I’ve been running a solar microgrid on my coffee farm for the last 7years. We started with a few golf cart batteries and 4 panels, these days we’re powering 4 houses, 7 cabins, water extraction, treatment, and RO processing, campus-wide fiber network and switches, path lighting, security systems, and a small server rack.
We’re running 6 inverters on our primary system in a three phase configuration, 35kw of panels and 160kwh of lithium iron batteries. About to add an additional 20kw of panels and a test bank of LiTo cells.
Our panels are a distributed set of rooftop mounted panels on various buildings, which also serves to shade the rooftops reducing cooling loads.
We still have to run a generator to supplement charging on dark overcast days, but it’s typically about 100 hours a year. Hooping to get that running on biomass eventually.
It’s strange to me that people in rural areas pay for electricity. It makes no economic sense, at least here in the Caribbean.
> It’s strange to me that people in rural areas pay for electricity. It makes no economic sense, at least here in the Caribbean.
This comment was very confusing until I read the second sentence. Electricity prices in the Caribbean are very high, and I can only imagine that rural areas are even worse.
Where I’m at in the United States a typical electric rate is around $0.10/kWh. Paying that nominal amount and avoiding the need to service additional equipment and deal with backup generators is an easy decision.
It grew organically so there was never a huge cost
Really, except when we decided to build a building for
The power plant because it was getting out of hand. It’s been a few thousand dollars a year in growth as we add batteries and panels. Also a bit of labor for installation of course, but we handle that in house.
How much are you valuing your own time? Theres money cost, then theres time cost and the final one is in more remote communities with cold weather… insurance costs on failure…
I have a solar system in my house in london. 5kw, 13kwhr battery. I am self sufficient from end of march to october.
I recently got a second hand electric car. I bought an EV plug (total fucking ripoff. its a fucking plug with a contactor, RCD and a CAN interface. no way is that worth fucking £600)
It has some basic control to allow me to charge from excess solar. What is not easy to do is charge at night without draining the house battery. Its fine for me, because I have Home Assistant, with enough fiddling I can get all the systems to talk to each other to play ball. (to add to the complication, I'm on a variable rate tariff, so price can be negative or £1 a kwhr)
I would really love a "house power API" that would allow a "controller" to locally control the power behavior of all the things in a house. Because at the moment, a "normal" person wouldn't be able to charge their car and have house batteries and have solar, and optimise for cost.
We have https://www.myenergi.com/ for our car charger and it seems to be able to integrate batteries, charging and panels like you suggest, only you have to go all in. We have parts of it and are tempted to use more, but the lock-in angle is a bit off-putting
If your electrical installation allows it: You can connect your ev plug before the battery so that it does not drain the battery. You can do this by placing the fuse/connection before the measurement clamps for the battery. Somewhere in between your mains connection and your battery/solar system.
This way the battery does not see the load and does not provide power to your EV.
That way you can still use excess solar (before you inject it into the mains) to charge your car + you do not pull power from your battery :)
The ideal solution is for the battery to have a third set of clamps to measure the EV. But as I don't have installer access to the software (centrally managed for the win) I'm not sure thats possible.
I might ask to see if thats possible. I probably need more panels to cover the winter load.
I mean, it's a bit more than a contactor and an RCD, it also has PEN fault detection because TN-C-S is how most of us are wired up to the grid.
Then for use with smart tariffs like IOG there's a microcontroller, cloud gateway for them to hook into for OCCP to turn on and off the charger when the grid is cheapest/greenest etc.
So £600 is about right, once you add in R&D, certification, profit margin, warranty claim % etc.
Midnight Solar are the OG company in off grid and they have a "waste not" feature from way back that triggers any device when the parameters you set are reached, ie: float voltage, and/or other things, like a second set point where power would be sent to a third load, like the grid or water heating.
https://www.midnitesolar.com/
hard core techies, even had the pleasure of detailing my inadvertant and unsucessfull attempts to melt one of there controlers.......literaly had a main lug get loose, and the panels arc melted the lug to slag, and it lived.
in any case, there web site has a wealth of info on what is possible, and to look for elsewhere
I did build my own solar system too. In Switzerland.
Took me 1-2 month planning and then 3 month building it alone nearly each day. Sept 2023 til Xmas 2023. Got all the hardware from a PV dealer friend on his purchase price level. Even 24 panels I have put myself alone onto the roof. With two persons it was a bit better.
I've got: 420w x 71 Trina solar panels and two SolarEdge inverters. SE10K Hybrid and a SE17k. Also a 24kWh BYD LFP battery.
All prices without state funding:
Offers from local installers for 56*410W Panels without battery were around 65k CHF.
I've paid now 44k CHF including every kind of cost associated with building it.
We’re living in a big river valley where we have fog from October until March. On some days in November the fog is so dense that the whole system does not produce any kind of energy. On the other days the produced kWh are enough to charge the battery.
We have a heat pump (extrem efficient), servers, one electric car, etc which consumes all together around 13MWh per year.
The solar system produces around 27.5MWh. Most of the energy gets fed back into the grid.
We’re currently investigating to connect the neighbour houses physically to us. But that takes even more time here :-(
Just for comparisons sake, our 8.6kwP setup with a 10kwH battery cost us (after subsidies from governemnt) appr. ~€11.5k. Haven't received all the subsidies yet, so the total will be lower by about 1.5k (I think). Everything was done through installers, we didn't lift a finger (also couldn't, because when it comes to electricity I have as much experience as the dog next door).
If I had more due diligence before I would have scaled up the panels up to at least 10kwP, for future proofing probably to 12kwP. This is mostly just to make sure winter is covered better, as our production is really low as we have a 10° flat roof installation.
Having done some work around net zero policy I am increasingly convinced that this is the way forward, and indeed that this will be the way things are done normally maybe 10-20 years from now. The concept is called "distributed generation" and in UK each distribution network keeps an "embedded capacity register" which is basically all the distributed energy resources that are connected to the grid at distribution level (i.e. in the local area). Over here the national grid largely operates at or over capacity, which is a very serious problem for the immediate future, especially as more and more power is drained by compute-heavy infrastructure (data centers and such). Distributed generation is an attractive solution for households regardless of which angle you look at it from.
No, having more power isn't a problem for solar; unlike coal or nuclear, solar can curtail production instantly and without suffering wear and tear. The problem is that in the UK in the winter there is an order of magnitude less power from PV than in the summer.
I personally feel there should be more allowance for small personal wind generators in sub-urban areas. That would offset a bit at least in winter for places like the UK. Not sure what the actual laws are, but I can assume councils wont be too happy about someone putting one up on their home.
If the objective is to reduce the number of hours you're not self-sufficient for a given battery size, or reduce the size of your expensive batteries, even a couple hundred watts could make sense.
https://www.amazon.com/NINILADY-Vertical-Generator-Controlle... is a 600-watt-peak wind generator, designed for 11m/s winds, for sale in the US for US$300, presumably much cheaper in countries that aren't descending into kleptocratic tyranny. (I talked to someone who recently bought something similar for US$60. I think it was a 300-watt turbine.) It's a vertical-axis type, less than a meter in diameter. No worries about annoying the neighbors, and it'll probably do a great job of keeping your fridge running most of the time when it's cloudy.
50¢ per peak watt would be a terrible, uncompetitive price if you were a utility company considering how to build a wind farm to sell power for profit. But, if you're a homeowner seeking energy self-sufficiency because your Public Utilities Commission is trying to throw you under the bus because of regulatory capture, it's pretty affordable.
Uneconomical and the sort of thing that really annoys the neighbors. We only just got onshore wind unbanned entirely, and Reform are heavily against permitting renewables at all.
I was under the impression that small wind generators at the scale of suburban backyards are really uneconomical and don't produce sufficient energy for anything of practical use.
small wind turbines are also horrendously unreliable because of mechanical failure. Same logic as to why pickup trucks are generally more reliable than a smart car.
Laws of physics: maximum power that can be generated is proportional to the swept area of the blades. So it scales exponentially as blade length increases.
One of those areas where policy action is desperately needed but no attention is paid due to media dysfunction. I think the UK would benefit from region-specific pricing, to move the datacenters closer to generation rather than urban environments. It would also encourage more embedded generation in expensive areas.
