sparkyshocks

@sparkyshocks@lemmy.zip

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘Suddenly energy independence feels practical’: Europeans are building mini solar farms at home⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s possible, but needs to be engineered for safety, and that design/testing/certification will increase the cost and complexity.

  You can have solar panels and a battery totally off grid, where the big battery just acts as a generator, with its own inverter creating AC power for anything you plug in. That’s really simple and cheap, but isn’t safe for connecting to and powering a grid-connected house circuit. So anything you want to power with one of these systems needs to be plugged into outlets that only get their power from these batteries.

  You can add a grid-following inverter that safely matches the grid frequency AC, so that you can use the solar power you collect in your own normal home circuit, to power your own household appliances. But the simplest design here is a grid following inverter that doesn’t work when the grid isn’t connected. It can only add to something that already exists and can’t do things on its own.

  If you want to do both, where it can work without grid power and it follows the grid when the grid power is on, you’ll have to design a system that can switch between the two modes without delivering power where it’s not expected or generating power that conflicts with the grid’s AC waveform. Making it automated, like an UPS system, is even more complicated.

  It’s not impossible, or even that difficult, it just does add complexity and the engineering tradeoff is always the question of “what problem does this solve, and is solving that problem important enough to devote these resources to it?” For anyone on a reliable electric grid where power outages are rare, the answer is usually no.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Could waste heat power the Great Lakes region? | The Narwhal⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I read the article’s main point as being that waste heat is all around us, and in places that get cold (like the Great Lakes region), that heat can be moved to where it is useful.

  I’m thinking of the brain meme where each level represents something better:

  1. Electric power is used to generate heat in places that need to be heated, using resistive heat.
  2. Electric powered heat pumps move heat from air where it’s not needed to places that do need heat, using heat pumps that draw heat from ambient air.
  3. Heat is transferred from places that actively need cooling to places that need heat.

  The main point in the article is that if we’re using electricity to cool a place while also using electricity to heat a place, can we just use less electricity to move the heat from the place where it’s not wanted to the place where it is wanted?

  So seen in that light, it’s not so much about how much thermal efficiency a power plant achieves, but rather a question about whether there is something better that can be done with that heat that doesn’t become electricity.