home battery

[John Larkin]

On Sat, 14 Feb 2015 13:44:26 +1100, Sylvia Else
<sylvia@not.at.this.address> wrote:

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.

Why waste perfectly good parking spaces that nobody uses?


--

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

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

 

[John Larkin]

On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 20:22:20 -0800, "Bill Bowden"
<bperryb@bowdenshobbycircuits.info> wrote:

"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?

Gas+electric, maybe $130 per month. We're into the upper pricing tier,
which is over 30 cents per KWH.


--

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

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

 

[Sylvia Else]

On 14/02/2015 12:08 PM, Jeff Liebermann 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.

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.

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.

 

[Sylvia Else]

On 14/02/2015 3:53 PM, John Larkin wrote:

On Sat, 14 Feb 2015 13:44:26 +1100, Sylvia Else
sylvia@not.at.this.address> wrote:

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.

Why waste perfectly good parking spaces that nobody uses?

If it's not used, it should be reallocated. Until then, it should be
left vacant if not used for its designated purpose. Otherwise it just
encourages antisocial behaviour.

Sylvia.

 

[John Larkin]

On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 17:23:33 -0800, Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@cruzio.com>
wrote:

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.

That's just two oil fields, and it's a big world.


--

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

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

 

[Tom Miller]

"Sylvia Else" <sylvia@not.at.this.address> wrote in message
news:ck7r4bFh737U2@mid.individual.net...

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.

There's a charging station at the local Walgreen's that has the cord cut
off. Guess someone was farming copper. I never saw any car parked there
charging up.

 

[John Larkin]

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.


--

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

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

 

[Sylvia Else]

On 14/02/2015 2:26 PM, Jeff Liebermann wrote:

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,

In terms of cost, any savings are completely illusory, and caused by a
market distorted by cross subsidies.

To achieve a real saving, the cost of solar power has to be below the
marginal cost of operating a large generator. The marginal cost of
operating a nuclear or coal powered generator is not very high at all.
The marginal cost of operating a natural gas powered generator is still
only a fraction of the retail price of electricity, with the rest of the
retail price being capital costs of the generator and distribution
infrastructure (and billing, profit, tax).

What happens when people use solar panels to reduce their utility bills
is that they end up paying less than their fair share of the cost of the
power generation and delivery infrastructure, and other people pay more
than their fair share. It should be noted that the cost of that
infrastructure is largely dictated by peak loads which those with solar
panels will be happy to contribute to if their panels are not producing
power.

If utilities were allowed to allocate the cost of the infrastructure in
an equitable way, those with solar panels would find that all they done
was to increase their cost of energy.

The above doesn't apply, of course, to people who go completely off
grid, but as you've noted, that requires extra equipment which comes at
a significant cost.



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.

I don't think space is that big an issue. What really kills these
schemes is cost.

Sylvia.

 

[Jeff Liebermann]

On Fri, 13 Feb 2015 20:48:43 -0800, John Larkin
<jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

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.

Must be a rather expensive house. These daze, solar systems run about
$4.00/kw installed. For a typical 6 kw system, that's $24,000. That's
quite a bit just for staging.

http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/solar/380732/total-energy-21040613-20150213.jpg

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

Yep. It's not quite that bad. Diving back into the numbers, I find
the monthly production for 2014-2015 at:
kw-hrs
June 597 (partial month)
July 923
Aug 866
Sept 625
Oct 404
Nov 261
Dec 190
Jan 284
Feb 116 (partial month)

Total production = 4,270 kw-hrs
At roughly $0.15/kw-hr, that a "savings" of $640.50 over an 8 month
span.

Yes, the Nov and Dec production numbers were lousy. High year round
production is not going to happen in the middle of the forest thanks
to the trees. Even if there were no clouds to ruin the day, the sun
is sufficiently low on the horizon to insure lousy production. The
house was relying heavily on PG&E power even the sky had been clear.
<http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/solar/Sun-path-Ben-Lomond.png>

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.

My PG&E averages about $42/month, mostly due to electric bathroom heat
and the electric water heater. No gas and I use wood heating using
about $500/year for 2 cords of super dry firewood. The total is about
$1000/year or about $83/month:
<http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/crud/PG&E%20to%20Sept%202014-01.xls>
Notice that the average price curve is essentially flat, while my
consumption curve is dropping thanks to various conservation measures.
That proves that the more I conserve, the more PG&E raises their
prices, proving the conservation doesn't work.


--
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 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.

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.

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.