Yeah. It would be more accurate to say that newspapers hate local government as a concept, but a lot of the public are happy to go along with that and get peeved about any difference which is pointed out to them.
(nobody ever describes house prices as a "postcode lottery"!)
Talk radio and TV are just as bad, as are the opposition. If Tories proposed it, Labour would be up in arms about postcode lottery. If Labour proposed it, exactly the same from the other side.
Doesn't matter how sensible it is, the other side will use it to score points. I can't believe for a second that Liberal Democrats think that James Dyson or Andrew Lloyd Webber should be able to avoid inheritance tax by buying tens of millions of pounds of farmland, but it's politically beneficial for them to do so.
> I found three companies and gave them my PG&E usage for the past year (about 16,000 kwh) and got three quotes ranging from ~45 — 55k.
Wow these rates are crazy. A 10kW setup costs you maybe €10.000 all-in here in the Netherlands.
What's going on with these rates? Do they already include the ridiculous tarrifs?
A new battery setup for a 20kWh LFP battery + 10 kW inverter + installation is €7000 now.
And dropping, fast.
Assuming batteries and PV come from China, someone in California is making a lot of money or the government is straining the process with bureaucracy costing $30.000 per setup.
Batteries are dropping fast in price, but for the USA, they might be going up because of tariffs. Neatly sidestepping that:
I have a powerwall 2 with 5kw panels, which I've had since about 2021. At the time it was the biggest, cheapest, had a grid isolation mode, and could be mounted outside. (I didn't trust tesla back then, and I sure as shit don't now. Moreover, once it catches fire, that shit aint going out anytime soon)
It still cost about £7k installed.
From about march/april to end of october, we are power sufficient (london, even with rainy days, gas hot water though.)
If I were to get a new system, 13kwhr of battery is something like £2k, plus inverter/charger.
The panels are dirt cheap, to the point where the scaffolding costs more than the panels. (and the mounts.)
Crazy stuff. Ten years ago I paid £5.5k GBP for a 3.7kW system. Since then I would expect the labour component to have gone up but the panels to have come down. I guess the skilled labour shortage in the US is having a very real effect on prices.
Under the subsidy rules for feed-in-tariffs at the time, that had to be done with an MCS approved installer. All work in England would require an approved "Part P" signoff anyway. However it did not require council planning approva, nor grid approval for that size of system.
There's not a shortage of skilled labor so much in US as there is a shortage of people able to go through the racketeering process of getting a contractor license, which also requires being a half-slave to someone with a license for a number of years. It's straight up mercantilist style shake-down to benefit prior entrants. It is easier in US to become an electrical engineer than it is to become a guy who adds a new outlet to a room addition, but that has nothing to do with skill.
In fact when I was first hired as an engineer, it was actually someone that wanted an electrician but hired EEs instead because they are cheaper and more readily available.
One of the worst is something like installing HVAC stuff. I got an EPA license in 2 days of studying and then did my own myself. If I wanted to install it for a profit for someone else, I would have to spend 4 years working for someone else with a license first to get the contractor license! The end result is it legitimately cost like $700 to have a single capacitor replaced on an air conditioner, and in places like Florida if you do it for someone else without years of 'training' you're now a felon.
I see 7k€ for 12kWp, retail, for a diy ground install set for our summer house. That's before 4k€ in subsidies. No net metering, and feedin compensation is capped at 0.02€/kWh. But at 3k€ net, who cares? Even with the low electricity rates here, this makes sense. Even for a summer house!
For comparison, my 10 kW solar install completed last week cost 24k CAD (15k EUR). That's just panels, inverters and installation. The incremental cost was likely in part due to the ~160% tariffs on solar panels imposed by the Canadian government, but not all.
> Customer might be willing to pay 10k, but if there's two identical quotes, one for 10k and one for 9k they'll go for the 9k
But you see the point. There's a comfortable cushion where everyone can make more money off the taxpayer and have an easier time of it. Spend a bit of it on better marketing to elevate yourself and justify the higher price in people's minds.
- Greed kicks in because capitalism: prices rise again, maybe not back to pre-subsidy levels, but they rise.
- Subsidy gets axed: prices rise to above pre-subsidy levels.
(Note: I'm personally entirely pro "subsidize things you want more of". But that requires a stable, trustworthy government that plans on longer timescales.)
There was a study in France showing that for rent subsidies.[1]
In France, the state pays max(rate * rent, cap) for apartments for students, unemployed and poor workers. Usually people don't qualify for ratio of the rent, because it's way over the cap for the subsidy. To keep up with inflation, the state re-evaluate the cap of the subsidy almost every year.
A french economist showed that there was a correlation between the cap of the rent subsidy and the rental market prices for small apartments. Of course, correlation is not causation, it could just be that the rental market follows the inflation as much as the cap. But this correlation doesn't happen for bigger and more luxurious appartments. Her explanation is that your poor household is only ready to afford €100 per month, as an example, the subsidy cap is €500, so the rental market prices these apartments to €600 (= 100 + 500). When the state re-evaluate the cap to €550, the rental market goes up to €650. (= 100 + 150)
The key difference in the markets is that it takes a very long time to build more apartments and houses, especially in France. There also isn't an option to not have housing. (Low elasticity) That keeps the short term supply effectively static. Same amount of supply, increase in money spent, inflation.
In a market like solar, there is production of more solar systems. There are also multiple readily available substitutes. (e.g. on-grid power) The effect of the subsidy should drive increased volume from manufacturers, keeping net price stable.
Great to see DIY early adopters getting great savings here. I think the bigger trend here is lower cost, commoditization, and it eventually becoming a no-brainer for people that have the opportunity/space to be running their own micro grids for cost reasons. The cost of what you need here is still quite high. But making things easier to plug together helps. And of course component cost is coming down.
For example, you can buy kits on amazon for powering your shed or boat and it's essentially a smaller version of what you would put on your house. No electricians needed. No permits required. Here in Germany you can buy balcony solar kits in the supermarket. They only deliver a few hundred watts of power but it's plug and play. And you can get a nice little subsidy to do that. Some of these kits only cost a couple of hundred euro.
I could see that eventually adding a microgrid to a building is not going to break the bank. Car batteries are much larger than what goes in a house and kwh prices are trending well below 100$/kwh now. Meaning it should not cost tens of thousands to get a couple of tens of kwh to store energy. Inverters shouldn't break the bank either. The going rate for solar panels is around 200$.
Mostly current prices for home setups are much higher than the component cost mainly due to regulations, labor cost, certifications, etc. If you go off grid, you can just DIY and you end up much closer to the component cost. But of course long term both component cost and other cost are coming down. With the exception of labor cost probably. Though the skills needed will become more common and you might be able to do a lot of work yourself.
I missed the "power" when I skimmed the headline and clicked the link. I was slightly dissapointed when I finally realised that the OP is in fact not building his own solar system.
My hard drives alone pull 200W idle and I don’t have that many. Cooling fans (in servers) pull 150W total most of the time but can be up to 300W. Each 10GbE NIC pulls ~40W. PoE switch gives ~30W to each of my APs, and uses ~80W itself, so there’s another 300W. All of my RAM pulls about 250W (admittedly there’s nearly 2TB of it in the rack, but still). Start adding up CPUs idle/average/max power and the numbers get way bigger.
40W for a 10GbE NIC sounds crazy, my internet router has a dual 10 GbE Intel NIC with one 10GBaseT SFP+ and one 10G DAC and the whole router only draws 24 W (Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny)
My whole “rack” draws about 120W total with: aforementioned router, Synology NAS with 4 drives, 2x10G+4x2.5G PoE switch powering a Ubiquiti AP, 16-port 1G switch, and a PowerBook 540c running AppleTalk routing
If I had more than 100 watts in idle hard drives, I'd start aggressively figuring out how to let them spin down. Maybe his drives are actually doing something 24 hours a day? But probably not.
Networking gear taking that much when it's not busy is really unfortunate. Did IEEE slack on adding effective sleep/downclocking features?
It sounds like the 10GbE is not fiber. With fiber, it would take around 5W only, depending on your needs. It's a bit harder to use, but fiber is really the better option if you want a serious homelab.
I'm curious, are you getting this with a kill-a-watt (or equivalent), or are you adding up wattage by specifications alone?
