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All the electricity you'll need for 40 years

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Re: All the electricity you'll need for 40 years

#121

Post by toomuchtodo »

fred_is_fred wrote: post #99
nightski wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my state electricity costs about $0.089/kWh. We spend about $100/mo on electricity total which comes out almost exactly to your 30kWh/day figure (with a $23.15 connection charge included). Invested that 40k would conservatively cover over 2x our electricity bill without touching the principal (inflation adjusted). That's a pretty hard sell for solar. Obviously incentives will improve things but it just seems less…

That’s where my math went. 30k- 12 years to get back to the investment. 30k in the s&p is worth a lot more than 30k…

Residential solar PV and batteries should be treated as a bond return and performance, and not equivalent to investment in equities, as it is insulating you from future utility rate increases.

https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=411421

Re: All the electricity you'll need for 40 years

#122

Post by euroderf »

defrost wrote: post #118
euroderf wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My use case is Scandinavia. The summer has an absurd oversupply of sunlight (weather permitting). Capturing this for winter usage is the poser.

The obvious (but often incorrect) thought is gravitational potential given mountains. What are the challenges to incline rail lifting a lot of material up a mountain to roll down later? Water freezes, slopes with snow can be unstable, cold weather is hard on gears, etc. Large (in old mine shafts and chambers?) thermal mass storage has potential, not dissimilar to "heavy" (not suitable for EV) recent battery technolog…

When I said Scando I meant Finland. So, mountains are out of the question! Also tidal races.

OTOH there's mines, but oddly enough I've seen no discussion in the media of using them.

So.. there's no simple land/geographic features worth exploiting. OTOH some storable liquid/gas is more realistic. There's also sand batteries - Helsinki city has one - but they're maybe not so easy to do residentially/DIY, I would expect the neighbors to complain.

Re: All the electricity you'll need for 40 years

#123

Post by euroderf »

defrost wrote: post #114
euroderf wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if ammonia might be doable at residential/DIY scale. Then you have to (a) store it safely, and (b) have a way to use it - not many people have a personal marine application.

Maybe .. but in an urban area with many houses, each with solar panels, it seems inefficient to have mini home chemical process factories, particularly with intermediate steps involving explosive gases. I'm in favour of home PV and community batteries | larger area "peak" use industries - it's a sensible long term use of cyclic energy production.

To further follow up... outside of the cities, Finland has a LOT of lightly populated land, and since EU entry, farming is not exactly going great guns. Land is cleared.

So AFAICT mass PV is a distinct possibility, and if it can be leveraged to reduce the cost of wintertime energy usage, it will find a firm foothold.

Re: All the electricity you'll need for 40 years

#124

Post by Larrikin »

EasyMark wrote: post #88
Larrikin wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you just use Home Assistant to do this?

True hacker would use web scraping to get the rates and a bash script to turn the switch on and off based on rates

That's the entire point of Home Assistant, I'm currently writing an integration for my electric company. I'd argue the college junior programmer would try to do it from scratch instead of leveraging the solution that gets you 90 percent of the way there out of the box.

Re: All the electricity you'll need for 40 years

#125

Post by Ella-e »

sdk77 wrote: post #8

It's nice to have solar panels, I have them too and while they do generate even more electricity than I need, they do so in around 6 to 7 months peaking in July. So in winter, it's grid power and in summer I might need to pay to feed in the surplus. This is in the Netherlands. It's kind of sad to see all that electricity unused in summer, and knowing I could have enough for all of the winter if only there was some wa…

Wow,interesting. But， the idea of storing the surplus electricity, it does raise a question about the energy consumption of storage batteries. i has been researching European home energy management recently, especially with winter approaching. Just share information. enjoyelec HEMS (Home Energy Management System). Use AI optimize energy usage in households. With features like real-time monitoring and intelligent control, it aims to reduce energy waste and potentially lower costs. Maybe can get some money from grid to pay from winter electicity bills.

Re: All the electricity you'll need for 40 years

#126

Post by Ella-e »

Larrikin wrote: post #124
EasyMark wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True hacker would use web scraping to get the rates and a bash script to turn the switch on and off based on rates

That's the entire point of Home Assistant, I'm currently writing an integration for my electric company. I'd argue the college junior programmer would try to do it from scratch instead of leveraging the solution that gets you 90 percent of the way there out of the box.

