|
|
re: economic lingo translations
5 jan 2001
george estep wrote:
>...i am currently trying to show that the average cost to connect each
>new home to the existing grid is over $10,000, thus bringing the cost
>of renewables in line with that for grid energy.
that would be cheerful news for renewablists...
>the other costs for the grid infrastructure are clearly astronomical...
i'm not sure about that. the cost of the rest of the grid is shared.
for generation, i seem to recall that a combined-cycle natural gas
plant costs less than $1 (50 cents?) per peak watt, and peak watts
become closer to average watts with more and more houses in a system,
statistically-speaking. phone companies provide "reliable" service
with 10% of the trunks needed to connect every subscriber at once...
>...i see real difficulties in quantifying this on a per-home basis.
we might look into an upper bound... let's say, in the most expensive
case, we have n homes per square mile. let's say they are far enough
apart that they each need their own transformer, and a few of their own
poles and wires, and they are located on a square grid (the network would
be cheaper if they were clustered, even if on both sides of a street :-)
so each home sits on 5280^2/n ft^2, eg 27.8k ft^2 (0.64 acres) with
n = 1,000 homes per square mile, and the distance between homes is
2x5280/sqrt(n), eg 334 feet for n = 1,000. these 1,000 homes can all
be connected with 999 334 foot wire links. more generally, n homes can
be connected with at most (n-1)2x5280/sqrt(n) feet of wire, roughly
10560sqrt(n), costing about $52800sqrt(n) at $5 per foot for the whole
system or $52800/sqrt(n) per home. (note that we can inexpensively add
a few links to greatly increase the distribution reliability.)
if we add $1k per home per transformer and another $1k for generation,
we might say the grid can compete with a $25k pv system whenever $25k
< $2k+52800/sqrt(n), or n > 5.3 houses per square mile, with at most
4,600 feet between houses, if i did that right... of course we are
only talking about the capital cost, vs the fuel cost (2 cents/kwh?),
or the ongoing cost of battery replacement (10 cents/kwh?)
>as stated before, the problem is generally that the homeowner cannot
>avoid the costs associated with the grid connection.
weasel-bob stated that, but my friend joe says homeowners are under
no obligation to connect to the grid in pa.
nick
|
|
