Comment on ‘If 1.5m Germans have them there must be something in it’: how balcony solar is taking off

• KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  a mix of both is good, there’s arguments for doing local co-generation. Where you essentially turn a community into it’s own power plant, and when you’re talking about things like micro inverters, the cost doesnt really change.

  Is it more efficient to do it at a utility grid scale? Yes, does that make it overall better? Not really, you still have to deal with grid inefficiencies, and maintenance, and well, you still have to deal with installations, so the cost isn’t that significant at the end of the day.

  Solar is one of very few renewable energy sources that you can actually locally build and maintain on a small scale, no sense in removing that utility from it, that’s part of the reason it’s so popular.

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  • ayyy@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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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    • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      ok so, even if we assume that you NEED to do this, which is an errant assumption on the basis of “you can just not have that problem through over provisioning” you could use that extra generated power for other things, selling to industry, energy storage, a community center whatever, there are literally endless things you could do with free power, most often you just dump it into heating since it’s cheap, and storing it is fairly trivial in something like water.

      At worst possible case scenario, your required grid imports are still going to be less than they currently are, which means less external grid maintenance, and less strain.

      Granted it’s not going to be used year round, unless of course, you over provision production and consume in the winter, and produce in the summer, where now you’re getting effectively double the usage, if not more. You probably won’t reach peak micro grid infrastructure, but the flexibility providing by something like solar is worth the consideration. A really good example of this is actually the texas power grid, although that is a pretty large power grid, i never said you should island micro generation, just that it’s likely going to be beneficial.

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      • ayyy@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        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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• fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Transformers, power lines, roads, trucks, and maintenance teams to move from large scale plants to houses also doesn’t grow on trees, but if maintenance in remote places doesn’t happen it can burn a lot of them.

  Sometimes large scale plants make sense, but as the back up too microgeneration where the costs of infrastructure to move from unpopulated to populus areas make sense.

  I am also a fan of less inverted power in microgeneration though. More and more of power usage is DC anyways. The need to convert to AC as much IMHO, but that is my far more radical take

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  • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    microgeneration purely in DC only really makes sense in stuff like campers and RV’s where you’re going to be using primarily nearby, low power consumption devices.

    AC is still better, plus modern switching technology while still fairly expensive, is considerably more efficient now. If you’re doing AC you also get a number of other benefits, notably, literally every existing appliance and device uses and works with AC voltages, the entire standard around electricity and home wiring is based on AC mains, all of the accessible hardware is also produced for AC mains, not that you can’t use it for something else, it’s just not intended for that.

    Certain appliances will use induction motors, and similar other tech (clocks for example, often use the frequency of the power grid to keep time) based directly on the AC sinewave. You could still run them on DC, it’s just significantly sillier. Plus transmission efficiency is a BIG loss in DC (even now with modern solid state switching components, it’s still just, not ideal), granted thats less of a problem on a micro grid scale, it’s still a concern and potential restriction, nothing beats the simplicity and reliability of a simple wire wound iron core transformer. There are a handful of other technical benefits, and drawbacks as well, but fairly minor.

    Having a dedicated DC supply side might be nice for a home environment, but the question is what do you standardize on? DC/DC voltage conversion is fairly efficient as it is already. Converting from AC/DC is incredibly easy and not particularly inefficient at lower power consumption, it’s more of a problem with higher draw devices. But you can easily get around that by using a higher voltage to convert down from.

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    • fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Agreed. I maybe a radical DC home evangelist but yeah AC has its place still and it being THE standard for home appliances is a good example of the powers of scale.

      So far for my home usage I’m standardizing on 48vdc because that is the last multiple of 12 before you go above OSHAs low voltage regs.

      From there I really want to standardize further on the power delivery spec, because I just love the idea of smart grid for my home. I can then have dispered batteries in my home for either the primary benefits of that device is portable but doesn’t always need to be (laptop, power tool batteries, little robot thing, car, etc) or as a way to reduce some crazy limited time power draw (like servers starting up, oven running for an hour a day, etc).

      From there maybe just Microadapter for a few standard circuits so the outlets work the same.

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      • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        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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      • ayyy@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Is the multiple of 12 thing just for ease of lead-acid storage?

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