You means something like HEMS. A controller to connect everything in house ?

Re: All the electricity you'll need for 40 years

#127

Post by Ella-e »

churchill wrote: post #17

I live here in Nigeria where electricity has been epileptic since I was born (I'm 23 now). Like, I live in one of the nicer suburbs in my state, but 12h of power isn't guaranteed. So, last year, I spent $7k on 8.4 KW of panels (400W * 21), an inverter, and 20KWh of batteries. It's been life-changing. I've been able to go completely off-grid. Like, I disconnected from the grid (i.e., my meter) completely. And my usage…

Umm，ｊust wondering, do you use any home assistant type systems? Or are you just relying on solar power.

Re: All the electricity you'll need for 40 years

#128

Post by ralphhughes »

defrost wrote: post #118
euroderf wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My use case is Scandinavia. The summer has an absurd oversupply of sunlight (weather permitting). Capturing this for winter usage is the poser.

The obvious (but often incorrect) thought is gravitational potential given mountains. What are the challenges to incline rail lifting a lot of material up a mountain to roll down later? Water freezes, slopes with snow can be unstable, cold weather is hard on gears, etc. Large (in old mine shafts and chambers?) thermal mass storage has potential, not dissimilar to "heavy" (not suitable for EV) recent battery technolog…

If you're talking about seasonal storage I would have thought the natural fit would be power-to-gas or power-to-liquid syn-fuels? Absorb all those extra kWh from the sun in summer, store it for 4-8 months and then burn it during the cold, dark winter? Energy storage density higher than gravitational potential energy and less energy leakage than thermal-mass storage due to non-perfect thermal insulators etc?

Re: All the electricity you'll need for 40 years

#129

Post by defrost »

ralphhughes wrote: post #128
defrost wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The obvious (but often incorrect) thought is gravitational potential given mountains. What are the challenges to incline rail lifting a lot of material up a mountain to roll down later? Water freezes, slopes with snow can be unstable, cold weather is hard on gears, etc. Large (in old mine shafts and chambers?) thermal mass storage has potential, not dissimilar to "heavy" (not suitable for EV) recent battery technolog…

If you're talking about seasonal storage I would have thought the natural fit would be power-to-gas or power-to-liquid syn-fuels? Absorb all those extra kWh from the sun in summer, store it for 4-8 months and then burn it during the cold, dark winter? Energy storage density higher than gravitational potential energy and less energy leakage than thermal-mass storage due to non-perfect thermal insulators etc?

FWiW I talk about storage liquid gas hydrogen byproducts a lot - I'm in Western Australia, we're putting up small country sized PV farms to power billion tonne per annum mining operations and with no actual "mountains" (although many mesa's) we look to ammonia | methanol and "infinity trains" rather than to hydro dams or gravity stacks, etc.

The GP comment mentioning "Scandanavia" seemed like a good excuse to spitball ideas with mountains - but as outlined they're no easy fix either - you can't just put a big dam anywhere without potential dangers and cold climates have issues with freezing, expansion, contraction, etc.

Where I'm at we're more concerned with overnight power for massive 24/7 continuous operation than with longer nights and less light in winter .. that's simply not a thing here.

Re: All the electricity you'll need for 40 years

#130

Post by defrost »

euroderf wrote: post #122
defrost wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The obvious (but often incorrect) thought is gravitational potential given mountains. What are the challenges to incline rail lifting a lot of material up a mountain to roll down later? Water freezes, slopes with snow can be unstable, cold weather is hard on gears, etc. Large (in old mine shafts and chambers?) thermal mass storage has potential, not dissimilar to "heavy" (not suitable for EV) recent battery technolog…

When I said Scando I meant Finland. So, mountains are out of the question! Also tidal races. OTOH there's mines, but oddly enough I've seen no discussion in the media of using them. So.. there's no simple land/geographic features worth exploiting. OTOH some storable liquid/gas is more realistic. There's also sand batteries - Helsinki city has one - but they're maybe not so easy to do residentially/DIY, I would expect…

I figured there'd be issues - see peer reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42001934
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