You know what big electricity companies, authorities and lobbyists REALLY fear? That with (hyperlocal) solar, wind and a bit of storage capacity (batteries, hydro and yes, the batteries in EV) we can turn a lot of places/small villages/city quarters into autark zones, where households can get electricity effectively for free, with maybe a low flatrate to keep the infrastructure humming. A local, federated grid along the "help your neighbours" principle.
And yes I've read of a small village that due to wind turbines basically has a cooperative energy company selling power for € 0,09/kWh + taxes and mandatory fees to residents and businesses...
@kkarhan Ah, the garantueed “ja, aber” response from Germany has arrived ;) Yes, there are a lot of hurdles in place. Guess why? ;) To defend the quasi-monopolies of the big electricity companies. But that can be changed, even in Germany, as various examples show. Wildpoldsried in Bavaria: “By 2011, Wildpoldsried produced 321 percent more energy than it needs and generated 4.0 million Euro in annual revenue. […] Three years later, the village was producing five times the energy it consumed.”
I think already the 'smaller' steps are important. So even if there is a 'ja aber' in your way, you can lay a solid foundation.
I installed PV (including a storage system) 4 years ago and on average over the year it provides 50% of the 2 attached housholds.
The energy which I deliver to the grid because the storage is fill could roughly be enough for the other 50%.
Think about the impact of more and more housholds reducing their powerdemand by ~50% as a first step.
#Bavaria is the state that purposefully #cockblocks#Renewables with absurd regulations that make it basically impossible to even apply for a permit to install #WindTurbines at all...
As far as I know a Windturbine (talking about a windpark version) needs more space to a village than a quarry where they use explosives ... might also be outdated knowledge or a myth but I would not be surprised if this is/was true.
@dexternemrod@kkarhan Yes, the 10H rule in Bavaria. Absurd stuff. But it also provokes people to get creative ;) As I linked to earlier in the thread, one of the electricity-independent villages actually is in Bavaria ...
@jwildeboer It's already starting in germany where we can install "balcony solar" with about 600 (in future 800w) of solar energy, directly connected to the mains net just by a regular plug.
Storage battery systems are slowly coming to the market too.
The revolution is already started..... adopt it! ;)
This year we added a 6.4 kWh battery to our solar panel set up. It has literally doubled the value of the solar panels. This month (May 2023) I have taken barely 1kWh per day from the grid, and something like 12kWh per day from solar+battery.
Of course, it's summer, but really that has exceeded my expectations.
@ACAElliott Now imagine your neighbours do the same, each with a slightly different setup, and you could all share the excess electrcity either by selling it back to the grid aor distributing it locally. Imagine how that would fundamentally change the dynamics ;) @hackbyte
Another one, Wildpoldsried in Bavaria: “By 2011, Wildpoldsried produced 321 percent more energy than it needs and generated 4.0 million Euro in annual revenue. […] Three years later, the village was producing five times the energy it consumed.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildpoldsried
Now, I don't have the time to find more examples right now, but feel free to add them to this thread as you see fit. Also failed experiments! We learn through mistakes and sharing the good and bad experiences.
The European grid (UCTE) has this Holy Grail of keeping the frequency as constant as possible, across the continent. An admirable goal, that is actually working quite well. But at the price of mostly centralised coordination by big players. Which makes hybrid grid solutions complicated. A certain drift isn’t that big of a problem in a federated grid architecture like I’m proposing. But it ends up being next to impossible in the current architecture of the grid. Good for a few, bad for the many.
Isn't the grid frequency simply used as a load indicator and as a simple yet effective tool to allow for decentralized power generation without requiring too much human intervention?
@jwildeboer wow. Cite: "Today, the effects of this are an unforeseen level of prosperity resulting in construction of nine new community buildings, including a school, gymnasium, and community hall, complete with solar panels."
@jwildeboer Largest employer there is sonnen producing batteries for sun energy. And they also provide a virtual power plant in Germany, where all meshed batteries work together and share their energy.
@jwildeboer You don’t get that kind of autonomy without equally decentralized calorie production, shelter and healthcare. But given those things, yes: there is not a lot short of kinetic force that any opponent can do to dislodge you.
@jwildeboer
This freedom from fossil fuels is inspiring! I’m wondering if it can be scaled up?
