home battery

[jeroen Belleman]

On 13/02/15 19:39, Jeff Liebermann wrote:

On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 06:11:07 -0800, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

There's gigatons of coal, oil, and natural gas, enough to last
hundreds of years.

A gigaton of oil is the order of magnitude of the yearly consumption
of the US alone!

Jeroen Belleman

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Saturday, 14 February 2015 01:11:07 UTC+11, John Larkin wrote:

On Thu, 12 Feb 2015 23:15:29 -0800, Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@cruzio.com
wrote:
On Thu, 12 Feb 2015 20:51:22 -0800, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote
On Thu, 12 Feb 2015 19:51:25 -0800, Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@cruzio.com
wrote:
On Thu, 12 Feb 2015 19:11:46 -0800, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

<snip>

PT Cruiser is a product. Electric cars are a market. It's possible
to saturate the sales of a product. Saturating a market is much more
difficult. Today's seriously expensive Tesla automobiles will
eventually morph into something both affordable and practical. That
has to happen because we're running out of things to burn to fuel our
civilization.

There's gigatons of coal, oil, and natural gas, enough to last
hundreds of years.

Sadly, the side effects of burning fossil carbon and and adding even more CO2 to our atmosphere means that we ought to leave most of those gigatons in the ground, ready to be used by the next species that evolves symbol-manipulating intelligence.

It's to be hoped that they are better at it than John Larkin.

--
Bill sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Saturday, 14 February 2015 05:39:30 UTC+11, Jeff Liebermann wrote:

On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 06:11:07 -0800, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

There's gigatons of coal, oil, and natural gas, enough to last
hundreds of years.

Perception is everything. I still remember the alarmist headlines
during the 1973-74 "energy crisis" proclaiming that we're running out
of literally everything. There were predictions that we'll run out of
gasoline by the next century. None of that happened, but the effect
on the economy and public buying habits were spectacular.

It might be true that there are gigatons of various fuels in the
ground (I have my doubts), but there are factors that might discourage
or prevent the use of these fuels even if they were cheap and
plentiful. Fears of global warming might put petroleum fuel
consumption in an unfavorable position, as enforced by higher fuel
taxes for research and CO2 mitigation. OPEC has provided a splendid
example of inflexible commodity pricing by constricting the supply in
order to maintain the prices. They're currently also doing a great
job of temporarily lowering fuel prices until all the companies based
on fracking and shale oil begin to fail. Fuel in the ground is
useless unless all the middle men and governments between you and the
fuel are cooperative.

Meanwhile, alternative fuels and sources have the potential for
creating billionaires out of their proponents. All that's needed is
to create the perception that petro fuels are evil, destructive,
depleted, etc, and the alternative fuels and sources will appear quite
attractive (by comparison).

There's no need to create the perception. Burning fossil carbon is evil and destructive,and the stocks - while not depleted to the point where there isn't any more to be had - are depleted enough that it's becoming progressively more expensive to dig them up.

Right now, such alternatives are in the early adopters stage, where
consumers will buy into the new technologies for any imaginable reason
except cost effectiveness. For example, an 80 year old semi-retired
friend just blew $26,000 on grid tied solar installation in a marginal
location. Based on my extrapolation of his current output and
assuming a constant rate of increase in electric power rates, I
calculated that he would break even in about 25 years. However, he
proclaimed that this was of no concern, since the purpose of his
"investment" in solar was a social and political statement that
somehow cleansed his conscience from a lifetime burning the evil
fossil fuels. I had much the same reaction when I calculated the
alleged savings of buying a hybrid automobile.

Eventually, we'll run out of such early adopters and need to deal with
the economic reality of alternative fuels.

The economic reality is that that the capital cost of renewable electricity is about twice as much per installed kilowatt as that of fossil-carbon fueled generating plant. If we were to get the bulk of our power from renewable sources, we'd have to manufacture at about ten times the scale, which would roughly halve the unit cost per kilowatt of generating capacity.

Of course, there will be
cost reductions and efficiency improvements. My guess(tm) is that
they will not be sufficient to make electric powered transportation
cost competitive with petro fuels.

It's cheaper already per mile - just less convenient, with shorter range, slower refueling and few recharging points and lower production volume, whence a higher capital cost for each vehicle.

The only obvious alternative will
be to make petro fuels more expensive, which is what seems to be
happening. That also saves the inconvenience of running out of fuels
before the alternatives are ready.

