141–150 of 651 posts
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The zillions of individual installations probably aren't actually getting approved, manually or otherwise.
Not if the purpose of the regulations is to thwart them, no. But those are the rules that ought not to be.
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Oh wow, that's an interesting position. I'm really curious to hear where you live and/or from what background you say this? Btw, this article is about putting a solar panel not on your roof, but on your balcony. People do it because it's cheap and saves money on electricity. Think of it like growing herbs on your balcony. Sure, industrial farms have economies of scale, but you still save money growing your own basil…
You grow herbs at home because it's kitsch, fun, or even convenient, not to save money. Store harvested herbs die in the fridge, electricity does not. In Australia, our government massively subsidizes putting solar panels on our roof, and batteries in our garages, for a $/kWh price wildly higher than could be achieved with economies of scale in an industrial installation. Batteries are even more egregious than solar,…
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Not if the purpose of the regulations is to thwart them, no. But those are the rules that ought not to be.
Purpose, ought, shouldn't, shouldn't, sense. These are words of minimal relevance to regulations and bureaucracy, which have internal incentive structures that rarely align with any kind of human morality.
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Perhaps the explanation is that it's not something that's useful or rational, but rather, something that fulfills emotional needs of some customers. It makes them feel good. And the manufacturers found they can profit from selling these things, so they sell these things.
It is completely rational to install one of these. The paypack times are just a few years, depending on how sunny the balcony is.
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What a ridiculous take. I have one of these systems and a 2kWh battery attached to it. It reduces my electricity bill by about half and will pay for itself in less than five years. I sacrifice nothing of my balcony, the panels hang outside.
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Balcony solar panels isn't necessarily a bad outcome. It's enormously more resilient to natural disasters and warfare than centralized power stations, it's potentially more responsive to individual power needs than an electric regulator, and it may not even be inefficient—while solar panels in a utility-scale solar farm will have a higher capacity factor than balcony solar panels, that only saves you money on solar p…
> it's getting harder and harder to justify the efficiencies of centralization. A lot of times they aren't even real to begin with. People assume that economies of scale keep going up as long as scale keeps going up, but that's almost never true. They typically have diminishing returns or thresholds past which the unit cost stops going down. If you want to build solar panels you have to build a factory. If the factor…
Also, clouds are less of a problem for a transmission grid with distributed solar farms than for an individual household with its own autarkic solar power system.
Even for solar energy, land is not a big cost, financially speaking. Morally and environmentally, it may be (it's arguable—solar farms don't have to devastate the ecosystem the way strip mining and oil spills do), but not financially.
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You are completely ignoring the biggest cost: land. In a dense country like Germany, using millions of existing, "free" rooftops is vastly more efficient and economical than buying and dedicating scarce, expensive land for an industrial-scale farm. Also rooftop solar generates power at the point of consumption. This significantly reduces the need for new, expensive high-voltage transmission lines.
No, land is not a significant cost, not even in Germany. You're in completely the wrong order of magnitude.
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> The $2,000 plug-in solar system installed on Dwyer’s backyard deck in March consists of two 400 watt panels, an inverter, a smart meter and a circuit breaker. It saves him around $35 per month on his power bill because he is consuming less energy from the grid, but he said reducing his carbon footprint was his primary motivation. so about 5yrs ROI And in germany a similar 5yr ratio (With some german cities subsidiz…
That's way overpriced. An 800W solar system is easily under US$1000 now.
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If the question is "is it an 'actual feature' or is it 'necessary behavior'" then the answer is: Yes. Simple grid-tied microinverters are completely incapable of doing anything without a grid to work with, and this is necessary: A non-synchronized AC generation source can't survive long before becoming an expensive puff of smoke instead. Anti-islanding is an actual feature that is also inherent in the design of grid-…
It’s not necessary in that the inverters need to support it (they could just do randomly staged power ons, and the first one could pick the phase). However, there’s a problem in addition to electrocuting utility workers (the ones around here assume islanding during outages, so that’s less of an issue now). Say you plug the microinverter into a 16A 120V outlet in the US, and the power goes out while you’re running a 2…