Also, I spend a few weeks in southern New Jersey USA each summer, and in the last few years there’s been fierce debate on a plan to build windmill farms 15 miles off the coast. I think this is an electric company project, so are some electric companies in favor of self-sufficiency or are they just trying to monetize it? #windfarms#environment#energyindependence
Agreed, energy companies are terrified of local power. They want centralised power in every meaning of the word, from energy to economic to political power.
"You know what big electricity companies, authorities and lobbyists REALLY fear? That with (hyperlocal) solar, wind and a bit of storage capacity (batteries, hydro and yes, the batteries in EV) we can turn a lot of places/small villages/city quarters into autark zones"
@jwildeboer This remind me of how ISPs lobbied my State's lawmakers to prevent a city from starting their own public utility ISP by full on making it illegal
@jwildeboer My town has done this but we still pay “delivery” charges to the electric company as they have a monopoly on the power lines and poles. Still, my power bill went down a lot.
@jwildeboer exactly what I've advocated for. Solar on all new construction. Incentives for older. Grid is for transmission only, basic fees. Shared generation.
@jwildeboer@mrcompletely There’s a group working on a bill in California to require that all EV’s have bilateral charging. I’ll try and find their info. Waterwheel hosted them at the Greek for Phish.
@jwildeboer Here the traditional energy companies do everything possible to slow the transition to more distributed energy production, too.
I'm doing my part home. Although we rely on the grid, in total our house is energy neutral or very close to it. 8-9 MWh consumed, 8-9 MWh produced.
@jwildeboer I suspect that is the real reason of the blockade of sensible power supply strategies.
Instead, the powers that be, the power companies, try to preserve their dictatorial power by centralizing energy supply.
@jwildeboer A farmer's coop in Mureck in Styria did this with biodiesel, "Nahwärme" (a mini district heating scheme), biogas, an oil mill (for rapeseed and pumpkin seed oil iirc) etc. Seemed like a pretty good circular setup about 20 years ago, later ran into some kind of financial trouble but I think it's still going. >
@jwildeboer i'm not an unreserved fan of biodiesel but in that case it was about as good as it can be, bc locally produced, mostly from waste, partly from crops on "setaside" land, and locally used.
@twobiscuits Yes, these experiments don't always work out. But lessons are learned through mistakes and can be fixed in the next iteration. We will get better at this, I am sure about that. When we share experiences in The Open Way :)
@juergen_hubert I gave two concrete examples that show that no, you don't need a lot more storage capacity and yes, it can be done in environmentally friendly ways. The "ja, aber" is strong in you, too ;)
@jwildeboer I do work in the energy sector (my company develops SCADA systems).
Hydro storage capacity is limited in most regions due to geography. And batteries are extremely expensive - they are the most expensive part of electric vehicles, for instance. (Besides, shouldn't we try to make do with as few vehicles as possible? While EVs are less bad for the environment than vehicles with internal combustion engines, they still require a lot of resources for their manufacture.)
And even if they were cheaper, they are primarily short-term storage. They can store electricity for hours or days - but for autark villages, you'd need to store electricity for weeks at an end because renewable energy is highly intermittent.
A large backbone grid - such as the European ENTSO-E - solves most of that, because regions where power generation is low at any given time can be supplied by other regions where power generation is abundant. Thus, while you still need some storage, you need much less overall.
@juergen_hubert Which is why I specifically limited my statements to household electricity. Of course we will need a backbone grid. But by creating hybrid solutions for households, we can also reduce the backbone grid load significantly and reduce electricity costs for households. Maybe this will also mean that household electricity will get reduced SLA in exchange for lower prices. With a 5-10 kWh battery you can happily survive hours of grid outage. That’s the advantage of decentralisation.
@juergen_hubert Call it a federated grid. A decentralised grid. Locally Resilient grid. There are many names you could give to that approach. And it will not mean fully independent local grids everywhere. But it can greatly reduce dependency.
@jwildeboer I'm afraid not. Energy companies love this stuff and are scrambling to capture margin from microgrids selling spare power, they are usually the ones making the profit from installing and maintaining the infrastructure.
@jwildeboer I look at my dashboard every single day and it does make me happy!
(btw, if anyone has an idea how to full screen snapshot a dashboard and push it to a static webserver so it can be viewed outside the FW - let me know!)
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