“The rapid growth of solar power led to a record-breaking year for clean energy generation in 2023, and the year is expected to mark the start of a long-term decline in fossil fuels”
My electricity bill for last month: Import costs ~£50, export credits ~£90. Overall credit for April: £40 (including standing charges and running an electric car).
This is thanks to Solar PV, a House Battery and a flexible tariff from #Octopus (Intelligent Go) - all orchestrated with #HomeAssistant
Capital cost was high but well worth it 👍 #solar#solarpower#battery#solarpv#lowcarbon
I'm sure I'm not the only person in the world who has solar panels on their roofs who has wasted quite some time in the mornings watching the magic of the power coming on.
This smugness is matched by looking back at a bell curve graph of production for the day where you've used up almost everything that the panels have produced and yet drawn almost nothing from the grid.
Now that the longer days are here, solar production at the house has gone up a lot, compared to winter, even with one panel down, due to a broken microinverter. I’m glad Enphase and our local solar installer are providing good service and warranty repair. Thanks, Highpoint Solar. #Enphase#solar#solarpower#homesolar
Hidden Lotus Herbs is getting ready to move to our new #farm site and really ramp up our operations!
For some backstory,
I was the recipient of a fund from @coop to start a worker-owned #cooperative and decided to make it an herbal apothecary!
We've been operational for around six months and are now starting our regenerative agroecological farm and increasing the capacity of our free clinic.
However, the #renewableenergy systems we're building are more expensive than we budgeted for, and we could use some help getting the farm and clinic going financially.
We're really needing help from our community to make all this cool stuff happen!
If you can spare some $, please consider supporting our transition and future. If you can't, please share far and wide!
"...solar roof tiles are solar panels that look like roof tiles.... Much like solar panels, they comprise semi-conducting materials that generate an electric charge and send it to an inverter and eventually a home and/or solar battery.
Unlike bolted-on roof panels, they take the place of the tiling on the roof and become part of the structure of the home."
「 California, which gets over a quarter of its electricity from solar, is generating more power than it knows what to do with. On sunny days, there's now so much solar energy being supplied that electricity prices can dip into the negative, The Washington Post reports — a preview of the economic and infrastructural problems that renewables will have to navigate 」
A little more progress on our #SolarPower project..
Got a third battery now, but waiting for some bigger jumpers to come in the mail, I think we’ll be running full tilt by monday or so.
Got 200w coming in, need to test some yet but I think it’s a good match for the power coming in.
The mock-up on the shelving looks good, should be a clean looking setup.
How much did the solar eclipse whack our solar power generation over in California, three time zones away from totality? A significant amount, it turns out. Monday was the eclipse, Tuesday was a regular sunny day. #Eclipse#SolarPower
Yesterday I let my bot manage the inverter charging and discharging for the entire day. It did quite well! Our entire electricity demand was met for less than zero cost with solar and automated load shifting on the Octopus Agile tariff. #solar#renewables#solarpower
My solar panel system is ready for testing. Two "6V 3W" panels connected in parallel. This weird backplane is connecting them using the ancient Chinese technique of hot glue. Using that screw I should be able to mount them to something.
Initial measurements show that this gizmo is making 180mA at 6V (~1.1W) with light clouds.
I'm waiting for a USB current meter, and soon I should be able to continue my "powering Raspberry Pi Pico" blog series.
I don't plan on touching them whilst grounded so I'm not too concerned, but I am now wondering if I can just put up an antenna and steal power. Screw solar and wind, our house will be powered by MEDIUM WAVE BABY!
I have to do a bunch of number crunching to confirm this*, but it appears our house is generating as much electricity as we use—if not more—thanks to our solar panels!
This fact brought to you by digging into our energy billing after seeing a huge spike in bills for the TWO MONTHS it took the solar company to come back out and reinstall our panels after getting our roof replaced due to hail damage. 😬
This might be a nice place for my next #SolarPower installation. South facing barn roof, almost no shading. Easily fits 10kWp. It would mostly feed to grid as the farm itself has very low power demand.
Just 5 km behind those birches in the background is #Russia, where 70% of Finnish primary energy used to come from. This could be my tiny contribution for #independence.