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‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms

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Re: ‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NEC doesn't specify GFCI breakers, it merely requires receptacles in certain areas have GFCI protection, and accepts GFCI breakers as one way to provide that. The conventional practice in the US is still to use GFCI receptacles rather than breakers.

Right, but the NEC spec arc fault as well (i've only seen this on breakers). recepticals are cheaper and otherwise just as good.

I find that receptacles tend to break prematurely if they are wet locations, even if 'protected' with a weatherproof box etc. You also need to know where the receptacle is and make sure it is accessible instead of behind a piece of furniture etc. Then some electricians misunderstand and put receptacles throughout the run (much more expensive than one breaker which is about 2x a receptacle), and in edge cases you need to know the order in which to reset them to get things working again. I much prefer to just have everything in the panel.

Re: ‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a real safety issue with plug-in solar panels and plug-in batteries. Things go wrong if other loads are on the same circuit, which is almost unavoidable with a plug-in system. Consider a circuit in a home, designed to carry 16A like a common EU/UK circuit, protected by a 16A breaker. Then plug in solar or a battery that delivers just a small 10A. Now in case some other thing on that circuit draws 26A, the br…

My understanding is that is why they are limiting to 800w (~4A) at least in the UK's BS 7671 Amendment, which they consider well within the designed safety margins.

Hopefully nobody thinks "I'll save even more if I get two!" and plugs them both into the same circuit.

Perhaps they could somehow detect each other and shut off.

Re: ‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms

#243
post #8

Fairly boilerplate article, but the bit that is news is the UK balcony solar permitting. Better longread: https://solarenergyconcepts.co.uk/post/plug-in-solar-uk/ Government press release with a long list of pull quotes: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-make-plug-i... (I note that in the alternate universe where Ed Miliband became PM because he didn't eat a bacon sandwich, we could have had this a dec…

British industry and standards bodies think this is an unsafe plan. Of course they would because it's work being taken away from them but it would be allowing people to plug generators into ring finals with unidirectional breakers. It's not even guaranteed that the circuit is protected by anything newer than fuse wire or an MCB. No guaranteed earth leakage detection. No guaranteed surge protection. Relying on the che…

What is the reason about earth leakage? Shouldn't the generator be grounded for the sake of powering those devices which require a proper earthing?

What do you mean by "guaranteed surge protection"? Are you an electrician to write like that?

Re: ‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms

#244
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's like if the grocery store let you give them milk for a credit at full price. I know of quite a few places where through net metering you don't get full price, you get the wholesale rate for your production which is significantly less.

Isn't that something other than net metering? Wikipedia calls that one "net purchase and sale."

Sure, I'm mentioning this because the number of places where you feed in at the retail rate is shrinking. It's great to get renewables on people's homes but as you get more of it, it becomes very expensive as fewer people pay for the base load

Re: ‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms

#245
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the transition to renewables , but there is nothing inevitable about it. We don't produce solar panels or have the materials to produce them in Europe. So we're just as dependent on imports as before.

It's aluminum, glass, silicon, and some conductive metal. Surely you all have those materials. And even if you don't make them yourselves, they aren't make and then burn like fossil fuels, they are durable infrastructure, you don't have to replace them often - they have an expected lifespan of >30 years. Buy as many as China will sell you, and once you have more than enough installed, you're good for a long time, reg…

> expected lifespan of >30 years

More like > I think being reliant on the fossil fuel supply chain for so long

France isn't. And they are net exporting their (nuclear fission) electricity to their neighbours who shut down nuclear power plants.

Re: ‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll question it. Why does it exist? Why can't we just shut off the panels or dump excess energy into a metal rod? Why do we need to have a buyer at all?

