Comment on Plug-in solar panels that fit on your balcony or deck are gaining traction in the US
trane69@lemmy.world 3 weeks agoCan’t have the plebs using the sun. They’d charge us for daylight if they could
Comment on Plug-in solar panels that fit on your balcony or deck are gaining traction in the US
trane69@lemmy.world 3 weeks agoCan’t have the plebs using the sun. They’d charge us for daylight if they could
sj_zero 3 weeks ago
I have done work with a large industrial plant that wants to be able to connect its local generation to the grid in order to supplement what it gets from the grid. The amount of permitting and everything required is surprising. Unfortunately, there are legitimate concerns about putting extra sources of electricity onto the grid. Hypothetically speaking, if poorly engineered sources of energy were placed on to the grid en masse, it has a potential to cause problems that ultimately bring down the entire grid in ways that make it quite difficult for the grid to come back up.
Effectively, you can say that the electric grid is not just a big truck that you can stack more power on, there are a number of precise things that need to be done right, and if they aren't things get really bad really fast.
This isn't related to that, but earlier this year there was a major grid collapse in Spain that almost turned into an even bigger collapse, and that was just related to conventional renewables rather than a bunch of individual households connecting to the grid.
sj_zero 3 weeks ago
And to be clear, conventional renewables such as solar and wind would not direct causal elements in the collapse, they were second order elements. One of the big issues was a lack of spinning synchronous generators, and one of the reasons that there would have been a lack of spinning synchronous generators is that things like solar were using igbt inverters instead. That also means that other conventional renewables such as hydroelectric we're not implicated because hydroelectric has large synchronous spitting generators.
budget_biochemist@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
AFAIK most of the small scale solar systems designed for balconies and rentals aren’t intended to connect to the grid. They are designed to deliver power downstream only to a few DC appliances, falling back to a mains power adapter when there isn’t enough sunlight or battery power.