This seems like a "green brag" without much substance. Great that this person is privileged enough to afford solar panels, I guess. Nothing to be learned here though: no wire diagrams, placement schematics, or BoM. Just someone telling everyone how green they are.
The idea is the important part. The details (wiring schematics and so on) are not. The cost of solar is rapidly approaching where you’re prepaying for your energy for the rest of your life with a few thousand dollars. You can get solar panels for 10 cents/watt today, for example. That price will potentially continue to decline (historically, price has declined ~20% for every global doubling of PV manufacturing capacity).
I think the details are actually important to the idea. Mainly this green brag doesn't seem to add up. The battery system is crucial.
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.
I’ve mounted ~8kw of solar on a south facing roof in ~4 hours with two other people. You need not multi acre lots, only a surface that can see the sky mostly unobstructed, although if you’ve got the land and aren’t using it, ground mount solar is cheaper, faster, and safer to deploy.
(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)
It doesn’t sound like it’s that expensive. Certainly less than most households pay for electricity, although I imagine they also use less than most people judging by their very tiny house. Probably some kind of financing available to reduce the initial capital outlay.
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?
I agree about this article being vapid, but at least it does introduce the fact that PV doesn't degrade. A lot of people have been poisoned by oil industry propaganda that every PV panel needs to be trashed in 20 years.
Aside from propaganda, what if the roof only lasts 25 years?
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.
I would personally never mount panels on the roof in a context like this one, a house in the middle of nowhere. They should just be on a pole, mast, or frame. Anywhere but the roof.
Furthermore, maybe, at low latitudes you can just lay them on the ground and at high latitudes just mount them vertically and the snow will drop off. Skip complexity.
I wouldn’t say so honestly. In the pantheon of green bragging you can do much, much worse. I think these folks are more down the earth given they recognize their mortality and that what they’ve got here will outlive them, but in general they are gridless people and as such a bit outside of the benefits of bragging.
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.
It's nice to have solar panels, I have them too and while they do generate even more electricity than I need, they do so in around 6 to 7 months peaking in July. So in winter, it's grid power and in summer I might need to pay to feed in the surplus. This is in the Netherlands. It's kind of sad to see all that electricity unused in summer, and knowing I could have enough for all of the winter if only there was some way to store it, all of the 1MWh..
Sure. Of course. Not being allowed to disconnect them would be ridiculous. But do you want to keep an eye on the market every day, and run to the breaker to turn on an off your inverter? No. So you need a solution for that. Then a battery is much more interesting.
Completely agree. I mainly mention it to dispel any notions that solar panels can expose you to financial risk due to negative energy prices. This is trivial to address. Negative prices should only be a concern for plants that can not be quickly or easily shut down, like thermal plants (coal/gas/nuclear).
You could implement something pretty easily with a relay or contactor and an ESP32 and a way to monitor the spot price, or just buy a system with that feature already built in.
All modern inverters have control interfaces that allow them to fold back their power output on command, this can be set up to track feed-in rates going negative.
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?
It all depends on the situation. Here in the Netherlands almost everybody has an PV installation with no way other than the breaker to turn it on and off. Some inverters do have an interface, and sometimes it's available. Even less people know anything about this at all, they just had panels installed. The technical solution is simple, bit implementing it will cost much more, I assume.
> This is in the Netherlands. It's kind of sad to see all that electricity unused in summer,
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.
Ammonia products are easier, particularly with excess peak energy.
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 wonder if ammonia might be doable at residential/DIY scale. Then you have to (a) store it safely, and (b) have a way to use it - not many people have a personal marine application.
Maybe .. but in an urban area with many houses, each with solar panels, it seems inefficient to have mini home chemical process factories, particularly with intermediate steps involving explosive gases.
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.
The obvious (but often incorrect) thought is gravitational potential given mountains.
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?