--
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 Sloman]

On Saturday, 14 February 2015 21:25:37 UTC+11, Jan Panteltje wrote:

On a sunny day (Fri, 13 Feb 2015 18:12:40 -0800 (PST)) it happened Bill Sloman
bill.sloman@gmail.com> wrote in
28b3544b-d7c4-4135-9e10-82233190df62@googlegroups.com>:

<snip - Jan Panteltje doesn't feel the need to mark his snips>

There's no need to create the perception. Burning fossil carbon is evil and destructive,

You are such a boring twit.

You are such an ignorant twit. Stuff you don't understand does strike you as boring.

If you cared you stopped posting (uses energy) and stopped breathing, and eating.

You REALLY got to get out of your minor thinking frame (denkraam in Dutch),

You need to get into the habit of thinking, but that needs a functioning brain ...

The whole UNIVERSE is destructive, stars are born and burn up and die,
you live on a piece of dirt near one, going round in circles on circles,
not only in you mind.

Perfectly correct - as far as it goes, which isn't quite far enough.

By the time things get critical in your view of what it should evolve into,
maybe this species will be an other one, or whatever,
we can always go nuclear with what is it, Thorium,
India and China are busy developing that.
And if not who cares.

Adopting a new technology doesn't require the evolution of a new species. Thorium does look more practical than uranium, but nobody has put it into practice yet.

Species adapt.
No, not in your time frame.

Obviously not. My life expectancy is 85 years. We've been around for perhaps 200,000 years, and typical species last about 10,000,000 years (but we aren't a typical species).

As a species we are really weird - we now live in big conurbations at densities only the social insects can match. We are obviously adapting furiously to a new and completely novel environment for mammals. Where we will end up is anybody's guess, but your guess-work is less knowledge-based than most..

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Saturday, 14 February 2015 13:43:22 UTC+11, Sylvia Else wrote:

On 14/02/2015 12:08 PM, Jeff Liebermann 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.

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.

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.

For that particular location. Geographical averaging means that the back-up actually required is rather less than the potential maximum output of that particular set of solar cells.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Saturday, 14 February 2015 17:03:42 UTC+11, Sylvia Else wrote:

On 14/02/2015 2:26 PM, Jeff Liebermann wrote:
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

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,

In terms of cost, any savings are completely illusory, and caused by a
market distorted by cross subsidies.

Not entirely. Shipping power across the grid involves losses and costs money.

If some of the power being generated is generated close to where it's being used, distribution costs go down.

To achieve a real saving, the cost of solar power has to be below the
marginal cost of operating a large generator.

This ignores losses in the distribution network and the cost of a distribution network sized to handle power distribution from a few large generators.

The marginal cost of
operating a nuclear or coal powered generator is not very high at all.

But higher than the marginal cost of exposing solar panels to sunlight.

The marginal cost of operating a natural gas powered generator is still
only a fraction of the retail price of electricity, with the rest of the
retail price being capital costs of the generator and distribution
infrastructure (and billing, profit, tax).

So use solar panels to generate a lot of the power closer to where it's being consumed.

What happens when people use solar panels to reduce their utility bills
is that they end up paying less than their fair share of the cost of the
power generation and delivery infrastructure, and other people pay more
than their fair share. It should be noted that the cost of that
infrastructure is largely dictated by peak loads which those with solar
panels will be happy to contribute to if their panels are not producing
power.

But in Australia, at lot of the peak load is air-conditioning systems that draw most power when the sun is at its brightest.

If utilities were allowed to allocate the cost of the infrastructure in
an equitable way, those with solar panels would find that all they done
was to increase their cost of energy.

Some of what they had done. Solar power generation is distributed, and coping with the shortfalls involves distributing less power than has to be distributed from a few central power stations.

The above doesn't apply, of course, to people who go completely off
grid, but as you've noted, that requires extra equipment which comes at
a significant cost.

Not so much significant as prohibitive. If it wasn't the electricity generating companies would use it to spread out their peak loads

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.

There's a lot of rural space close to every urban centre.

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.

I don't think space is that big an issue. What really kills these
schemes is cost.

If you want a scheme that makes money today, yes. If you want a scheme that's going to look good when the price of burning fossil-carbon has doubled per kilowatt hour, the situation is more complex. Digging up fossil carbon is getting progressively more expensive, and burning it and dumping the CO2 produced in the atmosphere isn't going to be free for much longer either.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Kevin McMurtrie]

In article <jt5tda152sa83t0t9bb8dplfuj0cah1tn5@4ax.com>,
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.

...

Depends on how much IR and UV passes through the solar cell enclosure.
A naked solar cell sometimes runs near full power even when clouds are
blocking a lot of visible light.

--
I will not see posts from astraweb, theremailer, dizum, or google
because they host Usenet flooders.