I'm an avid reader of Home Power magazine.
http://www.homepower.com
There's one technology which is never even mentioned, probably because
it doesn't work. That's charging a battery pile from commercial AC
power during off peak hours, and using the stored energy during peak
hours, in order to prevent power consumption from going into the more
expensive utility billing tiers. I've tinkered with the numbers for
this using common lead-calcium stationary batteries and it's far from
economical.

High capital cost and short battery life trump lower cost per kilowatt hour.. You don't recover 100% of the stored energy either. The utility-scale numbers are equally unattractive.

Thermal solar does have a uniquely useful capacity to store energy - in hot molten salt - for some hours before it gets converted into electricity. Huge insulated tanks for the hot molten salt are relatively cheap.

I haven't bothered to do this for Li-Ion for the same
reason that you don't see Li-Ion UPS power supplies on the market. A
100% fully charged Li-Ion battery has a reduced life expectancy.
http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_prolong_lithium_based_batteries
Reading between the lines, methinks this is what Elon Musk might be
proposing for his home storage battery. Unless I missed some new
battery technology, it won't work. That's one reason why I guessed
that it might be a different battery technology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium_redox_battery

> I guess we wait for the official announcement and proposal.

With bated breath. The vanadium redox battery is just one of number of half-baked possibilities floating around the literature, waiting for somebody to find a few million dollars on finding out why it won't work. Eventually one will work ... but one has to suspect that it's going to need one of the genuinely rare rare-earth elements, and China will own the only mine that produces it.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Saturday, 14 February 2015 00:39:58 UTC+11, upsid...@downunder.com wrote:

On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 05:12:21 -0800 (PST), Bill Sloman
bill.sloman@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, 13 February 2015 23:39:34 UTC+11, upsid...@downunder.com wrote:
On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 11:19:08 +0000, Martin Brown
|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 13/02/2015 09:41, upsidedown@downunder.com wrote:
On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 00:47:39 -0800 (PST), Bill Sloman
bill.sloman@gmail.com> wrote:

<snip>

Overcast decreases solar power for non-concentrated panels, but doesn't eliminate it. You are always going to have excess capacity in any solar set-up.

I have heard this claim repeated a few hundred times, but never seen
any actual test reports supporting it.

Try looking in some of the text books that dealt with solar power in the
late 1970's. In the UK to a very good approximation the incident energy
from direct sunlight and indirect scattered light are about equal and
about 10% better for an optimally sloped roof.

Most places get more direct sunshine than the UK too.

Solar PV was largely ignored back then because the cells were both
expensive and inefficient. The context was for solar thermal.

Photographic exposure guide EV is another measure:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_value#Tabulated_exposure_values

Which gives a working range of 1:16 for the ratio of full sun on snow to
deep shade outdoors.

I have done some tests with a small panel, measuring both current and
voltage simultaneously running into a variable resistor. Adjusting
that resistor for maximum voltage and current product to simulate an
MPPT. In my observation, the _power_ drop was quite significant when
some overcast occurred.

It is something like an order of magnitude drop (or more) in incident
power from full direct sunshine to behind a thick cloud - depending on
how much thin cirrus there is about to scatter diffuse light around.

OTOH the cooler PV array performs a bit better.

If you just measure the open circuit voltage or only short circuit
current, you might incorrectly draw the conclusion that overcast or a
small cloud doesn't do much harm. Only by running the panel into an
MPPT and measuring the current or voltage, you will get some usable
readings.

Agreed that you have to measure incident and converter power.

Each photographic stop represents a power of 2, so 1 or 2 stops below
direct sun light is more or less useless.

It should also be noted that PV panels generate electricity only when
the photon has sufficient energy. Photons below this may increase the
bolometric (total energy) of the sky, but only photons above the
threshold will actually produce electricity.

Clouds don't change the spectrum of the incident light - they just reflect
and scatter it.
Thick cloud reduces the local albedo so that most of the energy gets
scattered back into space.
It looks dark from underneath, but white from above.

And hence useless for any PV applications.

Of course. So build your PV solar farm well inland, where the air moving above the panels hasn't got much water vapour and rarely generates clouds.

That's exactly what First Solar is doing in Australia.

And your comment about photon energy - wavelength - still reflects an imperfect grasp of the physics involved.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Saturday, 14 February 2015 00:47:32 UTC+11, upsid...@downunder.com wrote:

On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 05:07:44 -0800 (PST), Bill Sloman
bill.sloman@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, 13 February 2015 20:41:26 UTC+11, upsid...@downunder.com wrote:
On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 00:47:39 -0800 (PST), Bill Sloman
bill.sloman@gmail.com> wrote:

Overcast decreases solar power for non-concentrated panels, but doesn't eliminate it. You are always going to have excess capacity in any solar set-up.

