111–120 of 632 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder to what extent we can make it unskilled, at least for a building with modern wiring. Plug-and-play solar panels and batteries sound scary, but not necessarily impossible to do safely.
> Plug-and-play solar panels [...] sound scary But they already exist and are pretty popular in Germany to put on your balcony.
solar costs keep shrinking and then you have power companies like SDGE that want to punish solar owners based on their salary and set a $125 min cost to be connected to the grid
I don't think utility companies are entirely wrong to charge some flat rate for being connected to the grid, there are fixed costs with each customer and solar homes are not actually independent from the grid even if they're net neutral their night time power has to come from somewhere. Even if we get to enough residential solar to completely power the grid from solar and charge enough storage to last overnight there…
A flat fee that accounts for all the fixed costs that the grid requires, then an additional fee based on usage. There is no magical bullet that removes that. Maintaining lines and transformers and keeping it all monitored and balanced and so on takes money.
That will make it so solar is still viable without making utilities complete money holes.
I remember as a child being on a school tour of the Enrico Fermi nuclear plant South of Detroit being told that nuclear power would soon become too cheap to monitor. This was over sixty years ago! So I am a bit skeptical. I also remember around 1975 getting all excited about solar and getting told that costs were dropping so fast that in five years solar would be cheaper than power produced from coal or natural gas.…
My understanding is commercial solar (as opposed to household solar) is cheaper than natural gas so that prediction is at least partly true
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anything involving roofs is difficult to do unskilled (at scale). You are working at height, potentially on a sloped surface, and have to worry about keeping the roof water tight. But if you put the panels basically anywhere else it becomes a lot more viable. Some houses come with a plug to connect your generator, you can do something similar to plug in your inverter. Then you can later decide to put up a solar fence…
Why not just prefab a frame with the panels mounted and hang it on the point of the roof with a crane? Working on the roof can be eliminated or minimized.
The pallet price of solar panels in the US is below 30 cents a watt.
https://a1solarstore.com/wholesale-solar-panels.html
And from alibaba, it is below 15 cents a watt.
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Longi-solar-Hi-MO-X6-...
With full systems below $1/watt. https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Moregosolar-hybrid-so...
Soon (if not already) the largest costs associated with solar installations will be the labor. It's expensive to get people on roofs and electricians to reconfigure panels, install transfer switches, etc. The equipment could be free and it would still cost thousands for the skilled trades to install.
I think eventually the hardware will be so cheap it'll make more sense to use them as solar fences. Reduce the cost to install and maintain by 3-4x easily. Or DIY for practically nothing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Plug-and-play solar panels [...] sound scary But they already exist and are pretty popular in Germany to put on your balcony.
Neat, do you have a quick reference handy? Thanks!
Soon (if not already) the largest costs associated with solar installations will be the labor. It's expensive to get people on roofs and electricians to reconfigure panels, install transfer switches, etc. The equipment could be free and it would still cost thousands for the skilled trades to install.
What if I just bought a field and laid them on the ground, over some plastic or something? Sure, I might be giving up some efficiency gains by not swiveling towards the sunlight or something, but I have to imagine there's a "plug and play" option possible here.
https://electrek.co/2022/12/12/texas-solar-farm-flat-on-the-...
I think the efficiency figures are exaggerated, but the fact remains that such an installation requires less labour.
Soon (if not already) the largest costs associated with solar installations will be the labor. It's expensive to get people on roofs and electricians to reconfigure panels, install transfer switches, etc. The equipment could be free and it would still cost thousands for the skilled trades to install.
I'm having a hard time getting past the assumption in the article that energy use is tied directly to GDP per capita and that by not following the 7% growth of the Henry Adams Curve we're somehow below where we should/could be as a country. That embeds so many assumptions about the economy and where GDP comes from, the decoupling seems more likely to be from the transition from manufacturing and other energy heavy se…
Same - take lightbulbs for example. Thanks to LEDs, the amount of energy you need to generate X amount of light has reduced considerably, but we still have as much if not more lighting than ever. And it's not like our GDP is suffering due to a lack of sufficient lighting, at a certain point there's no gain to productivity gained from having another lightbulb. Same thing can be said about cars, CPUs etc.
Many physical things take pretty fixed amounts of energy. Eg heating a liter of water.