfer switches.
All that said, two of my neighbors in western Las Vegas have solar panels and another one just came by with a form for me to sign so he can get his installation started. So it’s definitely starting to pick up. I’m thinking of doing it but probably won’t pull the trigger for another year or two. The cost is still tough to justify.
Wondering what you mean by “better energy storage method”. I’ve had an off grid photo-voltaic system at my home near Hilo, Hawaii for about 5 years. The battery energy storage set up we have works great. There is a propane generator as a back up, but it never is needed. It seems that if one has enough panels and enough battery storage, the current technology is sufficient. The area is quite a bit further south than most location in the US, so I get well over 5 hours of peak sunlight per day, but we have our share of cloudy days as well.
While it’s true that solar only works while the Sun is out, one major use of electricity in many parts of the country is air conditioning, and that’s needed most when the Sun is out. If you only run your AC when the panels are getting a lot of power, then you won’t need a fossil fuel plant on standby to pick up the slack.
While that’s true, ultimately I think it doesn’t really matter. The direction that everything is moving towards now is microgrids and local storage. Peaker plants will start to go away as battery and gravity storage flattens out the daily demand swings, and you’ll be left with highly-efficient base-load power plants and a lot of miscellaneous local generation.
Batteries work, but they are expensive enough that most folks around here don’t use them (eastern US, mid-Atlantic region). Instead, they rely on the power grid to pick up the slack.
People have been trying to make inexpensive, high capacity batteries for decades, not just for solar power but also for things like electric vehicles. Batteries are getting better, but the rate of improvement has been painfully slow.
Backup batteries for solar (or wind) at the network grid level are not something futuristic in the least.
Australia contracted with Tesla* for a very large battery backup system that started running 2 years ago. A year ago they reported significant savings. And just recently they announced a deal with Tesla to increase the capacity by 50%.
If you are knowledgeable about solar and grid issues, you will know about the first thing and probably should have heard about the second.
Anyone today pointing out that solar sucks because of the daylight thing is behind the times for any significant size solar installation.
To illustrate this, as of late 2018, total U.S. large-scale battery storage capacity was 1,236 megawatt hrs (source: EIA).
By contrast total U.S. 2018 electrical energy usage was 3.95 billion megawatt hrs (source: Statistica).
The maximum possible amount of battery energy density improvement using currently-known physics is about 2x for lithium ion, about 3x for lithium sulfur, and about 4x for lithium oxygen. These numbers are debated but in general the degree of available improvement is limited. Lithium sulfur and lithium oxygen are mostly research items, not commercial products.
This doesn’t mean the above improvements will be achieved, but those are limits beyond which improvement is unlikely using those chemistries: https://youtu.be/AdPqWv-eVIc
On the other hand, the numbers might be at least in part due to touchy-feely things. There’s advertising value in being able to say “Wal-Mart is at the forefront of renewable energy. All of our stores have solar panels on the roof”, because some touchy-feely customers will consider that a reason to shop at Wal-Mart.
Which would be a fair comparison if you expected the nation to run for an entire year on batteries. A fair comparison would involve an estimate of how long the batteries need to last, on average, and using electrical energy usage over that time span.
Plus, of course, we can increase that number nearly without limit, just by building more batteries. We don’t need an improvement in technology to do so.
Current battery technology on the grid has a niche application i.e. peaking power. (Like the Tesla batteries in Australia). Also, as many have pointed out, batteries currently do not have the technology maturity for storing power from wind and solar at appreciable levels.
Peaking power is very attractive to the power generation technology and economics.
Peaking power is needed only for a few hours (about 4) and usually only for a few days of the year. In warm climates, these are the hot days of the year where AC is needed; and in temperate climates, it’s the big cities where the people get back home at a certain hour and turn on their washer/drier/ovens.
So, for an example: let’s say you typically need 100MW for a city and at peak demand this goes up by 25 MW to a total of 125 MW for a few hours. Let’s look at two different aspects here:
**1. Power Generation : ** It doesn’t make sense for a power generation company to buy a generator that is rated for 125MW and only run it at 100MW for most of the year. Instead they buy a 100MW generator that is very efficient and a 25 MW generator that is cheap/inefficient but ready to go at the drop of a switch. Usually the 25MW generator is an aero-derivative turbine i.e. an airplane engine converted to generate power. It is important to note that this aero derivative is not as efficient as the 100MW plant and consumes proportionately more fuel to make the 25MW. Its biggest feature is that it can be started and stopped at the drop of a hat.
2. Economics: From the power producer’s perspective, she has invested in a 25 MW generator that sits around needing maintenance for most of the year and she needs to recover her costs somehow. Wholesale/bigger electricity contracts are different than household electricity contracts. So, say for example, a 100 MW contract will look like 10c per kW-hr when the peak demand is below 100MW and 15c per kW-hr when the peak demand is 125MW. The thing to notice is that the entire years’ consumption will be charged at the 15c rate; not just the time period of 125MW consumption. This is how the power producer hedges her bet on peak power production.
Now comes in current battery technology. Instead of using that airplane engine, she can use a battery to store power from solar or wind and then provide the power for the peaking (peak shaving) application. So, she buys a 25MW over 4 hours capable battery but the 100MW is still generated from conventional fossil fuels.
What the industry really needs is to replace the 100MW generated from conventional fossil fuels. To do so will require a renewable powerplant and a 100MW battery source over 12 hours or more. This is where current battery technology fails. If Battery technology was good, she could buy a 200 MW solar plant: In the day time (12 hours) she would provide 100MW to the grid and store 100MW on the batteries and in the night time (12 hours ) she will provide the 100MW from the batteries. Rinse and repeat.
Have you seen any ads touting Walmart’s solar/battery systems? I haven’t.
Walmart loves to lure in customers with stuff that customers care about. Several years ago they were putting Made In America type signs all over their stores. Some atop racks of clothes made overseas. Note that this was all signage. They didn’t actually do anything to increase the amount of made in America products in their stores. Quite the opposite. If they can avoid doing something but still advertise that they are, then they will advertise.
(And your big apples and small oranges comparison is amazing. A year is not a fraction of a day.)