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Building my own solar power system

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Re: Building my own solar power system

#191

Post by jagger27 »

robertlagrant wrote: post #120
isoprophlex wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Subsidy starts: prices drop. - Greed kicks in because capitalism: prices rise again, maybe not back to pre-subsidy levels, but they rise. - Subsidy gets axed: prices rise to above pre-subsidy levels. (Note: I'm personally entirely pro "subsidize things you want more of". But that requires a stable, trustworthy government that plans on longer timescales.)

> Greed kicks in because capitalism There were no greedy people before capitalism. Of that we can be sure.

The perpetual existence of greed is not a good enough reason to structure all of society around that singular trait.

Re: Building my own solar power system

#193

Post by gramie »

Aurornis wrote: post #150
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…

> 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…

In Quebec, I'm paying $0.069/kWh or USD $0.05/kWh (hydroelectric, so already green), so it's hard to make a case for solar.

Re: Building my own solar power system

#194

Post by looofooo0 »

kragen wrote: post #135
looofooo0 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well problem in the UK is that in summer there is like a magnitude more power from PV then in winter.

No, having more power isn't a problem for solar; unlike coal or nuclear, solar can curtail production instantly and without suffering wear and tear. The problem is that in the UK in the winter there is an order of magnitude less power from PV than in the summer.

magnitude less power from PV than in the summer

magnitude more power from PV than in the winter

That is a tautology.

Re: Building my own solar power system

#195

Post by robertlagrant »

komali2 wrote: post #188
robertlagrant wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Greed kicks in because capitalism There were no greedy people before capitalism. Of that we can be sure.

Greed is a Bad attribute in basically every ethical system and religion throughout history. Capitalism, on the contrary, rewards it. The best way to be under capitalism is greedy (sneakily so, if necessary). So yes, it is uniquely new to have a value system that rewards greed.

It doesn't reward greed, it rewards value. You could just as well say national borders reward invasions.

Re: Building my own solar power system

#196

Post by sponaugle »

jmb99 wrote: post #15
9dev wrote: post #4

I'm still curious what you'd need a rack consuming 1kw for… in your garage. From the photo, it looks like lots of storage(?).

My hard drives alone pull 200W idle and I don’t have that many. Cooling fans (in servers) pull 150W total most of the time but can be up to 300W. Each 10GbE NIC pulls ~40W. PoE switch gives ~30W to each of my APs, and uses ~80W itself, so there’s another 300W. All of my RAM pulls about 250W (admittedly there’s nearly 2TB of it in the rack, but still). Start adding up CPUs idle/average/max power and the numbers get wa…

1kW sounds pretty good to me!

My homelab is between 4 and 8 kW continuously, depending on what I have running. Cooling that homelab is another 400-1000 watts depending on outside air temp.

Re: Building my own solar power system

#197

Post by darkwater »

Aurornis wrote: post #154
K0balt wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It grew organically so there was never a huge cost Really, except when we decided to build a building for The power plant because it was getting out of hand. It’s been a few thousand dollars a year in growth as we add batteries and panels. Also a bit of labor for installation of course, but we handle that in house.

> It grew organically so there was never a huge cost Really, Ahh, the accounting style of hobby projects. I’m very familiar with this because I do it, too. Nothing ever feels expensive if you just never add it all up and value your time at $0 because it’s fun.

> and value your time at $0 because it’s fun.

I don't know if you were being ironic or not but... that's an absolute truth. Our free time doesn't have a fixed rate. It doesn't have a rate at all. What you do during free time can be basically seen as either:

* a chore you don't like to do

* something you like to do.

Any task can swing between those states depending on your mood. If installing your own solar plant or self-host your server rack (as OP is doing) is something you enjoy doing, then yes, it costs exactly $0 in labor.

Re: Building my own solar power system

#198

Post by sponaugle »

kalleboo wrote: post #140
jmb99 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My hard drives alone pull 200W idle and I don’t have that many. Cooling fans (in servers) pull 150W total most of the time but can be up to 300W. Each 10GbE NIC pulls ~40W. PoE switch gives ~30W to each of my APs, and uses ~80W itself, so there’s another 300W. All of my RAM pulls about 250W (admittedly there’s nearly 2TB of it in the rack, but still). Start adding up CPUs idle/average/max power and the numbers get wa…

40W for a 10GbE NIC sounds crazy, my internet router has a dual 10 GbE Intel NIC with one 10GBaseT SFP+ and one 10G DAC and the whole router only draws 24 W (Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny) My whole “rack” draws about 120W total with: aforementioned router, Synology NAS with 4 drives, 2x10G+4x2.5G PoE switch powering a Ubiquiti AP, 16-port 1G switch, and a PowerBook 540c running AppleTalk routing

I'm running 100G CWDM4s in my homelab, and those only take about 4w each for the optics, so I suspect with the PCIe card it is less than 10w.

Re: Building my own solar power system

#199

Post by robertlagrant »

ta1243 wrote: post #143
robertlagrant wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Customer might be willing to pay 10k, but if there's two identical quotes, one for 10k and one for 9k they'll go for the 9k But you see the point. There's a comfortable cushion where everyone can make more money off the taxpayer and have an easier time of it. Spend a bit of it on better marketing to elevate yourself and justify the higher price in people's minds.

Only if you believe that the invisible hand of the market doesn't work

I'm not sure government incentives allow the free market to do its work, then. Why would you think it would?

Re: Building my own solar power system

#200

Post by BubbleRings »

K0balt wrote: post #162
Aurornis wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It grew organically so there was never a huge cost Really, Ahh, the accounting style of hobby projects. I’m very familiar with this because I do it, too. Nothing ever feels expensive if you just never add it all up and value your time at $0 because it’s fun.

The total cost of the system so far is about $87k, and operating cost is around 4000 a year (includes equipment amortisation, slow expansion, direct operating costs). In all, for several homes, and a farm it’s very affordable. Getting power hooked up to a single house from the utilities is about $9000, so our buildout is roughly 2x what we might have spent just to get hooked up to the grid. We do buy carefully, and a…

Thank you so much for these posts! It makes me very optimistic about the future.

For the longest time we all watched from the sidelines, hoping that the desire to turn off coal-fired power plants, and research often funded by tax dollars, would get the ball moving on solar. Now that the market has its magic invisible hand on that ball, it seems clear to me we have a path out of this mess.

Rant your stupid “drill baby drill” crap all you want magats, we are going to solar, wind, and fusion our way to a better world, and there is nothing you can do to stop us.

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