161–170 of 365 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
British industry and standards bodies think this is an unsafe plan. Of course they would because it's work being taken away from them but it would be allowing people to plug generators into ring finals with unidirectional breakers. It's not even guaranteed that the circuit is protected by anything newer than fuse wire or an MCB. No guaranteed earth leakage detection. No guaranteed surge protection. Relying on the che…
I find it interesting because often the best way to achieve a safe building code is to learn by allowing with basic guard rails and iterating as things happen. This isn’t ideal for the rare individual impacted by the “things happening,” but collectively we refine and iterate. Our current standards weren’t arrived at by navel gazing - we got the codes we have by experience. It’s hard to realize that from the present t…
Not to mention that most houses aren't up to current electrical standards, much less fire codes.
- panel 490Wp 2sq.m chinese = ~80E
- battery 5kwh Li chinese = ~1200E , non-chinese ~2000E+
- hybrid invertor+charger 4kw = ~800E chinese , ~2000E non-chinese
- grid and regulations:
-- day price: 0.15E/kWh, night: 0.09E/kWh
-- no such thing as spot prices - summer or winter, peak sun or midnight, no difference
-- can install anything AS LONG AS Nothing goes back into grid - and does not break other city/dwelling rules
The (proven) efficiency one can get is about 50-60% per Wp (if there is sun). So.. it depends how much panels one can install as that is the monie-source, all else is monie-sink :/
Rough Napkin math, electronics with german prices, ~5 hours per day sun on average: 10 panels (1000E) + 2 batteries (2000E) + inverter (1000E) ~~4000E yielding on average 440kwh/month i.e. pay itself in 5-7+ years, mostly for summer loads. While 5 panels + 1 battery + inverter ~2500E -> ~220kwh/month -> 6-8+ years
BUT only IF you can use that much electricity, otherwise it will take much longer to repay. And, batteries have to be replaced probably in 5-7 years, depending on depth-of-discharge.
In most places here everything is electrical. i have convectors, boilers, stove, etc. No A/C. (all other electrics is maybe under 2kw in total). i use like day/night 400/250kWh in summer, 1400/800 kWh in winter. Some people have noisy heat pumps but doubt that changes things much.
If it was a separate house - i would have done it long ago. But it's a block of flats.
So... small Balcony stuff makes no sense (a very expensive UPS?), big balcony stuff (like putting those 5 panels as balcony's shade.. a) probably won't be allowed, b) only a short balcony faces south-ish.
The roof of the building is empty - 250sq.m - and can hold about 75 panels - but dividing that into 15 (or 50+ in higher buildings).. is not pretty. a) Making one single farm and splitting the bill/output seems the only reasonable way but does not work without completely rewiring the building's grid input and measurings; not doable without bunch of permissions/certifications ; while b) making 15 separate 5-panels-packs - is not much economical, plus few kilometers of cables.. And c) If only few people want panels on roof, maybe some form of renting the roof space from others who don't want.. may work for a while but as any renting, may go crazy.
So.. been sitting and thinking.. and recently seems only sitting..
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> 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…
This is not how curtailment works. Curtailment is when an energy company has successfully bid on delivering electricity for the next block of time (an hour, for example) but it can’t provide that agreed amount of power because it would overload the grid. There are various reasons why that would happen: faults and unexpected lack of demand, for example. In that case the company is paid for the energy it was contracted…
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You can spend every euro or dollar only once. If you consider CO2 emissions a critical problem, then you should spend every single dollar as efficiently as possible. Obviously independence of fossil fuels has a value too, as the current situation in the middle east shows. It would make much more sense to import (renewable) electricity from Spain to Germany than strawberries.
You shouldn't be spending euros or dollars at all. The economic system is the ideology holding us back.
That's 'resources' viewed as expansively as possible, everything from the specialized labor-hours of people who know how to do quality control on bulk-manufactured photovoltaics to the ore used to make ball bearings in the factory all the way to the guy in charge of managing a grain elevator that was involved in making the bread for the sandwich one of the janitors had for lunch. The web of collaboration between all these far-flung people who mostly don't know each other, too vast and intricate to fit in any living mind, is how we currently get most of our material stuff.
... And in a conventional market system, the core of how those people coordinate their efforts is money. The price that each person is willing to buy something for or sell it for sends a signal about how much they care about it relative to other things. And markets are one popular way of aggregating that information, helping guide society's cooperative efforts in the direction of what people care about.
There are various allocation systems that don't involve money, both theoretical and historical. Community-based mutual reciprocity with a reputation mechanism to discourage freeloading, for example, can be found all over the place in pre-modern history because it worked – as long as your community was small enough that you can realistically all know each other. Or, back in the 20th century, there were a number of efforts to scale up operations research toward the level of nations, since suddenly we had computers fast enough to handle e.g. non-trivial linear programming. (The successes and failures were both instructive.)
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Coordination problems are hugely underrated in political discourse. So when I hear people say things like "The economic system is the ideology holding us back", I always have to wonder: how carefully has this person thought about a what a viable alternative would look like?
"I dislike the current system" is only the first and most trivial part of a real reform agenda; the next part has to be "... and here is how to meaningfully change it in a way that doesn't result in disaster, with a detailed discussion of mechanism design and a look at relevant historical prior attempts. [Insert essay or hyperlink here.]"
For european individuals, yes. For european nations, not in the least. They try to avoid independent consumers and producers of energy with all the regulations they can throw to them.
What nations are you talking about? E.g. in Germany, you can buy up to 7kW of panels, screw them onto your roof, wire them up with controller and battery and feed up to 800W into local grid, no one is gonna stop you or anything (only thing you need to do is register online with the grid operator if you have >2kW of panels). Legislation is, in fact, specifically made so people (i.e. landlord) actually can't easily sto…
For european individuals, yes. For european nations, not in the least. They try to avoid independent consumers and producers of energy with all the regulations they can throw to them.
A quick check of OBI (our main home-improvement chain) shows that I can get that 800w "balcony" plug-and-go system for 300-600 EUR depending on the exact panels and inverter I want, and it's all pre-approved. I have fill in a simple, free form online announcing that I've done so or am planning to, and I'm now technically an energy seller - my local utility pays some for power fed back into the network (not nearly the…
God forbid you produce more, or try to sell it for market prices or even sell it directly to other individuals through a microgrid.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
British industry and standards bodies think this is an unsafe plan. Of course they would because it's work being taken away from them but it would be allowing people to plug generators into ring finals with unidirectional breakers. It's not even guaranteed that the circuit is protected by anything newer than fuse wire or an MCB. No guaranteed earth leakage detection. No guaranteed surge protection. Relying on the che…
“Unidirectional breakers” aren’t a thing for AC circuits.
If the circuit will be supplying power too (e.g. battery storage, an EV and EVSE that supports powering the house from the EV, etc) then you need a bidirectional RCBO.
People with no differential fault protection need not worry about any of this, they'll just be killed when it goes badly wrong.
Source: Am a UK electrician
Example: https://assets.cef.co.uk/downloads/pdg/wylex_nhxs1b32_datash...
EDIT: To say nothing of people with unidirectional electricity meters; plugging these into those setups will get them prosecuted for electricity theft. All SMETS 2 smart meters are bidirectional; you'd best check your meter if it isn't one of those.
Distributed energy production / storage is the key for resiliency in the future. Every solar farm doesn't need to be China Size - it doesn't even need to be a "farm", just put them on roofs. 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.
Anything bigger in scale is prone to being shittified to the limit by public entities.