Steve
Green EnergyInstalling solar panels on your home or business is common in many European countries. But they really come into their own during energy crises.
“If you’ve got a solar roof on your home and you’ve got a battery then, depending on how much energy you can generate, you are substantially insulated from importing electricity,” explains Matthew Clayton, CEO of UK-based Thrive Renewables.
Dynamic tariffs are becoming more common in Europe. This is where the price of electricity varies throughout the day and night, with costs going up during peak periods, like dinner time, when households are using more.
This means that if you store up solar power during daylight hours, when the sun is at its strongest, then you can use that energy, rather than drawing it from the electricity grid, during the most expensive periods. “Your relationship with the grid is totally changed,” says Clayton.
Grid going down?
I think the last time I experienced that was 15 years ago. Even then it was only for a couple of hours.
Like it's such a non event as to not even bother trying to fix it.
Being prepared for emergencies always seems silly and unnecessary - until that emergency actually hits.
In berlin in december, people sabotaged an electrical substation which led to an entire district losing power. People had no heating, couldn't go shopping and millions of euros worth of food went bad. In most cities it's not a problem as every german city (usually) has multiple mobile powerstations, basically a mobile power plant. Well, turns out, berlin only had 3 of them, unlike munich, for example, which has 120.
My girlfriend also recently told me that in some american state (Can't remember which one exactly), hundreds of thousands of cows froze to death because it got unusually cold. Since the stables are all open (because it's never that cold), most farmers were unable to intervene in time so most of the cattle died out there.
Or may I remind you of the time texas was hit by a massive snow storm, most of the state lost power and some people actually died because of the temperature? And all because it's just a "rare occurence" and barely anyone was prepared.
I'm not saying you have to prepare for any eventuality like internet crashes or other stuff that doesn't cost potentially kill you if it's gone, but having a backup plan for power outages during winter or maybe a few barrels of clean water in case the water supply gets contaminated is probably not a terrible idea.
Being prepared for emergencies is a good thing. But not everything we do has to actively prepare for an emergency.
This article is about people installing equipment that alleviates their energy costs and reduces the amount of energy they draw from the grid, especially during high demand times. That is worth doing, entirely separately from being prepared for emergencies.
So the fact that this equipment does not prepare for emergencies is relevant to know, but doesn't change whether it's a good idea to install the equipment.
The article is about that, yes, but the comment I replied too talked about the grid going down.
It happened in Spain last year and it lasted for a day more or less. You never know.
The disadvantage is that you still lose power when the grid goes down, even if you have storage. Unless you run parallel circuits, and your system is island/black start capable.
Colleagues, users of Lemmy, please do not downvote this poster. Most solar power installations in use today are grid-following, so it's correct to point out: if the grid drops, most solar inverters stop. Your average Huawei is not capable of operating in island mode. It needs a reference frequency to follow.
On most days, this is not a problem. The operator of the electrical grid will do everything to keep it up.
However, it's a real risk if your electrical grid should get bombed, or pelted with ice rain.
Myself I have a different kind of a solar power system, and it's not commonplace. It's easy and doable, there is plenty of instruction available, but it's less profitable.
panels -> DC -> charging controllers -> DC -> interrupter -> battery bank -> balancers and fuses -> still DC --> local consumers, among them an inverter --> finally some AC --> possibly the grid
To get a safe system, ask a specialist or learn about balancers, interrupters and fuses. Everything is DIY-able with a willingness to learn. Avoid dangerously high voltage if you aren't certified to work with electrical power.
Do you have a pointer to such DIY home solar? I was planning to build my next system from Victron components, but this could be an interesting alternative.
Do you have any directions where to go for this, traveler?
It depends on the country one lives in, because to connect equipment to the grid, it has to be certified in that country.
As a good starting point, I would recommend to look at inverters sold as "hybrid inverters", especially if the manufacturer advertises "off-grid" capability with automatic switch-over.