It's not a buyer, people are paid to take the energy that would otherwise be wasted. And when energy use is shifted it means you need to generate less later, saving money. The people who pay that cost to the people using the energy are people running energy generators that suffer wear and tear when they ramp down. Or sometimes it's a subsidy for the use of clean energy being passed on to ensure the clean energy is ac…

> are people running energy generators

In Germany's case it's the tax payer, thanks to extremely generous subsidies that are excluded from state aid regulation

Re: ‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms

#247
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it ever makes sense to switch to electric radiators. It might make sense to switch to a heatpump, but you need to avoid being hugely overcharged by the installers and there are flow issues if you have 8mm piping. This ROI calculator looks reasonable: https://ukcalculator.com/solar-panel-roi-calculator.html - note that it subtracts the install cost for you, so any case where the final figure is positive…

Well France did move to electric everything (cooking, hot water, heating) in the past thanks to ample nuclear electricity production (and possibly not too harsh winters). Unfortunately they let their nuclear programme decay and are struggling now (EU grid integration does not help)... I think a big part of the push to install heat pumps now is that it is understood that electricity production is in dire straights, ta…

Part of the struggle is that renewables have state aid exceptions, enabling massive taxpayer funded subsidisation of the """industry"""

Re: ‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Unidirectional breakers” aren’t a thing for AC circuits.

Yes they are. Current alternates direction, but power usually only flows in one direction, from the input terminal (from the bus bar) to the output terminal (that the circuit is wired into). If the circuit will be supplying power too (e.g. battery storage, an EV and EVSE that supports powering the house from the EV, etc) then you need a bidirectional RCBO. People with no differential fault protection need not worry a…

That’s an RCD, not a breaker. Guess the English still insist on using nonstandard terminology, like “lift”, “bonnet”, “torch”, and, apparently, “breaker”. Oh well.

Re: ‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes they are. Current alternates direction, but power usually only flows in one direction, from the input terminal (from the bus bar) to the output terminal (that the circuit is wired into). If the circuit will be supplying power too (e.g. battery storage, an EV and EVSE that supports powering the house from the EV, etc) then you need a bidirectional RCBO. People with no differential fault protection need not worry a…

I don't follow you regarding unidirectional meters and electricity theft. How does that work?

Between the phasing out of analog meters (the latter half of the last century) and the introduction of smart meters (2010), a lot of electronic prepayment meters produced for the UK market would set a tamper flag if they detected power flowing backwards through them, as a proxy indication of an attempt at electricity theft. These meters will refuse top-ups in this condition, requiring you to contact your energy supplier to sort it out, leaving you without power until you do and then exposing you to scrutiny when they arrive.

Pre-smart non-prepayment electronic meters (for those with old meters, still submitting manual readings, and paying by direct debit) will be fine. Most of these meters, and all smart meters, are inherently bidirectional, because they maintain 4 counts (energy imported and energy exported, in kWh and kVARh) and your energy provider will do all the necessary math to figure out what to actually bill you for (residential customers are not billed for kVARh usage).

The UK government in 2011 announced plans to have 50 million smart meters installed by the end of 2020. In typical overpromise underdeliver government fashion, they didn't even achieve half of that; by then, only 23.6 million had been installed, and of those, 4.5 million had stopped working because they were initially (and stupidly) designed to be tied to a specific energy provider and the customer had changed provider. This even affected me.

Nevertheless they'd still accurately track energy consumption and export even if they'd lost their reporting capability, so you have nothing to fear here. This situation has been rectified at the redesign stage with provider-independent SMETS 2 meters, and all SMETS 1 meters still in service have been hotpatched to bring them into line (restoring their smart functionality regardless of provider).

Even today (well, as of last September), this number is only 40 million, with only 36.7 million of them actually working as designed (reporting readings automatically).

This leaves up to 16 million properties with a meter that may stop working and expose you to a theft investigation when you obtain generation capacity that even momentarily exceeds your usage (for example if you have a dual RCD board and one of the RCDs trips, taking out half of the circuits in your home, but not the one the inverter is plugged into).

Realistically the true figure is probably around a quarter of that; prepayment meters were very popular among the renting population of the time, and those who wanted to track their energy usage carefully and only pay for it with cash as and when needed, and sometimes people had these meters forced upon them by suppliers after the customer had demonstrated poor payment history, but they were far from the norm.

Average home owner buying plug-in solar at a supermarket isn't going to know or care about any of this. They'll just plug it in, and it will work, until one day maybe it doesn't and their supplier opens a theft investigation.

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