(I do have an epyc with a bunch of memory and storage, but never bothered doing the math since my UPS claims to be able to run with the average load for 30+mins)
> Cooling fans (in servers) pull 150W total most of the time but can be up to 300W.
Oxide Computer found that going from tiny 20mm fans to 80mm dropped their chassis power usage bigly: they found a rack full of 1U servers had 25% of its power going to the fans (efficiency is to the cube of the radius).
He mentioned that he refuses downsizing for ideological reasons, and I totally get that, but there's a certain amount of rightsizing that doesn't hurt in practical operation, and still let's you keep what feels like an awesome, big, complex model train setup in your garage.
Not all rust has to spin, almost no ports have to be 10GE, and a lot can be virtualized. Consumer CPUs have much lower idle than old xeons, and having less DIMMs with the same capacity also seems to pay off.
I'd be surprised if he couldn't cut that energy usage to 10% with a clear separation between hot and cold storage, and realistic expectations of bandwidth requirements.
But hey, I'm not judging. Solar power is great, and I don't mind waste as long as he can afford it and it makes him happy. Nobody drives the car they actually need either, and that is a much bigger problem.
It is always surprising to me but small loads that are on 24/7 end up consuming a ton of energy. My 55W idle "homelab" consumes as much energy as my dishwasher, fridge and washing machine combined.
I feel like they overpaid maybe because they got direct to consumer rates for the gear. If you would have went through a full on solar installer that solar system would have come out to less than $15k, throw in having to get the subpanel and a reroof you would maybe be looking at $30k all in. (Not including the batteries, but by the time he got to the batteries I feel like his budget was way overboard even going the non-microinverter route).
Make sure you are buying and not leasing from the company, have that all rolled into a single loan and then you claim the tax credits to help pay for the reroof.
To add to this, they take care of getting the certified roofers, the city permits for both the roof and solar and handle the PTO for you, which from what you called out is even more costs.
No way, man - yes, they overpaid for some of their gear, but the labour cost of an installer ends up being most of what you pay.
No, the smart move here is to find out where the installers buy from, and buy from them. I never explicitly stated I was or wasn’t an installer, they just assumed that I was, as I was buying pallets of panels and kilometres of cabling.
The one advantage of going with a professional installer is that it makes it a lot easier to get grants - I had to spin up a company and invoice myself to get my rebate.
It’s a public utility, possibly with monopoly pricing power. There are other well known economic models around for managing public utilities, that mean profits don’t get prioritised above everything else
This is fantastic. Looking at the absolutely massive cost differential between DIY and full-service solar installers, the DIY option looks prettypretty tempting. My main concern was 1) actually getting through the local permitting process, and 2) what a potential purchaser would think of a DIY system when I go to sell the house.
Seeing that somebody has done it is very inspiring, and if I didn't see a high chance of moving in the next 5 years I'd be on it tomorrow.
DYI if your dad is an electrician. I wonder what the total would be if he tallied his dad’s assistance at market rates - probably not that much less than the initial quotes he got from professionals.
Depending on the jurisdiction you could be saving a whopper amount on taxes. Where I live the service tax could be anything up to 23% and the guys doing the work have to pay income tax. Insurance would also be a factor where I live too. There are massive savings if you can get a friend to do it or if somebody does it for cash (which is considered tax evasion)
I have the advantage of living totally off grid and not planning on ever selling the place, so I can have whatever screwy setup I fancy.
Well - I say “off grid” but I’ve built a grid - I now have over a km of buried SWA cable linking the three houses on our land, battery banks at each (60kWh of OPzS down at the mill, 15kWh of LiFePO4 at each of the others), and victron inverter-chargers all over the shop. Two arrays of panels each 8kW, one winter optimised, one summer optimised, and planning on adding a third to make more of the morning sun, as we are in a deep and steep valley with awkward topography. Have mucked around with hydro on and off before landing on a plan for an overshot waterwheel using bits of a burned-out ‘88 hilux, which is my current project. Pessimistically it will give us a constant 1.5kW, but theoretically it should end up nearer 3. Either way, that’s a lot of power. Right now I’m stuck running a Honda generator off our biogas in the winter, and it works, but it’s noisy and I have to go yank the cord to start it, usually in the pouring rain.
Using victron and fronius gear all over, frequency shifting to control where the power goes, and home assistant to automate the whole shebang where it’s beyond what the inverters and chargers can do themselves.
As we aren’t grid connected, the permitting process is… “you do what you want”.
It’s all far, far more straightforward than most people think - the hard bit is the physical install, as you’re inevitably lugging awkward panels onto roofs or up cliffs (going for smaller panels can help with this if you’re doing it without any help), or incredibly heavy batteries to wherever they need to be. The lithium arrays weigh about 150kg each, the lead array the better part of 2000kg.
People assume it must have cost hundreds of thousands of euros, but no - all in it has been about €30k, and our ongoing costs are zero.
This is brilliant. Energy self-sufficiency often associated with off-grid eccentricity,looks engineerable for city homes. Goes to show that the more "personal" our energy solutions become, the more they reflect institutional failure. Wonder how this scales and if it does what are the political implications?
Funnily enough back home along the equator, having a solar setup still is a social signal of luxury!
We also setup our own off-grid solar system, almost 4 years ago now. The cost was much lower due to lower import fees and lack of regulations where I live, it was altogether somewhere between $3-4k total, for 16 panels, mounting rack, inverter (with backup inverter), mptt, 12 acid-lead batteries, etc.. We saved so much money, and fewer headaches, since state electricity only came around 5-6h a day and people relied on scammy-mafia generator providers that ask for insane prices.
Well big chunk of the electricity cost are fixed cost, meaning if enough people lower their bill with PV and batteries then prices will have to rise for their connection. In fact some suggest that it would make more sense to let people pay a flat rate.
Am interested in the DC-AC—DC- Battery-AC vs DC-DC-Battery-AC efficiency argument. As in there must be a DC-DC conversion happening to charge batteries appropriately.
It’s a true shame that the public utility commission is so corrupt that we lose the obvious economies of scale from grid-scale installations of same in favor of expensive rent seeking by a state-sanctioned monopoly.
I also have 60kWh of batteries in my kitchen, but for the average person who doesn’t want to deal with this stuff, having to admin part of the power grid is a tragic waste.
If the PUC and power company weren’t bastards, this could all be in a giant field somewhere staffed by a tiny fraction of the people who have to waste their lives dealing with it in their garages. So many unnecessary struts, so much caulk and EPO switches, so many inverters.
It turns out that the biggest cost of California energy is not generation, it's distribution and transmission.
Highly distributed energy lessens the peak demands on the T&D system, which means that the T&D system can be smaller, which greatly reduces the fixed cost of T&D. Utility scale solar requires greatly expanding transmission lines, to the extent that lack of transmission is the biggest barrier to adding solar to the grid in most of the US.
So even if installation costs of solar are higher on the grid edge, it usually makes a ton of sense, and this is evident in the payoff times of NEM3 systems that include batteries. As batteries get cheaper, or there's more vehicle-to-home systems out there, it will only increase.
This lessened need for T&D is the true reason that utilities in California hate solar and need to stop it. They can take a guaranteed rate of profit from anything they get to spend on T&D, but the same isn't true of generation. So utility solar, which requires building more lines and beefing up distribution substations more, lets them profit much more than residential solar.
Spinning steam turbine generators also can't just turn on/off instantly. They need to ramp up/down. If you can't ramp up fast enough to meet demand, you have issues. When solar drops off pretty fast, and people come home from work and start turning on appliances, you suddenly have a huge amount of power needed from generators.
The solution of course is more batteries, but you can't really incentivize non-peak generation until you get the batteries. That's part of the NEM3 change that the blog mentions, to change the incentives from just solar to solar and battery.
Abstracting away from any particular grid regulatory environment, distributed solar and batteries make sense and make more and more sense as the cost reduces.
Another way of saying that, if we were playing a city simulator as a disembodied beneficent dictator you'd want distributed generation and storage as part of your grid.
In reality there's all sorts of complications, compromises, trade-offs, graft and politics but on balance those factors are working against distributed solar which is succeeding despite them.
Some people have a knee-jerk reaction to anything that requires legislation, regulation or subsidies which clouds the issue though.
There’s distributed and then there’s piecemeal. It doesn’t make sense to try to fit large energy storage safely inside every residential building.