"pay to feed in the surplus"? In my U.S. context, this sounds surprising: are you saying that sometimes the energy utility CHARGES you money when you feed solar energy to the grid? That sounds... bizarre?
If I were to deliver you 1000 gallons of milk that expires in 10 minutes*, would you pay me or want to charge me for that priviledge. Assume you have enough milk already.
* (< 1 millisecond for electricity but hey for the milk analogy say 10 minutes).
I don't think this is an apt analogy. Electricity is pulled, not pushed. (Well, I realize it is actually a bit more complicated than that, but for the purposes of this conversation, I think the generalization is sufficient.)
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.
It is more complicated on grid level. Some inverters might be smart enough, but some are not. Thus there is both push and pull going on. And this can affect voltage and frequency.
This is the only reply I understand, so I’ll follow up here - in this case, is the end user paying to push the energy into batteries that the power company owns? Or is the extra energy just dissipated somewhere? Or does the power company stop producing their own energy once the grid is saturated? (I believe that electricity doesn’t actually flow like water, so it’s not the exact same electrons that the solar panel is producing which would be stored on batteries or dissipated somewhere)
[edit] if you don't produce the exact amount consumed at the exact same time, the current will loose its phase and the effective energy transported will be reduced, while producing surtensions at different grid points (don't quote me on that, but accumulator try to keep the phase, and too much divergence can cause their failure from what I understand. But I'm no physic major and I might be completely wrong). Grid coordination is vital.
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…”
> Is there a reason that consumer solar can’t be accounted for as smaller stable nodes in the system
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).
When there's too much energy available for the grid, and the price goes negative, producers are paying for someone to use that energy or paying another potential producer to reduce their output.
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.
What happens if no one takes the power (not one solar installation but lets assume lots of surplus power). Does it screw up the grid? Increase voltage/frequency?
Yes, if nobody removes the excess, grid frequency will increase. Running too high or too low frequency can damange equipment, on both the supply and demand sides.
When there is a lot of wind and sun simultaneously there is effectively too much electricity supply on the net, and day-ahead prices drop negative. This is partially fueled by flat subsidies per unit produced (has been fixed for a while for new installations), so producing when there's oversupply can still be profitable. Also most households have a flat energy rate and can amortize their energy usage over the year, so they will always keep their solar panels on even if the energy is less than worthless.
US pricing works very differently, especially in Texas.
Purchasers want to make margin on anything. So they charge this on the seller and then on buyer. Also with how markets work it is not like there isn't risks or need to at least some level forecast how much you will be buying and then selling. So their cut also covers this work.
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.
Isn't there a way to sell the unused solar power to the grid in summers and during winters the grid sends back the power needed to you at a discounted price?
Well, until '27, I'm allowed to use the grid as a free battery, basically, this is a kind of government subsidy. But that will end, and the contracts available will be fixed price with a feed in tariff or dynamic (realtime) market price, but then prices can and have been negative during peak solar hours. A battery can solve this only for a bit, and maybe with smart algorithms it can be trading on the electricity market full time, I'm not sure if that makes enough money for the grid power in winter.. it's nice to think about though.
or you get a battery. Is just great. I have 3.5kw solar power witha 9kwh battery. Very very seldom it switches to power line. And this is in south Germany, maybe a bit sunnier than north but still - it rains a lot/cloudy, sun is sparse.
It seems like that works for daily cycles, but isn't that very expensive storage for one cycle a year, which is what you need to save energy for winter?
Depends how close to the poles you are. A lot of the world can do this fine by sizing the PV for winter; too close to the poles and there's not going to work — you either need to diversify power generation by kind (wind, wave, hydro, geothermal all work too, but again geographically constrained) or by distance (the maths says we can build an adequate and literally global power grid for an affordable quantity of aluminium, shame about the politics).
If every household did this we would have massive problems. We would still need a base load amount in the winter, and in the summer there would be an over abundance. The price of electricity would swing between essentially free in the summer to higher than normal in the winter, because the cost of operating base grid power would be about same but they would need to cover all operating costs during the winter.