I have heard this claim repeated a few hundred times, but never seen
any actual test reports supporting it.

I have done some tests with a small panel, measuring both current and
voltage simultaneously running into a variable resistor. Adjusting
that resistor for maximum voltage and current product to simulate an
MPPT. In my observation, the _power_ drop was quite significant when
some overcast occurred.

If you just measure the open circuit voltage or only short circuit
current, you might incorrectly draw the conclusion that overcast or a
small cloud doesn't do much harm. Only by running the panel into an
MPPT and measuring the current or voltage, you will get some usable
readings.

I didn't say that overcast didn't reduce non-concentrated solar panel output, I just said that it didn't eliminate it.

What is "eliminating" ? 0.1 %, 1 % or 10 % ?

It depends on the density of the clouds. The First Solar lecture showed time series of a small cloud crossing a solar farm, and it knocked back the output to perhaps 70% of cloudless for a few minutes.

Thick "black" cloud could knock it back to 10% or less - but that's rare in places where you'd build a solar farm.

Syliva Else was claiming that "there has to be backup for pretty much the
entire solar power generation capacity" which is nuts.

The worst case scenario is about that.

The peak solar power generating capacity - at noon on a sunny day -
is going to be way higher than the network could absorb

Anyone designing such idiotic systems deserve to be shot.

The solar farm is going to be delivering power for most of the sunlit hours - not just at noon. You have enough panels so that you can deliver a more or less constant power output - which is what the grid wants - for most of the day.

Excess maximum generating capacity does raise the capital cost, but not dramatically. It's certainly cheaper than power storage.

(at least not without some power storage system - either pumped or
batteries - which currently seems to be much too expensive to be practical).

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Saturday, 14 February 2015 05:32:07 UTC+11, John Larkin wrote:

On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 15:47:27 +0200, upsidedown@downunder.com wrote:

On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 05:07:44 -0800 (PST), Bill Sloman
bill.sloman@gmail.com> wrote:

On Friday, 13 February 2015 20:41:26 UTC+11, upsid...@downunder.com wrote:
On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 00:47:39 -0800 (PST), Bill Sloman
bill.sloman@gmail.com> wrote:

Overcast decreases solar power for non-concentrated panels, but doesn't eliminate it. You are always going to have excess capacity in any solar set-up.

I have heard this claim repeated a few hundred times, but never seen
any actual test reports supporting it.

I have done some tests with a small panel, measuring both current and
voltage simultaneously running into a variable resistor. Adjusting
that resistor for maximum voltage and current product to simulate an
MPPT. In my observation, the _power_ drop was quite significant when
some overcast occurred.

If you just measure the open circuit voltage or only short circuit
current, you might incorrectly draw the conclusion that overcast or a
small cloud doesn't do much harm. Only by running the panel into an
MPPT and measuring the current or voltage, you will get some usable
readings.

I didn't say that overcast didn't reduce non-concentrated solar panel output, I just said that it didn't eliminate it.

What is "eliminating" ? 0.1 %, 1 % or 10 % ?

Syliva Else was claiming that "there has to be backup for pretty much the entire
solar power generation capacity" which is nuts.

The worst case scenario is about that.

Like the US Northeast is experiencing a lot lately. Blizzards that
cover entire states, just when you need a lot of energy to keep from
freezing to death.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2015/02/13/blizzard-snowstorm-boston-new-england/23348961/

How efficient is a solar panel under a cloud, that's covered in two
feet of snow? How about a thermal concentrator?

How much light gets through two feet of snow? Putting solar farms that far north is a pretty stupid idea to start with.

Fill up Arizona with solar farms and build a heavy duty high-voltage transmission system to get the power up to the people who are freezing to death.

The Germans are talking about building their solar farms in the Sahara and shipping the power up through Italy or Spain.

Build wind farms in the far north instead. They love blizzards (though they do have to be designed to cope with the maximum wind speeds).

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[John Larkin]

On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 13:25:14 -0800 (PST), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com>
wrote:

On Friday, February 13, 2015 at 10:32:07 AM UTC-8, John Larkin wrote:

How efficient is a solar panel under a cloud, that's covered in two
feet of snow? How about a thermal concentrator?

Mount your solar panel vertically, aimed south, and the snow just reflects
more sunlight onto it; you don't get less power, you get more.
This is a winter question, right? With the sun low in the sky?