You could build fireproof mini storage substations in blocks or subdivisions to load shift, but taking a chunk out of everyone’s garage space and forcing every person to do inverter and battery maintenance is silly.
The grid needs batteries and that’s how they make you buy some. They have good reasons - look at Spain.
Running aircon to burn the excess is better than feeding an already overloaded grid, too. The second best outcome for them, neatly contained in a single euro amount.
Don't you have energy cooperatives to avoid this in the Netherlands ? According to rescoop.eu i did find hetcooperatie.nl, energiesamen.nu & lochemenergie.org.
Even if you are instead in Newfoundland, maybe ask cecooperative.ca if there us a project to create one in your province.
Storage comes at a cost, but storing cheap/free power offsets even bigger generation costs. So the power company should pay to build storage.
There's a point where the grid has so much solar power that we need to start shedding production as a general rule and not just as an intermittent temporary measure, but I don't think we're anywhere near that point.
Heat up molten salt, or shipping containers full of sand. It’s a surprisingly high density and cheap way to store an awful lot of energy. Don’t have sand batteries here yet, but they’re on my todo for deep storage of excess energy, which I currently just dump as heat into the air.
Ah yes...because the simple solution is always "just pack up your life, leave behind your family and friends, and relocate half way across the country".
Unironically that is what cost-of-living is forcing a lot of people to do in coastal cities. If you have a cushy six figure salary you aren't faced with that reality, but it's different for median-income.
That's the most ridiculous claim I've seen in a while.
Giving up one foot of space along one garage wall is not a big deal. And if you're worried about physically getting the batteries into place, hiring people would still be cheaper than movers.
Also, a basement that removes cooling costs for the home lab would not make a big difference. If the 800W A/C unit runs 8 hours a day for 4 months out of the year, then it's only about 10% of the home lab power use. Since it's not needed at night it's probably even less.
Yeah sorry but thats the most insane take anyone could have. You're again quite litterally saying upping sticks and moving across country, so new job, losing friends and family, etc is the best option, vs losing a big of garage space...
I have a minor interest in this subject as well, and after some thinking I realized that my personal solar interests are best served by electro-mechanical harvesting of solar energy, first and foremost .. since a full-blown EV solar rig would require the purchase of components I cannot myself personally make very easily.
This summer I'm building a solar oven to cook bread and veggies with .. and if this works well, I'll build a solar death ray to play with while I wait for lunch.
It seems to me that this is a potential route for the popularization of off-grid/local-energy-harvesting movements to gain more traction. Sure, its nice to have a whole roof full of PV panels and a battery bank to sip juice from now and then, but this still requires a heavy investment in foreign-originated parts and materials.
A solar oven/solar death ray, however, is a lot more feasible to produce locally.
This solar installation is quite large and quite expensive.
There is a whole cottage industry of DIY 48V 15kWh batteries based on LFP prismatic cells (16x) and special battery case resulting a price of around 1500 Euro for 15 kWh.
A DIY setup is quite doable, Deye (EG4) or Victron make suitable inverters.
The continuous 1 kW power draw I find Ludicrous, probably especially as a European. I would realy rethink what is absolutely necessary. Huge data storage was my hobby but the storage server is only turned on when required, saves a lot of power.
Okay I finally did this earlier this year too and it took quite a bit less than that. Started with impulse buy of invert at an online auction end of January. Installed last panels end of April. 3 months. Quite a bit of it was waiting for third parties or just me being lazy and not ordering parts I needed. I've wanted them for years beforehand so I did some research.
For actual labor - it's about half days to install roof racks (I have shingle roof so quite a bit of time on angle grinder). Another half day to put panels on (requires 1 or more helpers), run a cable thru roof space. I've installed 12 panels on 2 facia.
My hack was hiring electrician to install inverter so I can export to grid (I'm in New Zealand).
Guy claims he's tired of paying for electricity because of the "ludacris" (sic) costs so he's going to "DIY". Yet, first thing he does is pay a guy to do it.
I’ve been running a solar microgrid on my coffee farm for the last 7years. We started with a few golf cart batteries and 4 panels, these days we’re powering 4 houses, 7 cabins, water extraction, treatment, and RO processing, campus-wide fiber network and switches, path lighting, security systems, and a small server rack.
We’re running 6 inverters on our primary system in a three phase configuration, 35kw of panels and 160kwh of lithium iron batteries. About to add an additional 20kw of panels and a test bank of LiTo cells.
Our panels are a distributed set of rooftop mounted panels on various buildings, which also serves to shade the rooftops reducing cooling loads.
We still have to run a generator to supplement charging on dark overcast days, but it’s typically about 100 hours a year. Hooping to get that running on biomass eventually.
It’s strange to me that people in rural areas pay for electricity. It makes no economic sense, at least here in the Caribbean.
> It’s strange to me that people in rural areas pay for electricity. It makes no economic sense, at least here in the Caribbean.
This comment was very confusing until I read the second sentence. Electricity prices in the Caribbean are very high, and I can only imagine that rural areas are even worse.
Where I’m at in the United States a typical electric rate is around $0.10/kWh. Paying that nominal amount and avoiding the need to service additional equipment and deal with backup generators is an easy decision.
Would imagine it's the initial cost of seeing all that up, and then the cost of maintenance. For me personally, where do you even start?
It grew organically so there was never a huge cost Really, except when we decided to build a building for The power plant because it was getting out of hand. It’s been a few thousand dollars a year in growth as we add batteries and panels. Also a bit of labor for installation of course, but we handle that in house.
How much are you valuing your own time? Theres money cost, then theres time cost and the final one is in more remote communities with cold weather… insurance costs on failure…
Would love a write up or links to resources for water extraction and treatment if you’d oblige.
I have a solar system in my house in london. 5kw, 13kwhr battery. I am self sufficient from end of march to october.
I recently got a second hand electric car. I bought an EV plug (total fucking ripoff. its a fucking plug with a contactor, RCD and a CAN interface. no way is that worth fucking £600)
It has some basic control to allow me to charge from excess solar. What is not easy to do is charge at night without draining the house battery. Its fine for me, because I have Home Assistant, with enough fiddling I can get all the systems to talk to each other to play ball. (to add to the complication, I'm on a variable rate tariff, so price can be negative or £1 a kwhr)
I would really love a "house power API" that would allow a "controller" to locally control the power behavior of all the things in a house. Because at the moment, a "normal" person wouldn't be able to charge their car and have house batteries and have solar, and optimise for cost.
We have https://www.myenergi.com/ for our car charger and it seems to be able to integrate batteries, charging and panels like you suggest, only you have to go all in. We have parts of it and are tempted to use more, but the lock-in angle is a bit off-putting
If your electrical installation allows it: You can connect your ev plug before the battery so that it does not drain the battery. You can do this by placing the fuse/connection before the measurement clamps for the battery. Somewhere in between your mains connection and your battery/solar system.
This way the battery does not see the load and does not provide power to your EV.
That way you can still use excess solar (before you inject it into the mains) to charge your car + you do not pull power from your battery :)
The ideal solution is for the battery to have a third set of clamps to measure the EV. But as I don't have installer access to the software (centrally managed for the win) I'm not sure thats possible.
I might ask to see if thats possible. I probably need more panels to cover the winter load.
I mean, it's a bit more than a contactor and an RCD, it also has PEN fault detection because TN-C-S is how most of us are wired up to the grid.
Then for use with smart tariffs like IOG there's a microcontroller, cloud gateway for them to hook into for OCCP to turn on and off the charger when the grid is cheapest/greenest etc.
So £600 is about right, once you add in R&D, certification, profit margin, warranty claim % etc.
> no way is that worth fucking £600)
Liability coverage, and UL certification (or UK/EU equivalent), for the company is. Though see perhaps:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenEVSE
> I would really love a "house power API" that would allow a "controller" to locally control the power behavior of all the things in a house.
With regards to EV and the grid, see perhaps:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_15118
* Also: https://www.ampcontrol.io/post/what-are-ocpp-iec-63110-iso-1...
