Solar here isn't worth it without a subsidy. Photovoltaic panels on houses cost more then they produce.
I think I use $5000 a year. I have no solar. 3kW continuous computer usage. If I can get round to joining the garage and the house, the Boinc computers can be the heating.
If this page takes an hour to load, reduce posts per page to 20 in your settings, then the tinpot 486 Einstein uses can handle it.
Oh cripes, energy providers. Now's there's a tale. First they flogged off all the state assets to get the state out of debt in the early 1990's. Then with that ( Victorian ) government monopoly breakup came the internal market system. So the generation is owned by various companies - coal fired, some gas, hydroelectric, and a little bit of wind/solar. There's only ever a little bit of wind/solar. No nukes DownUnda. Then there's the providers to households and businesses, the ones that actually bill you. Any given street will usually have a multitude of providers to various addresses based upon consumer choices. Then there's the maintenance people who do all the actual line work - including attending to trees and other dangers - they are paid by the providers largely but also on the generation side as well for their connections. Anyhows the idea is that anyone suitably cashed up can buy from the generators and sell to the providers.
Now I know a guy who works in this internal market. So you buy an energy amount ( in GWh mind you ) from some generator to be delivered on such and such a day b/w the time A and time B. You compete with others to sell that energy blob to the providers in part or whole, hopefully with a margin for yourself. You need :
(a) Wads & wads & wads of cash, and
(b) Nerves of steel, and
(c) A disdain of sleep 'cos it's a 24/7 affair ( or have a team in shifts, or auto-trade or ... )
Now comes the smart meters from 2008 onwards. The original allegation that they would lead to more efficient use of energy grid wide - better matching of supply to demand - they have gone real quiet on since the initial announcement. They basically serve, IMHO, to provide the above market with data to make decisions about when to outlay and how much ( serving the big fish first ). Gone are the days when you could have a cut rate 'off peak' hot water service for your morning shower, or do your laundry in the evenings, or .... whatever. They get you coming or going because you're now in a tier determined by your total usage ( billed quarterly ), timing aside. Your tier determines the rate, unless of course you are a massive whale with those wads of cash and can cut a deal*.
Now if you outlaid to put solar on your roof the only benefit you'll get is drawing less energy from the grid, as the feed-in tariff is smaller than <expletive deleted>. For the very few that have solar power plus a battery array, the generation and feed-in times are uncoupled, but gee whiz : as a small fry there's no time based arbitrage to skim from. In any event your total feed-in to the grid is limited to 6KWh per 24 hours** and at the <expletive deleted> rate it wouldn't even buy a can of Coca Cola ( much less run the fridge to keep it cool in ).
For comparison purposes I'll reveal that I pay AUD $0.336 per KWh ( GST 10% included ), and <expletive deleted> = AUD $0.03 per KWh. So their arbitrage vs your nett is (0.336 - 0.03)/0.03 > 10, or put another way you save at least AUD $0.30 per KWh by having solar and not pulling from the grid for as many hours as you can generate. But hey, guess what ? The Sun goes down! Seasons come and go etc ....
Now for an AUD $15K to $20K outlay ( $30K to $40K with batteries ), and a max daily solar benefit ( assuming a yearly use ~ 10 MWh ) is ~ 27kWh * $0.30 = $8.22/day or about $3000/year. But that assumes that you consumed all that you generated with no grid feed at any time ( ie. this is an off-grid calculation ). Where I live ( latitude 40o S ) no one I know is even getting 15KWh from their rooftop on a good day. Now the financial argument devolves to the lifetime of the equipment at a certain diminishing efficiency etc ..... I'll leave that unexplored. But you get the idea.
Cheers, Mike.
* Buy some GWh's direct from a generator and give it to yourself.
** Wow, a whole 250 watts.
( edit ) Sorry. Terminology. An arbitrage is a gradient somewhere that you can profit from, buy-low/sell-high, that sort of thing ......
( edit ) Oooops the exact definition of arbitrage is simultaneous buy and sell. But no transactions are truly simultaneous. Mind you those doing high-frequency trading on the stock markets are pushing that to it's physical limit.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
Actually the price of electricity is very much to the point. Each individual who donates computer time to E@H is doing their bit to offset a massive electricity cost. We did a calculation ...... ooooh, quite some time ago ..... and reckoned that about, IIRC, USD $3.5M per year was the outlay with conservative numbers. Bruce Allen first brought this up here and these are 2005 dollars. So those record breakers are especially paying a premium to contribute, but I know there are many countries where electricity provision is horrendously expensive and yet people do participate still.
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
Oops, that's me banned from Techpowerup. Apparently calling a mod a power hungry maniac and threatening him with a lawsuit isn't permitted.
We keep getting more energy efficient processors, but also keep getting more stuff to do. I guess my 8 trillion calculations a second graphics card would have looked amazing back in the 80s when I had a ZX Spectrum. Not sure I could have interfaced PCI-Express to the edge connector of a Spectrum, which looks like half an ISA slot:
If this page takes an hour to load, reduce posts per page to 20 in your settings, then the tinpot 486 Einstein uses can handle it.