Utilities should charge a separate connection fee and per-kWh rate if that's what matches the economic reality of their business. I don't see the summer abundance as an issue. It means we get to shut off the fossil fuels 8 months out of the year. The remaining 4 months, everyone pays a little more per kWh, averaging out to the same cost over a full year. What's not to like?
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.
We are in the process of installing a 13 kwH system which is 31 panels at 430 watts with two Tesla power walls. Total cost (with snow guards) is just shy of 60k. The backup batteries are where this really shines. Our power provider had a blackout of 25 hours in April and if we were 6 blocks south, it was an entire week. The true cost of the system will be approximately half this after rebates and is more like 32k. The rebates are so good between Fed, State and the power company that we almost got the backup batteries for free.
In my state electricity costs about $0.089/kWh. We spend about $100/mo on electricity total which comes out almost exactly to your 30kWh/day figure (with a $23.15 connection charge included).
Invested that 40k would conservatively cover over 2x our electricity bill without touching the principal (inflation adjusted).
That's a pretty hard sell for solar. Obviously incentives will improve things but it just seems less financially risky to use grid power.
~500$ for a 250/400W panel seems absurd, here in Italy you can buy a 500W solar panel for 100€ without effort or less. Given that you can buy a pallet of them, you can probably pay less than 100€ per 500W, I have found deals down to 77€ per 550W panel with pallets of 31 (31x550=+17k at 2405€), shipment included, and I'm talking about new half cell panels, not old stuff.
This is cool, and I wish I had a setup like that, but the premise seems a bit hollow. Do they grow all the food they consume? What about the energy needed to produce the electric car, host the Substack? What about when they get sick? Do they stay off-grid, or do they go to a modern hospital, which can only exist because of urban industrial buildup.
It’s cool to live off grid, but solarpunk-libertarianism is a vibe, not a meaningful policy direction for modern society
I live here in Nigeria where electricity has been epileptic since I was born (I'm 23 now). Like, I live in one of the nicer suburbs in my state, but 12h of power isn't guaranteed.
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.
This compared to my own experience shows how much location matters for these things.
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.
Different strokes for different folks. If you already have sufficiently reliable power and the savings won't beat the S&P500, then I guess sticking to the grid makes more sense. It's just the flexibility and reliability of solar I'm commenting on, especially if you live close to the equator.
I wish regulations where more lax in France. It was a battle with the town council to install 3.2kw of solar panels on the ground, I want to install 10 more but it looks like the ground option which is cheap will not be approved, I would have to out them on my roof which is costly and is not true south (and arguably, more visible).
Basically it's zoning laws, to not add permanent structures onto agricultural lands, but yeah it's stupid because this is for solar panels without foundations so I don't see the harm. I need to get an appointment with them, see if I can change their minds.
Solar allows one to prepay for power. Would be nice to see more efficient financing for 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.
I also thought this was an odd statement to see. Electric cars really haven't been around long enough to give that kind of respect to time. A few brands have but the newer models are totally different beasts.
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.
Most cars now can easily last 15 years/200,000 miles with maintenance. Obviously a few will fail, but I’ve done it a few times now (miles wise), 200k seems like a cut off, transmission can fail, various chassis parts worn out, etc. Some people even get 300-400k miles out of some of the more reliable brands like Toyota/Honda/Subaru
It also depends on the batteries themselves. An older Nissan leaf? Doubt it. A newer Tesla? I sure hope so.
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?
300k on my Toyota right now. Most modern ICE engines should last 200k with no problems. EVs (other than the battery) should last a million miles. Even the batteries are turning out to last longer than everyone expected, ignoring some notable notable failures.
I'm not sure about averages, but given the second hand pricing I've seen: I thought after 100 or so megameters, even well maintained internal combustion engines needed maintenance of a price comparable to replacement?