For an (industrial) electrical communication protocol, perhaps:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_61850
Midnight Solar are the OG company in off grid and they have a "waste not" feature from way back that triggers any device when the parameters you set are reached, ie: float voltage, and/or other things, like a second set point where power would be sent to a third load, like the grid or water heating. https://www.midnitesolar.com/ hard core techies, even had the pleasure of detailing my inadvertant and unsucessfull attempts to melt one of there controlers.......literaly had a main lug get loose, and the panels arc melted the lug to slag, and it lived. in any case, there web site has a wealth of info on what is possible, and to look for elsewhere
I did build my own solar system too. In Switzerland.
Took me 1-2 month planning and then 3 month building it alone nearly each day. Sept 2023 til Xmas 2023. Got all the hardware from a PV dealer friend on his purchase price level. Even 24 panels I have put myself alone onto the roof. With two persons it was a bit better.
I've got: 420w x 71 Trina solar panels and two SolarEdge inverters. SE10K Hybrid and a SE17k. Also a 24kWh BYD LFP battery.
All prices without state funding: Offers from local installers for 56*410W Panels without battery were around 65k CHF.
I've paid now 44k CHF including every kind of cost associated with building it.
Should write a blog post about it :-)
Next project is a solar fence with 6kWp.
What do you do with that much electricity? Was it necessary to over-dimension for winter?
Of course it is a bit oversized.
We’re living in a big river valley where we have fog from October until March. On some days in November the fog is so dense that the whole system does not produce any kind of energy. On the other days the produced kWh are enough to charge the battery.
We have a heat pump (extrem efficient), servers, one electric car, etc which consumes all together around 13MWh per year. The solar system produces around 27.5MWh. Most of the energy gets fed back into the grid.
We’re currently investigating to connect the neighbour houses physically to us. But that takes even more time here :-(
FYI: Neighborhood-level connections are changing starting next January (look up RCP and CEL).
I would also be interested in the reasoning here!
Just for comparisons sake, our 8.6kwP setup with a 10kwH battery cost us (after subsidies from governemnt) appr. ~€11.5k. Haven't received all the subsidies yet, so the total will be lower by about 1.5k (I think). Everything was done through installers, we didn't lift a finger (also couldn't, because when it comes to electricity I have as much experience as the dog next door).
If I had more due diligence before I would have scaled up the panels up to at least 10kwP, for future proofing probably to 12kwP. This is mostly just to make sure winter is covered better, as our production is really low as we have a 10° flat roof installation.
If you have an EV that can be charged only at night, a big battery is required.
For solar excess charging I use evcc.io
When I charge the car via battery then only down to ~75% for now. The remaining energy is needed by the house during winter months.
How much did you pay for the panels, and what's your capacity factor? (Kilowatt hours produced on average per nominal peak kilowatt.)
Having done some work around net zero policy I am increasingly convinced that this is the way forward, and indeed that this will be the way things are done normally maybe 10-20 years from now. The concept is called "distributed generation" and in UK each distribution network keeps an "embedded capacity register" which is basically all the distributed energy resources that are connected to the grid at distribution level (i.e. in the local area). Over here the national grid largely operates at or over capacity, which is a very serious problem for the immediate future, especially as more and more power is drained by compute-heavy infrastructure (data centers and such). Distributed generation is an attractive solution for households regardless of which angle you look at it from.
Well problem in the UK is that in summer there is like a magnitude more power from PV then in winter.
No, having more power isn't a problem for solar; unlike coal or nuclear, solar can curtail production instantly and without suffering wear and tear. The problem is that in the UK in the winter there is an order of magnitude less power from PV than in the summer.
Eventually it'll become noisy, yet provide little value.
I personally feel there should be more allowance for small personal wind generators in sub-urban areas. That would offset a bit at least in winter for places like the UK. Not sure what the actual laws are, but I can assume councils wont be too happy about someone putting one up on their home.
Wind generators really scale with size though. Small ones rarely make sense
If the objective is to reduce the number of hours you're not self-sufficient for a given battery size, or reduce the size of your expensive batteries, even a couple hundred watts could make sense.
https://www.amazon.com/NINILADY-Vertical-Generator-Controlle... is a 600-watt-peak wind generator, designed for 11m/s winds, for sale in the US for US$300, presumably much cheaper in countries that aren't descending into kleptocratic tyranny. (I talked to someone who recently bought something similar for US$60. I think it was a 300-watt turbine.) It's a vertical-axis type, less than a meter in diameter. No worries about annoying the neighbors, and it'll probably do a great job of keeping your fridge running most of the time when it's cloudy.
50¢ per peak watt would be a terrible, uncompetitive price if you were a utility company considering how to build a wind farm to sell power for profit. But, if you're a homeowner seeking energy self-sufficiency because your Public Utilities Commission is trying to throw you under the bus because of regulatory capture, it's pretty affordable.
The issue is the payback is not worth the hate from your neighbors and capital cost. at least solar panels are quiet.
Uneconomical and the sort of thing that really annoys the neighbors. We only just got onshore wind unbanned entirely, and Reform are heavily against permitting renewables at all.
They barely produce anything at all. You really need a bigger one and putting it very high up for it to generate any real power.
I was under the impression that small wind generators at the scale of suburban backyards are really uneconomical and don't produce sufficient energy for anything of practical use.
small wind turbines are also horrendously unreliable because of mechanical failure. Same logic as to why pickup trucks are generally more reliable than a smart car.
I wonder what studies may exist on this. Were they all funded by Big Wind?
Laws of physics: maximum power that can be generated is proportional to the swept area of the blades. So it scales exponentially as blade length increases.
The swept area of the blades scales quadratically with the blade length, not exponentially. Exponential scaling is f(x) = knˣ, not f(x) = kxⁿ.
The difference between quadratic scaling and exponential scaling is earth-shatteringly enormous; this is not some minor detail.
With quadratic scaling, if f(1) = 1 and f(2) = 4, then f(10) = 100.
With exponential scaling, if f(1) = 1 and f(2) = 4, then f(10) = 262144, a 2600× difference. And the difference gets bigger from there on out.
One of those areas where policy action is desperately needed but no attention is paid due to media dysfunction. I think the UK would benefit from region-specific pricing, to move the datacenters closer to generation rather than urban environments. It would also encourage more embedded generation in expensive areas.
The cost for generators to connect is already based on region (TNUoS pricing).
Politics however them collides, with "postcode lottery" headlines
Democracy really limits governments
And despite HN people not liking this reality, here's some examples
https://www.gbnews.com/money/energy-bills-rise-postcode-lott...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/energy-prices...
Yeah. It would be more accurate to say that newspapers hate local government as a concept, but a lot of the public are happy to go along with that and get peeved about any difference which is pointed out to them.
(nobody ever describes house prices as a "postcode lottery"!)
Talk radio and TV are just as bad, as are the opposition. If Tories proposed it, Labour would be up in arms about postcode lottery. If Labour proposed it, exactly the same from the other side.
Doesn't matter how sensible it is, the other side will use it to score points. I can't believe for a second that Liberal Democrats think that James Dyson or Andrew Lloyd Webber should be able to avoid inheritance tax by buying tens of millions of pounds of farmland, but it's politically beneficial for them to do so.
Add smart storage and demand response, and you've basically got a decentralized resilience network
> I found three companies and gave them my PG&E usage for the past year (about 16,000 kwh) and got three quotes ranging from ~45 — 55k.
Wow these rates are crazy. A 10kW setup costs you maybe €10.000 all-in here in the Netherlands.
What's going on with these rates? Do they already include the ridiculous tarrifs?
A new battery setup for a 20kWh LFP battery + 10 kW inverter + installation is €7000 now.
And dropping, fast.
Assuming batteries and PV come from China, someone in California is making a lot of money or the government is straining the process with bureaucracy costing $30.000 per setup.
Batteries are dropping fast in price, but for the USA, they might be going up because of tariffs. Neatly sidestepping that:
I have a powerwall 2 with 5kw panels, which I've had since about 2021. At the time it was the biggest, cheapest, had a grid isolation mode, and could be mounted outside. (I didn't trust tesla back then, and I sure as shit don't now. Moreover, once it catches fire, that shit aint going out anytime soon)
It still cost about £7k installed.
From about march/april to end of october, we are power sufficient (london, even with rainy days, gas hot water though.)
If I were to get a new system, 13kwhr of battery is something like £2k, plus inverter/charger.
The panels are dirt cheap, to the point where the scaffolding costs more than the panels. (and the mounts.)
