241–250 of 251 posts
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I haven't seen them doing that on power outage post storm line repairs near me, usually during those they're working as fast as possible because they have dozens of other spots they need to repair.
Hopefully they're bonding the line to their bucket at least.
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True [x] independence in even a small capacity has a value beyond just money. ..water.. ..food.. ..housing.. ..information.. I get what you are trying to conveying, I just wanted to highlight the semantic generality of the statement if it stands alone.
If you have a house in the countryside, then water and food are relatively easy. You've got your own well and septic system for water, and plenty of room to stock up on food, plus you can supplement your diet by growing your own vegetables and raising chickens, fishing or hunting as seasonally appropriate per your local regulations. The well and septic system require no real effort on your part once installed, though…
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Interesting that PV efficiency is impacted by peak heat. Why are there so many solar farms in the desert near Las Vegas and in West Texas then? Serious question, would love to know the answer. Are these inefficiencies just now coming to light?
The effect has long been known, but it's pretty modest. Here's the data sheet for a typical modern solar panel: https://static.trinasolar.com/sites/default/files/Datasheet_... It loses about 0.29% of (relative) power output for every degree Celsius of temperature increase. If the module is operating at its maximum rated temperature of 85 degrees C, it's still about 83% as efficient as it would be under standard test…
I did see some citizen science that showed a cooling fan added more power overall to panels, but I guess that’s another moving part and the way the subsidies work… who cares about increasing panel life.
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Michigan is just like the south: highest electricity consumption is during summer. This may change with increased use of heat pumps for heating, but it’s still a while out before seasonal electricity consumption patterns invert. +/- on what effect electric cars will have: people drive more in summer but efficiency goes down in winter. Arizona, Florida, etc are not really in a sweet spot we all think it is because PV…
we are likely there already. Ontario, just to the north of Michigan, already has a winter peak very close to the summer peak. The provinces subsidises heat pumps. Ontario will be a winter peaking region in a couple of years.
https://www.ieso.ca/power-data/demand-overview/historical-de...
Surprisingly difficult to find monthly data though :(
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> A healthy regulated will encourage maximizing profit for power and bring in competition which drives the cost down until energy is a commodity and the cost of electricity is actually based on the price of production and a small profit based on the cost of capital. That is not how the electricity market works, in Australia anyway, and somewhat fundamentally everywhere. The network needs to maintain a frequency and v…
What it sounds like is Australia needs negative energy prices during peaks, again arguing for market forces, if you pay people to take electricity (charging people who produce electricity more than you pay people to take, keeping the difference) the "having more electricity than we can use" problem goes away and you don't have to prevent people from hooking up new capacity. Well regulated markets enable this, charge…
In 2022, a lot of retailers nearly went under due to the max price of $14.4k per MWh ($14.4 per kWh, which is usually ~$0.25 for households) being sustained for a longer period cause a few producers had the market over a barrel. The federal government needed to step in and restrict the maximum price for gas (despite Australia exporting >10x more than in produces, we still have to buy it at international market rates), which flowed down to gas peakers which during times of lower than expected energy production act as short term stablisers. In this case we had multiple coal plant failures due to their age/poor upkeep, and likely some manipulation by producers.
Your average household doesn't want to have their energy consumption behaviours dictated by a market. We have a national battery program that creates a VPPs (Virtual Power Plant) and other mechanisms to enable households to somewhat benefit from these market prices and theoretically provide stability to the grid, but it is all quite complicated, and suffers from being able to be gamed. There isn't a simple solution when a market is involved because you have a group of people acting in bad faith to extract the most value for a shared resource that relies on shared infrastructure.
If the network and producers were publicly managed (like the electricity networks use to be and still are in some states), the incentives are a lot better aligned with a stable grid that is affordable for the most number of consumers. It still would be complicated, but a bunch of problems would be simplified, likely traded off for other issues.
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If you have a house in the countryside, then water and food are relatively easy. You've got your own well and septic system for water, and plenty of room to stock up on food, plus you can supplement your diet by growing your own vegetables and raising chickens, fishing or hunting as seasonally appropriate per your local regulations. The well and septic system require no real effort on your part once installed, though…
Lol. I grew up in a house in the countryside. Dealing with the well, water storage tank, and pressure booster pump were far from "easy". They required frequent maintenance and occasional large expenses. The well got clogged with sand. The pump motor burned out. The tank float sensor got stuck and caused an overflow (several times). The tank had to be emptied and cleaned. An earthquake caused a pipe to shear off and d…
I've lived with well water for all of my life except my college years and a few years after. In all that time, the only maintenance that's been needed has been to replace a water pressure tank (not a difficult job unless you've never seen hand tools before) and adding salt to the softener once a blue moon.
My sister in law had to get a new well put in, but that was because it needed a new well pump and the plumber she called told her he couldn't work on the existing one because it was out of code and her well wasn't grandfathered in.
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That is wrong. I’m over 2000km north of you in a tight valley that snows a lot. The 7.8kw system on my roof will be paid back in about 7 years.
How cloudy is it up there though? Seattle has a lot of overcast days.
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Lol. I grew up in a house in the countryside. Dealing with the well, water storage tank, and pressure booster pump were far from "easy". They required frequent maintenance and occasional large expenses. The well got clogged with sand. The pump motor burned out. The tank float sensor got stuck and caused an overflow (several times). The tank had to be emptied and cleaned. An earthquake caused a pipe to shear off and d…
What is the water storage tank for? We've never needed one, and the only time I've heard of someone getting one was for trapping rainwater or they were a farmer. I've lived with well water for all of my life except my college years and a few years after. In all that time, the only maintenance that's been needed has been to replace a water pressure tank (not a difficult job unless you've never seen hand tools before)…
From what I understand, most homes that are connected to both solar and the grid require the grid to be active to produce solar. This is for two reasons. One, not to endanger lineman working on the grid. And two, the solar AC cycle must be synchronized with the grid AC cycle. Are these homes not also connected to the grid? Or is there some technology that addresses these two issues that are in use in Puerto Rico?
It's just a coordination problem. You are also sort of conflating "loss of interconnect" with "outage'.
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What is the water storage tank for? We've never needed one, and the only time I've heard of someone getting one was for trapping rainwater or they were a farmer. I've lived with well water for all of my life except my college years and a few years after. In all that time, the only maintenance that's been needed has been to replace a water pressure tank (not a difficult job unless you've never seen hand tools before)…
The storage tank was for storing water. Obviously you don't want to run the well pump every time you flush the toilet.
Maybe you could get a bigger one if you have a large family, but I've never heard of one that would be large enough to dump that much water except for mountainside cabins that are too far from the water table for a well in the first place.