301–310 of 616 posts
Kenya is an equatorial country so they basically have steady ~12 hours of sunlight every day year round. Pretty cool!
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You responded to a comment about cobalt with vague references to cell chemistry, cycle count, and energy density. What does any of that have to do with cobalt?
The post you're replying to didn't explain it well, but: LFP batteries don't use cobalt (or nickel). LFP production is starting to pass NMC (lithium + nickel manganese cobalt oxide). Slightly lower density but a lot of advantages in lack of easily catching on fire, longer lifetime -- and lack of cobalt. LFP (LiFePo4) is the battery chemistry of choice today for solar installations, where the longer lifetime and incre…
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I could handle this style when it wasn't everywhere. But now I've developed a hypersensitivity and can't bear it. It's like suddenly most of the internet is in a language I can't read.
I always wonder now if an article was written by GPT, or by someone who spent so much time chatting with GPT that they've started sounding like an LLM.
Good story but jesus fucking christ the ChatGPT. I cannot bear it.
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Tariffs (government tax) on Chinese panels, corruption (companies bribing(lobbying) to get monopolies on installs) and more corruption ( power companies bribing to get guaranteed profits) Based on comments here my 7.8kw rooftop solar in Canada was 3-5x cheaper than people pay in the US. It was $8k CAD ($5,660 usd) My Dad in Australia got a 10kw system fully installed for $5k AUD ($3,250 usd)
To be fair, prices in Aus have been heavily subsidised until recently.
When you buy corn or gas or tires for your car do you really care if it’s subsidized and say something like “oh yeah it was $x, but heavily subsidized”?
Of course not, you only care about how much it costs you.
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And trust, probably the most valuable commodity. Three or four decades of proven ability to deliver, trusted relationships. Even despite all the political noise.
The industry basically treats any designs sent to China as a loss since they know it will be duplicated I don't think trust has much to do with it
" Let’s dive in"
" Want to fight climate change?"
Seven hundred bullet points in the article, etc.
Some solar panel companies in China are trying to extract the idea of value from farmers whose hands change actual currency a couple of times a year to whoever brings it to market, all other times "money" is sent around in SMS. That bit of extracted wealth pays out in volume, eventually, but they also get a huge boost from selling "we did an environmentalism" dollars to corporate social responsibility brokers who are trying to help ai and oil and gas companies convince legislators that actually their businesses don't harm the environment because they bought the magic dollarydoos from the Chinese solar panel vendors who are making money selling solar panels but also selling magic dollarydoos.
It seems madness. This system is efficient and the best one we can do?
Wondering if any Aussies here know this. I’ve heard that if you have a solar system and a battery system connected to the grid, if the grid goes out for whatever reason, your battery gets cut off as well. Meaning that it’s essentially useless as power backup. Is this true? Can you really go fully off-grid in Australia? I’ve heard this from rural people in Victoria, where they do experience blackouts and where an actu…
This is yet to be tested, but it's very specifically setup to me able to.
There are some specific electronics required to continue operation when the grid is down, and with the explosion of popularity of home batteries, I think these options are also more common.
The grid is HUGELY expensive, an absolutely massive cost for our electricity. And it would still be expensive in a well-regulated environment where you can quickly and easily get permission to build, without, say, voter ballot propositions illegally blocking a transmission line for years [1]. Here in the US we have a very very poorly regulated environment for adding to our grid, it moves slower than molasses and ther…
1: e.g. I saw an inspector not allow two 90deg. bend in RMC because, while the existing RMC went through a wall, and came out in a straight line on the other side, without knocking out the wall, we couldn't prove that there weren't already 3 90deg. bends. Maybe that's the right call (the electrician certainly thought it was asinine), maybe not, but things like that can significantly increase the time for project completion, since there are downstream effects to the scheduling.