Barring weird parts supply issues rebuilding an engine should be significantly cheaper than purchasing a low mileage crate replacement. Same with transmissions.
$88 amortized over 15 years is only $16k. It’s really impressive they can get it done for that much, although I suspect labor has to be free at that cost.
I’d be curious what batteries they went with and how it’s organized (aka the more technical side)
A $16k investment at 4% annual yield with quarterly payout re-invested turns into $29k at the 15 year mark. So maybe batteries and panels today feels like a good investment, but is it the best?
Yeah, that seems very likely. I just hope it will be them, instead of somebody else, as it sometimes happens when we're making plans and life is also making plans, but different plans.
Just a note to the web designer: The footnote links don't account for the fixed header, so the page always ends up with the footnote hidden behind the header when the user clicks one. Needs an 89 pixel offset.
People forget that solar panels don't grow on the trees, battery packs especially have very large footprint and their manufacturing is resource intensive.
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.
Honest question, why is this your reaction? Why are people on this forum so unwilling to be happy for others? I have noticed that this attitude is extremely prominent in tech. Everything is either perfect (according to the person making the judgement) or it’s utterly worthy of ridicule. I am growing very, very tired of seeing this throughout tech.
I suspect that the comment was provoked by the term “solarpunk”.
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.
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.
>Why are people on this forum so unwilling to be happy for others?
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.
It would be a mistake to think their experience is anything close to that of people in poverty, regardless of their ability to walk away from it. Poverty doesn't involve affording the capital outlay for $16k of solar/battery/hardware to give you 24x7 heat, heated water, electricity, and _an electric car_.
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.
So what are these 'whites' supposed to do in your opinion, quit denying their wealth and just go live in a nice suburb, big house, big car? You propose no solution, it's only bitterness.
This seems like a "green brag" without much substance. Great that this person is privileged enough to afford solar panels, I guess. Nothing to be learned here though: no wire diagrams, placement schematics, or BoM. Just someone telling everyone how green they are.
The idea is the important part. The details (wiring schematics and so on) are not. The cost of solar is rapidly approaching where you’re prepaying for your energy for the rest of your life with a few thousand dollars. You can get solar panels for 10 cents/watt today, for example. That price will potentially continue to decline (historically, price has declined ~20% for every global doubling of PV manufacturing capacity).
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...
I think the details are actually important to the idea. Mainly this green brag doesn't seem to add up. The battery system is crucial.
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.
The solar panels are cheap. It's the multi-acre lot with a lake that's expensive.
I’ve mounted ~8kw of solar on a south facing roof in ~4 hours with two other people. You need not multi acre lots, only a surface that can see the sky mostly unobstructed, although if you’ve got the land and aren’t using it, ground mount solar is cheaper, faster, and safer to deploy.
(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)
It doesn’t sound like it’s that expensive. Certainly less than most households pay for electricity, although I imagine they also use less than most people judging by their very tiny house. Probably some kind of financing available to reduce the initial capital outlay.
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?
I agree about this article being vapid, but at least it does introduce the fact that PV doesn't degrade. A lot of people have been poisoned by oil industry propaganda that every PV panel needs to be trashed in 20 years.
Aside from propaganda, what if the roof only lasts 25 years?
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.
I would personally never mount panels on the roof in a context like this one, a house in the middle of nowhere. They should just be on a pole, mast, or frame. Anywhere but the roof.
Furthermore, maybe, at low latitudes you can just lay them on the ground and at high latitudes just mount them vertically and the snow will drop off. Skip complexity.
I wouldn’t say so honestly. In the pantheon of green bragging you can do much, much worse. I think these folks are more down the earth given they recognize their mortality and that what they’ve got here will outlive them, but in general they are gridless people and as such a bit outside of the benefits of bragging.
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.
