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‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms

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Re: ‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms

#151

Post by hvb2 »

theshrike79 wrote: post #130
raverbashing wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you find dollar bills on the ground you need to pay someone to collect it as litter" Charge batteries, do electrolysis, or a multitude of other uses (I know some companies do that already)

This is literally the only sane usage for hydrogen outside of industrial uses, when you have a massive excess of renewables, use it to turn water into pressurised hydrogen. And when the prices go up, you run that through a grid scale fuel cell and feed it back to the network.

Storing hydrogen is no small feat. Especially for long duration

Re: ‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms

#152

Post by hvb2 »

wat10000 wrote: post #118
msandford wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Net metering is really, really smart when the installed base is small relative to the fossil fuel power plant capacity. But it doesn't scale forever. Once it gets up towards 20-40% of the fossil fuel capacity, it goes from an asset to a liability. Suppose I have a 100MW gas turbine. And suppose there's 1MW of solar installed in my generation network. I don't really care if I sell 80MW at noon and 90MW around dinner t…

Net metering only makes sense as a way to incentivize solar installations. Looking at the economics, it's not something any utility would offer willingly. It's like if the grocery store let you give them milk for a credit at full price. (Let's ignore the sanitary/health/quality issues that would come up.) You decide to buy a cow and you drink that milk. Sometimes you need more than your cow can give so you buy extra…

> It's like if the grocery store let you give them milk for a credit at full price.

I know of quite a few places where through net metering you don't get full price, you get the wholesale rate for your production which is significantly less.

Re: ‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms

#153

Post by leonidasrup »

mbgerring wrote: post #135
te_chris wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wild that you're getting downvoted for saying something so obvious. Weird.

Not weird if you’ve been participating in discussions on clean energy since the beginning of this century. The inevitability of the energy transition has been obvious for so long, and even when it’s done there will be cranks insisting that it’ll never work.

[dead]

Re: ‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms

#154

Post by laurencerowe »

mbgerring wrote: post #136
friendzis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Yes there are times when solar doesn't produce energy, but there are also times where it OVERproduces. When solar OVERproduces you have to literally pay someone to consume that energy, most probably wind farms, which could be producing energy instead. So you pay actually twice. When the solar underproduces, you need to bring in alternative sources, but those now have to c…

There will be connected batteries in every home solving this problem faster than the fossil fuel lobby can come up with a new talking point about why it’ll never work.

I'm not convinced we'll ever see mass deployments of batteries to homes, not because of the fossil fuel lobby but because of the economies of scale from installing grid sized batteries at strategic points in the transmission network.

In California grid scale batteries have capital costs of around $125/kWh to $155/kWh while a home battery might be 20x that including installation.

Re: ‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms

#155

Post by tadfisher »

sl-1 wrote: post #138
theshrike79 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My current EV has a 38kW battery. When it's too worn out for car use (SoH around 60-70%), it's still perfectly enough to run _everything_ in my house for multiple days - except for the electric sauna, and I'm smart enough to turn it on if there are production issues :D There's a reason why EV's will never be as cheap as the cheapest ICE shitbox. Just the bare metals in the battery are worth thousands when recycled, e…

If you ever are looking to implement that EV battery as house backup, this repo might be useful: https://github.com/dalathegreat/Battery-Emulator I did mine with it and old leaf 24kwh battery (~60k km). After all the safety margins I get ~15 kwh out of the battery.

Sorry, the consequences are too dire for me to delegate household battery control to a vibe-coded project.

I'm curious what your home insurance provider has to say about your installation.

Re: ‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms

#156

Post by skippyboxedhero »

zowie_howie wrote: post #56
metalman wrote: post #5

to answer the first question in the article "Many consumers want to know how long it will take them to make back the upfront costs of solar" my answer is that the payback is imediate, right from the first moment watching as energy is generated out of thin air, and the sudden relief from getting off the energy angst missery-go-round, and the sheer borring inertness of solar pv as it does the thing with zero detectable…

Is it immediate? Sure, there is satisfaction that you are using 'free' electricity. But it does have an upfront cost. I calculated that it would take over 11 years to recoup the investment based on our current usage. Given we already get cheap night-time rates to charge the car and run appliances, it is hard to justify. Like many UK houses, we have gas central heating too. I guess if we had a battery too (more invest…

UK also has massive subsidies. I know someone who got a government subsidy, the company didn't complete the job, got paid for the government for the full job, and they calculated the payback was 50+ years.

