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@paekakboyz said in Solar Power and Storage - a nerd's view:
We've been investigating solar options again. We've got a north facing sun trap - with a standard iron roof so I imagine install etc would be pretty straight forward. Only prob is now we are on the family buzz there's a good chance we'd move to a bigger place before we hit ROI. Given where we live I'm not sure we'd recoup the investment in capital gains either.
I'm a massive fan of local body loans to tie the asset to the house so it gets paid off over time by the owner, rather than one-off by the current owner. Our last place needed insulation, but there was no point for us doing it as we'd be gone in a few years.
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@paekakboyz said in Solar Power and Storage - a nerd's view:
did you list Elon as a reference??
Prick won't return my calls. Got what he needed out of me and radio silence since.
I feel so used.
Oh well, I'll just have to console myself with all these negative power bills.
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@paekakboyz said in Solar Power and Storage - a nerd's view:
Have seen a couple of shows where a small turbine was a back up to solar. But that was in higher wind and rural type areas from memory. On my drive to work in Wellington there is a house with a decent sized turbine between Tawa and Jville. But that house is on a lifestyle block and not far from the motorway so noise isn't an issue I guess.
We've been investigating solar options again. We've got a north facing sun trap - with a standard iron roof so I imagine install etc would be pretty straight forward. Only prob is now we are on the family buzz there's a good chance we'd move to a bigger place before we hit ROI. Given where we live I'm not sure we'd recoup the investment in capital gains either.
But it's soooo tempting!
Good luck with the job @NTA did you list Elon as a reference??
You would think if you had one of those solar setups with a backup battery and what not that adding a 1 KW wind turbine would be a good cheap way to keep the juice flowing into the batteries when its not sunny.
In a rural setting anyway. Round where I have my place there is a company that builds hay storage sheds for the farmers for free, the catch is they get to keep all the money from the PV installed on the roof. I wonder why they don't throw up a couple of turbines at each end, maintenance maybe?
My place I could do both but you don't see it much, in France there is different buy back rates for wind and for solar. The rates vary as well depending on the size of your install so its all very complicated configuring the best system for ROI
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I would look at a combination setup if in a rural setting for sure.
The other thing I would do though is to reduce the need for electricity in the first place. As hot water is a big user (if not gas) then I would be routing the inlet supply though a coil within my compost heap. Any increase in temp before hitting the HWC is a big saving. -
A mate at work is in his early fifties (prick looks 40) and planning his block now. About three Powerwalls, fuckloads of solar, and using a heat pump for his hot water as it is more efficient than a traditional hot water system.
He's currently enquiring into the costs of staying on grid, but it's just him and the wife so the Powerwalls should be more than enough to keep him happy off grid
The main thing is to size your inverter hardware right - can have all the storage you want but if the juice can't get to it from the generation/storage/usage, you're wasting money.
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We have that heatpump water storage in our place. The whole house is kitted out with heatpumps 6 in total I think plus the one for the hot water.
Never even turned them on in the summer as the house has 2 foot of brick on the outside so stays nice and cool. I suspect we may need them in the winter though. But for now we are only there a couple of weeks in winter so won't get hit to hard by that.
This has sparked my interest and am looking now into what is possible. Need a good plan before I present the wife with a plan to spend 20K on something she will never notice the difference.
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@infidel We are still looking at supplementing our solar system when I get around to starting our build with a wind turbine.
I might have mentioned it all earlier in this thread and NTA sent me here:
http://visionairwind.com/Not exactly a micro system but we are rural so would work for us.
It would be great if they got those PV roof tiles ourt soon. I'm starting our build next year.
I'm hoping that they perfect this soon too (especially as I own a paint shop)
Nick's comments above about combining solar, wind and batteries is the answer for me. I might even be able to throw in micro hydro from a stream so even a still, cloudy/rainy day will have some energy produced.
@NTA What did you mean by this?
"I don't believe the are any schemes for consumers to sell wind back to the grid,"
Energy is energy right? My current (no pun) system with the battery is grid / internet linked so any surplus when the battery is full goes to the grid. They don't care where it comes from. What am I missing there? -
@snowy it comes down to legislation, here at least.
Once the installer is finished, you sign paperwork that gives them the RECs (Renewable Energy Credits) over to them, for which they get paid in lieu of you paying full price for the system. I paid $16k to the installer but there was a $4k subsidy on that in RECs.
In that documentation is a statement of what they installed and effectively the nameplate* capacity of the system.
I don't believe this includes wind in any form as all the schemes are legislated for solar photovoltaic systems.
Of course i could be wrong.
*Nameplate capacity is a funny thing here - most domestic installs are generally limited to 10kW and some states will count your battery in that. If you breach that limit, no more feed in tariff for you!
Other installers get around it by putting a certain amount of kW per phase (I have three phase) so it never looks like more than 10kW to the grid.
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@nta said in Solar Power and Storage - a nerd's view:
......Other installers get around it by putting a certain amount of kW per phase (I have three phase) so it never looks like more than 10kW to the grid.
Trying to remember back to my grid industry experience 10 years ago... would putting out different amounts at different phases mess with the frequency?
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A way to generate income from that excess Solar power generation
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@stockcar86 said in Solar Power and Storage - a nerd's view:
Trying to remember back to my grid industry experience 10 years ago... would putting out different amounts at different phases mess with the frequency?
Correct. FCAS (Frequency Control Ancillary Services) is going to be a big part of why batteries and other dispatchable power are important in the new grid. This whole "baseload" thing - which was actually bullshit to start with - is going to be replaced by demand response.
When Distributed Energy Resources (DERs*) are switching on and off, keeping 50Hz is going to be paramount.
*Its funny that Americans call DER Providers DERPs for short.
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@dk Power Ledger an interesting idea. They're still early days yet though and they've only run trials in WA which is a very limited market - essentially still government owned.
When they come into a more open market with multiple generators and retailers, the strength of their offering needs to stand up in the face of the market.
Also if they're using sophisticated blockchain, it is actually going to start costing energy to maintain:
LONDON — Bitcoin transactions use so much energy that the electricity used for a single trade could power a home for almost a whole month, according to a paper from Dutch bank ING. Bitcoin trades use a lot of electricity as a means to make verifying trades expensive, therefore making fraudulent transactions costly and deterring those who would seek to misuse the currency. “By making sure that verifying transactions is a costly business, the integrity of the network can be preserved as long as benevolent nodes control a majority of computing power,” wrote ING senior economist Teunis Brosens. “Together, they will dominate the verification (mining) process. To make the verification (mining) costly, the verification algorithm requires a lot of processing power and thus electricity.” Comparing the amount of energy used for a Bitcoin transaction to running his home in the Netherlands, Brosens says: “This number needs some context. 200kWh is enough to run over 200 washing cycles. In fact, it’s enough to run my entire home over four weeks, which consumes about 45kWh per week costing €39 of electricity (at current Dutch consumer prices).” Not only does Bitcoin use a vast amount of electricity to complete transactions, it uses an almost exponentially larger amount than more traditional forms of electronic payment. “Bitcoin’s energy costs stand in stark contrast to payment systems that have the luxury of working with trusted counterparties. E.g. Visa takes about 0.01kWh (10Wh) per transaction which is 20000 times less energy,” Brosens notes, pointing to the chart below: ...
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I should add: the system I've got (Reposit Power) is already trading power, but mainly for peak events and not everyday stuff like Power Ledger.
This is the bit about "GridCredits" or selling power at 8 times the normal solar tariff:
http://unleashthepowerwall.com/2016/05/15/reposit-power-microgrid/
And on the "saving me money" bit:
http://unleashthepowerwall.com/2016/10/29/tariff-arbitrage-using-reposit/
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@reprobate mining becomes increasingly more energy intensive as the chain approaches the limit.
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@snowy said in Solar Power and Storage - a nerd's view:
Energy is energy right? My current (no pun) system with the battery is grid / internet linked so any surplus when the battery is full goes to the grid. They don't care where it comes from. What am I missing there?
Not here EDF have different tarrif rates depending on the size and type of your setup up it changes as well if the panels are on your roof or the roof of a detached garage. For some reason domestic solar has the highest buy back tarrif and Wind has a very low one. Now how would they know where the power came from. I suspect this is where the inspection comes in.
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@snowy I did a little more digging - apparently RECs (which are now split into Small scale and Large scale certificates) can include wind and hydro.
The issue is nobody really has the technology to work at consumer scale for wind or hydro - easier to put on solar PV in the sunburnt country.
With a rural block I'd be sticking on a 5kW wind turbine and as much solar as I was allowed after that.
Solar Power and Storage - a nerd's view