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It's nice to have solar panels, I have them too and while they do generate even more electricity than I need, they do so in around 6 to 7 months peaking in July. So in winter, it's grid power and in summer I might need to pay to feed in the surplus. This is in the Netherlands. It's kind of sad to see all that electricity unused in summer, and knowing I could have enough for all of the winter if only there was some way to store it, all of the 1MWh..
> ... in summer I might need to pay to feed in the surplus.
You're allowed to just disconnect solar panels. It's free and does not damage them.
Sure. Of course. Not being allowed to disconnect them would be ridiculous. But do you want to keep an eye on the market every day, and run to the breaker to turn on an off your inverter? No. So you need a solution for that. Then a battery is much more interesting.
Completely agree. I mainly mention it to dispel any notions that solar panels can expose you to financial risk due to negative energy prices. This is trivial to address. Negative prices should only be a concern for plants that can not be quickly or easily shut down, like thermal plants (coal/gas/nuclear).
This seems like a problem that should be relatively easy to solve with technology.
This is in fact what my home installation already does.
Note: doing this manually every day (breaking the circuit) can increase the risk of damaging your installation.
How can the use of a switch damage your installation?
inrush current, mechanical wear, thermal stress on some components (mosfets, transformers, etc)...
Could you just use Home Assistant to do this?
True hacker would use web scraping to get the rates and a bash script to turn the switch on and off based on rates
with a scrolling LED display for streaming updates.
You could implement something pretty easily with a relay or contactor and an ESP32 and a way to monitor the spot price, or just buy a system with that feature already built in.
All modern inverters have control interfaces that allow them to fold back their power output on command, this can be set up to track feed-in rates going negative.
> need to pay to feed back in the surplus
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?
It all depends on the situation. Here in the Netherlands almost everybody has an PV installation with no way other than the breaker to turn it on and off. Some inverters do have an interface, and sometimes it's available. Even less people know anything about this at all, they just had panels installed. The technical solution is simple, bit implementing it will cost much more, I assume.
> This is in the Netherlands. It's kind of sad to see all that electricity unused in summer,
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.
Doesn't anyone smelt their own bauxite anymore ? sigh
Ammonia products are easier, particularly with excess peak energy.
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 wonder if ammonia might be doable at residential/DIY scale. Then you have to (a) store it safely, and (b) have a way to use it - not many people have a personal marine application.
Maybe .. but in an urban area with many houses, each with solar panels, it seems inefficient to have mini home chemical process factories, particularly with intermediate steps involving explosive gases.
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.
My use case is Scandinavia. The summer has an absurd oversupply of sunlight (weather permitting). Capturing this for winter usage is the poser.
The obvious (but often incorrect) thought is gravitational potential given mountains.
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.
electrolysis of water to hydrogen and oxygen seems sensible. could be done at home, but probably best at community scale
"pay to feed in the surplus"? In my U.S. context, this sounds surprising: are you saying that sometimes the energy utility CHARGES you money when you feed solar energy to the grid? That sounds... bizarre?
If I were to deliver you 1000 gallons of milk that expires in 10 minutes*, would you pay me or want to charge me for that priviledge. Assume you have enough milk already.
* (< 1 millisecond for electricity but hey for the milk analogy say 10 minutes).
I don't think this is an apt analogy. Electricity is pulled, not pushed. (Well, I realize it is actually a bit more complicated than that, but for the purposes of this conversation, I think the generalization is sufficient.)
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.
It is more complicated on grid level. Some inverters might be smart enough, but some are not. Thus there is both push and pull going on. And this can affect voltage and frequency.
This is the only reply I understand, so I’ll follow up here - in this case, is the end user paying to push the energy into batteries that the power company owns? Or is the extra energy just dissipated somewhere? Or does the power company stop producing their own energy once the grid is saturated? (I believe that electricity doesn’t actually flow like water, so it’s not the exact same electrons that the solar panel is producing which would be stored on batteries or dissipated somewhere)
[edit] if you don't produce the exact amount consumed at the exact same time, the current will loose its phase and the effective energy transported will be reduced, while producing surtensions at different grid points (don't quote me on that, but accumulator try to keep the phase, and too much divergence can cause their failure from what I understand. But I'm no physic major and I might be completely wrong). Grid coordination is vital.
