Location: Southern Germany. Anomalous heat season broken, first night frost. Firewood even more expensive this year, now up to 160 EUR/m^3 . Natural gas and electricity will jump higher sooner than expected due to tax breaks ending, probably by end of the year. Economy is in recession, particularly any energy intensive industry. Lots of migrants, which are taxing municipalities’ finances. Worst: absolutely no improvement in sight.
On the positive side, 400 Wp photovoltaics modules are down to 100 EUR, kWh scale storage batteries also much cheaper and inverters also somewhat. 80+% autarky for off-grid is no longer prohibitively expensive.
Wind power doesn’t scale for domestic size installations. My solar PV is at 2 kWp at the moment, and I’m planning to add some 10 kWh battery storage in a year or two. Grid-tied but insular capable, it would flatten the PV production peak and be an insurance against potential load shedding events.
I’m using microinverters which are grid-tied, they stop prodicing AC power when the grid goes down, for safety reasons. I will move these to the AC branch of the battery backed Victron modular system (building that in 1-2 years) which is island-capable, so that part requires no modification.
The problem with residential wind is that it never EROIs due to physics scaling. You need MW scale facilities in suitable locations to EROI.
There is some small use case from DIY wind systems made from recycled components in coastal areas, since these are complementary to PV and can improve the duty cycle of backup diesel in insular installations. No point in that for grid-tied setups.
I won’t go back to Reddit, but I’ve been disappointed at how quickly this community died off. The pinned months old threads were enough for me to be convinced the mods had abandoned it and the users would follow soon.
There were no fireflies this summer in eastern PA… I was moving a lot the last decade and finally moved back to the northeast but by the time I did I guess they are pretty much all gone.
I’m really gonna miss fireflies. They were so pretty and such a peaceful part of a kinder world.
Writing about the VA area; I think they’re mostly gone; I remember in the 90’s they were everywhere all summer and now you see two or three every blue moon.
On a happier note I have noticed them in wilder regions like deep in the woods near a creek in almost normal numbers at dusk (and a lot more present out in rural areas I’ve driven through at night). So maybe if whatever’s stressing their population to death subsides somehow at some point they’ll bounce back at some indeterminate point in the future. That’s about as optimistic as I can get about this sort of thing though.
It’s fine that this is an old comment, this community doesn’t have the interaction rate anyways so timely discussions aren’t to be expected.
But hey that’s nice that you saw some, I went into the suburbs and really only saw a few at a time. I definitely wouldn’t feel comfortable putting any in jars like I did as a kid but hey maybe they can hold on for all the lights to go out.
It’s incredibly hot in my region for this time of year; basically summer temperatures in October. It’s a bit trippy when the leaves are all changing or fallen and I can’t split wood without pouring sweat and overheating after ten minutes.
I hike a lot around the Front Range, and the woods are so silent compared to when I moved here in 2002. I used to always see chickadees, nuthatches, woodpeckers, magpies, juncos…it was gorgeous. Now I’m lucky to see a couple of birds within a two-hour hike.
It’s a weird, different, quiet world. I miss the birds.
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