‘If 1.5m Germans have them there must be something in it’: how balcony solar is taking off
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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 again for all the information!
Yeah, going off grid is a whole philosophical idea in itself, way smarter to share with the grid if you're not in some very specific situation IMO.
I always thought that those calculations about solar was a bit bogus, like you extrapolate the earnings today over say 12 years to pay off an installation, of course it will get cheaper in the future and as more people have solar, revenu goes down too. Seems you solidify that idea!
Today though it starts to be almost a criminally good investment... Living in an appartment I seriously think I might get one of those balcony panels this year, just gotta check out how it actually works when ju inject that into the system. We redid all the electricity so we have separate lines for about everything, will the sun powered line hop over to another one (they are after all all tied together at the central input) and how many amps can you allow to flow "backwards" like that and so on.
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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
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Reducing the money spent on DC-AC conversion is my main thoughts. If my power generated is all DC, my battery storage is all DC, my servers are DC, my lights, and water pumps can be DC, my car is DC, then switching from AC to just switch back to DC 20-40 feet just doesn't make sense to me.
I would like to actually find a better formula then the napkin math I've done to say when it does and doesn't have benefit.
Really want to get my hands on a Open compute Rack for my next server build and have the UPS and power rail be all 48v too (as per spec). Again why have another component to possibly fail and use power if I don't need it.
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im pretty sure most of the will do a yearly breakout over the months? A really big reason to use them is to figure out maximum and minimum production throughout the year, so idk what calculator you're using, but any good ones should be able to calculate that.
I've used PVwatts before, and it does spit out monthly data, though it can also bring in some more complex data, it's a whole field of research, and it's worth investing time into if you're curious about it.
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uh, you clean the panels for one. Outside of that, you import external energy, or use other generation sources.
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i can understand the thought process, especially if you're going to do a full DC and no AC at all setup. The problem that i have is that switching from AC mains, to DC mains is such an incredibly tall order that you have to think about literally everything you integrate fairly significantly, otherwise you're going to end up implementing AC mains as well, and then you're not in a much better spot, even though you may now have more losses, chances are you could just offset them with more production and storage, or better inversion.
It's an interesting project for sure, just not likely to be one i would ever invest time into lol.
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And at that point you need a power grid and at that point you may as well centralize the generation to utilize economies of scale.
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If using million as a multiplier, one ought to use capital "M" (to be consistent with the metric prefix mega, which is also for 10^6^), change my mind.
1.5M Germans, if you will.
1.5 MegaGermans
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Honestly the micro inverter on a small circuit level seems like an interesting middle to me. So I can have the ac outlets here and there, but just for non DC appliances.
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Hey thank you! I re-checked out PVwatts (the link was used
️I probably avoided it because you have to put your address in, I don't want calls etc. Turns out the city is enough) it's exactly what I needed, thanks! -
it requires you to put in your address to locate your lat and long so it can properly calculate your energy production, especially throughout the year. It may still do some tracking on that, but it's unlikely to be anything significant unless you have an account and money tied to it somehow.
But yes, a place close by you will work just as fine. Though you can expect some level of inaccuracy, it's probably not that significant if you're reasonably close.
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there's definitely an interesting way to do it, i just don't think it would be something i want, though i'm always up for some theory crafting, so who knows, maybe there is a good way of doing it.
Maybe the trick is just doing like 1 AC outlet per wall, and then using DC outlets for most other receptacles, since most devices are going to be low draw.
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Yes and thanks again, there are soo many crap sites out there I just gave up!