At this point, I do not understand how anyone can possibly believe that the people advocating for this stuff are thinking in terms of economic (as opposed to political or social) returns. This stuff makes no economic sense and is already bankrupting the country.

Also, there is a legal requirement for new builds to have this now, this is with a massive shortage of housing, with a government that is a government of the "people" but has just put out the same housing targets as the last one and is running 75% behind annually. The scale of subsidies being given to these industries is probably tens of billions, green energy subsidies are now 5x larger than industry profits...this makes no sense, even with sky-high electricity prices (to be clear, it is consumers who are ultimately paying for this...we pay higher prices so that a lawyer somewhere can prattle on about leading a "green revolution" that is lining the pockets of donors).

Re: ‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms

#157

Post by roysting »

triceratops wrote: post #99
roysting wrote: post #42

[flagged]

Countries other than China make panels too. India is dealing with an oversupply from domestic production right now: https://solarmagazine.com/2025/08/india-solar-supply-chain-f...

There is so much darn what-about coping going here. I can’t help people with their emotional rationalization.

Fact of the matter is still getting your source of energy from India, when you are not India, is still not energy independence either, regardless of whether or not you do or do not like India more or less than China.

The craziest part about all of this is that Europe is quite literally not independent in any way whatsoever, especially not in matters of energy of any kind.

Re: ‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms

#158

Post by gorbypark »

misja111 wrote: post #27

Can anybody explain how these plug-in solar panels work? I am suprised that it's possible to just plug them in to your wall socket. For instance, isn't it complicated to have their output be in perfect sync with the frequency that comes in via the electricity net? Because to me it seems that if they won't, you will have lower benefits or even a net minus after plugging it in.

The micro inverter (most of these balcony kits use micro inverters) uses the grid as the reference. Most of these inverters will actually do nothing when the grid goes down. Like, they shut down for safety so you are not back feeding the grid, but even if you had some sort of back feeding isolation going on, they would still do nothing because they don’t have the reference of the grid.

It’s a downside of many grid tied residential systems (even large ones). No grid = no solar.

The Enphase IQ8 series is one of the first mass market micro inverters based systems to have the ability to make its own tiny electric island when the grid goes down. Requires an isolation switch and a relatively power hungry controller to use that feature, though. I looked into them for a balcony solar setup but it would be way overkill to run a full on controller for 800w of solar!

The best way for a small setup is just have a small “solar generator” battery that can take MC4 connectors as input. Prolonged power outage? Unplug the inverter, plug in the battery.

Re: ‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms

#159

Post by gorbypark »

ForHackernews wrote: post #29

They are going to start selling solar panels at Lidl, a German-owned grocery store chain https://www.independent.co.uk/extras/indybest/house-garden/l...

I saw a video from the UK government with a guy walking down the aisle of a Lidl talking about it! I quickly went to Lidl.es to look as these 800w balcony solar setups are legal here in Spain. Unfortunately they don’t sell the here! Maybe once the UK does it they’ll start.

Re: ‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms

#160

Post by itsmek »

misja111 wrote: post #27

Can anybody explain how these plug-in solar panels work? I am suprised that it's possible to just plug them in to your wall socket. For instance, isn't it complicated to have their output be in perfect sync with the frequency that comes in via the electricity net? Because to me it seems that if they won't, you will have lower benefits or even a net minus after plugging it in.

Syncing them with electricity is easy. The hard part is preventing export to the grid which requires either a compatible smart meter that can communicate with your panels or a transformer clamp installed by an electrician. My understanding is some meters measure both directions equally so if you do end up exporting power you can conceivably increase your utility bill.
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