Here is one, from the manufacturer whose devices (older versions, no longer manufactured) I use. There are many others. If the user's manual explains the process of automatic switch-over to off-grid (island) mode, then the inverter will provide autonomous power in case of grid collapse.
https://maximumsolar.online/product/hybridv2-6048/
...and here is another one, from a different company. Anything that becomes autonomous upon loss of grid freqency (disconnects from the grid and leaves only sensors to read its status) and then gracefully handles the return of grid frequency (does not connect before synchronization has been achieved).
https://www.qoltec.com/product/qoltec-hybrid-solar-inverter-off-grid-24kw-80a-mppt-sinus
Thanks! I'm in SW desert USA, on a large piece of land so I was thinking of just putting on the a scaffold structure on the ground instead of on the roof. In the past looked at the ability to put panels over my small garden to act as a shade, but I think the structure needed to hold them would be prohibitively expensive.
I'm not sure how that is a disadvantage compared to being on the power grid? If you are on the power grid, and the grid goes down, you also don't have power.
What is this a disadvantage compared to?
My point is that with this basic setup (I run 2 kWp) is that you still lose power when the grid goes down, so your relationship to the grid is not totally changed. The only thing you notice are smaller power bills.
The disadvantage is compared to a insular/black start capable setup which is more expensive/complicated (and needs a licensed electrician to be legal) but lets you run on battery when the grid goes down.
It is valid that a grid failure proof system is a bigger change to relationship with the grid.
But as someone with a 10x cost difference between on-peak and off-peak pricing, stored power certainly changes how I interact with the grid. My time of use use, and therefore my family's own habits, are drastically changed. Not doing laundry 16h00-21h00 with a toddler was a rough go. So yes, my relationship with the grid has totally changed; in ways more than jsut my bill.
Sure, if you happen to have dynamic electricity tariffs, you're going to change your consumption pattern.
Solar makes it much less likely for the grid to crash anyway. ESPECIALLY closer to the source (avoids transmission loss and transformer strain)
Renewable power generation is not dispatchable, so large fraction of it in generation make grid stabilization interventions more frequent.
Unless your country has a sane generation strategy you should plan for more rather than less power outage events in future. Fortunately commercial home solutions for that exist and are getting cheaper.
Its pretty common to have a ups built in to switch to batteries. Can't export power but still lights on
Yeah, you can run a few systems on a circuit that way, but most of the ups-like storage inverters are not integrated into your solar PV system, so don't try to minimize feed-in into the grid and maximize locally generated power consumption.
For the plug in panels would it be possible to swap the plug into a battery that isn’t connected to the grid during an emergency? Or is the “plug in” bit more complicated than I’m imagining?
Around me (unrelated to war) they’re offering rebates for home batteries and generators to keep some basics up during an outage.
It's possible, but needs to be engineered for safety, and that design/testing/certification will increase the cost and complexity.
You can have solar panels and a battery totally off grid, where the big battery just acts as a generator, with its own inverter creating AC power for anything you plug in. That's really simple and cheap, but isn't safe for connecting to and powering a grid-connected house circuit. So anything you want to power with one of these systems needs to be plugged into outlets that only get their power from these batteries.
You can add a grid-following inverter that safely matches the grid frequency AC, so that you can use the solar power you collect in your own normal home circuit, to power your own household appliances. But the simplest design here is a grid following inverter that doesn't work when the grid isn't connected. It can only add to something that already exists and can't do things on its own.
If you want to do both, where it can work without grid power and it follows the grid when the grid power is on, you'll have to design a system that can switch between the two modes without delivering power where it's not expected or generating power that conflicts with the grid's AC waveform. Making it automated, like an UPS system, is even more complicated.
It's not impossible, or even that difficult, it just does add complexity and the engineering tradeoff is always the question of "what problem does this solve, and is solving that problem important enough to devote these resources to it?" For anyone on a reliable electric grid where power outages are rare, the answer is usually no.
The grid-tied inverters need to have a grid voltage and frequency to be in a certain defined range orelse they switch off (this behaviour can be changed via firmware for some inverters). In theory you could use a pure sinus UPS for that, but in practice it is not designed to receive power on the outlet side and will overload/burn out.
There are specific battery/diesel backed solar grid-tied inverter solutions which can smoothly separate and reconnect from the grid during outages while providing power to the consumers. These are far more expensive than simple grid-tied solar inverters.
