This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
There is something in it - they are making solar panels with chemicals that makes energy trans
That's 4' 11" - I had no idea Germans were so short.
It's going to be hard to justify production costs, but in places that subsidize it: it makes perfect sense to scale up solar wherever possible.
i mean, it'll work. You should probably just collectively work together to install a solar array on the roof of the apartment instead, assuming it doesn't already have one.
Granted this is in the EU, so ideal solar tracking is kinda just, fucked. It matters more closer to the equator, because you can get significantly more power from pointing them correctly, and tracking, if you decide to use that.
any form of collective project requires organization, which conveniently is not required for an individual project that can be as impulsive and unsafe as the individual wants.
Read it as germans who are 1.5 meter tall, wondered why them being short is relevant.
This is great for people who live in the middling latitudes.
My dumb ass: “Is it just 1.5m Germans, or other heights too?”
M in million should always be capitalised for this reason.
1.5M Germans vs 1.5m Germans
Megagermans vs milligermans
This me me lol. Thank you 😂
Megagermans just sound evil.
And milligermans, well there's a vaccine against that I think.
1.5 10^6 Germans vs 1.5 10^-3 Germans
Until I read this comment I was 100% certain the post was about short Germans somehow preferring having their balconies occluded by taller-than-them solar panels.
1.5m Germans are 150cm people !
Home solar indicates a massive management failure of public utilities. If it is more cost effective and more pleasant to generate your own electricity without any economies of scale, something is very wrong.
Source: I live in California where the “public” utility is an absolute disaster that charges $.60-$.70/kW/hr so anybody who can afford the upfront cost of solar has done so.
Microgeneration makes way more sense to me. If you generate the power where it is used without pollution, we should. The unfortunate piece is we have to many landlords who's interest are too divorced from their tenets to put up more microgeneration
Grids work on economies of scale. The bigger the better. Ask anyone who lives on an isolated island for their power bill. That's why it was such a big deal when the Baltics switched from the Russian grid to the EU one.
Bigger grid = more intertia&redundancy = less likelihood of failure, more options, lower costs.
Electricity isn't like chicken eggs. Transporting it is for all intents and purposes free. The network is expensive, but whether your house is pulling 1 A or 5 A is a non-difference to your utility. So to think local generation is "better" is a complete fallacy. Unless your house is fully disconnected from the network (not "net zero", disconnected) then it's not helping to generate power locally. Like someone else said, it's actually way more expensive per kWh than grid-scale solar.
Now this would all be a "you" problem, except the big problem with microgeneration is that current tech is "dumb". It's either pushing power on the network, or sometimes tripping if the voltage goes above 250V or so. Which actually happens in rich neighborhoods on very sunny days where everyone is pushing power.
What this means for the operators is that on very sunny days, they cannot do anything but account for the extra residential solar power. Which might mean they have to very quickly spin up or down alternative power generators which were not meant for this. Or they might be dealing with complex issues with current flowing the other way than designed and large voltage fluctuations on specific parts of the network that don't have the necessary infrastructure to "dump" that extra solar somewhere else.
The end result is that, counter-intuitively, microgeneration is one of the many failures of the neoliberal electricity market. It's more expensive and more disruptive for society than if those solar cells had been put to use in grid-scale solar production. They only end up where they are through political mismanagement and misaligned incentives (e.g. net metering which does not account for negative externalities).
If you generate the power where it is used without pollution, we should.
Generators take space, require maintenance, and have a certain optimal capacity that isn't necessarily hit on a given roof.
For wind energy in particular, the bigger the turbine, the more yield per $ spent. If you go out to Corpus Christi you'll see these enormous turbines - $10M to $50M / ea - that generate on the order of $24 to $75 per MWh, or $.024-.075/kWh. Home wind/solar don't get anywhere close to that.
Prime placement of units, distribution across a wide area, and a degree of storage capacity means you're going to get better and more consistent yield.
welcome to the land of windmills
These microinverters aren’t made of fairy dust. Doing this stuff at utility scale uses a lot less nasty minerals and chemicals.
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.
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
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.
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.
Makes sense mathematically or you think makes sense?
Both.
The reduction of infrastructure and leveraging existing buildings without reducing their existing utility vs converting a new space to be a dedicated power plant plus the infrastructure to move power from less populus (normal case because the cost of populus land is high due to demand) to more populus space.
I also idealogically support it because it makes more controllable by people and less controlled by an outside entity (a corporation/state).
Shoot, my electric is like $.0625/KWH
But there is also another 75-100 bucks tacked on as fees. Tempting to go solar and disconnect from the grid. Even without selling energy back to the grid, I would break even. (Savings over 20 years ~200 bucks)
The rent seekers making everything worse again
God, I love living in a nuclear plant evacuation zone
it's not actually that bad, unless you live next to a gen 1, or maybe gen 2 plant. Unless you're next to one of like, three existing operational RBMK plants.
By the time you needed to evacuate from that area due to a nuclear disaster, you would be well informed, and probably gone already. Even if you didn't the radiation exposure is likely to be incredibly minimal. Probably under the regulated limits.
For first few seconds, I deadass though they are talking about Germans with a height of 1,5 meters.
This is really nice! This is the future!
I'd love to know how much they produce, especially during the winter/monthly.
not very much, especially during the winter, the best way to optimize panel production is by pointing it towards the sun most effectively, the farther north, or south, of the equator the less effective it is, the less directly it points towards the sun in general, the less power you make.
It might still produce a decent amount of power overall, through a reasonable period of time, but it's probably WELL below what you could be making with an optimized install, especially one with solar tracking, granted some solar power is still better than no solar power, so you do get tradeoffs at the end of the day.
as another commenter said, there are solar power calculators out there, if you're looking for rough figures, use them.
That kind of depends on what you're building. Standard is currently 800W (2 standard solar panels). Older models use 600W, other models are using 2000W and limit it to 800W. That doesn't make much sense, but skirts our local regulations that limits them to 800W, but of course generates more energy.
It then also depends on where you live. Can you point it to the sun? Do you live in sunny Spain or in northern Norway? In Germany a 800W system can produce 800-1200kWh per year. Our average electricity price is at 0.35€, so you'll save 280€-420€ a year. And those systems are dirt cheap, there are deals out there where you can get one for 200€. That is quite a good ROI for something that you can install in an hour.
If you want to know more, here is a calculator https://priwatt.de/service/ertragsrechner/