In USA, as a general off the cuff that may be wrong, DIY prices is generally ~1/3 of contractor price.
A $45k quote would correspond roughly to 14k euro of materials.
Crazy stuff. Ten years ago I paid £5.5k GBP for a 3.7kW system. Since then I would expect the labour component to have gone up but the panels to have come down. I guess the skilled labour shortage in the US is having a very real effect on prices.
Under the subsidy rules for feed-in-tariffs at the time, that had to be done with an MCS approved installer. All work in England would require an approved "Part P" signoff anyway. However it did not require council planning approva, nor grid approval for that size of system.
There's not a shortage of skilled labor so much in US as there is a shortage of people able to go through the racketeering process of getting a contractor license, which also requires being a half-slave to someone with a license for a number of years. It's straight up mercantilist style shake-down to benefit prior entrants. It is easier in US to become an electrical engineer than it is to become a guy who adds a new outlet to a room addition, but that has nothing to do with skill.
In fact when I was first hired as an engineer, it was actually someone that wanted an electrician but hired EEs instead because they are cheaper and more readily available.
One of the worst is something like installing HVAC stuff. I got an EPA license in 2 days of studying and then did my own myself. If I wanted to install it for a profit for someone else, I would have to spend 4 years working for someone else with a license first to get the contractor license! The end result is it legitimately cost like $700 to have a single capacitor replaced on an air conditioner, and in places like Florida if you do it for someone else without years of 'training' you're now a felon.
I see 7k€ for 12kWp, retail, for a diy ground install set for our summer house. That's before 4k€ in subsidies. No net metering, and feedin compensation is capped at 0.02€/kWh. But at 3k€ net, who cares? Even with the low electricity rates here, this makes sense. Even for a summer house!
For comparison, my 10 kW solar install completed last week cost 24k CAD (15k EUR). That's just panels, inverters and installation. The incremental cost was likely in part due to the ~160% tariffs on solar panels imposed by the Canadian government, but not all.
Prices were high even during the Biden administration.
Markups due to subsidies are a part of it.
Subsidy causing high prices? You're going to have to explain that.
Customer is willing to pay 10k. Supplier will charge 10k.
Customer is willing to pay 10k, state is willing to pay 5k. Supplier will charge 15k.
That applies with inelastic goods - land for example - where supply can't increase
Assuming the base cost is 8k
Supplier A and Supplier B charge 15k and have 100 customers between them, making 350k each
Supplier B decides to undercut Supplier A, and charge 14k, and get all the customers, making 600k profit
Customer might be willing to pay 10k, but if there's two identical quotes, one for 10k and one for 9k they'll go for the 9k
> Customer might be willing to pay 10k, but if there's two identical quotes, one for 10k and one for 9k they'll go for the 9k
But you see the point. There's a comfortable cushion where everyone can make more money off the taxpayer and have an easier time of it. Spend a bit of it on better marketing to elevate yourself and justify the higher price in people's minds.
Only if you believe that the invisible hand of the market doesn't work
- Subsidy starts: prices drop.
- Greed kicks in because capitalism: prices rise again, maybe not back to pre-subsidy levels, but they rise.
- Subsidy gets axed: prices rise to above pre-subsidy levels.
(Note: I'm personally entirely pro "subsidize things you want more of". But that requires a stable, trustworthy government that plans on longer timescales.)
Sounds like a situation where there's not enough competition.
the Netherlands had a net-metering subsidiy + good competition + frictionless install and as a result we have 3,5 solar panels per person installed.
Or price fixing.
There are two more steps:
- Demand drops due to increased price to buyers.
- Prices drop so manufacturers can remain profitable.
> Greed kicks in because capitalism
There were no greedy people before capitalism. Of that we can be sure.
There was a study in France showing that for rent subsidies.[1]
In France, the state pays max(rate * rent, cap) for apartments for students, unemployed and poor workers. Usually people don't qualify for ratio of the rent, because it's way over the cap for the subsidy. To keep up with inflation, the state re-evaluate the cap of the subsidy almost every year.
A french economist showed that there was a correlation between the cap of the rent subsidy and the rental market prices for small apartments. Of course, correlation is not causation, it could just be that the rental market follows the inflation as much as the cap. But this correlation doesn't happen for bigger and more luxurious appartments. Her explanation is that your poor household is only ready to afford €100 per month, as an example, the subsidy cap is €500, so the rental market prices these apartments to €600 (= 100 + 500). When the state re-evaluate the cap to €550, the rental market goes up to €650. (= 100 + 150)
[1] https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/fichier/1376573/es381-3...
The key difference in the markets is that it takes a very long time to build more apartments and houses, especially in France. There also isn't an option to not have housing. (Low elasticity) That keeps the short term supply effectively static. Same amount of supply, increase in money spent, inflation.
In a market like solar, there is production of more solar systems. There are also multiple readily available substitutes. (e.g. on-grid power) The effect of the subsidy should drive increased volume from manufacturers, keeping net price stable.
and now you know why america's GDP is so high
Great to see DIY early adopters getting great savings here. I think the bigger trend here is lower cost, commoditization, and it eventually becoming a no-brainer for people that have the opportunity/space to be running their own micro grids for cost reasons. The cost of what you need here is still quite high. But making things easier to plug together helps. And of course component cost is coming down.
For example, you can buy kits on amazon for powering your shed or boat and it's essentially a smaller version of what you would put on your house. No electricians needed. No permits required. Here in Germany you can buy balcony solar kits in the supermarket. They only deliver a few hundred watts of power but it's plug and play. And you can get a nice little subsidy to do that. Some of these kits only cost a couple of hundred euro.
I could see that eventually adding a microgrid to a building is not going to break the bank. Car batteries are much larger than what goes in a house and kwh prices are trending well below 100$/kwh now. Meaning it should not cost tens of thousands to get a couple of tens of kwh to store energy. Inverters shouldn't break the bank either. The going rate for solar panels is around 200$.
Mostly current prices for home setups are much higher than the component cost mainly due to regulations, labor cost, certifications, etc. If you go off grid, you can just DIY and you end up much closer to the component cost. But of course long term both component cost and other cost are coming down. With the exception of labor cost probably. Though the skills needed will become more common and you might be able to do a lot of work yourself.
I missed the "power" when I skimmed the headline and clicked the link. I was slightly dissapointed when I finally realised that the OP is in fact not building his own solar system.
reddit thread with the article author commenting https://old.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/1kpm2cb/i_got_sick...
> I have a rack in the garage that pulls a little less than 1kw. That’s 1kw 24/7/365
This is insane. And here I am shutting down nightly the drives in my synology to save 20W.
I'm still curious what you'd need a rack consuming 1kw for… in your garage. From the photo, it looks like lots of storage(?).
My hard drives alone pull 200W idle and I don’t have that many. Cooling fans (in servers) pull 150W total most of the time but can be up to 300W. Each 10GbE NIC pulls ~40W. PoE switch gives ~30W to each of my APs, and uses ~80W itself, so there’s another 300W. All of my RAM pulls about 250W (admittedly there’s nearly 2TB of it in the rack, but still). Start adding up CPUs idle/average/max power and the numbers get way bigger.
If all he’s pulling is 1kW I’m jealous.
40W for a 10GbE NIC sounds crazy, my internet router has a dual 10 GbE Intel NIC with one 10GBaseT SFP+ and one 10G DAC and the whole router only draws 24 W (Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny)
My whole “rack” draws about 120W total with: aforementioned router, Synology NAS with 4 drives, 2x10G+4x2.5G PoE switch powering a Ubiquiti AP, 16-port 1G switch, and a PowerBook 540c running AppleTalk routing
If I had more than 100 watts in idle hard drives, I'd start aggressively figuring out how to let them spin down. Maybe his drives are actually doing something 24 hours a day? But probably not.
Networking gear taking that much when it's not busy is really unfortunate. Did IEEE slack on adding effective sleep/downclocking features?
It sounds like the 10GbE is not fiber. With fiber, it would take around 5W only, depending on your needs. It's a bit harder to use, but fiber is really the better option if you want a serious homelab.
I'm curious, are you getting this with a kill-a-watt (or equivalent), or are you adding up wattage by specifications alone?
