‘If 1.5m Germans have them there must be something in it’: how balcony solar is taking off
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i still think the green party is nothing but a meme and should be completely abolished, just fucks up the voting outcomes.
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yeah, i'm definitely not as aggressive on that, but then again i also dont really like having a lot things on my network, or connected to my grid, so i suppose i just sort of optimize that problem out. Plus like i said, convenience, running 120v and 240v is going to be significantly more beneficial for me since i primarily use high wattage draw devices that would benefit from more efficient transmission and conversion (servers and any high power switching power supply basically) i've thought about doing a low voltage network, but that really only seems like it's going to be a bigger mess, for no real significant gain, i have to have central DC conversion and regulation now? I'm just not sure it's worth it, unless i'm pulling it straight from a dedicated battery bank or something, but that doesn't really make any sense to me. I might end up using lower voltage LED products for a lot of lighting, but i think i would rather have a handful of high quality high efficiency power supplies, rather than a global one and some weird ass 48v system where i need to convert from AC natively, unless i'm doing some really weird shit, and then down/up convert to any device as needed. It seems like a bit much for removing the AC conversion part of the problem, but that's just me i guess.
One of the nice things about 120/240 is that our grid is sort of designed for it, so there are some clever ways you can go about utilizing it appropriately. Certain plug specs use both hot/live legs, and neutral (plus ground) so you can technically pull 120/240 voltage out of a single plug, which is quite the trick. You could also fairly easily wire up both of these in more standardized outlet receptacles as well. (although i dunno what the electric code looks like for this one)
My ultimate goal would be doing a decentralized off grid production/storage solution, so high efficiency on higher draws is going to be really important, as well as the ability to standardize on a widely accepted voltage standard. The only real advantage i can think of to using DC grid, is that it would be safer, but like, that's a solved problem so idk.
personally im not huge on smart grid stuff, though i like the idea of smart grid management, being able to do "useful" things with excess generated power, or pull from storage banks at will given a certain rule set defined under a smart home system is way too convenient to ignore.
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i mean, i would also, but that's a weird way to phrase that statement
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destruction of uranium mining is far less than the mining of rare earth metals, coal, oil, gas, iron, copper, bauxite, can i keep going? You need VASTLY less uranium than ANY of these other materials. It's quite literally a non concern at scale.
the toxic cooling water
you clearly understand nothing about nuclear power, Do you live next/nearby a nuclear power plant? If so can you tell me what plant it is so i can do some research on it? Even if i grant you this argument, in the BWR design, which is ancient and hasnt been used in 20 years, which is technically going to have radiation products in the primary turbine loop (the cooling loop is mechanically isolated and has ZERO radiation products in it, unless it fails, and even if it DID fail, it would decay so quickly the chance of it causing harm is going to be almost zero, not to mention that the plant would probably shut down very quickly.
If we're talking modern reactor designs, like the PWR, they have a primary pressurized loop, which is going to have radiation products in it, however this is also a pressurized loop and unsuitable for running a turbine, so it's going to be coupled to a heat exchanger for the turbine loop, which is then also going to be coupled to another heat exchanger so the chances of BOTH of these loops failing and releasing radiation products is quite literally, impossible. Even TMI had zero known radiation products released, there have been groups and studies claiming that there was, but those were not suitably backed up, and provide no significant proof, there's also tons of evidence against these claims, notably the reactor PCV wasn't penetrated, meaning it was entirely contained, so it's extremely unlikely any amount of radiation got outside of that containment, and if we did, we would know about.
