What do I cost?

When you start making your own power using the sun as your power station you might start to think about how much it cost in the past to use power from the utility and how much you used. You might even think about how much a particular item costs let's say daily to operate.

Well I did and decided to investigate... Chris helped.

We set up a spreadsheet and listed all the items we normally use on a daily basis. We tend to be frugal  anyway but some things you just can't get around like a fridge. Good thing about a fridge is even though it has to stay cold it doesn't run all day and all night.

So, without getting too complicated we came up with this list and the eventual cost if you use the utility to supply the power.

This electric cost calculator is based on  the current cost of electricity on Anguilla. I divided the amount of items used only once a week into days because this is a day to day total.

Electricity Cost Calculator per device Assumptions Cost of Electricity 0.4 Item Device Power (Watts) Time (Mins) KWh Cost 1 Coffee Pot 600 10 0.10 $0.04 2 Microwave 1000W 1000 10 0.17 $0.07 3 blender 300 3 0.02 $0.01 4 Toaster Oven 1200 5 0.10 $0.04 5 Refrigerator 750 720 9.00 $3.60 6 Household Fan 120 720 1.44 $0.58 7 cell phone charger 10 720 0.12 $0.05 8 tablet 10 720 0.12 $0.05 9 cell phone charger 10 720 0.12 $0.05 10 laptop 75 720 0.90 $0.36 11 TV 32" LED/LCD 50 300 0.25 $0.10 12 Satellite Dish / Receiver 30 1440 0.72 $0.29 13 wine fridge 500 360 3.00 $1.20 14 washing machine 500 10 0.08 $0.03 15 lights asst. 50 720 0.60 $0.24 16 water pump 1500 15 0.38 $0.15 17 electric car 6,000 60 6.00 $2.40 18 convection oven 2,500 10 0.42 $0.17 19 clothes dryer 5,000 10 0.83 $0.33 20 Hot shot water heater 600 5 0.05 $0.02 21 0.00 $0.00 Total 20805 7278 24.41 $9.76

I thought to myself, $9.76 US a day, not too bad, I can live with that. Our electricity rates on Anguilla are very high, one of the highest in the world. Multiply that daily amount times 30. $292.80 almost 300.00 a month and that is just for me. Ouch! To be fair, many items on the list are used by two people, we both watch the same TV and use the same fridge but he has his own computer and other devices and does his own thing with power.

Notice there is no listing for hot water. That is because we have a solar hot water heater, have had it for  years, well paid for and still making hot water.

We also have a pool. Small pool but it still requires a pump to keep it clean. Did not include that either in my list because we have a solar pool pump. If you have a pool this device is the greatest thing ever made. It runs every day, all day as long as the sun shines. Most people complain about the cost of running their pool, but not us, we even included a solar pool heater so we have a nice warm clean pool all powered by the sun.

An electric clothes dryer can kill you if you are buying electric. It does the same thing if you are making your  own. Aside from charging the car or running an air-conditioner it is the biggest drain on your power. I hardly use the drying anymore but that is because I am dedicated. Creating enough power to use an electric dryer  is something to think about before you venture down the road of an off-grid system.

And another thing, no one can say they have an  electric car if the electric car  is powered by a diesel powered generating plant. If I am not charging on solar energy my car runs with diesel and although it is much more efficient the  bottom line is I used diesel to charge it. Exactly the thing I am trying to get away from.

So going off-grid and creating your own power is kind of like the  difference between buying or renting a house. If you own, you must maintain, pay off your mortgage, get insurance, lots of expense. If you rent all you have to do is pay every month and let somebody else worry about all the  problems. But if you rent you must take what you get and if there is a problem wait for somebody else to fix it like we waited a week and some folks waited 3 weeks to get power back after Gonzalo. When you buy you know exactly what is going on, what you can afford to do and spend. And like our water heater, once  you pay it off it is yours and it is still working and making hot water. If you use current costs of utility power to determine how long it will take to pay off your off-grid system you will know how much it cost and how long it will take to "own" your system and become a power king.

Terms to Know

Kilowatt Hour

1. one thousand watts

2. The kilowatt-hour (symbolized kWh) is a unit of energy equivalent to one kilowatt (1 kW) of power expended for one hour. One watt is equal to 1 J/s. One kilowatt-hour is 3.6 megajoules, which is the amount of energy converted if work is done at an average rate of one thousand watts for one hour.

From <https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=how%20many%20watts%20in%20a%20kilowatt%20hour> 

Why is the Tesla Battery so important?

