What if half of Switzerland's rooftops produced electricity?

Sounds like the reasonable thing to do is to the electric bill into a fixed fee portion (infrastructure) and a variable fee portion (energy).

This is not a function of regular market economics, but rather the extremely monopolizing regulatory capture that Hydro One has in Ontario where they charge huge $$$ for distribution.

Hydro One has a zillion regular folks earning >$100K (see the Sunshine list), working-class retirees earning huge incomes for life after retirement.

A regular line manager in rural Ontario without a college degree and not a huge amount of responsibility can earn $80-100K, which is 3x the national average, in an area where cost of goods and housing is very cheap.

Hydro One exists to support the historical cabal of line managers and pensioners and to maximize their income. They will charge whatever they can force you to pay - since they are a monopoly, that will be a lot.

Electricity will never be cheap because those that have the power to control distribution will 'set prices' and take massive surpluses.

Government/Quasi-Government workers (natural gas distribution is similar to Hydro) have a privilege that few in the private sector have, which is job security, which is an extremely valuable benefit never really put into the calculation. The average person has to change careers or is put out every few years, not only is this structurally costly, but it means from age 45-65 it often means massive pay cuts or worse - no income.

Energy transmission is a big roadblock to the entire energy equation, it'd be amazing if somehow we could get around this. Imagine if we had high-efficiency hydrogen generators, and homes (or neighbourhoods) simply had to maintain them, abnegating the need for complex transmission. It would change market dynamics quite radically.

Which then makes it more economical to produce your own electricity so more systems get installed, until the power grid just shuts down entirely and everyone is self sufficient....

> electricity rates would skyrocket

Which is perfectly fine, because you're using less.

It's a fantastic feedback loop until you're not using any at all!

They also usually try to find a way to weasel out of the payments that were promised to be paid for the excess electricity generated by residential solar, so that the return on investment is much worse than projected when they are installed.

Grid prices going up leads to more clean energy solutions being installed, not less. It's not a problem for consumers but for monopolistic grid providers relying on obsolete and hopelessly noncompetitive means of generating energy. I.e. Nuclear, coal, and gas (in order of $/kwh). California has no excuse for power outages or water shortages as it plenty of untapped clean energy (sun, wind) to power the state and desalinate all the water it could ever need. All that takes is investing a few percent of the revenue of any their resident trillion $ mega corporations. Grid and water prices are high only because the local government there is a mess. It's the same reason it has a homeless problem & widespread poverty, the roads are bad, etc. These are governance issues, not technical problems.

The grid needs to be able to adapt to being needed much more sporadically. The only places where this is a problem is where the grid is a for profit monopoly relying on the ability to dictate prices. Most of the US used to be like that which is why they are running so many costly and out of date coal and nuclear plants. Lots of these are going bankrupt lately because of decades of just sitting on their hands while increasing prices and lobbying to prevent people from even being allowed to install solar on their roofs (e.g. Arizona until not so long ago) or refusing to buy excess capacity has failed to prevent the inevitable. Operating a coal plant in Arizona is like selling ice cream on the North Pole. I.e. not a great business plan. 2 out of the 5 remaining ones have scheduled closing dates in the very near future. I doubt the remaining 3 will survive the decade and it's in any case only a few percent of the total grid capacity.

Now that the proverbial shit has hit the fan in terms of people figuring out they can spend 5-10K dollars on upgrading their house and still get a return on investment in grid savings, grid providers are getting a reality check. All this means is that they are forced to adapt and compete on price. In most places that means investing in wind and other clean solutions with a very low variable cost. Anything that requires you to spend money on tons of fuel even when there is no demand just because spinning up and down capacity takes time is a problem because it means you are burning money for energy that you can't sell.

The key technical challenge here is to find a way to monetize the vast overcapacity we will inevitably end up with. If the grid is the only place you can sell excess energy and demand for grid is going down and you are investing in solutions that generate more energy than you need most/all of the time, finding a way to soak up that energy in a way that can generate revenue is the key thing to do.

Here's some cool stuff you can do guilt free with cheap clean energy:

- desalinate water (again, California: the pacific has plenty of H2O) or condense it from air (by chilling it) - generate hydrogen or other fuels from air, water, etc. - turn biomass into coal (yep, that's a thing). - charge batteries, pump up water, power industry, transport, etc. Whatever amount of twh. capacity we need. - exporting it to places that still have a shortage. - run the AC 24x7 at ridiculously low temperatures or heat your place at a ridiculously high temperature.

We are about to enter an era of vast of excess energy production capacity. That's not a problem but an opportunity. People are talking about covering 100% of our current needs when they need to be thinking in terms of 1000% our current needs. The market for clean energy is magnitudes our current consumption. There is no upper limit.

Californians were conserving because the state government told them to everywhere, higher rates were their reward for listening. All so the state could have an easier time dealing out water to big business. The state is basically a bunch of rich interests surfing on a wave of gullibility.

See also Project Sunroof: https://www.google.com/get/sunroof

Do any of these tools factor in average cloud cover etc.?

An important problem is the fog in the winter months. The nights are longer than in summer and the ground cools off. Moisture condenses and fog develops. The Swiss plateau is special that it is essentially a wide valley about 60 miles wide and 200 miles long. The Rhine and the Rhone rivers leave Switzerland through constrictions. So the cold air tends to stay. During the day the sun warms the clear air above the fog such that a temperature inversion manifests itself. Such a situation can be very stable for weeks. Sometimes it even snows slightly under the fog cover. The Swiss living in the plateau complain about the depressing dark and gray weather and try to flee as often as they can by going up somewhere, sometimes the next hill is enough if the fog cover is not very high. Some cities are more affected than others, for example Zurich, Lucerne and Aarau can have months of fog some years.

Google sea of fog switzerland to get some pictures. These are beautiful.

They're on a fairly low latitude so no, not shorter than say France or Austria. At worst you get some shade because of the landscape.

I guess that's roughly the latitude of Maine is you live on the states. So shorter days than Florida, but not crazy short either.

Nasa provides historical data on the amount of solar energy reaching the surface for any point on planet: https://power.larc.nasa.gov/docs/v1/

> I believe they have very short days during winter ?

You may be thinking of Sweden

There could be a problem with a roof getting covered with snow. Sometimes Alpine pitched roofs have raised strips to stop snow all sliding off at once, you would lose that if it had PV panels on it.

Except they're not, for the vast majority of them. Yes, it might be true in the ski resorts, but most people leave in the plains. Zürich has barely had any snowfall this year.

Even in snowier years, it's a few days per year at most.

Contrary to popular opinion, most of Switzerland's population does not live in the mountains.