Right. The sunlight always sneaks in under the clouds.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Saturday, 14 February 2015 10:36:08 UTC+11, dagmarg...@yahoo.com wrote:

On Friday, February 13, 2015 at 3:47:43 AM UTC-5, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Friday, 13 February 2015 18:49:12 UTC+11, Sylvia Else wrote:
On 13/02/2015 6:17 PM, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Friday, 13 February 2015 17:42:59 UTC+11, Sylvia Else wrote:
On 13/02/2015 4:09 PM, Kevin McMurtrie wrote:
In article <ck5b0cFru6hU1@mid.individual.net>, Sylvia Else
sylvia@not.at.this.address> wrote:
On 13/02/2015 2:11 PM, John Larkin wrote:

<snip>

Overcast decreases solar power for non-concentrated panels, but doesn't eliminate it. You are always going to have excess capacity in any solar set-up.

You will need back up, but with a smart grid and pre-negotiated rapid-disconnect loads the back-up capacity required is going to be a fraction of regular load, and way less than than all the power all the solar panels could generate at noon on a sunny day.

This capacity has a cost even when it's not being used, because of the
capital used to construct it.

The capital cost is independent of whether the back-up generators are used or not. You've got to have them, but it doesn't make sense to burn fuel that you have to buy when you don't need to.

In Australia the hydroelectric capacity - what there is of it - is a bit different. You want the dams full at the end of the rainy season, but you may need to run them down to make space for potential flood flows before the next rainy season.

The real cost of solar power is then the cost of the panels, plus the
cost of the batteries, plus the cost of the backup generators.

That's the capital cost. The running cost of the system includes the
cost of the fuel that you have to burn in the back-up generators.

In reality, the existing generating plant is a lot of the back-up capacity. Gas-turbine-based generating plant is particularly well-suited to the back-up role, as is hydroelectric plant.

As a point of reference, my area's averaging about one sunny day per three
cloudy this winter. (We had gone ~six weeks without seeing the sun, then got
a lucky streak.)

"Hate California - it's cold and it's damp". Lena Horne wasn't wrong.

Your area isn't a point of reference, it's a horrible example of where not to build a solar farm. If you are living next to an ocean and a predominantly on-shore wind direction, you see a lot of cloud.

I grew up on the north-west coast of Tasmania, in an area that got 40 inches of rain per year. The west coast - exposed to the Roaring Forties - got 140 inches of rain per year. The east coast got about 25 inches of rain per year.

If you built a solar farm in Tasmania, you'd build it close to the east coast. In practice they have hydroelectric stations in the middle

http://www.hydro.com.au/energy/our-power-stations/great-lake-south-esk-0/poatina-power-station

Less rain falls in the middle, but Poatina has an 835m static head ...

'Cloudy' days produce 2% to 5% output on my polycrystalline reference panel,
compared to full sun.

Not the right place to build a solar farm then - lots of cloud, and lots of thick cloud. No wonder that at least one of the inhabitants is weak on clear thinking.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[John Larkin]

On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 14:12:28 -0800 (PST), makolber@yahoo.com wrote:

I'm an avid reader of Home Power magazine.
http://www.homepower.com
There's one technology which is never even mentioned, probably because
it doesn't work. That's charging a battery pile from commercial AC
power during off peak hours, and using the stored energy during peak
hours, in order to prevent power consumption from going into the more
expensive utility billing tiers. I've tinkered with the numbers for
this using common lead-calcium stationary batteries and it's far from
economical. I haven't bothered to do this for Li-Ion for the same
reason that you don't see Li-Ion UPS power supplies on the market. A
100% fully charged Li-Ion battery has a reduced life expectancy.


if you have time of use pricing, you can save a lot of money by use of simple timers and common sense to schedule the use of hot water heater/dryer/air cond...etc to off peak time.

No expensive batteries and inverters are needed.

I am waiting for time of use pricing to be offered in my area. They already took away the heating rate and I'm already paying for the smart meter.

Mark

Do you use electricity for heat and hot water? That's very
inefficient.

We use natural gas for heat, hot water, cooking, and the clothes
dryer. And we don't have a/c.




--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[John Larkin]

On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 15:36:04 -0800 (PST), dagmargoodboat@yahoo.com
wrote:

On Friday, February 13, 2015 at 3:47:43 AM UTC-5, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Friday, 13 February 2015 18:49:12 UTC+11, Sylvia Else wrote:
On 13/02/2015 6:17 PM, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Friday, 13 February 2015 17:42:59 UTC+11, Sylvia Else wrote:
On 13/02/2015 4:09 PM, Kevin McMurtrie wrote:
In article <ck5b0cFru6hU1@mid.individual.net>, Sylvia Else
sylvia@not.at.this.address> wrote:

On 13/02/2015 2:11 PM, John Larkin wrote:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/12/musk_to_unveil_home_storage_battery/






" that could compete with the National Grid as a power source,"

Someone doesn't understand what "storage" means.