(I do have an epyc with a bunch of memory and storage, but never bothered doing the math since my UPS claims to be able to run with the average load for 30+mins)
> Cooling fans (in servers) pull 150W total most of the time but can be up to 300W.
Oxide Computer found that going from tiny 20mm fans to 80mm dropped their chassis power usage bigly: they found a rack full of 1U servers had 25% of its power going to the fans (efficiency is to the cube of the radius).
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTJYY_Y1H9Q
Yeah, I wondered the same.
He mentioned that he refuses downsizing for ideological reasons, and I totally get that, but there's a certain amount of rightsizing that doesn't hurt in practical operation, and still let's you keep what feels like an awesome, big, complex model train setup in your garage.
Not all rust has to spin, almost no ports have to be 10GE, and a lot can be virtualized. Consumer CPUs have much lower idle than old xeons, and having less DIMMs with the same capacity also seems to pay off.
I'd be surprised if he couldn't cut that energy usage to 10% with a clear separation between hot and cold storage, and realistic expectations of bandwidth requirements.
But hey, I'm not judging. Solar power is great, and I don't mind waste as long as he can afford it and it makes him happy. Nobody drives the car they actually need either, and that is a much bigger problem.
1kW is less than a toaster, fwiw.
I draw 1-1.5kW for my servers in a spare bedroom. It’s not a lot of spindles/cores, just a few dozen.
1kW continuously is 8760kWh per year. To compare, my house used 6200kWh in total over 2024, including heating.
Your toaster draws 1kW for maybe 5 minutes a day, which is maybe 30kWh per year.
The power in this comparison is not important, it's the total energy consumed (which is what you are billed for in the end).
Not many people run their toaster 24/7/365
It is always surprising to me but small loads that are on 24/7 end up consuming a ton of energy. My 55W idle "homelab" consumes as much energy as my dishwasher, fridge and washing machine combined.
> 1kW is less than a toaster, fwiw.
Odd argument. A cheetah can run up to 110kmh, but that doesn't mean they can cross 110 kilometres in an hour.
I feel like they overpaid maybe because they got direct to consumer rates for the gear. If you would have went through a full on solar installer that solar system would have come out to less than $15k, throw in having to get the subpanel and a reroof you would maybe be looking at $30k all in. (Not including the batteries, but by the time he got to the batteries I feel like his budget was way overboard even going the non-microinverter route).
Make sure you are buying and not leasing from the company, have that all rolled into a single loan and then you claim the tax credits to help pay for the reroof.
To add to this, they take care of getting the certified roofers, the city permits for both the roof and solar and handle the PTO for you, which from what you called out is even more costs.
No way, man - yes, they overpaid for some of their gear, but the labour cost of an installer ends up being most of what you pay.
No, the smart move here is to find out where the installers buy from, and buy from them. I never explicitly stated I was or wasn’t an installer, they just assumed that I was, as I was buying pallets of panels and kilometres of cabling.
The one advantage of going with a professional installer is that it makes it a lot easier to get grants - I had to spin up a company and invoice myself to get my rebate.
"they have come out and said what we knew all along: they only care about profits."
Not the detract from the rest of the article, but - it's a company, what did you expect?
It’s a public utility, possibly with monopoly pricing power. There are other well known economic models around for managing public utilities, that mean profits don’t get prioritised above everything else
I’m cynical, but most companies do have some scruples.
Eg basic environmental care/policies or how they handle staff and customers.
This is fantastic. Looking at the absolutely massive cost differential between DIY and full-service solar installers, the DIY option looks pretty pretty tempting. My main concern was 1) actually getting through the local permitting process, and 2) what a potential purchaser would think of a DIY system when I go to sell the house.
Seeing that somebody has done it is very inspiring, and if I didn't see a high chance of moving in the next 5 years I'd be on it tomorrow.
DYI if your dad is an electrician. I wonder what the total would be if he tallied his dad’s assistance at market rates - probably not that much less than the initial quotes he got from professionals.
Depending on the jurisdiction you could be saving a whopper amount on taxes. Where I live the service tax could be anything up to 23% and the guys doing the work have to pay income tax. Insurance would also be a factor where I live too. There are massive savings if you can get a friend to do it or if somebody does it for cash (which is considered tax evasion)
I have the advantage of living totally off grid and not planning on ever selling the place, so I can have whatever screwy setup I fancy.
Well - I say “off grid” but I’ve built a grid - I now have over a km of buried SWA cable linking the three houses on our land, battery banks at each (60kWh of OPzS down at the mill, 15kWh of LiFePO4 at each of the others), and victron inverter-chargers all over the shop. Two arrays of panels each 8kW, one winter optimised, one summer optimised, and planning on adding a third to make more of the morning sun, as we are in a deep and steep valley with awkward topography. Have mucked around with hydro on and off before landing on a plan for an overshot waterwheel using bits of a burned-out ‘88 hilux, which is my current project. Pessimistically it will give us a constant 1.5kW, but theoretically it should end up nearer 3. Either way, that’s a lot of power. Right now I’m stuck running a Honda generator off our biogas in the winter, and it works, but it’s noisy and I have to go yank the cord to start it, usually in the pouring rain.
Using victron and fronius gear all over, frequency shifting to control where the power goes, and home assistant to automate the whole shebang where it’s beyond what the inverters and chargers can do themselves.
As we aren’t grid connected, the permitting process is… “you do what you want”.
It’s all far, far more straightforward than most people think - the hard bit is the physical install, as you’re inevitably lugging awkward panels onto roofs or up cliffs (going for smaller panels can help with this if you’re doing it without any help), or incredibly heavy batteries to wherever they need to be. The lithium arrays weigh about 150kg each, the lead array the better part of 2000kg.
People assume it must have cost hundreds of thousands of euros, but no - all in it has been about €30k, and our ongoing costs are zero.
Yeah, we once unmounted our panels so painters could do some work on our roof. It was pretty trivial to do. The tricky part is the electrical work.
That sounds amazing, would love to be able to check it out.
Out of curiosity, have you ever calculated the cost of the batteries over their expected lifetime ?
This is brilliant. Energy self-sufficiency often associated with off-grid eccentricity,looks engineerable for city homes. Goes to show that the more "personal" our energy solutions become, the more they reflect institutional failure. Wonder how this scales and if it does what are the political implications?
Funnily enough back home along the equator, having a solar setup still is a social signal of luxury!
We also setup our own off-grid solar system, almost 4 years ago now. The cost was much lower due to lower import fees and lack of regulations where I live, it was altogether somewhere between $3-4k total, for 16 panels, mounting rack, inverter (with backup inverter), mptt, 12 acid-lead batteries, etc.. We saved so much money, and fewer headaches, since state electricity only came around 5-6h a day and people relied on scammy-mafia generator providers that ask for insane prices.
With the rising price of energy, this is a fantastic idea
Well big chunk of the electricity cost are fixed cost, meaning if enough people lower their bill with PV and batteries then prices will have to rise for their connection. In fact some suggest that it would make more sense to let people pay a flat rate.
I don't understand the comment about the small battery from installers. Don't they allow customization?
He estimated break even at 2-3 years.
Am interested in the DC-AC—DC- Battery-AC vs DC-DC-Battery-AC efficiency argument. As in there must be a DC-DC conversion happening to charge batteries appropriately.
Stepping voltage up or down isnt as lossy (or expensive) as converting from AC<->DC
forget the technology, what is that gorgeous snake-like plant in the picture by the blue stairs? I need that
Not sure if the identification by the PlantNet is the correct one, but you may check [1]Asparagus aethiopicus
1 https://www.backyardboss.net/asparagus-fern-guide/
Thank you, I think that's the one!
If you like the general shape you may look into various Echium species. Echium wildpretii is just stunning.
It’s a true shame that the public utility commission is so corrupt that we lose the obvious economies of scale from grid-scale installations of same in favor of expensive rent seeking by a state-sanctioned monopoly.
I also have 60kWh of batteries in my kitchen, but for the average person who doesn’t want to deal with this stuff, having to admin part of the power grid is a tragic waste.
If the PUC and power company weren’t bastards, this could all be in a giant field somewhere staffed by a tiny fraction of the people who have to waste their lives dealing with it in their garages. So many unnecessary struts, so much caulk and EPO switches, so many inverters.
It turns out that the biggest cost of California energy is not generation, it's distribution and transmission.