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?)
Interesting!
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…”
> Is there a reason that consumer solar can’t be accounted for as smaller stable nodes in the system
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).
When there's too much energy available for the grid, and the price goes negative, producers are paying for someone to use that energy or paying another potential producer to reduce their output.
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.
What happens if no one takes the power (not one solar installation but lets assume lots of surplus power). Does it screw up the grid? Increase voltage/frequency?
Would this lead to grid needing to be shut down?
Yes, if nobody removes the excess, grid frequency will increase. Running too high or too low frequency can damange equipment, on both the supply and demand sides.
When there is a lot of wind and sun simultaneously there is effectively too much electricity supply on the net, and day-ahead prices drop negative. This is partially fueled by flat subsidies per unit produced (has been fixed for a while for new installations), so producing when there's oversupply can still be profitable. Also most households have a flat energy rate and can amortize their energy usage over the year, so they will always keep their solar panels on even if the energy is less than worthless.
US pricing works very differently, especially in Texas.
Purchasers want to make margin on anything. So they charge this on the seller and then on buyer. Also with how markets work it is not like there isn't risks or need to at least some level forecast how much you will be buying and then selling. So their cut also covers this work.
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.
Yes, prices can go negative if you have a dynamic energy contract.
Maybe you could use the IJsselmeer as a pumped storage hydro ;)
Isn't there a way to sell the unused solar power to the grid in summers and during winters the grid sends back the power needed to you at a discounted price?
Well, until '27, I'm allowed to use the grid as a free battery, basically, this is a kind of government subsidy. But that will end, and the contracts available will be fixed price with a feed in tariff or dynamic (realtime) market price, but then prices can and have been negative during peak solar hours. A battery can solve this only for a bit, and maybe with smart algorithms it can be trading on the electricity market full time, I'm not sure if that makes enough money for the grid power in winter.. it's nice to think about though.
or you get a battery. Is just great. I have 3.5kw solar power witha 9kwh battery. Very very seldom it switches to power line. And this is in south Germany, maybe a bit sunnier than north but still - it rains a lot/cloudy, sun is sparse.
It seems like that works for daily cycles, but isn't that very expensive storage for one cycle a year, which is what you need to save energy for winter?
Depends how close to the poles you are. A lot of the world can do this fine by sizing the PV for winter; too close to the poles and there's not going to work — you either need to diversify power generation by kind (wind, wave, hydro, geothermal all work too, but again geographically constrained) or by distance (the maths says we can build an adequate and literally global power grid for an affordable quantity of aluminium, shame about the politics).
Any advice on battery brands and features you could share?
yes , check this guys https://www.anern.com/products/solar-battery/
Thanks
If every household did this we would have massive problems. We would still need a base load amount in the winter, and in the summer there would be an over abundance. The price of electricity would swing between essentially free in the summer to higher than normal in the winter, because the cost of operating base grid power would be about same but they would need to cover all operating costs during the winter.
Utilities should charge a separate connection fee and per-kWh rate if that's what matches the economic reality of their business. I don't see the summer abundance as an issue. It means we get to shut off the fossil fuels 8 months out of the year. The remaining 4 months, everyone pays a little more per kWh, averaging out to the same cost over a full year. What's not to like?
The economic viability of a fossil fuel plant that's only used 4 months out of the year.
If the plant shuts down because it's no longer economically viable/doesn't cover operating costs, what happens next winter?
The electricity price in the winter will go up until either the plants are viable again or alternatives become viable.
Ostensibly it gets replaced by a grid storage array and sufficient renewable inputs.
> in the summer there would be an over abundance.