On my best days during long summer days I have occassionally broken 80kWh of generation from my combined two systems. The big one is on a ground mount and the smaller, later installed one is on the garage roof.
I generate about 20MWh a year of power from 11.2 kW of capacity. I consume 30MWh of power so I pay for a net 10MWh of power every year. About 5500W constant 24/7 load.
I would need to install an additional 80kW more of panels to make enough excess power during the day to recharge about 30kWh of battery storage for night use to finally make net zero usage.
that's true. it would need a new ground support. I had imagined the array was on a single post or only on a couple posts centrally mounted. i see the complication you're illustrating though with the complicated support structure they've given.
but looking at that. if you broke it up into halves or fourths, and spread them apart a bit to reduce the shadow from one onto another, you could do the same thing I mentioned. just be a little more costly. but i think the cost of new supports and the motors and whatever to allow sun tracking would probably be cheaper than the cost of additional panels giving the same increase in output.
If I ever go solar, I always envisioned having a sun tracking ground mounted system for peak output of the panels. you can't really implement sun tracking on a roof mounted system. but I don't have enough unshaded land for an array like that right now :(. my house backs up to a park on the south side with big tall trees. even a roof mounted system might be not worth it for me due to the limited amount of sunlight I get because of tree obstruction.
at the very least, your ground mounted system looks a lot more accessible to clean to be able to maintain peak output as much as possible. harder to climb up on the roof to clean dirty panels.
Yes, it is real easy to clean the ground mount array with a window washer 12' extensible pole and two sided scrub/microfiber mop head. Just walk along the front of the array. Bottom to Top.
It is much harder climbing a ladder up onto the roof of the garage to clean the panels mounted there. They are on the west side of the garage, the structure behind the ground mount in the picture.
I get about 5% extra daily production on each array after a cleaning so it is worth it. I normally have to clean them every 3-4 weeks depending on the amount of dust or fire smoke or ash gets deposited.
I saw a sun tracking system outside of town by a machinist and the support tower and the rack has to be very susbstantial because of the sail wind loading they have to endure. He had 3 towers each supporting a 3 X 3 array.
Solar here isn't worth it
)
Solar here isn't worth it without a subsidy. Photovoltaic panels on houses cost more then they produce.
I think I use $5000 a year. I have no solar. 3kW continuous computer usage. If I can get round to joining the garage and the house, the Boinc computers can be the heating.
If this page takes an hour to load, reduce posts per page to 20 in your settings, then the tinpot 486 Einstein uses can handle it.
Oh cripes, energy providers
)
Oh cripes, energy providers. Now's there's a tale. First they flogged off all the state assets to get the state out of debt in the early 1990's. Then with that ( Victorian ) government monopoly breakup came the internal market system. So the generation is owned by various companies - coal fired, some gas, hydroelectric, and a little bit of wind/solar. There's only ever a little bit of wind/solar. No nukes DownUnda. Then there's the providers to households and businesses, the ones that actually bill you. Any given street will usually have a multitude of providers to various addresses based upon consumer choices. Then there's the maintenance people who do all the actual line work - including attending to trees and other dangers - they are paid by the providers largely but also on the generation side as well for their connections. Anyhows the idea is that anyone suitably cashed up can buy from the generators and sell to the providers.
Now I know a guy who works in this internal market. So you buy an energy amount ( in GWh mind you ) from some generator to be delivered on such and such a day b/w the time A and time B. You compete with others to sell that energy blob to the providers in part or whole, hopefully with a margin for yourself. You need :
(a) Wads & wads & wads of cash, and
(b) Nerves of steel, and
(c) A disdain of sleep 'cos it's a 24/7 affair ( or have a team in shifts, or auto-trade or ... )
Now comes the smart meters from 2008 onwards. The original allegation that they would lead to more efficient use of energy grid wide - better matching of supply to demand - they have gone real quiet on since the initial announcement. They basically serve, IMHO, to provide the above market with data to make decisions about when to outlay and how much ( serving the big fish first ). Gone are the days when you could have a cut rate 'off peak' hot water service for your morning shower, or do your laundry in the evenings, or .... whatever. They get you coming or going because you're now in a tier determined by your total usage ( billed quarterly ), timing aside. Your tier determines the rate, unless of course you are a massive whale with those wads of cash and can cut a deal*.
Now if you outlaid to put solar on your roof the only benefit you'll get is drawing less energy from the grid, as the feed-in tariff is smaller than <expletive deleted>. For the very few that have solar power plus a battery array, the generation and feed-in times are uncoupled, but gee whiz : as a small fry there's no time based arbitrage to skim from. In any event your total feed-in to the grid is limited to 6KWh per 24 hours** and at the <expletive deleted> rate it wouldn't even buy a can of Coca Cola ( much less run the fridge to keep it cool in ).
For comparison purposes I'll reveal that I pay AUD $0.336 per KWh ( GST 10% included ), and <expletive deleted> = AUD $0.03 per KWh. So their arbitrage vs your nett is (0.336 - 0.03)/0.03 > 10, or put another way you save at least AUD $0.30 per KWh by having solar and not pulling from the grid for as many hours as you can generate. But hey, guess what ? The Sun goes down! Seasons come and go etc ....
Now for an AUD $15K to $20K outlay ( $30K to $40K with batteries ), and a max daily solar benefit ( assuming a yearly use ~ 10 MWh ) is ~ 27kWh * $0.30 = $8.22/day or about $3000/year. But that assumes that you consumed all that you generated with no grid feed at any time ( ie. this is an off-grid calculation ). Where I live ( latitude 40o S ) no one I know is even getting 15KWh from their rooftop on a good day. Now the financial argument devolves to the lifetime of the equipment at a certain diminishing efficiency etc ..... I'll leave that unexplored. But you get the idea.
Cheers, Mike.
* Buy some GWh's direct from a generator and give it to yourself.
** Wow, a whole 250 watts.
( edit ) Sorry. Terminology. An arbitrage is a gradient somewhere that you can profit from, buy-low/sell-high, that sort of thing ......
( edit ) Oooops the exact definition of arbitrage is simultaneous buy and sell. But no transactions are truly simultaneous. Mind you those doing high-frequency trading on the stock markets are pushing that to it's physical limit.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
You gotta be the coolest mod
)
You gotta be the coolest mod I've seen, most shout OFF TOPIC! all the time and delete everything.
If this page takes an hour to load, reduce posts per page to 20 in your settings, then the tinpot 486 Einstein uses can handle it.
Well, thank you. Actually
)
Well, thank you.
Actually the price of electricity is very much to the point. Each individual who donates computer time to E@H is doing their bit to offset a massive electricity cost. We did a calculation ...... ooooh, quite some time ago ..... and reckoned that about, IIRC, USD $3.5M per year was the outlay with conservative numbers. Bruce Allen first brought this up here and these are 2005 dollars. So those record breakers are especially paying a premium to contribute, but I know there are many countries where electricity provision is horrendously expensive and yet people do participate still.
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
We keep getting more
)
Oops, that's me banned from Techpowerup. Apparently calling a mod a power hungry maniac and threatening him with a lawsuit isn't permitted.
We keep getting more energy efficient processors, but also keep getting more stuff to do. I guess my 8 trillion calculations a second graphics card would have looked amazing back in the 80s when I had a ZX Spectrum. Not sure I could have interfaced PCI-Express to the edge connector of a Spectrum, which looks like half an ISA slot:
If this page takes an hour to load, reduce posts per page to 20 in your settings, then the tinpot 486 Einstein uses can handle it.
On my best days during long
)
On my best days during long summer days I have occassionally broken 80kWh of generation from my combined two systems. The big one is on a ground mount and the smaller, later installed one is on the garage roof.
I generate about 20MWh a year of power from 11.2 kW of capacity. I consume 30MWh of power so I pay for a net 10MWh of power every year. About 5500W constant 24/7 load.
I would need to install an additional 80kW more of panels to make enough excess power during the day to recharge about 30kWh of battery storage for night use to finally make net zero usage.
Keith Myers wrote: The big
)
you could boost output significantly on this one with a simple sun tracker and motor to have the panel/array track the sun throughout the day.
_________________________________________________________________________
Ian&Steve C. wrote: Keith
)
Not sure how I would change this to sun tracking. Would have build a complete new racking/support tower I think.
that's true. it would need a
)
that's true. it would need a new ground support. I had imagined the array was on a single post or only on a couple posts centrally mounted. i see the complication you're illustrating though with the complicated support structure they've given.
but looking at that. if you broke it up into halves or fourths, and spread them apart a bit to reduce the shadow from one onto another, you could do the same thing I mentioned. just be a little more costly. but i think the cost of new supports and the motors and whatever to allow sun tracking would probably be cheaper than the cost of additional panels giving the same increase in output.
If I ever go solar, I always envisioned having a sun tracking ground mounted system for peak output of the panels. you can't really implement sun tracking on a roof mounted system. but I don't have enough unshaded land for an array like that right now :(. my house backs up to a park on the south side with big tall trees. even a roof mounted system might be not worth it for me due to the limited amount of sunlight I get because of tree obstruction.
at the very least, your ground mounted system looks a lot more accessible to clean to be able to maintain peak output as much as possible. harder to climb up on the roof to clean dirty panels.
_________________________________________________________________________
Yes, it is real easy to clean
)
Yes, it is real easy to clean the ground mount array with a window washer 12' extensible pole and two sided scrub/microfiber mop head. Just walk along the front of the array. Bottom to Top.
It is much harder climbing a ladder up onto the roof of the garage to clean the panels mounted there. They are on the west side of the garage, the structure behind the ground mount in the picture.
I get about 5% extra daily production on each array after a cleaning so it is worth it. I normally have to clean them every 3-4 weeks depending on the amount of dust or fire smoke or ash gets deposited.
I saw a sun tracking system outside of town by a machinist and the support tower and the rack has to be very susbstantial because of the sail wind loading they have to endure. He had 3 towers each supporting a 3 X 3 array.