For as long as I can remember there has been an awareness that solar PV is this amazing technology that produces power from the sun, clean power right from the homeowner's location. Solar PV power had appeal for the hippy and the tree hugger, then the business owner and now the utilities and Governments. Everyone loves solar. With the precipitous drop in solar panel prices, solar is now so cheap that nothing in the Caribbean can compete with the price of electricity from solar.
But, there is a catch, as I have explained to customers, the sun doesn't shine at night. No problem, I am told, use batteries. For anyone who has never done this, it sounds like a perfectly reasonable solution. Add some batteries and you have unlimited power all the time. If only it was so easy.
The devil is, as always, in the details, and the devil is called Lead Acid batteries.
Battery based systems are much more complex than grid tied systems. The grid tied system only has two active components, the solar panels to make power and the inverter to convert it to grid power. There is very little to go wrong and it is very simple.
The battery based system has a number of components, and requires maintenance and supervision. Living off the grid requires a change in lifestyle, and not everyone is going to be happy. In our house, we bake bread, wash and dry clothes and charge the electric car between 12 noon and 3 pm, when the batteries are fully charged and we have spare power. Not everyone is willing to change their lifestyle to match available power.
Battery based systems suffer from a serious problem; they require batteries. While the technology behind solar panels has progressed rapidly and costs have plummeted, batteries are essentially the same product as Thomas Edison used in the first electric car (yes, he had the first electric car, and almost convinced his friend Henry Ford to favour electric over gas). Batteries are heavy, expensive, and don't last long.
Batteries truly are the achilles heel of solar power. Imagine if batteries were perfect, storing all the power you could make and returning it all when you wanted it without penalty, and doing it for as long as you needed. If this product was cheaply available, why would anyone need the utility?
And this is why the utilities are trembling at the thought of the perfect battery. Given the availability of the "perfect battery", a large number of utility customers would simply say "no thanks" and move of the grid. Utilities rely on there being no alternative, on having a "natural monopoly". Everyone needs the service and cannot say no, so the utility does not need to be nice to anyone, to market, to price aggressively. Utilities find it easy to get investment, as they are guaranteed their profits. They have a product that everyone must have, in fact in many Caribbean islands, it is illegal to make your own power, you must buy their power even if you don't want to.
Now imagine the perfect battery came on the market. The customer can now say "why do I need these guys"? Although not everyone will think this way, just the fact that there is an alternative changes the game. Supposing a customer is further from the grid than the utility is willing to bring cables, and is facing a high cost for installation. That customer can simply say "no thanks" and go solar. Imagine the utility cuts a customer off for missing a payment, as happened to a friend of mine recently, through no fault of theirs. That customer, sick of the abusive utility, could just say no and install solar.
The term for this is 'mass defection". There has always been customers willing to install solar and go off-grid, as with "yours truly". The cost is higher than people realize, and it is not straightforward, but if the magic battery was available, those issues for the most part would go away. The utilities start to lose customers, and no-one knows how many they will lose. Investors get worried and investment dries up. The utilities have to change their attitudes towards their customers, as the customer now has an option. That means the utility must retraining customer service staff, alter policies, and be nice, something utilities are traditionally very bad at.
The combination of the magic battery, carbon taxing, and solar incentives could bring about a whole new world of clean energy and energy independence, and usher in a new world in which the utility is no longer the ruler of their domain. The utilities will try to force legislation to outlaw solar and batteries, as they are doing, but in the long run this is futile. Once the new world of solar energy has been established, that genie will never be put back in the bottle. Can you imagine the phone companies reversing the spread of the internet because it affects their phone business. You can never go back.
So all we need to bring about massive social change is the magic battery. And then Tesla announces the Tesla Powerwall battery to enormous hype.

Any company could introduce a battery technology and be met with some success. But understand who Elon Musk of Tesla is. Musk is a founder of Paypal, which changed the business of paying for things, a business that the banks had firmly controlled for ever. He then founded Tesla motors, a business that challenged the motor industry, which has been doing business the same way for the last century and had a lock on the manufacture and distribution of motor vehicles. They had little interest in electric cars, so he went around them and brought the world the most successful electric car, bypassing the dealer networks and selling cars to consumers on the internet.
He also chairs SolarCity to bring solar systems to homeowners, and founded SpaceX, because NASA could not afford to make rockets to take people to space anymore.
Elon Musk is a one man revolution, and when he announced the magic battery, people took notice. Utilities are trembling, solar companies are empowered, and the orders are flowing in so fast that Musk predicts a two year waiting list. This is for a product that no-one has actually installed yet, outside of closed door testing.
The Tesla Powerwall  is a Lithium Ion battery, essentially a wall mounted version of the storage system powering the Tesla car. We have long known that Lithium Ion is a far superior product to Lead Acid for solar systems, but only the electric car industry had the research might to bring this complex technology to the market, and they were pretty focussed on the much larger electric car industry. Lithium Ion requires cooling, battery management and high voltages to be effective. It is not simply a larger battery.
Musk decided to bring down the cost of batteries by using scale, to build a monstrously large Lithium Ion battery factory. The $6B factory, known as Gigafactory 1, is under construction in Nevada and will double the world's capacity in one go. The implications of this for the solar industry are game changing.
The ball is in motion for a society changing disruptive technology that will end the utility monopolies in the same way cell phones changed telephones. Electric cars will displace gasoline propelled vehicles, solar systems will supplant diesel and coal produced electricity for homes, and the Caribbean will benefit tremendously from these developments. It is an exciting time to be alive.