This ain't gonna happen. Air conditioning will be saving lives.
Average US home power consumption: 30 KWh/day.
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.
We are in the process of installing a 13 kwH system which is 31 panels at 430 watts with two Tesla power walls. Total cost (with snow guards) is just shy of 60k. The backup batteries are where this really shines. Our power provider had a blackout of 25 hours in April and if we were 6 blocks south, it was an entire week. The true cost of the system will be approximately half this after rebates and is more like 32k. The rebates are so good between Fed, State and the power company that we almost got the backup batteries for free.
In my state electricity costs about $0.089/kWh. We spend about $100/mo on electricity total which comes out almost exactly to your 30kWh/day figure (with a $23.15 connection charge included).
Invested that 40k would conservatively cover over 2x our electricity bill without touching the principal (inflation adjusted).
That's a pretty hard sell for solar. Obviously incentives will improve things but it just seems less financially risky to use grid power.
10 years ago for me math didn't add up for batteries and offgrid but it did add up for solar.
Offgrid added up if you are already offgrid so that ongrid becomes a big expense when comparing.
That’s where my math went. 30k- 12 years to get back to the investment. 30k in the s&p is worth a lot more than 30k…
Did you factor in 30% federal tax credit?
https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/homeowners-guide-federal-t...
No.
Your numbers are way off (at least for Europe). Panels are 580 W peak now and cost < €150. Battery < €1000 per kWh. Prices still dropping.
I was quoting an installed price. Panels are less than half the installed cost now.
If the "solar roof" people ever get their act together, that might change.
Not too bad. You need a lot of space for 50 panels. You need to live in a large suburbian house or rural and stick them on a barn or on the ground.
Clearly to meet demand we need solar farms and grids for most people.
~500$ for a 250/400W panel seems absurd, here in Italy you can buy a 500W solar panel for 100€ without effort or less. Given that you can buy a pallet of them, you can probably pay less than 100€ per 500W, I have found deals down to 77€ per 550W panel with pallets of 31 (31x550=+17k at 2405€), shipment included, and I'm talking about new half cell panels, not old stuff.
This is cool, and I wish I had a setup like that, but the premise seems a bit hollow. Do they grow all the food they consume? What about the energy needed to produce the electric car, host the Substack? What about when they get sick? Do they stay off-grid, or do they go to a modern hospital, which can only exist because of urban industrial buildup.
It’s cool to live off grid, but solarpunk-libertarianism is a vibe, not a meaningful policy direction for modern society
I live here in Nigeria where electricity has been epileptic since I was born (I'm 23 now). Like, I live in one of the nicer suburbs in my state, but 12h of power isn't guaranteed.
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.
This compared to my own experience shows how much location matters for these things.
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.
Different strokes for different folks. If you already have sufficiently reliable power and the savings won't beat the S&P500, then I guess sticking to the grid makes more sense. It's just the flexibility and reliability of solar I'm commenting on, especially if you live close to the equator.
I wish regulations where more lax in France. It was a battle with the town council to install 3.2kw of solar panels on the ground, I want to install 10 more but it looks like the ground option which is cheap will not be approved, I would have to out them on my roof which is costly and is not true south (and arguably, more visible).
What are their reasons for not allowing it?
Sounds stupid on many levels to forbid it.
Basically it's zoning laws, to not add permanent structures onto agricultural lands, but yeah it's stupid because this is for solar panels without foundations so I don't see the harm. I need to get an appointment with them, see if I can change their minds.
Please consider a blog post and posting it here detailing your journey if you don't mind.
Solar allows one to prepay for power. Would be nice to see more efficient financing for 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.
> Electric vehicles are mainstream and last longer than their gas engine counterparts, with an estimated lifespan of 200,000 miles.
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.
I also thought this was an odd statement to see. Electric cars really haven't been around long enough to give that kind of respect to time. A few brands have but the newer models are totally different beasts.
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.