Sylvia.

Elon Musk has plans to build both battery and solar cell
"gigafactories." It's only natural to combine the two into a
product for disconnecting from the grid

People won't disconnect from the grid though, because there will
always be times when there's been insufficient sunshine. People
will expect to use the grid as backup.

The grid will have to charge a lot to allow people to use it as a
generator of last resort, and that will make the economics of solar
plus batteries even less attractive than they already are.

On the other hand, sunlight is free, and we've still got at least one
more tenfold increase in solar-cell manufacturing volume in the
pipe-line, and the corresponding halving of the unit price per
kilowatt.

Engineers Australia hosted a puff from First Solar last night, and
while the speaker wasn't too explicit about how it worked, he seemed
totally convinced that his firm's 100 MegaWatt solar farms could
operate with the existing grid, and made a great fuss about being
able to smoothly ramp up the output into the grid, and ramp it down
equally smoothly.

Ramping up and down is helpful, but the real problem the grid has with
solar power is that the latter is not reliable, meaning that generating
capacity has to be available to cope with a solar power shortfall.

A bit of geographic diversity makes it lot more reliable. The First Solar talk made the point that their individual solar farms were already bigger than some small clouds.

Batteries big enough to carry the grid through the night seems to be
some way off, but dealing with a small cloud passing across the array
of cells seems to be within reach, not that the speaker had a clue
about that (and he was asked about it in question time).

Getting through the night is better than nothing, but the grid also
needs to be able to cope with the shortfall that arises when the skies
are overcast during the day, meaning that the batteries didn't get
charged. In practice, there has to be backup for pretty much the entire
solar power generation capacity.

Overcast decreases solar power for non-concentrated panels, but doesn't eliminate it. You are always going to have excess capacity in any solar set-up.

You will need back up, but with a smart grid and pre-negotiated rapid-disconnect loads the back-up capacity required is going to be a fraction of regular load, and way less than than all the power all the solar panels could generate at noon on a sunny day.

This capacity has a cost even when it's not being used, because of the
capital used to construct it.

The capital cost is independent of whether the back-up generators are used or not. You've got to have them, but it doesn't make sense to burn fuel that you have to buy when you don't need to.

In Australia the hydroelectric capacity - what there is of it - is a bit different. You want the dams full at the end of the rainy season, but you may need to run them down to make space for potential flood flows before the next rainy season.

The real cost of solar power is then the cost of the panels, plus the
cost of the batteries, plus the cost of the backup generators.

That's the capital cost. The running cost of the system includes the
cost of the fuel that you have to burn in the back-up generators.

In reality, the existing generating plant is a lot of the back-up capacity. Gas-turbine-based generating plant is particularly well-suited to the back-up role, as is hydroelectric plant.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

As a point of reference, my area's averaging about one sunny day per three
cloudy this winter. (We had gone ~six weeks without seeing the sun, then got
a lucky streak.)

'Cloudy' days produce 2% to 5% output on my polycrystalline reference panel,
compared to full sun.

Cheers,
James Arthur

A guy was installing panels next door, and tried to sell me, too. He
said that power output was down about 50% on cloudy days.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

On Thu, 12 Feb 2015 23:15:29 -0800, Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@cruzio.com>
wrote:

On Thu, 12 Feb 2015 20:51:22 -0800, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:


PT Cruiser is a product. Electric cars are a market. It's possible
to saturate the sales of a product. Saturating a market is much more
difficult. Today's seriously expensive Tesla automobiles will
eventually morph into something both affordable and practical.

Like a Chevy Volt? ;-)

 

On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 14:47:51 -0800, John Larkin
<jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 14:12:28 -0800 (PST), makolber@yahoo.com wrote:



I'm an avid reader of Home Power magazine.
http://www.homepower.com
There's one technology which is never even mentioned, probably because
it doesn't work. That's charging a battery pile from commercial AC
power during off peak hours, and using the stored energy during peak
hours, in order to prevent power consumption from going into the more
expensive utility billing tiers. I've tinkered with the numbers for
this using common lead-calcium stationary batteries and it's far from
economical. I haven't bothered to do this for Li-Ion for the same
reason that you don't see Li-Ion UPS power supplies on the market. A
100% fully charged Li-Ion battery has a reduced life expectancy.


if you have time of use pricing, you can save a lot of money by use of simple timers and common sense to schedule the use of hot water heater/dryer/air cond...etc to off peak time.