Highly distributed energy lessens the peak demands on the T&D system, which means that the T&D system can be smaller, which greatly reduces the fixed cost of T&D. Utility scale solar requires greatly expanding transmission lines, to the extent that lack of transmission is the biggest barrier to adding solar to the grid in most of the US.
So even if installation costs of solar are higher on the grid edge, it usually makes a ton of sense, and this is evident in the payoff times of NEM3 systems that include batteries. As batteries get cheaper, or there's more vehicle-to-home systems out there, it will only increase.
This lessened need for T&D is the true reason that utilities in California hate solar and need to stop it. They can take a guaranteed rate of profit from anything they get to spend on T&D, but the same isn't true of generation. So utility solar, which requires building more lines and beefing up distribution substations more, lets them profit much more than residential solar.
How many office parking lots would be covered in solar carports immediately if the corrupt PUC paid reasonable rates for generation?
This solves the T&D problem too, as generation remains distributed.
It’s the money.
Is it the generation that cost, or the promise that you'll always have power?
Keeping capacity ready is probably the expensive bit.
Not so easy to reduce the grid load all the time, needs a big battery for every night and for multiple dark days you still need the grid a lot.
Spinning steam turbine generators also can't just turn on/off instantly. They need to ramp up/down. If you can't ramp up fast enough to meet demand, you have issues. When solar drops off pretty fast, and people come home from work and start turning on appliances, you suddenly have a huge amount of power needed from generators.
Even has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve
The solution of course is more batteries, but you can't really incentivize non-peak generation until you get the batteries. That's part of the NEM3 change that the blog mentions, to change the incentives from just solar to solar and battery.
Paying reasonable rates for generation also incentivizes distributed storage for anyone who wants to buy batteries and help load shift.
Large neighborhood batteries seem to make a lot more sense to me than batteries in every home.
The fact that so many people are turning their homes into mini power plants is less a triumph of individualism and more a symptom of a broken system
Abstracting away from any particular grid regulatory environment, distributed solar and batteries make sense and make more and more sense as the cost reduces.
Another way of saying that, if we were playing a city simulator as a disembodied beneficent dictator you'd want distributed generation and storage as part of your grid.
In reality there's all sorts of complications, compromises, trade-offs, graft and politics but on balance those factors are working against distributed solar which is succeeding despite them.
Some people have a knee-jerk reaction to anything that requires legislation, regulation or subsidies which clouds the issue though.
There’s distributed and then there’s piecemeal. It doesn’t make sense to try to fit large energy storage safely inside every residential building.
You could build fireproof mini storage substations in blocks or subdivisions to load shift, but taking a chunk out of everyone’s garage space and forcing every person to do inverter and battery maintenance is silly.
And over here in NL we're going to be _charged_ when returning power to the grid in 1.5 yr... I'll be running my airco to burn off those kWh's :P
The grid needs batteries and that’s how they make you buy some. They have good reasons - look at Spain.
Running aircon to burn the excess is better than feeding an already overloaded grid, too. The second best outcome for them, neatly contained in a single euro amount.
Don't you have energy cooperatives to avoid this in the Netherlands ? According to rescoop.eu i did find hetcooperatie.nl, energiesamen.nu & lochemenergie.org.
Even if you are instead in Newfoundland, maybe ask cecooperative.ca if there us a project to create one in your province.
We've been on a dynamic contract for the last year (also in NL), it's worked out pretty well (Tibber).
Already happening in Flanders for those on dynamic pricing.
> I'll be running my airco to burn off those kWh's :P
As an American I welcome you to our national pastime: burning kWhs on aircon! :P
What should the grid operators do with all that energy that comes in at noon on a beautiful sunny day?
Pump it to the storage. Building something like https://www.energyvault.com/products/g-vault-gravity-energy-... is impossible for a home owner. But the country scale energy provider can build such thing.
Great idea, but that also comes at an additional cost - who would you recommend should pay for that cost?
Storage comes at a cost, but storing cheap/free power offsets even bigger generation costs. So the power company should pay to build storage.
There's a point where the grid has so much solar power that we need to start shedding production as a general rule and not just as an intermittent temporary measure, but I don't think we're anywhere near that point.
Hmmm, run direct carbon capture systems?
Heat up molten salt, or shipping containers full of sand. It’s a surprisingly high density and cheap way to store an awful lot of energy. Don’t have sand batteries here yet, but they’re on my todo for deep storage of excess energy, which I currently just dump as heat into the air.
[flagged]
Yeah, because you don't lose anything by living in the middle of nowhere.
There are benefits to being in the bay area, too. This happens to not be one of them.
Living in "a part of the country that has basements" is no utopia either.
Also: my house, in the bay area... has a basement.
Many of us like where we live, like our jobs and like our warn out old houses.
There are plenty of more efficient ways of doing things, but I still stuck solar on this old, energy inefficient house.
Yeah, he spent a ton, but he clearly wanted to stay where he is and took control of the situation in a way that fits his priorities
That cellar wouldn't stay that temperature once they put a 1 kW heater element in there though.
Ah yes...because the simple solution is always "just pack up your life, leave behind your family and friends, and relocate half way across the country".
Unironically that is what cost-of-living is forcing a lot of people to do in coastal cities. If you have a cushy six figure salary you aren't faced with that reality, but it's different for median-income.
Relocating is a simpler ask to most ordinary people than is turning their garage into a battery vault.
That's the most ridiculous claim I've seen in a while.
Giving up one foot of space along one garage wall is not a big deal. And if you're worried about physically getting the batteries into place, hiring people would still be cheaper than movers.
Also, a basement that removes cooling costs for the home lab would not make a big difference. If the 800W A/C unit runs 8 hours a day for 4 months out of the year, then it's only about 10% of the home lab power use. Since it's not needed at night it's probably even less.
Yeah sorry but thats the most insane take anyone could have. You're again quite litterally saying upping sticks and moving across country, so new job, losing friends and family, etc is the best option, vs losing a big of garage space...
From logical/cost perspective maybe, from emotional not so much... is it really that hard to see it?
I have a minor interest in this subject as well, and after some thinking I realized that my personal solar interests are best served by electro-mechanical harvesting of solar energy, first and foremost .. since a full-blown EV solar rig would require the purchase of components I cannot myself personally make very easily.
This summer I'm building a solar oven to cook bread and veggies with .. and if this works well, I'll build a solar death ray to play with while I wait for lunch.
It seems to me that this is a potential route for the popularization of off-grid/local-energy-harvesting movements to gain more traction. Sure, its nice to have a whole roof full of PV panels and a battery bank to sip juice from now and then, but this still requires a heavy investment in foreign-originated parts and materials.
A solar oven/solar death ray, however, is a lot more feasible to produce locally.
This solar installation is quite large and quite expensive.
There is a whole cottage industry of DIY 48V 15kWh batteries based on LFP prismatic cells (16x) and special battery case resulting a price of around 1500 Euro for 15 kWh.
A DIY setup is quite doable, Deye (EG4) or Victron make suitable inverters.
The continuous 1 kW power draw I find Ludicrous, probably especially as a European. I would realy rethink what is absolutely necessary. Huge data storage was my hobby but the storage server is only turned on when required, saves a lot of power.
Okay I finally did this earlier this year too and it took quite a bit less than that. Started with impulse buy of invert at an online auction end of January. Installed last panels end of April. 3 months. Quite a bit of it was waiting for third parties or just me being lazy and not ordering parts I needed. I've wanted them for years beforehand so I did some research.
For actual labor - it's about half days to install roof racks (I have shingle roof so quite a bit of time on angle grinder). Another half day to put panels on (requires 1 or more helpers), run a cable thru roof space. I've installed 12 panels on 2 facia.
My hack was hiring electrician to install inverter so I can export to grid (I'm in New Zealand).
Funny how half the battle is just… remembering to order the right parts ahead of time
[dead]
[dead]
To save you the click, it’s about building a solar electricity system.
And not a cosmic solar system.
Ah, the title was edited, so now my comment seems nonsensical.
to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.
Guy claims he's tired of paying for electricity because of the "ludacris" (sic) costs so he's going to "DIY". Yet, first thing he does is pay a guy to do it.
Yeah but come on, there's a big difference between paying someone to design plans vs handing over the whole project to a solar installer
capex vs opex