Most cars now can easily last 15 years/200,000 miles with maintenance. Obviously a few will fail, but I’ve done it a few times now (miles wise), 200k seems like a cut off, transmission can fail, various chassis parts worn out, etc. Some people even get 300-400k miles out of some of the more reliable brands like Toyota/Honda/Subaru
It also depends on the batteries themselves. An older Nissan leaf? Doubt it. A newer Tesla? I sure hope so.
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?
They're already used for industrial storage of surplus solar- and wind power.
I'm my opinion the big problem with electric cars are the price of replacement batteries in combination with buying used.
300k on my Toyota right now. Most modern ICE engines should last 200k with no problems. EVs (other than the battery) should last a million miles. Even the batteries are turning out to last longer than everyone expected, ignoring some notable notable failures.
Betting on Teslas didn't work out so well for Hertz due to expensive repairs. Rental cars take a beating, though.
I'm not sure about averages, but given the second hand pricing I've seen: I thought after 100 or so megameters, even well maintained internal combustion engines needed maintenance of a price comparable to replacement?
Barring weird parts supply issues rebuilding an engine should be significantly cheaper than purchasing a low mileage crate replacement. Same with transmissions.
Probably going off of the, now outdated, rule of thumb that a car lasts ~100,000 miles.
$88 amortized over 15 years is only $16k. It’s really impressive they can get it done for that much, although I suspect labor has to be free at that cost. I’d be curious what batteries they went with and how it’s organized (aka the more technical side)
A $16k investment at 4% annual yield with quarterly payout re-invested turns into $29k at the 15 year mark. So maybe batteries and panels today feels like a good investment, but is it the best?
Looking at the posted pictures, it seems like they're living in heaven. Good to know the panels will be good for at least 40 years.
Still, I'm kind of left wondering, where will they be in 40 years. Can life really be so predictable?
You can imagine a high probability that someone will be in the home enjoying the power generated.
Yeah, that seems very likely. I just hope it will be them, instead of somebody else, as it sometimes happens when we're making plans and life is also making plans, but different plans.
That's great. I wish we had more housing like this, especially if we could build them into little hobbit villages. I would readily live there
Just a note to the web designer: The footnote links don't account for the fixed header, so the page always ends up with the footnote hidden behind the header when the user clicks one. Needs an 89 pixel offset.
People forget that solar panels don't grow on the trees, battery packs especially have very large footprint and their manufacturing is resource intensive.
From the article:
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.
Nuclear power has a minimal carbon footprint of around 15–50 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour (gCO2/KWh).
If you want to be a real hippy
Everything is relative though. Bikes also don’t grow on trees but they are several orders of magnitude more green then cars.
They should use potato’s as electricity source, they just need a couple hundred tone, as potato sort of grows on trees
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TIL mud huts are "solarpunk" and "Pinterest worthy" so long as you're doing it in the US.
Honest question, why is this your reaction? Why are people on this forum so unwilling to be happy for others? I have noticed that this attitude is extremely prominent in tech. Everything is either perfect (according to the person making the judgement) or it’s utterly worthy of ridicule. I am growing very, very tired of seeing this throughout tech.
I suspect that the comment was provoked by the term “solarpunk”.
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.
/dismissive handwave
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.
>Why are people on this forum so unwilling to be happy for others?
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.
It would be a mistake to think their experience is anything close to that of people in poverty, regardless of their ability to walk away from it. Poverty doesn't involve affording the capital outlay for $16k of solar/battery/hardware to give you 24x7 heat, heated water, electricity, and _an electric car_.
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.
So what are these 'whites' supposed to do in your opinion, quit denying their wealth and just go live in a nice suburb, big house, big car? You propose no solution, it's only bitterness.
It sounds like you may be conflating wealth with consumption. What these people have, and what billions around the world do not, is financial freedom.
We posted the same time. You said it better than I did!
But - cosplay - 100%