 

[DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUn]

On Sat, 14 Feb 2015 10:18:39 +0000, Jan Panteltje wrote:

There is plenty oil, the rest is marketing to get the price up.

It is as simple as that

You're an abject idiot. This is further substantiation.

Ever seen a peat bed?

 

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Fri, 13 Feb 2015 15:50:50 -0800) it happened John Larkin
<jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote in
<hb3tda5f789s8stc3c3u8cj6ckqoh5h1bq@4ax.com>:

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.

Must be terrible then on sunny days

I have an about 100 W panel installed,
and on cloudy days the power is maybe enough to charge a cellphone, slowly.
I agree with James Arthur.

 

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Fri, 13 Feb 2015 16:17:23 -0800) it happened John Larkin
<jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote in
<ql4tdadh3vrteepguskoqjjbs8ok57tgr6@4ax.com>:

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

I will tell you something, what "I" think about that.

First, in school, we learned that oil came from plants that died etc etc.
I never believed that, but to speak up was not a good idea.

I always wondered...

Then, some years ago, I found an article by NASA about the Pluto spacecraft (it is almost there now),
It said" "We hope to be at Pluto before the atmosphere condenses".
---------------------------------^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Now that hit me, ! OF COURSE !

Earth was once a glowing molten stone mass with hydrocarbons forming its atmosphere.
As it cooled of, stones solidified, and later the hydrocarbons became fluids, and condensated
on the surface,.
THE WHOLE ATMOSPHERE.
That is why you see oil in sands, under the water in sands, some places still at the surfece, etc.

There is plenty oil, the rest is marketing to get the price up.

It is as simple as that.

But you will not see that simple theory published or even repeated in a simple 500 $ experiment..

 

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Fri, 13 Feb 2015 18:12:40 -0800 (PST)) it happened Bill Sloman
<bill.sloman@gmail.com> wrote in
<28b3544b-d7c4-4135-9e10-82233190df62@googlegroups.com>:

>There's no need to create the perception. Burning fossil carbon is evil and destructive,

You are such a boring twit.
If you cared you stopped posting (uses energy) and stopped breathing, and eating.

You REALLY got to get out of your minor thinking frame (denkraam in Dutch),

The whole UNIVERSE is destructive, stars are born and burn up and die,
you live on a piece of dirt near one, going round in circles on circles,
not only in you mind.

By the time things get critical in your view of what it should evolve into,
maybe this species will be an other one, or whatever,
we can always go nuculear with what is it, Thorium,
India and China are busy developing that.
And if not who cares.
Species adapt.
No, not in your time frame.

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Sunday, 15 February 2015 00:11:24 UTC+11, Sylvia Else wrote:

On 14/02/2015 11:41 PM, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Saturday, 14 February 2015 17:03:42 UTC+11, Sylvia Else wrote:
On 14/02/2015 2:26 PM, Jeff Liebermann wrote:
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

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,

In terms of cost, any savings are completely illusory, and caused
by a market distorted by cross subsidies.

Not entirely. Shipping power across the grid involves losses and
costs money.

Some is lost, but all that does is create a moderate increase in the
marginal cost.

If some of the power being generated is generated close to where it's
being used, distribution costs go down.

The cost of distribution consists almost entirely of capital, so the
distribution infrastructure costs the same whether it's being used or not..


To achieve a real saving, the cost of solar power has to be below
the marginal cost of operating a large generator.

This ignores losses in the distribution network and the cost of a
distribution network sized to handle power distribution from a few
large generators.

It has to be sized that way to handle the loads when solar isn't delivering.


The marginal cost of operating a nuclear or coal powered generator
is not very high at all.

But higher than the marginal cost of exposing solar panels to
sunlight.

It's the wrong comparison. The generating plant and distribution
infrastructure need to be there anyway, to cope with the absence of
solar power when solar isn't delivering, so its capital cost is
unavoidable. So the only cost that can be avoided by installing solar
panels is the marginal cost of generating. But the cost that can be
avoided by *not* installing solar panels is their capital cost. So the
correct comparison is between the capital cost of the solar panels and
the marginal cost of the generating plant.



The marginal cost of operating a natural gas powered generator is
still only a fraction of the retail price of electricity, with the
rest of the retail price being capital costs of the generator and
distribution infrastructure (and billing, profit, tax).

So use solar panels to generate a lot of the power closer to where
it's being consumed.

That would be fine, if solar panels could be relied on to deliver power.
They can't.


What happens when people use solar panels to reduce their utility
bills is that they end up paying less than their fair share of the
cost of the power generation and delivery infrastructure, and other
people pay more than their fair share. It should be noted that the
cost of that infrastructure is largely dictated by peak loads which
those with solar panels will be happy to contribute to if their
panels are not producing power.

