I've been meaning to post an update on my system. We are still tuning and have a minor technical problem that will require another trip to fix. But with everything going as normal and renters in the house (with no concept of power saving or conservation), everything is working normally and we are right at 11% of our previous usage from the grid. April 16 (+/-) will be the end of the first full bill cycle. That will let me see how close my metering is to their metering. I also expect a visit from them to see why the usage is down 90%!. I still need to add some battery and am trying to figure out the best path for that project. There is also some operational tuning still to do, that I think I can easily get another 5% or so wrung out of the system. If I get more battery there would basically be no need for the grid connection except for a backup if something failed. There is a monthly connection fee, so that will eventually factor in.
A week ago, they took most of the town offline for a transformer upgrade to fix some summer time load issues they have been having. Our place didn't even notice. Ice, cold beer and streaming music - all critical services were 100%.
Another update, almost 1 year into operation. We have now made it to the 2nd least expensive tier of the tariff program here. Much more reasonable. We were paying 6 pesos a KWH ($0.20-0.30 depending on exchange rates), we are now down to 1.055 Pesos/KWH (about $0.05 at current rates). The tariff is based on a rolling 12 month average, so we should continue to progress down the scale. Renters are still a problem and drive usage up when they are here. They can cause ~2000 pesos ($100) a month in additional power use and muck with the tariff math too. Especially problematic in summer season when they try to run the AC overnight. I'm installing some more battery as an experiment for myself, but it will help that as well.
Our average power use even with renters is less than 10% of the previous demand. And when we are here, we are less than 3%, and trending downward. If we were here full time I think we would be nearly zero power from the grid. We also get the benefit of backup power. When the lights go out in the neighborhood - common in August/September, we are fine. The fridge keeps running and we don't really notice. One of my lingering projects is to put a grid meter on. Right now I can tell when we switch to grid power (rare), but I can't tell if the grid is up until we try to fail over. Even with the renters and other '1st year' problems, our energy cost will be down 90% and our power consumption from the grid is down about 70% - both numbers year over year from the previous year. If I cut out the renters, the consumption would have been down 97% and the cost down 98%.
Headline is a little misleading. The negative pricing was only during peak production. Germany fails to store most of the energy produced in that window. But this shows that there is plenty of capacity available.
Especially since Germany isn't a particularly sunny place.
Headline is a little misleading. The negative pricing was only during peak production. Germany fails to store most of the energy produced in that window. But this shows that there is plenty of capacity available.
Wrong verb. Let people build them. Do away with zoning laws that prevent them from building solar roofs and they'll do it to save money. Stop trying to force the future and let the future happen.
We're also going to do away with arcane permitting rules that require people to have a grid connection too right? There have been incentives and subsidies for all the traditional sources for decades to force their adoption. We now know (we knew then too) that there are substantial issues with those sources, but they were there supporting the right politicians, so the rules were made.
Wrong verb. Let people build them. Do away with zoning laws that prevent them from building solar roofs and they'll do it to save money. Stop trying to force the future and let the future happen.
Hmm, not having solar i wasnt aware there were zoning issues...though not surprised as trying to add even a 10x12 deck requires months of paperwork and thousands of $.
Wrong verb. Let people build them. Do away with zoning laws that prevent them from building solar roofs and they'll do it to save money. Stop trying to force the future and let the future happen.
Well why not a decentralized hybrid approach?
Build more houses with solar/windmills?
Wrong verb. Let people build them. Do away with zoning laws that prevent them from building solar roofs and they'll do it to save money. Stop trying to force the future and let the future happen.
The big problem with renewables is the ratio of power generated to resources (land, material, labor, energy, capital) required to build them. You can think of this as cost, which greenies tend to think of as irrelevant, but it represents real resources. If the power generated doesn't justify the investment it's a net loss. A step backward. Coal burnt and labor spent that shouldn't have been.
Some projects make sense, some don't. The ones that make sense will happen because those building them can see a return; the ones that don't make sense get subsidizedâpropped up as a huge virtue signal measurable in tons of CO2, cubic miles of earth dug up, and years wasted.
Yes, there are technical problems, but they're solvable. The problem of humans deluding themselves that they're making progress by building windmills that spend most of their lives idle has proved a lot more intractable.
ok, when I have time, I'll look into the energy budget of windmills. I do know they are technically challenging and high maintenance. But I am still surprised at the sheer scale of wind energy output. I live here and it is not like the entire landscape is littered with the damn things, not more than any other major infrastructure.
I know you hate the distortion of government incentives (for good reason) but renewables are certainly not the only energy sector to have benefited from them. Nuclear, coal and oil & gas have too over the years.
Anyways, a cursory look at solar shows that a panel assuming an average daily generation of 2kW will have produced more power than was needed to build it within the first 1000 hours of operation and will keep running pretty well maintenance free for years to come. Sounds like a winning formula to me.
So it's not all chasing windmills or unicorns.
And the oil&gas lobby has been strangely quiet on the opportunity cost of their particular business for, how long now, um, maybe forever. It is not just climate change, but land use, air quality, radiation in the tailings, environmental impact, high fatality and accident rates, etc.
The big problem with renewables is securing the base load. This is why gas-fired plants are still so important, as you can fire them up at short notice to meet peak demand.
the only renewable source with that kind of flexibility is hydro and pumped storage, but there is nowhere enough of it to meet the baseload.
No.
The big problem with renewables is the ratio of power generated to resources (land, material, labor, energy, capital) required to build them. You can think of this as cost, which greenies tend to think of as irrelevant, but it represents real resources. If the power generated doesn't justify the investment it's a net loss. A step backward. Coal burnt and labor spent that shouldn't have been.
Some projects make sense, some don't. The ones that make sense will happen because those building them can see a return; the ones that don't make sense get subsidized—propped up as a huge virtue signal measurable in tons of CO2, cubic miles of earth dug up, and years wasted.
Yes, there are technical problems, but they're solvable. The problem of humans deluding themselves that they're making progress by building windmills that spend most of their lives idle has proved a lot more intractable.
One of my big frustrations with energy policy in Australia is the lack of support for gas generation to support peak demand. The environmentalists take a "build it and they will come" attitude to renewables and think that the problem of peak demand will somehow be solved if non-renewable options are off the table. Meanwhile labor and liberals tacitly support continued coal generation because the union jobs are joined at the hip to big business mining. The opportunities for pumped hydro storage are limited by the lack of suitable rivers. Locally, there was an initial assessment that showed the promise for pumped hydro using the maze of mine shafts beneath the town, going down well over a kilometer in depth (no evaporation loss). The catch is that the next study needed would be a quite expensive demonstration that they could keep the upper zone in one mine trend isolated from the deep zone in another and no one wants to spend that. So they will turn off the pumps and flood the deep zone to the point where it will be impossible to reverse.
So that leaves battery storage, which has had some success in South Australia but will be hard to scale up to the level needed. And there is a growing opposition to the impacts of lithium mining. Don't get me started on the limitations put on wind generation by nimbys on the right and left.
tbh, 20 years ago as the whole wind thing was starting to stoke investor interest here (because of tax breaks) I was thinking, yeah, good to have, but, you know, unicorns.
I am actually surprised that so much of Germany's power now comes from renewables. Never thought it would happen at that scale or so quickly.
I looked for a :thumbsup:
