‘If 1.5m Germans have them there must be something in it’: how balcony solar is taking off
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Nuclear as clean? Now that's loco talk.
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Wasn’t Solar City’s whole gambit ….
Yes there were and still are too many scammers. Sometimes I think that’s held the industry back even more than the price. If we had any consumer protections, it would blow up the installer industry.
That doesn’t change my point
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I am a big grid fan too. The hope that HVDC ca,n mean longer time with solar on the grid, and more averaged wind power.
Smarter grid ties is definitely something that I would like to see as well, including battery usage.
The infrastructurea though isn't just a potential reduction in wattage needed to be supported in the last mile, but not needing infrastructure at all dedicated to a power plant. Again pro renewables, solar, wind, hydro. Wind and hydro benefit from scale quite a bit, and I don't think roof top solar alone will cover industrial power usage, so I expect we will have some grid scale plants, but in addition to microgeneration. -
Even if you have perfect eutopic solar communities you would still have to build and maintain the grid for the times when it’s cold and cloudy/snowy/rainy for a week straight to import from somewhere with different weather. It’s completely unreasonable to build that much battery capacity into every town, as nice as it would be.
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Nobody else found it odd that these solar installations are just flying away?
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In Germany those panels usually pay themselves after about 5 years depending on the price of the necessary electronics (don't forget the electricity meter!) and if there's also a battery.
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Isn't wind energy better on balconies?
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8-10 years is a fully fledged pv system. The small balcony panels pay themselves after about 5 years, longer if you add a battery.
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Personally, a remnant of that. Being able to use standard lead acid batteries is a perk, but primarily I find that that voltage range of < 20-50>vdc in terms of equipment is in those 12v increments too. With the powedelivery (PD) extended power range (epr) going up to 48v right now, and the fixed voltages in that spec being multiples of 12 again matching the industry it is now.
With adjustable voltage supplies (AVS) it might matter less (because it can increment in 100mv instead of a couple fixed voltages) but I haven't messed with that yet myself
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Might be most efficient when power is in higedt demands, in the morning and evenings when everyone is using power at home.
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Russia went trans even earlier than that.
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Sadly really small wind turbines are really ineffective and not worth the investment until you have a really windy balcony. If you only have a few square meters solar is the only choice.
But I'd still love to have a small windmill in my garden.
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You don't need a smart meter for this, just plug and play. If seen offers for complete sets from as low as 250€ in supermarkets, so almost everyone can get one and start saving some power.
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My North-East facing balcony doesn't get enough sun light. But it's an interesting idea.
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Doubt it. Wind around buildings tends to be shit.
There's a reason they build turbines on hilltops and out at sea.
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The PC industry has been trying to get rid of those 3.3V and 5V rails for over a decade now, trying to get everyone on board with 12V only. The only hold-out in a modern PC should be SATA, at 5V, the mainboard already doesn't care and GPUs definitely don't. Also no -12V any more. Any year now, not that SATA will die that quickly but the mainboard knows how many SATA connectors it has and can provide sufficient 5V to power your disks.
