Bangladesh has installed
a
million solar power systems, and is installing hundreds of
thousands of new ones per year.
"One solar energy system every four minutes" in the US sounds
impressive, but it amounts to only some 130,000 a year — far
below what we could achieve if policies were set up to encourage it
instead of obstructing it.
California electric utilities are
trying to
obstruct local solar electric generation.
The excuse that the utilities give is incoherent. Suppose someone did
get energy from the grid to charge a battery, and sold it back later.
If the prices are unvarying, he'd lose money on the deal, because the
utility would sell it at a higher price and buy it back at a lower
price. Therefore, the systems would be designed to avoid this.
If, however, the price of electricity varies from moment to moment
according to usage and availability (which is a recommended practice),
people would have an incentive to charge their batteries when
electricity is cheap and sell the electricity back to the grid when
electricity is expensive. And this is exactly what society needs to
reduce the problem of peak demand.