r/PoliticalDiscussion • u/Tliish • 2d ago
US Politics Is our energy distribution model a danger to national security?
Specifically, the one-to-many model developed in the 1930s? Central power planta with distribution lines radiating out to every home and business? Is that still efficient and safe? It made absolute sense then and throughout the 20th century because there were no alternatives. But does it still make sense today?
The increasing cost of energy is a prime issue that directly effects everyone, but are those expensive prices a symptom of obsolescence? Is the real energy issue facing us the archiac one-to-many model that has become dangerously obsolete, and trying to prop it up gets more expensive every year, while it gets more dangerous and unreliable every yea?. It was a good way...the only way...to electrify the country in the 1930s, but it isn't working well anymore. Every weather-related disaster results in the loss of power to hundreds of thousands of people, with more effected every passing year. The cumulative daily productivity losses to businesses and the citiizenry are staggering., far beyond the direct damage storms do.
The worst part is that they are avoidable, but we're forced to endure them in order to maintain the one-to-many model that is becoming increasingly extractive, increasingly unreliable, and increasingly dangerous. As the atmosphere gains heat energy, it translates into higher wind speeds in addition to its fire dangers. Those higher wind speeds are exceeding the capacity of distribution lines to withstand them. We need to reduce reliance upon them.
What I think is required is governmental intervention in the form of a major push subsidizing the conversion to solar power...and most definitely NOT via solar farms that preserve the one-to-many models, with its concentrated profits and control, and the dangers of an expensively decaying distribution network. Instead the push should be for rooftop solar, home battery storage, and community-based backup. The minimum goal shoulld be as complete energy independence as possibl;e for all residential purposes.
The old fossil fuel powerplants can then supply the data centers, hospitala and heavy industry...and all other heavy demand entities...moving away from relying upon providing residential power supply, reducing the number of overhead distribution lines.
It is a matter of national security to prevent regional blackouts and prevent damage to the national economy. Regional blackouts are far more dangerous in an unstable world, too tempting and too easy to attack the country during such a period with cyber attacks on the remaining regional power grids, or via sleeper cells of terrorists or enemies vs targets of opportunity. Even without outside threats considered, climate change is creating more bad situations more frequently, and the longer it takes to recover the more damage is done to the economy. If every home was energy independent with backup, it would free up repair crews to restore their power far more quickly at lower costs. Every day shaved from major outages is a day less drag on the economy. And that isn't even considering the benefits to the citizenry. It would also help mitigate the CO2 problems a bit.
So upon which would billions be better spent? On investing in energy independence and resilience or on propping up an outdated distribution network that suffers repeated failures every year?
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u/hiddentalent 2d ago
There are huge economies of scale in both renewable and non-renewable energy generation, and those economies of scale adhere to both the marginal costs (ie, ongoing cost per kWh) and the economic and environment costs of installation. Building a small number of really big generators and storage facilities that can average out usage is incredibly more efficient than having a large number of sites that need to be sized for local peak usage, which is often very bursty requiring massive overcapacity to handle locally. So your proposal is bad even before we look at national security concerns.
But turning to national security, you talk exclusively about "residential purposes" which are among the least important parts of infrastructure in terms of defense. Most individual families can go without power for pretty long periods of time as long as factories, hospitals, office buildings, and other infrastructure aren't affected. It's annoying, but it's not crippling. There are plenty of examples, contemporary and historical. They stem from conflict (e.g. Ukraine) and just poor planning (e.g. Texas, South Africa). You might be grumpy about your cold shower in the morning, but what really matters is that the water (ie, massive municipal pumps that can't be powered by onsite solar) still comes from the taps. And you certainly aren't going to power a steel mill or refinery with onsite solar.
I know "big == bad" is the populist zeitgeist these days, but from an infrastructure perspective it's completely wrong.
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u/Tliish 1d ago
I guess you missed the part about freeing up repair crews to more quickly restore power to non-residential users? If most residences are self-sufficient, it frees up enormous amounts of power for non-residential use, and reduces the risks of blackouts and brownouts.
The one-to-many still requires expensive and dangerous overhead distribution lines, and represents a single point of failure. It lacks resiliency. In those respects it is far less efficient than rooftop. It also provides power of a different sort to a small group: the shareholders, who can use that power to influence legislation in their favor.
Energy independence and resilience is the goal here, not preserving the wealth and power of investors.
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u/hiddentalent 1d ago
You're just falling back on cheap propaganda about boogeymen like "shareholders" rather than engaging any sort of critical thinking.
First, a large number of utilities around the world are publicly owned. "Shareholder" owned utilities are a relative rarity in the world, although they are more common in certain countries. Those publicly-owned utilities still generally rely on economies of scale because it makes the most sense in terms of their ability to meet the demands of their customers. So scaremongering about "shareholders" has no relevance to your argument about resiliency, it's just political grandstanding. If you want to make that political point, go ahead and do it directly. It's a reasonable political opinion. But don't make up obviously false lies about it being functionally better. You would be optimizing for that political point at the expense of other things.
Second, repair crews don't sit around idle. The staffing for things like repair crews is determined by service level goals, it's not a fixed pool. If there's less work for them, there will be fewer of them. Ironically, that would put money back into the pockets of your boogeyman shareholders.
Power grids are absolutely not a single point of failure. Individual distribution lines, substations, and generation facilities fail or undergo maintenance downtime all the time. The grid is designed to withstand equipment failures, large-scale natural disasters and military attack. The fact that you think it is a single point of failure demonstrates you're unqualified to talk about this. And residential solar isn't immune to large-scale outages, it just moves the most likely source of those outages to cyberattacks which can be efficiently and deniably executed remotely, which is a much safer and more effective kind of attack than blowing something up.
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u/GiantPineapple 1d ago
I worked in distributed solar for twenty years. Way too many people don't know or care how to maintain their arrays. I'm still able to monitor the outputs of many of my old employers' projects, and there are actual government agencies, who paid millions for their large systems, that aren't aware their systems have been underperforming, or even outright down, for years.
Distributed generation is a dependable part of the energy mix only when in the care of extremely professional hosts. For the sake of green energy, which is crucial to our future, I hope solar and wind power ownership stays as concentrated as possible.
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u/Ind132 1d ago
Can you explain what losses occur as solar systems age, and what kind of maintenance is needed?
Maybe even "With the best maintenance, a solar system is likely to lose __% of its output by the time it is __ years old."
You don't have to type it out just for me, I'll take a link if you have one.
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u/GiantPineapple 1d ago
Sure!
There are a few places that losses can come from: onset shade (like a nearby tree gets significantly larger or your neighbor builds a second story), differential aging between modules, module.aging in general, lack of rain, or general failure to periodically clean the module glass, or acute component failure (ex. inverter capacitor bank goes pop).
Some of these things are the luck of the draw. Others can be managed with good design. For example, shade and differential aging will affect you much, much less if you use module level power electronics like Solaredge or Enphase. Cleaning your modules with an extension squeegee once a year will get you a boost of 1-2%, assuming they were dirty. If a module drops out entirely (which you will know right away if you have module level power electronics, and the module manufacturer warranty should cover it), replace it promptly.
All of these things can be caught and, by degrees, corrected (except general module aging), so long as either the host or the maintenance contractor is paying attention to the data acquisition system, which reports all of these things to a website in an easy to read format. Most data acquisition systems have apps and widgets as well.
If everyone is paying attention to everything, and luck breaks your way, the only problem you're going to have is module aging. Most module manufacturers, around the time I left the industry, guaranteed module aging not to exceed 0.5% losses per year, relative to the baseline. This means that by the end of year three, you can expect your modules to generate at worst 1.5% less electricity than they did when they were new. In my experience, module aging is likely much less than that. It's small enough that, in practical.terms, it gets lost in natural weather patterns. In other words, when I looked at my fleet performance over time, I did not really ever see a general downward trend.
I hope that's useful to you!
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u/Ind132 1d ago
Yes, that covered what I cared about. I didn't have expect "differential ageing".
I didn't know that the data goes to a website. My small town utility recently added some solar. I noted that the utility provided the land and did an agreement to purchase electricity at a stated rate. So the maintenance is up the to firm that owns and installed the equipment.
The 0.5% was a lot less than I expected. I thought that panels would lose half their output in 20-30 years. This stretches that halflife to 100 years.
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u/Tliish 1d ago
Guess what?
The problems yyou cite open up jobs that AIs can't do: cleaning and maintenance of solar arrays. Training classes for owners.
Reminders of when, how and why to clean them could be PSAs frequently aired or pushed on the internet.
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u/GiantPineapple 1d ago
Operations and maintenance contracts do not make economic sense until you get to megawatt scale - for a residential homeowner whose warranty has expired or been abandoned, it is almost always cost effective to simply let your array degrade. Another reason to concentrate ownership.
Most data acquisition systems do push notifications. I'm sure that helps to a nonzero degree, but the failure rate I've personally seen is nevertheless pretty nuts.
(Also, robots and unpaid ruminants do quite a bit of O&M already)
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u/NoDig3444 1d ago
Giving every single person enough solar panels to cover their personal usage isn't possible. Never mind that we can't build that many solar panels. Nevermind that we can't make enough batteries. Nevermind that not every area of the country gets enough sunlight. There just isn't enough roof area for that much rooftop solar.
Solar is great and we should build as much as we can, but most electricity is going to come from large centralized plants, now and forever.
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u/Tliish 1d ago
We could if we made it a national priority. What could be done with the money wasted on a lost war so far?