Fukushima is probably the go to point out here, but fukushima was a BWR reactor, and uh, fucking exploded. I only know of three nuclear incidents where reactors exploded, one being chernobyl, an objectively bad reactor core design, SL1 which was user error, and a bad design. And well, fukushima, which was user error, bad design, bad regulation, and bad handling. TMI just melted, so nothing funny happened there.
little bonus tidbit here, if we're talking modern designs, which are going to be either gas or metal/salt cooling based, where it's practically impossible to have a significant failure event, especially with designs like the SSR. Even if you did manage to spill metal/salt fuel it's going to be self contained within the fuel itself. The SSR design takes this one step farther and puts the fuel into fuel rods, which then sit in a salt pool.
spend radioactive fuel rods
these are only a problem for certain reactor designs, designs like the CANDU reactor, and other fast reactor designs (any molten salt/metal reactor is by definition a fast reactor btw) can actually burn the spent waste from PWR designs as fuel, bringing it down to a much safer less significant point in the product chain, by that point encasing them in concrete is going to entirely absorb all of the radiation emitted, and any sort of criticality incident is going to be impossible. And if you're REALLY concerned about these casks, go put them far underground in a big deep hole.
contaminated machinery.
we've literally been working with this shit since nuclear bombs, contamination is quite literally a solved problem, some reactor designs even burn straight unprocessed uranium, though the after products are particularly nasty, those can also be burnt off
Real clean…
compared to something like coal? Absolutely, even when comparing to the fabled wind and solar energy, it's still right up beside them in terms of the rankings. Nuclear power is only bad if you're scared of it.
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I grew up here, occasionally it was mentioned what we would do in an evacuation at school, it was never weird to me
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You’re spending too much time in theoryland. How do you over-provision for 10 feet of snow in a week of 0f/-10c? It’s not a hypothetical. Moving energy across long distances is absolutely critical to carbon-free energy.
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Thanks for the input, but I yet have to find a calculator that shows how much you generate per month and not only oer year!
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Thank you for your concern, I surre will not do anything crazy without knowing what I'm doing
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Hmm no,
- first oft all: noise. Wind turbines have moving parts, that attached to a building or even worse attached to a balcony creates noise in the whole building. Imagine the rattling of 5-6 ~10 year old, bad maintained, wind turbines.
- Second: the energy output is rather low. A 1,2KW turbine is about 1.2m/3.9feet big. That's in spherical, cause it has to be able to rotate by wind direction.
- Third: balconies are preferred to not have wind, but sun.
- And last but not least: blades. Every windturbine form factor has (fast) moving blades. If it's reachable someone is going to stick a finger in it.
If you're living more suburban and have a windy detached place to setup a small windturbine that's an option. On the garage or shed for example.
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will the sun powered line hop over to another one
This is why you need a new meter, at least that was the situation for us. If we didn't get a new meter, we would only be able to use one line, and the surplus would go to the grid.
They actually forgot to tell us that, so after some very confusing analyzing of what the fuck was wrong, I complained that the system didn't work, most of our generated power was sold, and then we had to pay to sort of buy it back!!
This was all down to the meter not being replaced for one that was meant for handling local production properly. We basically lost 3 months of production on that account. After we got the new meter, it worked perfectly, and production is as advertised, and I was very happy to see that production in winter was almost exactly as I'd calculated:
Although obviously you can't calculate the number of sunny days in advance.Something that surprised me, was that in the summer, production is still reasonably good even on days where the sky is completely overclouded, as long as the clouds are white, enough light penetrates so we can still achieve almost half the full capacity.
Another fun story IMO, is that we switched electricity supplier February last year, and they work with advance payments, and since we were new customers, we got a bill for 3 months of normal use. We just received the "bill" for 2nd quarter, with negative payment amount, because there is still money left from our advance payment!
AND that is without sales, which is a separate account, but is only about €15 per month on average. (for selling 7844 kWh for the year 2024) So about 2 cent per kWh on average. -
To be a positive impact, they just need to be less carbon intensive thans the energy they displace. According to the first results on google, (presumably utility-scale) solar is about 12 times less carbon intensive than natural gas and 20 times compared to coal. So as long as you're replacing base load and not utility solar, balcony solar could be as much as 10 times less efficient and still come out a net positive.
Keep in mind also that these numbers keep improving as solar panel manufacturing becomes more efficient and starts using more green energy itself over the coming decades