How does residential solar increase grid stability?
The “Stability” of a power system would relate to the ability to withstand changes in load conditions. I don’t see how residential solar contributes positively to that.
A downside to these schemes is that the stability of the electric system now also depends on large communication networks and some computer solving some algorithm. I can imagine the outages. I prefer my power outages to be caused by good old fashioned weather rather than Hadoop kubernetes cluster operator eventually consistent race error.
“Nodal pricing” exists in several markets but isn’t often used. One example is in Ontario the nodal price in Thunder Bay was always very low since industry there had collapsed but there were still three coal fired power plants. They could bid a low price so it would be accepted, and due to low local demand the supply and demand solved for a low price in Thunder Bay, but due to transmission constraints all of the bidders could not generate what they bid, so they would have to be constrained off. I can’t recall if they got a payment for the power they weren’t able to generate.
I think it is different than other commodities since it is very expensive to store electricity. A diesel powered generator and tank full of diesel is probably the best option.
Anyone that needs access to cheap power. So, basically anyone with high energy bills. That's why there's going to be a surplus.
People put solar on their roof not to get rich from selling power back to the grid (though that is a nice incentive) but to avoid having to buy expensive power from the grid. For the same reason factories might put solar panels on their roofs. Car charging companies might invest in some solar panels, etc. And of course power companies themselves also like the idea of swapping out expensive gas generators for solar panels plus batteries.
>The overprovisioning of solar is going to create so much cheap surplus energy during summer and during the day
I associated this cheap power during summer days as when prices approach zero or even go negative. Power you have to pay to have somebody take is worse than worthless!
So some days the power is cheap but it still costs a lot for transformers, grid interconnections, power lines, battery systems if you want power on a cloudy day, so any solar farm that gets built has to cover financing of those costs, which means power is also expensive some of the time.
We can’t both have power so cheap we can dream up ways to use it when it is practically free and also be able to pay for it to be built and maintained.
Is there any substitute for chrome cast audio? I love being able to play in sync audio to the group of receivers I choose throughout the property, using any amplifier. I’m not even using the digital optical input and I love them
I think Sonos sued the heck out of Google for those, and it caused those devices to disappear for a few years. Sonos lost that case late last year though, so hopefully we'll see a resurgence?
I am fairly certain that the academic open source community had already published prior art for delay correction and volume control of speaker groups (which are obvious problems when you add multiple speakers to a system with transmission delay). IIRC there was a microsoft research blog post with a list of open source references for distributed audio from prior to 2006 for certain. (Which further invalidates the patent claims in question).
Before they locked Chromecast protocol down, it was easy to push audio from a linux pulseaudio sound server to Chromecast device(s).
> I think Sonos sued the heck out of Google for those, and it caused those devices to disappear for a few years.
Oh so that was why they disappeared? Seriously, it's time to rework the entire patents system. You should only get a patent granted when you attach a reasonable (!) price tag and agree to non-discriminatory licensing.
I think that's the reason, but I can't be sure. It probably didn't help, that's for sure...
Had I known Sonos would be like that, I wouldn't have bought their products. Their latest app also totally broke the speakers. Stay far far away from Sonos.
The awkwardly-named "WiiM Pro" is a device that claims to support Chromecast Audio (and a bunch of other stuff like Airplay and Spotify Connect). It's been getting good reviews but I haven't pulled the trigger yet.
A lot of networked receivers/audio systems have C4A (Cast 4 Audio) built-in, and they should support grouping. I have a Sony receiver-esque audio system and it plays in sync with my Google Home speakers very nicely.
The point was that you could have an optical out connection to a Hi-Fi system and things would just work from Spotify, etc... The google speakers don't even have an aux out. A Rasperry Pi isn't at all equivalent as it's not plug and play.
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