But in Australia, at lot of the peak load is air-conditioning systems
that draw most power when the sun is at its brightest.

There is some benefit to the system, but it's not enough to justify the
cost of the solar panels. It's now been realised that panels have been
installed so as to maximise their energy output, but the greatest
benefit to the system occurs if the panels face west, so maximise their
output in the afternoon. There's even talk about requiring that they be
moved.


If utilities were allowed to allocate the cost of the
infrastructure in an equitable way, those with solar panels would
find that all they done was to increase their cost of energy.

Some of what they had done. Solar power generation is distributed,
and coping with the shortfalls involves distributing less power than
has to be distributed from a few central power stations.

If the backup capacity were colocated with the solar power generation,
that would be true. But it's not, and nor is it practical to do so.

You miss the point. Solar power generation isn't there all day and it's not there at all at night. The variation within daylight hours depends on the weather, but it is statistically predictable, and if the solar generating plant is spread out the weather variations tend to average out.

The night-load has to be carried by the back-up generators but you can fudge the tariffs to keep it a lot lower than the peak daylight load.

The back-up generation is centralised, but it isn't going to supplying the peak load, or anything like it if the generation system is competently run, so the capital cost of the distribution system big enough to balance substantial distributed solar generation is a lot less than the cost of the distribution system required to handle the same power centrally generated.

<snip>

I don't think space is that big an issue. What really kills these
schemes is cost.

If you want a scheme that makes money today, yes. If you want a
scheme that's going to look good when the price of burning
fossil-carbon has doubled per kilowatt hour,

Not so very much. At the moment, coal fired electricity in Australia
costs about 4 cents per kilowatt hour before it enters the grid. That's
out of the 25 cents or so we pay. Double the 4 to 8, and it would hardly
be noticed in the scheme of things.

That's not the only cost of burning coal. Climate change is already costing Australia quite a bit in extreme weather, longer bush-fire seasons and so on.

And if doubling the coast of coal wouldn't matter, what's the objection to paying 5.9 cents per kilowatt hour for solar power?

Burning more coal is really bad idea, and burning a good deal less would be a step in the right direction. The Chinese and the Americans have to see the light before we have any hope of slowing down climate change, but the Chinese have actually got the message, though it's going to take a while before they ramp up their renewable generation to the point where it will make a difference.

The Americans are a bigger problem, but enough extreme weather will eventually get through even their problems with the people who own the country running the country for their own short term benefit.

the situation is more
complex. Digging up fossil carbon is getting progressively more
expensive, and burning it and dumping the CO2 produced in the
atmosphere isn't going to be free for much longer either.

In Australia, we have plenty of uranium. At the moment, it's all shipped
abroad (pretty much in its raw state - which is typical of Australia -
no value adding before export). None is used locally, but it could be
used to produce electricity for not that much more than coal currently
costs.

Sadly, getting rid of the waste from nuclear reactors is one of those neglected areas, much like the CO2 injected into the atmosphere by burning fossil carbon.

There are technically adequate solutions - Synroc comes to mind

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

but nobody is willing to tolerate even the most safely packed nuclear waste in their own back yard. We've had fifty years to find a solution, and there's nothing workable in sight.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Sunday, 15 February 2015 00:20:10 UTC+11, Sylvia Else wrote:

On 14/02/2015 11:21 PM, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Saturday, 14 February 2015 13:43:22 UTC+11, Sylvia Else wrote:
On 14/02/2015 12:08 PM, Jeff Liebermann 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.

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.

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.

For that particular location. Geographical averaging means that the
back-up actually required is rather less than the potential maximum
output of that particular set of solar cells.

There are two issue with geographical averaging. One is simply that it's
hard to define an upper limit to the area that can be adversely affected
at the same time. Some weather systems are very big.

But they don't produce a uniform overcast over a vast area. Cloud is generated by wet air getting cooler - so you tend to get 50% cloud as some air moves up and gets cooler while an equal mass moves down and gets warmer.

Tropical cyclones are a different story, but they don't qualify as "very big", at least not in my lexicon, and when they come ashore power distribution isn't the first problem that you are thinking about.

The other is that the larger the area you're using for the averaging,
the greater the distances that power potentially needs to be moved to
cover shortfalls, and the greater the power involved. The distribution
capacity required is extra capacity, because it wouldn't otherwise be
required, so the cost of it needs to be included in the cost of solar power.

The grid system we've got moves power from a very few centres out to an extended periphery. Solar power is never going to be as concentrated as coal-fired or hydroelectric power stations.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney