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Building my own solar power system

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Re: Building my own solar power system

#171

Post by bilbo0s »

nullpoint420 wrote: post #164
Aurornis wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s strange to me that people in rural areas pay for electricity. It makes no economic sense, at least here in the Caribbean. This comment was very confusing until I read the second sentence. Electricity prices in the Caribbean are very high, and I can only imagine that rural areas are even worse. Where I’m at in the United States a typical electric rate is around $0.10/kWh. Paying that nominal amount and avoiding…

I’m jealous. Where I live in California the off peak rate is $0.32/kWh and peak rates are $0.58/kWh.

If that's considered high, I'm just not going to say what it costs in the Caribbean.

At least where I was.

Re: Building my own solar power system

#172

Post by eldaisfish »

epistasis wrote: post #16
sneak wrote: post #7

It’s a true shame that the public utility commission is so corrupt that we lose the obvious economies of scale from grid-scale installations of same in favor of expensive rent seeking by a state-sanctioned monopoly. I also have 60kWh of batteries in my kitchen, but for the average person who doesn’t want to deal with this stuff, having to admin part of the power grid is a tragic waste. If the PUC and power company we…

It turns out that the biggest cost of California energy is not generation, it's distribution and transmission. Highly distributed energy lessens the peak demands on the T&D system, which means that the T&D system can be smaller, which greatly reduces the fixed cost of T&D. Utility scale solar requires greatly expanding transmission lines, to the extent that lack of transmission is the biggest barrier to adding solar…

you're making a big assumption here - that the demand peak coincides with the distributed generation peak. This is generally not true.

Re: Building my own solar power system

#173

Post by sneak »

jaapz wrote: post #106
sneak wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1kW is less than a toaster, fwiw. I draw 1-1.5kW for my servers in a spare bedroom. It’s not a lot of spindles/cores, just a few dozen.

1kW continuously is 8760kWh per year. To compare, my house used 6200kWh in total over 2024, including heating. Your toaster draws 1kW for maybe 5 minutes a day, which is maybe 30kWh per year. The power in this comparison is not important, it's the total energy consumed (which is what you are billed for in the end).

yes, computers use a lot of energy, and spinning disks in my 40 hard drives use even more.

Re: Building my own solar power system

#174

Post by belorn »

KaiserPro wrote: post #90

I have a solar system in my house in london. 5kw, 13kwhr battery. I am self sufficient from end of march to october. I recently got a second hand electric car. I bought an EV plug (total fucking ripoff. its a fucking plug with a contactor, RCD and a CAN interface. no way is that worth fucking £600) It has some basic control to allow me to charge from excess solar. What is not easy to do is charge at night without dra…

Would be interesting to know how London compare to Sweden. Electricity here are generally about twice to four times more expensive during the winter than during the summer, and energy consumption is about twice the amount during winter compared to summer. On average people here spend around 75% of the total energy bill during winter.

Re: Building my own solar power system

#176

Post by gopalv »

thebiss wrote: post #170
K0balt wrote: post #144

I’ve been running a solar microgrid on my coffee farm for the last 7years. We started with a few golf cart batteries and 4 panels, these days we’re powering 4 houses, 7 cabins, water extraction, treatment, and RO processing, campus-wide fiber network and switches, path lighting, security systems, and a small server rack. We’re running 6 inverters on our primary system in a three phase configuration, 35kw of panels an…

What is your recovery plan in the event of a hurricane? I'm not fond of high electric rates, but in addition to generation those rates amortize and distribute the cost of storm recovery. A home or business with grid-tied solar pays interconnect fees for the option to get paid back a little for excess generation, and the option to decide to switch back to 100% grid power if a storm damages the on-site panels.

> those rates amortize and distribute the cost of storm recovery

Not exactly when it is a farm out there away from a town.

My experience is from a different era (90s) and a different kind of farm, but I spent a bunch of summers in one, which had power outages whenever the monsoons picked up.

The trouble was that there was a single line feeding the farm from about 6km away, so if that went down a single farmowner complained - the rate payers who were in a denser urban area always got priority, because there were 600+ people who shared a transformer.

The generator ran a lot when winds knocked power out, but the generator only ran when there was a big power need like running the well pumps or one of the winnowing mills. Even the winnower had pedals, because work doesn't stop.

Every bathroom had a light with a 30 minute battery in it, which came on when the power went out - I guess if they had LEDs those same batteries would be 6 hour lights.

They would have killed for solar + storage, because shipping fuel in for the generator was one of those annoying things you had to keep doing over and over again.

Re: Building my own solar power system

#177

Post by baby_souffle »

Loughla wrote: post #166
nullpoint420 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m jealous. Where I live in California the off peak rate is $0.32/kWh and peak rates are $0.58/kWh.

Rural area power co-op member here - flat rate 24/7 for residential is .13/kWh. Businesses/farms can get down to .10/kWh if they qualify. They proposed to update it to .15 so they could trim trees around the lines a little better, but it got denied by the co-op members as unnecessary.

> They proposed to update it to .15 so they could trim trees around the lines a little better, but it got denied by the co-op members as unnecessary.

Pge felt the same way and it did t turn out so well for them. I hope your coop is never found to be at fault for the next record breaking fire…

Re: Building my own solar power system

#178

Post by rz2k »

thebiss wrote: post #170
K0balt wrote: post #144

I’ve been running a solar microgrid on my coffee farm for the last 7years. We started with a few golf cart batteries and 4 panels, these days we’re powering 4 houses, 7 cabins, water extraction, treatment, and RO processing, campus-wide fiber network and switches, path lighting, security systems, and a small server rack. We’re running 6 inverters on our primary system in a three phase configuration, 35kw of panels an…

What is your recovery plan in the event of a hurricane? I'm not fond of high electric rates, but in addition to generation those rates amortize and distribute the cost of storm recovery. A home or business with grid-tied solar pays interconnect fees for the option to get paid back a little for excess generation, and the option to decide to switch back to 100% grid power if a storm damages the on-site panels.

After a hurricane, the plan might be to help neighbors charge their phones, or sell electricity to telcos to power their networks switches and cell towers.

I think I am much less remote than the poster, and I can easily lose power for a week or more after a winter storm. Considering that they already have generators on site that can manage the full load, they probably have much better up time than the utility electricity provider.

Re: Building my own solar power system

#180

Post by _whiteCaps_ »

metalman wrote: post #95
KaiserPro wrote: post #90

I have a solar system in my house in london. 5kw, 13kwhr battery. I am self sufficient from end of march to october. I recently got a second hand electric car. I bought an EV plug (total fucking ripoff. its a fucking plug with a contactor, RCD and a CAN interface. no way is that worth fucking £600) It has some basic control to allow me to charge from excess solar. What is not easy to do is charge at night without dra…

Midnight Solar are the OG company in off grid and they have a "waste not" feature from way back that triggers any device when the parameters you set are reached, ie: float voltage, and/or other things, like a second set point where power would be sent to a third load, like the grid or water heating. https://www.midnitesolar.com/ hard core techies, even had the pleasure of detailing my inadvertant and unsucessfull att…

Midnite Classics are great... But the web APIs seem to be deprecated. Do you know of any tools that can get data off them?
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