No expensive batteries and inverters are needed.

I am waiting for time of use pricing to be offered in my area. They already took away the heating rate and I'm already paying for the smart meter.

Mark

Do you use electricity for heat and hot water? That's very
inefficient.

But it's (more than) 100% efficient! ;-)

Yes, we use electricity for heat (heat pump) and HW. It's the
cheapest TCO heat available. So in terms of BTU/$, it's the most
"efficient".

We use natural gas for heat, hot water, cooking, and the clothes
dryer. And we don't have a/c.

We sorta need both, making the heat pump the obvious choice.

 

[Jeff Liebermann]

On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 18:52:08 -0500, krw@attt.bizz wrote:

On Thu, 12 Feb 2015 23:15:29 -0800, Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@cruzio.com
wrote:
PT Cruiser is a product. Electric cars are a market. It's possible
to saturate the sales of a product. Saturating a market is much more
difficult. Today's seriously expensive Tesla automobiles will
eventually morph into something both affordable and practical.

Like a Chevy Volt? ;-)

The only thing wrong with the Chevy Volt is everything. I'm not sure
exactly what went wrong. Certainly the fires and politics didn't
help:
<http://greentransportation.info/ev-politics/car-fires/chevy-volt-battery-pack-fire-2011.html>
It seems to me that GM threw everything they had, starting in 2006, at
the project and still didn't produce anything worth buying. I would
guess(tm) that the basic problems are that it costs too much and does
not distinguish itself in any way. The latter is important because
early adopters will willingly overpay for making a statement, but want
something in return that will distinguish them from "ordinary"
automobile owners. You can easily spot a Prius or Tesla, but the
others are rather ordinary and boring. If one is expected to pay
$35,000 and up for a Volt, they would want everyone to know that they
had overpaid:
<http://images.thecarconnection.com/lrg/2016-chevrolet-volt-spy-shots_100465140_l.jpg>
Nice try, but not quite what I had in mind.


--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

 

[John Larkin]

On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 10:39:26 -0800, Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@cruzio.com>
wrote:

On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 06:11:07 -0800, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

There's gigatons of coal, oil, and natural gas, enough to last
hundreds of years.

Perception is everything. I still remember the alarmist headlines
during the 1973-74 "energy crisis" proclaiming that we're running out
of literally everything. There were predictions that we'll run out of
gasoline by the next century. None of that happened, but the effect
on the economy and public buying habits were spectacular.

"Peak oil."

"The Canadian oil sands—a natural combination of sand, water, and oil
found largely in Alberta and Saskatchewan—are believed to contain one
trillion barrels of oil. Another trillion barrels are also said to be
trapped in rocks in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming,[185] but are in the
form of oil shale."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil#Criticisms


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[Jeff Liebermann]

On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 15:50:50 -0800, John Larkin
<jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

A guy was installing panels next door, and tried to sell me, too. He
said that power output was down about 50% on cloudy days.

That depends on what you consider to be cloudy. Offhand clouds seem
to drop the output to somewhere between 15% and 70% depending on cloud
density and the position of the sun.

Here's about 9 months of numbers from an installation in California.
We haven't had much in the way of storms and clouds, but when present,
the effects on solar output is noticeable. All the big drops in
output are from clouds (or PG&E outages).
<http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/solar/380732/total-energy-21040613-20150213.jpg>
The big plunge around the beginning of Feb 2015 is from a 3 days
storm. Even so, this 5.6 kw (21*270w) array still managed to produce
about 2.0 kw-hrs (about 15% of Feb normal) during the storm. The
lowest was 0.8 kw-hrs on Feb 6 which was caused by a 6 hr PG&E power
outage. Grid tied solar systems without auxiliary power sources are
shut down when utility power is absent.

There are lots of ways to sell residential grid tied solar. In my
never humble opinion, the best is that it helps prevent your power
bill from climbing into the next higher billing tier. Since PG&E
lowered the tier thresholds in Jan 2015(?), that's more difficult than
before, but still possible. Much depends on your total consumption.
Notice the big jump in price between tier 2 and 3:
<http://www.pge.com/en/myhome/saveenergymoney/plans/tiers/index.page>
I don't have my numbers handy, so I can't produce typical savings
right now. Most residential users end up somewhere in the middle of
Tier 3. If you're into Tier 4, think about investigating where the
electricity is going and looking into appliance efficiency.

