Comment by freetime2
Comment by freetime2 13 hours ago
Yup if you really need to be off grid in a climate that has cold, cloudy, snowy winters, you’re probably going to need a generator that runs on fossil fuels. For everyone else, use the grid.
Comment by freetime2 13 hours ago
Yup if you really need to be off grid in a climate that has cold, cloudy, snowy winters, you’re probably going to need a generator that runs on fossil fuels. For everyone else, use the grid.
It's uncommon, but a wind generator can help a lot: in some climates, cloudy days tend to be windy days. Not really practical in a city though.
The AMC White Mountain huts have been doing this for years. The croo don't tend to maintain the systems, so I've never gotten a sense for what their storage capacity, generating capacity, and loads look like, but from a visitor perspective, the system works well.
Reportedly, even the fairy stout wind turbines they use up there have short, brutal lives. I heard the story of a croo that had to lasso/tangle/jam the blades of theirs in a storm because it lost the ability to control its speed and the alternative was letting it overspeed and possibly tear itself apart. They aren't large in diameter, but at the speeds they turn even in normal conditions up there, catastrophic failure could be really bad.
Try 30-50% more.
It's so obviously better to reduce your need for heating and cooling than it is to increase your panel. battery, and HVAC size.
30-50% over 500k build is 10x more than 10k solar or 5k worth of batteries.
I've just setup electrical heating for my bedroom (HA PID sensor). Uses about 450KWh - $90 NZD worth of grid power per winter. Heat pump would take 20+ years to pay itself. Double glazing probably 30-40 years.
To make same amount of solar power per year I need a single $130 NZD panel.
Or you find somewhere with terrain amenable to hydropower. It’s how we bridge the gap in the winter.
you have personal hydropower? that sounds pretty cool
And it's especially great if you have a neighbor with a son who are willing to do the labor for you. [1] [2]
Agreed. You can increasingly over-provision the solar generation to reduce the proportion of time when you will need a fossil fuel generator or grid input, and install lots of battery to allow the system to smooth over multiple dull days. But chasing that 100% is going to be very expensive, and at some point it'll be much cheaper to have a fossil fuel generator that you need to run 1% of the time.