With the media so obsessed with the eventual "waste" from green energy production - end of life solar panels, turbine blades, batteries etc, wouldn't it be great if they provided context?
There are 9000 oil tanker ships on the planet. 10s of thousands of petrol trucks. 10s of thousands of petrol stations. 10s of thousands of miles of pipeline.
All of which are environmentally damaging to dispose of.
Yet, never discussed in the media. Its just the green boogeyman.
Hmmmm... Our #solar battery provider is offering to upgrade our unit.
Going from 2kWh to 4.8kWh.
Total cost including installation will be £2,900!
That's expensive. But cheap for a battery of that size.
Our old battery is about 8 years old, and getting a little temperamental. But still basically works.
But bigger capacity would mean being able to export more when energy prices are high.
🆕 blog! “eInk Display for Octopus's Agile Energy Tariff”
I'm a little bit obsessed with building eInk displays. They're pretty cheap second hand. They're low energy, passive displays, with good-enough performance for occasional updates. Here's a new one which shows me what the current cost of my electricity is: Background After installing solar panels, a …
They arrived about 10am, and just left now about 6pm. Four guys doing the install. We have 10 panels, five on the front and five on the back of the roof so should get good coverage, and a 5.5kW lithium battery. Alas they finished as the sun was going down so there was barely time for it to charge, but the battery did charge to 20% while they were hooking things up to it. We also have an app to check everything.
No need to clear new land for solar power. Panels can coexist with agriculture, and even help it since many crops thrive in partial shade and/or benefit from water retention under the panels.
“Maize is grown by about 50% of farmers in Tanzania. Maize is also a sun loving plant. So the fact that we had an 11% yield increase in maize [under solar panel arrays] is a phenomenal result,” he said.
It's very clear how desperate green tech advocates are to paint the current developments as a win for the climate. But by doing so they only reinforce the status quo.
Greer's understanding of energy and the capabilities of renewables is spot-on, but his assessment of risk sounds off. Just because a nuclear war hasn't happened doesn't mean it never will. I'm not saying it's inevitable either, but the risk is much higher today than it was even ten or twenty years ago, and due to climate change is only bound to increase with time.
Balancing my time between work and planning my summer hobby projects.
Trying to figure out the best bang for my literal buck... trying to decide between a 4G/LTE/5G router, more solar panels, a second inverter... those are probably the largest purchases I'm considering.
Leaning heavily towards more solar panels having the biggest impact for my money. I've got 1400W now. Bumping that to 2100W would be a significant improvement.
This one took weeks to write. It's about me finding a way to significantly reduce the power consumption of a Raspberry Pi Pico W working as a weather station, collecting environmental data.
I am also writing about powering the Pico using solar panels, and this time it's a success, my weather station can now run indefinitely, powered by the sun!
The amount of electricity that the #Nuclear industry has produced globally peaked in 2006, but regrettably that wasn't the peak in regards to how much taxpayers have subsidized that industry.
This winter, rather than using bottled gas for additional heating, we used electric heaters - this post talks a little about how we approached it, some issues we encountered and the result.
Genuinely curious as most of my followers are #infosec and somewhat logically minded (just somewhat) - how many of you have #solar panels, batteries, an #EV, or even gas/diesel generators at home? Or more than one? Curious.
Nuclear power was sold to the world as a safe, clean, and economically viable source of electricity. We were told that it would be "too cheap to meter"1. Even the most ardent proponent of nuclear power will have to admit that hasn't come to pass. Construction costs for nuclear power stations are dwarfed only by their decommissioning costs. Yes, politics and regulation conspire to increase the price - but nuclear hasn't made electricity particularly cheap. Indeed, we mostly seem to be paying more than ever for our power.
Well, not quite.
On Christmas Eve, my electricity company emailed me to say that I would have several hours of free electricity. They would charge me £0.00 per kWh. More than that, at a few specific times they would pay me for my electricity use!
Most factories and heavy industrial plants weren't running the day before Christmas. UK power usage spikes when everyone boils a kettle at the end of a football match or other similar event - but there was nothing so momentous happening at 3AM. So supply outstripped demand.
Anyone with a smart-meter could have been paid to charge their car, run their tumble dryer, or stay up until the wee hours playing on their console.
It wasn't mined uranium which gave us power which literally had to be given away; about 62% of the electricity came from wind.
At this point, the nuclear lobby will start whinging about subsidies (both nukes and renewables are generously subsidised) and how wind can't provide a base load (which is fair). But although sticking a bunch of turbines in costal waters is an engineering marvel - it's pretty cheap compared to building and maintaining a nuclear power station.
Wind - and other renewables - have done what nuclear couldn't. They have provided such an abundance of electricity that consumers are paid to use it.
Because home appliances are increasingly efficient, domestic energy use is falling - it's down 19% since 2010. Electricity use by domestic properties was about 96.2 TWh in 2022 and 135 TWh was generated by renewables.
Yes, electricity is fungible, but you can convincingly make the case that every home in the UK was powered by renewables.
Solar panels don't work at night, and wind-turbines don't work when there's no wind. We'll always need something to be able to provide a base-load of electricity. That might be nuclear, or fossil fuels, or it might be storage from the excess power from renewables.
Sadly, the world is still filled with war, famine, and disease. But, for a few moments on a winter's evening, wind power genuinely became too cheap to meter.
If you want to move to a time-of-day electricity tariff, you can join Octopus Energy - if you use that link, we both get £50 bill credit.
There is a lot of contention about that phrase. It was (probably) about the future prospects of nuclear fusion - but it became attached to nuclear fission. You can read more at the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission↩
Finally got around to switching to Octopus Flux, which gets us cheap electricity to charge the batteries during the night. Of course, the day it goes active we get glorious sunshine and now I have a full battery but nowhere to store the solar. shakes fist at sun#solar#solarpower#batterystorage#renewables
August 2017 solar eclipse traffic, in a nutshell... apparently turned some routes into hours and hours long traffic jams. #solar#eclipse#solareclipse#traffic
For almost an hour this morning in the midwest of the U.S. almost 2/3rds of our electricity was being produced from #wind power (which is actually a form of #solar power I'd like to point out but that's besides the point).
This is real, tangible #ClimateProgress and more concrete results of our efforts over the last decades that should give you #ClimateHope
This story is NUTSO. Who knew that a Canadian inventor had created working solar panels as early as 1905 – and that him being KIDNAPPED is what possibly derailed the evolution of solar tech for decades?
(I thought the story might be exaggerating that last point until I saw the kidnappers' conditions for his release... 😲)
Less than a year ago, in August 2023, we installed a 4.8kWh Solar Battery at a cost of £2,900. Whenever I talk about the upfront capital costs of solar power, people rightly want to know what the payback period is. Well, after less than 10 months, the battery has given us 1MWh. To put that […]