Grinding the numbers:
<http://www.pge.com/en/myhome/saveenergymoney/financialassistance/medicalbaseline/understand/index.page#>
You're in Territory T with a baseline rate of 8.5 kw-hr during the
winter and 7.0 kw-hr during the summer. That produces tiers of:

Per Day
Tier 1 Tier 2 Tier 3 Tier 4 (kw-hr)
winter <8.5 <11.0 <17.0 >17.0
summer <7.0 < 9.1 <14.0 >17.0

Per Month (assuming a 30.4 day month):
Tier 1 Tier 2 Tier 3 Tier 4 (kw-hr)
winter <258 <336 <517 >517
summer <213 <277 <426 >426

Look on your bill and see where you stand to see if solar will drop
your bill into a lower tier.


--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

 

[Jeff Liebermann]

On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 16:17:23 -0800, John Larkin
<jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 10:39:26 -0800, Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@cruzio.com
wrote:

On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 06:11:07 -0800, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

There's gigatons of coal, oil, and natural gas, enough to last
hundreds of years.

Perception is everything. I still remember the alarmist headlines
during the 1973-74 "energy crisis" proclaiming that we're running out
of literally everything. There were predictions that we'll run out of
gasoline by the next century. None of that happened, but the effect
on the economy and public buying habits were spectacular.

"Peak oil."

"The Canadian oil sands—a natural combination of sand, water, and oil
found largely in Alberta and Saskatchewan—are believed to contain one
trillion barrels of oil. Another trillion barrels are also said to be
trapped in rocks in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming,[185] but are in the
form of oil shale."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil#Criticisms

Ok, let's see if that works. The weight of a 42 gallon barrel of oil
is about 300 lbs. 1 trillion barrels of (crude) oil would weigh 300
trillion lbs or
300*10^12 / 2000 lbs/ton = 150*10^9 = 150 gigatons
Yep, there are gigatons of oil in the ground in Canada.

Averaging the conflicting predictions of daily petroleum consumption,
I'll pontificate that the world is burning about 90 million barrels of
oil per day. That should last:
1*10^12 barrels / 90*10^6 barrels/day = 11,000 days
11,000 days / 365 = 30.4 years
Not exactly hundreds of years, even if we squeeze the Canadian oil
sponge dry.

--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

 

[Sylvia Else]

On 14/02/2015 5:34 AM, John Larkin wrote:

On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 10:09:06 GMT, Jan Panteltje
pNaonStpealmtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

On a sunny day (Thu, 12 Feb 2015 19:11:46 -0800) it happened John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote in
4rqqda56ajmpl4gcqfa0m20fob6p395u4a@4ax.com>:


http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/12/musk_to_unveil_home_storage_battery/

Quote:
"During the earnings call the company revealed it made a loss of $108m (Ł71m) in its fourth quarter,
blaming poor sales in China
"

More to come?

There's a beautiful Tesla charging station in the parking lot of the
Safeway in Truckee. I've never seen a car charging there. Shoppers
park their gasoline cars in the charging slots when things are busy.

Yes - there's always someone who thinks the rules don't apply to them.

Sylvia.

 

[John Larkin]

On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 18:59:14 -0800, Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@cruzio.com>
wrote:

On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 18:22:28 -0800, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 17:08:37 -0800, Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@cruzio.com
wrote:

On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 15:50:50 -0800, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

A guy was installing panels next door, and tried to sell me, too. He
said that power output was down about 50% on cloudy days.

That depends on what you consider to be cloudy. Offhand clouds seem
to drop the output to somewhere between 15% and 70% depending on cloud
density and the position of the sun.

Oh, he was lying, of course.

Everyone lies, but that's ok because nobody listens. Does your
neighbor keep or download production statistics? If not, my guess(tm)
is that his guess is as bad or worse than mine.

The solar was put in when the house was staged for sale, to increase
the selling price. The neighbors are very non-techy (two MDs) and I
doubt they know what a KWH is.

Look at the graph I produced for your benefit and notice the drops on
cloudy daze. It's difficult to put a number on these drops, but you
can sorta guess by dividing the lowest output, by the highest output
that would have been produced using a smoothed curve of the expected
peak power.
http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/solar/380732/total-energy-21040613-20150213.jpg
For example, in December, the minimums were around 2 Kw-hrs/day while
the typical peak output would have been around 9 Kw-hr/day had there
been no overcast or clouds. Daily output was therefore 2/9 = 22% of
"normal" which is much lower output than your neighbors 50% output
loss. If I expand the data, the output varies radically as storm
cells float over, as holes in the clouds appear, as the angle the
light has to pass through the clouds, whether it was raining, and
other weather effects. 78% loss is probably a decent average for the
left coast.

