All the electricity you'll need for 40 years(innerpathing.com) |
All the electricity you'll need for 40 years(innerpathing.com) |
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 has gone up to around 50KWh daily (air conditioners, fridges, etc.) but it hums along day-after-day. That assurance that the power won't trip off while I'm on a meeting with a client has done wonders for my mental health among others. Just reliable, stable power.
And, given that I used to pay $0.12 per KWh, the whole setup will pay for itself in 2.7 years. Just under two years to go.
I live in a place with cheap and stable hydropower. There's winter time price spikes but average solar earnings compared to grid cost from solar during sunny months would be pocket change. In winter solar would give virtually nothing.
The overwhelming conclusion was that instead of buying a pile of hardware to install, configure and maintain I will earn more by clicking a button that puts it as a financial investment into anything with more than 2-3% annual yield and just paying the electricity bill and reinvesting whatever is left over.
I wanted to find an edge case that would make me feel smart for buying a multi kWh home battery but with the exception of a market apocalypse or the likes every outcome suggests that I just put it in dividend stock, high interest savings accounts or whatever else until either power prices increase tenfold or $/kWh for batteries drop tenfold.
churchill’s comment provides a similar example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41965228 (2.7 year payback in Nigeria, cheaper per kWh than utility rate of 12 cents/kWh)
The engineering of energy abundance and democratization of energy globally continues. That’s the story.
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/solar-panel-prices-...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices
https://www.pv-tech.org/solar-lcoe-continues-to-decrease-glo...
While there's a bit about needing to replace it in 10-20 years coming out to a $83/month, this is essentially burying the $15,000 bill coming.
Also, unless their battery system is wildly over provisioned at the moment, you can't just add a bunch of new panels. Are they selling back to the grid? I don't think so, they mention grid independence wrt natural disaster. Do they have some sort of system to heat the water in the day only? Did they just take the name plate capacity of the system and multiply it by 40 years? who knows?
These "details" will make anyone buying into their big idea quite frustrated.
I also don't understand the part about chopping wood. Yes it's probably a idilic bit for the story, but that's almost one of the worst fuel sources. Dangerous, carcinogenic, and polluting.
edit: yes in the footnotes, burning wood. Getting rid of that would be the number one way to improve their impact on the earth and their community.
(In the United States, the majority of housing units are single-family houses – about 82 million out of the total 129 million occupied units in 2021)
And doesn’t mounting panels on top of a roof increase possibilities for leaks?
I really would like solar to work. But have seen too many crazy storms and even a minor tornado in the past 5 years to make me wonder about 20+ year longevity.
Unless you just mean they’re privileged in the sense that most Americans and Europeans are relatively well-off and secure by global standards, in which case sure, but what’s your point?
The shit shows unfolding elsewhere fall into hypocritical territory - concerned about climate change yet are regularly flying. For these folks here, I’m willing to be more charitable. Looking forward to seeing more photos of, hopefully, simpler life.
Assuming an average of 4 solar hours per day, you would need a solar system capacity of approximately 7.5 kW to 12.5 kW.
Individual solar panels produce 250-400 watts. So, conservatively, 50 panels. Installed, that's currently about $25,000, including inverter but not battery backup. Battery backup will cost maybe $15,000 more. So, the whole installation is about $40,000. This is with no grid connection, power sales, or incentives. Not too bad. Costs about the same as a car.
Median US house price is $412,300.
It’s cool to live off grid, but solarpunk-libertarianism is a vibe, not a meaningful policy direction for modern society
Sounds stupid on many levels to forbid it.
Using solar to heat and cool, heat water and run your dryer is quite a bit more. And generally doing the HVAC efficiently requires a large investment in insulation. Those non solar costs may dominate.
What's this based on? Don't many gas cars last that long? It seems like it depends very much on how well you maintain them.
Vs ice which easily last long, long past 200k. I'm at 240k right now and it still performs perfectly.
As a side note on the newer ice vehicles I don't see how those terrible tablets that control everything will last long enough for the other mechanical problems in the cars to show up.
Im curious as to how car batteries will be repurposed to use for energy storage. Once they degrade to the point of only holding charge for short trips, can they still be used for other scenarios that don’t require as much from them?
I'm my opinion the big problem with electric cars are the price of replacement batteries in combination with buying used.
Still, I'm kind of left wondering, where will they be in 40 years. Can life really be so predictable?
Solar panels and batteries depend on a global supply chain and take their own toll on the environment, but the life cycle emission of solar is ~40 gCO2/kWh, 25x lower than coal's 1,000 gCO2/kWh. And buying solar fuels innovation—such as alternatives to lithium-ion batteries now on the horizon.
If you want to be a real hippy
For many people in non first world countries this sort of existence is standard - not something to be blogged about with artfully composed photos carefully edited and posted to the internet.
So I guess the comment was provoked by something like that. It was certainly one of my reactions reading the piece. I also thought “oh that’s cool, I wonder how they did it” but it was very short on detail, made up for by self-congratulatory back patting.
Maybe the person making the comment lives in a developing country and finds it a little jarring to see “solarpunk” cosplay.
It's a particularly offensive part of white culture that fetishizes a "return to the land" while billions around the world are trapped miserably eeking out that existence with literally zero opportunity to ever have anything else.
The only reason you feel "happy" for them is because you know its a cosplay charade they could walk away from at any time. Otherwise we would call this what it is; destitute poverty.
You're allowed to just disconnect solar panels. It's free and does not damage them.
Why not have the panels disconnect themselves in this case? Is this too small an expense to justify the cost of additional hardware to manage switching on and off?
This is literally what local and state government is for; talk to others and get policy moving on excess energy being used to generate bulk stored energy at scale for winter months, be that gas, deep thermal storage, tradable goods to offset winter costs, etc.
* (< 1 millisecond for electricity but hey for the milk analogy say 10 minutes).
US pricing works very differently, especially in Texas.
And finally electricity is a spot market. So there is agreed price for certain period and in some cases market can be distorted and that price can be negative. It could be idiotic subsidies or production that can't be ramped as effectively. Or someone does massive mistakes with their bids, think of trading bots going wrong.
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 financially risky to use grid power.
Offgrid added up if you are already offgrid so that ongrid becomes a big expense when comparing.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/homeowners-guide-federal-t...
Clearly to meet demand we need solar farms and grids for most people.
If the "solar roof" people ever get their act together, that might change.
I think you and the other person are reading far too deep into one person's contentment with a humble living space. It's clear they are safe and comfortable; that doesn't translate in any way to suggesting other places where this living style (sans electricity or safety) should just pick themselves up by their bootstraps.
They're trying to have a developed world quality of life in a low-resource/low-cost way. In some ways, beyond average developed world quality of life: the place they're living is stinkin' gorgeous.
I don't know if it's generally practical for most people or even as energy efficient as living in a modest apartment in a large city (the transportation issues around food, medicine, and necessities factor in), but it's not an uninteresting thing to explore.
But - cosplay - 100%
Yes, we still have six active bauxite mines providing feedstock for six alumina refineries ... they're optimal as pipelined processing and not great at switching on|off with energy surges.
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.
If the plant shuts down because it's no longer economically viable/doesn't cover operating costs, what happens next winter?
This ain't gonna happen. Air conditioning will be saving lives.
If there is no grid-side demand for the energy from my solar panels, then they're not going to be force-feeding it to a grid that doesn't want it.
When you plug a light bulb that's rated to draw 20 watts into a power source capable of delivering 1000 watts, it doesn't blow up your light bulb, because the light bulb only takes what it needs from the source.
The main issue with consumer solar connected to the grid is the lack of predictability. The reason why we charge if you put electricity on the grid when too much energy is produced is because we did not plan on offsetting this production, and the network people have to keep it balanced. Reducing the output of thermal fossil plants is usually free, but while we can module nuke plants, it's best and way cheaper when that is predicted (also, opportunity cost is high, so for privately owned nuke plants, it cost even more. EDF is the bitch of the European electricity market so they eat the opportunity costs, but they are the only plant owner who does it (and I won't talk about ARENH here, but again, EDF is the bitch of the EU). Then, when really to much shit is on the grid, and you have reservoir space, you pump the water up the STEP (batteries, but better). Up to 4500€/mwh if unpredicted (it's never actually that, but it's the price seer in the SPOT command order). And lastly, if it's the only solution, wind/solar farms are shut down. Again, if predicted, good time to do the maintenance.
In the future consumer grade installations will probably come with a lot of stuff to help with the lack of predictability. I don't love it, but that's actually my current job (well, I actually love the actual job, really interesting shit, I'm not so sure about the moral implications of even more surveillance. Because we do have the geoloc of the newer installations. We don't link it with anything relevant yet, and it's anonymous for the moment, but will it stay that way?)
Is there a reason that consumer solar can’t be accounted for as smaller stable nodes in the system (sounds like they are still considered volatile and not a reliable source of inflow power)? For instance, maybe a rooftop solar array can easily be sucked up if the home decides to do a few loads of laundry that day, and therefore since there aren’t enough homes with solar arrays, it’s harder to predict an average influx per day from consumer solar to power the grid?
Are there any goals to shut down larger plants or not build larger solar fields by instead subsidizing distributed solar on peoples’ property?
Utilities are so interesting. The other afternoon I was looking out at the hills as the trees change, and said to my friend, “what a beautiful view… besides all these power lines! Although, I’d rather have the infrastructure than an unmolested view…”
Some industrial users have variable demand, and a lower (or negative) price could encourage them to use more. A multi-region internet service might send more traffic to a datacenter with negative electricity prices, even if in increases latency for users.
Some producers need time to modulate output, and stopping and restarting can be expensive. Solar and Wind are at least technically easy to start/stop, but subsidies may make it economic to pay the grid to deliver electricity; either because of contracts/subsidies, or because the expense to deliver unwanted electricity is less than the expense to monitor pricing and reduce production.
Would this lead to grid needing to be shut down?
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.
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 technologies.
Are there any serious tidal races in Scandy lands that can be tapped?
It's a poser alright.
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.
It's not my subject (i mostly work on automation for the network and security teams), but when i consider some changes we did last year, i think the issue with consumer-grade solar is that we didn't know where installation number XXXX was set, not even which country it was from. That is changing, we will now know if it's near Paris, near Munich, near Barcelona... That will probably help with output prediction. I think at some point there were talk about using geoIP, but that was shut down for some reason (i think it was a mix of geoIP lying, and privacy/GDPR considerations we weren't ready to tackle on yet).
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.