Bugger all solar predicted for today, so the battery is charging while electricity prices are cheap.
About 20p/kWh right now. Jumping to 50p later this evening.
@davemark We have a Tesla Powerwall 2 and it’s great but apparently the 3 is coming soon. Get microinverters on your solar panels as otherwise, any shade on one will reduce the output on all the panels. And don’t expect to get any significant money from feeding back to the grid - you’re better off using a battery to store that for yourself.
@davemark I recently upgraded my solar system (from an old 1.5kW system to a 6.6kW system). The ROI was less than 3y. The costings for me didn't make sense for either a 13kW system or a system with a battery. For both those systems, the ROI would be significantly longer - for a system with a battery, the ROI was ~ 10 years, at which point I was concerned the battery would have limited remaining life. If I had an EV that I could charge during the day, then the 13kW system would be good.
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.
@osma I had been reading about Dutch farms, and its fascinating. Now wondering about something like this on a much smaller scale for personal vegetable gardens. I'm planning to make one at some point in the not too distant future.
@Lucomo@nomdeb@osma How will we manufacture all the renewable energy products needed without fossil fuels? And then replace them every 20 years? #climatecrisis
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.
@jackofalltrades I don't know where to start on that . " PV hasn't gotten any better or cheaper since 2000" [ 40x cheaper? 60x? I don't think the exact numbers matter at that point] or " You can't run a grid on PV only " [ true, in the same way that "you can't live on rice alone" is true. The US gets meaningful amounts of power from six different sources.]
Just to restate this: I'm not against renewables. All I'm interested in is solving the #ClimateCrisis so that my children have a future. All I'm doing is looking critically at the proposed solutions and I find them lacking.
I wish the #GreenGrowth scenarios were possible, but due to everything I wrote before they all look very improbable. They're just a way to prolong our unsustainable way of living a few years longer and #collapse the system from an even higher point.
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.
@alexstandiford Ah! No and I kinda prefer to keep them separate so I can dump gray and black separately. Especially here at my in-laws cottage, where we don't have a sewer hookup, we leave the gray valve open and only use the portable tank for black + black tank rinse water.
"#Solar prices have significantly decreased, leading participation to increase. This has disrupted rate equity between solar-owning customers and non-solar-owning customers.
The proposed alternative would have all grid-provided energy billed at retail rates and all excess solar energy credited at [a lower rate].
The billing would only apply to future customers, but would not affect customers who already own them."
@CelloMomOnCars In my opinion, the "natural monopoly" that's argued for by incumbent utilities doesn't apply to electricity generation. Grid services shouldn't be owned by institutions guaranteed a profit by utility commissions. Make the grid publicly owned.
Allow the electricity marketplace to dictate the price of power and pay for grid access separately. Doing so discourages utilities from building macro generators, like nuclear, because they're not guaranteed a profit on a risky investment.
@CelloMomOnCars@kevincianfarini this separates power market, grid providers, power sales and power generation, but all work under same power pool system. Households might have two different power companies and grid provider.
(One for buying power, one for selling generated power and one that owns cable coming to house.)
Payment generally consist of:
Grid: transfer fee / kwh and monthly fixed fee based on main fuse size + tax
Power provider: power fee / kwh and monthly fee
Seit wir unsere PV-Anlage in Betrieb haben, beobachte ich unseren Stromverbrauch und da fallen einem Dinge auf, die, nun ja, eigentlich offensichtlich sind. Man weiß sie schon, aber es hat mir nochmal die Größenordnungen von Leistung vor Augen geführt.
Bis 2 Watt:
Ein Handy im Standbybetrieb dürfte normalerweise unter 2 Watt liegen, eine Smartwatch z.B. noch deutlich drunter. Also schauen wir gleich mal bei dem 10-fachen:
Bis 20 Watt
In dieser Kategorie haben wir verschiedenste Elektronikgeräte, Spielzeug, Router, Raspberry Pi, Ladegeräte von Handys usw. Als Beispiel hier mal unsere Mario vs. Yoshi Carrera Bahn: 10,3 W Netzteil.
Wenn ihr euren Was-Auch-Immer-Abdruck in dieser Welt verringert wollt, verzichtet auf das Auto. Egal ob Elektro- oder Fred-Feuerstein-Steinzeitkarre. Licht ausmachen wenn man das Zimmer verlässt ist auch gut. Statt für sich alleine lieber für 2 oder mehr Leute kochen auch, aber im Prinzip sind das alles Rundungsfehler gegen nicht Auto fahren oder wenigstens nicht alleine.
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
@kel install cost £11.5k. ~4000kwh solar over the last 12m. Assuming everything is 100% efficient and that we used 100% of it ourselves then we saved max £1040 @ 26p/kwh. Reality is obv different. Battery was often full during the summer, so we exported ~1100kwh, at a cheaper rate (now ~10p/kwh). Next year we'll use some of that to heat water though instead of kerosene, but kerosene is only ~10p/kwh. Greener though! Spose worth noting that 26p saved is worth a bit more because tax. #solar
August 2017 solar eclipse traffic, in a nutshell... apparently turned some routes into hours and hours long traffic jams. #solar#eclipse#solareclipse#traffic
We were in the same jam. I remember seeing a freight train next to I-25. It was trundling along, not very fast, yet I thought “I’d pay a thousand bucks to be on that train right now.”
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 is more #ClimateProgress that has occurred because thankfully just enough Americans voted for Democrats than didn't bother voting or pretty much the same thing voted for the GOP or a third-party candidate.
Stellantis & Samsung announce new $3.2 billion battery plant in Kokomo, Indiana!
Stellantis & Samsung are now constructing another battery plant ($2.5 billion) in Kokomo. The first plant starts operations in 2025. Both create 2,800 jobs.
Despite all of the #Doomism that the grifters are selling, we're actually making #ClimateProgress and there's still time for us all to #Decarbonize and start to reverse this #GlobalWarming we've caused.
The world's first modular green ammonia plant is starting up in Kenya, allowing the production of fertilizer on farms rather than having it transported thousands of miles.
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 […]
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... 😲)
@gspeng - that's a great question! I found this research report that delves deeper into it and it looks like the answer is unclear. Sounds like according to the patent, the device should have theoretically worked but he didn't seem to have very much success getting investors for it.