Yikes, there were two months of essentially zero output. Keep those
turbines spinning!

Incidentally, if you want to see what others are doing, go thee unto:
https://enlighten.enphaseenergy.com/public_systems
These are all Enphase microinverter users and does not include all
solar installations. The system I graphed is one of my customers and
is NOT publicly accessible. However, there are plenty of others that
are available for inspection. Never mind the guesswork, just grind
the numbers and see if it can be made to work for your house.

I have no desire to have a mess of solar panels on my roof. My PG&E
gas+electric bill runs around $130 a month.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing laser drivers and controllers

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[Jeff Liebermann]

On Sat, 14 Feb 2015 13:43:16 +1100, Sylvia Else
<sylvia@not.at.this.address> wrote:

So the grid had to provide the remaining 85%. It doesn't matter that
this was only for three days out of nine months. During those three
days, the backup was required, and therefore had to exist.

Sylvia.

True. This was a grid tied system that produces exactly zero watt-hrs
when the grid is down. Even though there was probably about 2kw-hrs
of electricity available, none of it could be used because there was
no means of storing it. That might be what Elon Musk plans to
provide.

Grid tied solar was never intended to provide full time power. It's
primary purpose and benefit is to offset utility costs by consuming
cheap locally generated solar power before going to grid power, and
possibly selling any excess to the utility for others to use. It's
not a 100% solution for pulling the plug on the grid and living off
the grid. To do that would require:
1. A major reduction in typical home power consumption.
2. Production of more power than is consumed.
3. A means of storing unused power and later recovering it.
4. An intelligent controller that can optimize production and
consumption.

In general, production is fairly easy at low latitudes during the
summer, and quite difficult during the winter. It's also difficult in
urban locations that lack the space for a sufficiently large array and
have zoning ordinance that proscribe large battery banks. Almost all
of the examples of self-sufficient off the grid power systems featured
in Home Power magazine are rural and have multiple sources of power
(solar, wind, hydro, co-generation) available.

The east coast blizzard problem could likely be handled by wind power.
When the weather is bad, the wind is usually blowing. Wind power
doesn't work well in a urban environment, so that's again only
suitable for rural.

More simply, when you use a non-concentrated form of energy
production, you need lots of room to store it. For example, fuel oil
is rated at 36 MJ/liter, while firewood is rated at 5 MJ/liter. So,
for the same amount of heat delivered, you'll need a wood burner
that's 7 times as big. However a Li-Ion battery is about 1 MJ/liter,
so if you want to heat your house with an electric heater, the batter
pile will again be 5 times larger. The numbers may be off a bit, but
the ratios are in the ballpark.

What ever happened to the Google megadollar inverter challenge?
<http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/googles-1m-challenge-a-laptop-sized-solar-inverter>
<https://www.littleboxchallenge.com>
Oh well. Registration now closed and the winner gets announced in Jan
2016. This should be interesting.

--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

 

[Bill Bowden]

"John Larkin" <jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote in message
newsjvsda1v0h2tell4e8lv5akvoamav3cq3e@4ax.com...

On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 14:12:28 -0800 (PST), makolber@yahoo.com wrote:



I'm an avid reader of Home Power magazine.
http://www.homepower.com
There's one technology which is never even mentioned, probably because
it doesn't work. That's charging a battery pile from commercial AC
power during off peak hours, and using the stored energy during peak
hours, in order to prevent power consumption from going into the more
expensive utility billing tiers. I've tinkered with the numbers for
this using common lead-calcium stationary batteries and it's far from
economical. I haven't bothered to do this for Li-Ion for the same
reason that you don't see Li-Ion UPS power supplies on the market. A
100% fully charged Li-Ion battery has a reduced life expectancy.


if you have time of use pricing, you can save a lot of money by use of
simple timers and common sense to schedule the use of hot water
heater/dryer/air cond...etc to off peak time.

No expensive batteries and inverters are needed.

I am waiting for time of use pricing to be offered in my area. They
already took away the heating rate and I'm already paying for the smart
meter.

Mark

Do you use electricity for heat and hot water? That's very
inefficient.

We use natural gas for heat, hot water, cooking, and the clothes
dryer. And we don't have a/c.

So, what's your utility bill? I use propane for cooking and electric for
everything else. My electric bill is 279kwH at 11 cents a kwH or $30.69 a
month. 5 gallons of propane lasts 6 months at maybe $5 a gallon. So, my
total energy cost is $31.52 a month. In summer it's cheaper since I don't
have A/C.

--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
picosecond timing precision measurement

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: news@netfront.net ---