Thoise aren't balis excuses fo doing as much as possible to provide every citizen with basic power needs.
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u/NoDig3444 1d ago
You're missing the point. An apartment building might have 500 people living in it and only have 10,000 sqft of rooftop space. It's not physically possible to install enough solar panels on any building more than two stories to cover the power use of that building.
If you're concerned about emergency preparedness, you should be handing out emergency diesel generators. That's what hospitals use.
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u/Avatar_exADV 1d ago
It's irresponsible to ask this kind of question without having done some math on the issue. Why not? I don't mean "we need a formal quote" level here, just... break out a napkin and Google, and at least get an idea of the orders of magnitude involved.
How many households in the US? How much is the approximate cost of a solar installation?
Doing this properly would also involve getting an idea of how much output you'd get at particular latitudes - someone in Florida will get a lot more juice out of the same installation compared to someone in Maine. But even a little bit of napkin math ought to be enough to tell you that yeah, this is way, way, way more costly than anything you could submit as a practical policy proposal.
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u/Tliish 1d ago
Of course, results will vary, anyone with two functtioning brain cells understands that. The goal is to create as much energy independence as possible.
As forr the costs, such a program would be a 10-15 year project, not done for business reassons, but rather survival reasons. Did anyone cost out the current Iran war before starting it? Has it turned a profit yet in any sense of the word?
Taxing those who created the climate problems in the first place would help support it.
We can do it if we choose to do it.
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u/Avatar_exADV 1d ago
We can do it if we choose to do it.
Until you have done the math, -you do not know that-. You're just making an airy and unserious suggestion.
When you have an idea of what the actual numbers look like, even ballpark I-did-this-in-30-minutes numbers, then you can make this assertion.
Do the math! Seriously. If you're holding back on it because you suspect the numbers will come out crazy, then you already know that you're not making a serious policy proposal. But until you can put some kind of number to it, you're just beclowning yourself. Quit saying "let them eat silicon wafers" and understand the problem with your own brain.
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u/Tliish 5h ago
Working on the numbers. ~134 million homes would be solar-powered, minus those already done. Assuming a 15 -year program that includes panels and batteries at a 50% subsidy, the cost would be ~$280B per year, and the break-even point would be reached in year 14 or so. I will post a more detailed set of figures tomorrow. The benefits...economically, socially, and climatogically...would be immense.
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u/semideclared 2d ago
What is the costs of buried lines minus your costs
Problem solved
Most cities dont have power issues when they have no over head powerlines along with many other issues
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u/neverendingchalupas 1d ago
All distribution and transmission infrastructure has to be upgraded, replaced, or expanded for renewables. There is an enormous fiscal and environmental cost.
Solar is only perceived as being a cheaper source of power due to the already high amount its subsidized by.
But you reduce the subsidies to what oil and gas receives and factor in the cost of infrastructure work and its fucking moronic to suggest its cheaper.
Solar is profitable for private industry due to the subsidization and it s effect on consumer prices. Consumer prices which are driven higher with increased adoption.
It makes far more sense to focus on zero emission power generation, not solar or wind specifically. Converting existing coal plants to hydrogen, can be done significantly quicker and cheaper and result in dramatically more power generation, stable power, than renewables.
Building small nuclear reactors that can process existing waste as fuel, is a net benefit, reducing the amount of nuclear waste while providing reliable and stable power. And there are no large infrastructure costs associated with nuclear energy. The cost of construction can be reduced by removing unnecessary regulation that was enacted to disincentivize nuclear power over fears of proliferation.
Even shit that isnt directly tied to power production could be used, water desalinization plants that pretreat water to reduce harmful byproducts, that then can be used to generate hydrogen for power use.
We already have the infrastructure for the distribution of hydrogen in the US, over 99% of natural gas pipelines have already been lined and are suited to transmitting both natural gas and hydrogen. Hydrogen can also be shipped as a solution at room temperature if needed.
The push for solar alone, or just solar in general is collective suicide.
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u/Ben-Goldberg 1d ago
A large part of why energy prices is going up so fast recently is because nearly all of the utilities choose to delay infrastructure upgrades.
Now they are all doing upgrades and passing the price to consumers.
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u/Tliish 1d ago
Those upgrades will need upgrades again soon as average wind speeds keep increasing. Maintaining the lines is expensive, which is why energy companies defer preventive maintenance so often. Which is why they spark wildfires. Prices can only continue to go up as storms knock down lines more often.
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u/Infinite-Plantain-45 2d ago
the one-to-many model worked when it was the only option but now its just a liability. every storm season we see the same thing, lines down for weeks and nobody can do anything about it
rooftop solar with battery backup makes too much sense. my cousin put panels on his house 3 years ago and during the last outage he was the only one in the neighborhood with lights on, everybody else sitting in dark. the upfront cost is the problem for most people tho, without some kind of subsidy it stays out of reach
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