Random Renewables Thread

pah

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122683638#Comment_122683638

Apologies for the typo captain pedantic, I know the difference.

Ubbquittious

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122682230#Comment_122682230

You would think if second hand prices crater then all the people looking for EVs would snap up the second hand ones and things would balance out again but apparently not

the_amazing_raisin

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122683772#Comment_122683772

Well they are cratering to some extent, second hand ID models are pretty well priced at the moment

There's also a fair cohort of dreamers out there who bought at inflated prices and are asking more because they don't want to eat the loss

I think a bunch of dealerships got caught up in this as well, recently I was passing Bright Ford and spotted an ID.3 1st Plus for sale. They were asking something like €29k on a car which was going for around €21k on done deal at the time and was around €41k new in 2022

My guess is that some genius salesperson paid way over odds on trade in because they thought they could flip the car quickly and reality came to bite them

It's also worth keeping in mind that second hand sales won't show up in any SIMI motor stats. So part of the sales drop might be high availability of well priced second hand vehicles

graememk

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122683683#Comment_122683683

It makes a difference though. And a lot don't realise the difference, because your post implied you did think that it would charge at 5kW

pah

Ok, but not because I thought a "5kw battery should charge at 5kw" it was because my inverter is 5kw and the battery discharges at 5kw.

I literally showed that I understand the difference by talking about the power compared to the time it took to generate the energy. I just left out a h

graememk

Looking at the spec sheet the max the livotek can charge at is 50A.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122627980#Comment_122627980

https://xkcd.com/2991/ ..

conor_mc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122686851#Comment_122686851

took me a few moments, that one! 😂

Exiled Rebel

A noticeable nose dive in production so far this month. I'm exporting every bit of surplus power from my 7.8kWp array and even at that I'm just over €6 in the red in the 7 full days we've had in October. The next few days are promising. I might get to the end of the week in a break even position for the month but it looks like October will be the first time in 6 or so months where the cost of importing (incl. SC) exceeds FIT payment.

The system was installed at the end of January so this is my first winter with it. Very nerdy I know but to me it's very interesting.

SD_DRACULA

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122696242#Comment_122696242

Sounds to me you need a battery (or a bigger one), just so happens I have 16kwh of cells for sale 😂

Exiled Rebel

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122696410#Comment_122696410

I'll see how the winter goes first 😀

The account is currently €300 in credit thanks to FIT. Excluding the upcoming government €250 freebie I reckon the credit will get me through to the middle of January. That leaves me with just 1 two month billing cycle where I'll need to dig in to my own pocket to pay for a bill before the solar kicks off again in earnest in March.

Having to pay for 1 bill in a year (likely to be €180 going by what it was this year) makes it hard to justify a battery as things stand.

SD_DRACULA

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122696524#Comment_122696524

Yeah to be fair that is peanuts to pay for 1 year of power 😁

jkforde

this is interesting, hadn't heard about this duck curve before..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4loz5EAHVUY

deezell

On the 1.00 news, less liklyhood of power shortage outages this winter. D'Esb have more wogawatts of batteries, more (unmentionable fuel) powered generators, and an increase in gas fired output. Plus more coming in on a new interconnecter from Wales to Wexford, Probably from Wylfa. Nice heady mix of stored wind, solar, oil, nuclear, and gas to keep the lights on.

DC999

I’m a warm fuzzy glow today! Ran a ‘learn about solar at home’ session in the canteen in work today. Was informal for people to drop over and ask Qs. Had a few people with solar where there to answer Qs.

Hopefully we’ll have a few new posters on this forum as they start their journey 😊 I’ve giving everyone links to the Interested in Solar PV? Read this FAQ first. — boards.ie - Now Ye're Talkin’ sticky as a starting point.

It’s nothing related to work, but part of our 'Green Team' to help inform people on certain topics. 1st time I’ve done that. So far I’ve had many coffees with people explaining the benefits, but has always been 1-1 type chats.

As an aside, we did a short survey and 1/4 of people replied. 10% have solar, 10% can’t get it (renting, moving home, live in an apartment), 30% considered but didn’t go further, 50% never considered it. Age profile is mostly people in their 40s+50s. And also showed ‘clusters’ of family members with it. As in parents’ home plus 1 sibling’s.

JayBee66

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122697779#Comment_122697779

I hope the warm fuzziness works out for you. She Who Must Be Obeyed has many people asking about the panels on our roof. She directs them to me. I never hear from them. I must have that kind of face. 😡

deezell

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122697869#Comment_122697869

Like this face, surrounded by a warm glow, (or a red mist?).

JayBee66

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122698470#Comment_122698470

In rural Ireland there's only one thing worse than a Blow-In, a returnee.

"Why did he come back?" "Who does he think he is?" "Does he think he's better than us?" "What does he know?"

More their green envy than my red mist.

paulbok

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122698470#Comment_122698470

"Why would you be praising solar PV? The sun is just doing its job."

JayBee66

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122701118#Comment_122701118

Oh no. If you don't praise the Sun enough, it doesn't come out. Why did the ancestors erect all those stones? They were onto something. What is the government hiding?!

the_amazing_raisin

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122697159#Comment_122697159

Yep, personally I've never seen the resemblance to a duck but I guess energy traders don't get out much

As a general rule it's better for the grid to self consume or charge batteries during the day rather than export, since there might not be the demand for the electricity

However in the context of Ireland it's worth keeping a few things in mind

First, were not exactly the sunniest country around. It's easy to imagine in California or Australia the grid getting overfed with solar energy. While we do get the occasional negative prices, it doesn't happen very often

Second, we have some high capacity interconnectors (well, one, but more on the way). This does help with grid balancing as generally the UK can take any extra we have to export

Third, we have a fair amount of battery storage coming online. Basically works the same as a home battery but bigger, best thing about them is they can discharge at peak times to reduce the need for gas generators

Fourth, we have a lot of data centers which can vary their load. While they're normally a bit of a scourge, if you login to AWS or similar you'll notice they have services called spot instances. This basically means you get a discount in return for Amazon running the service at off peak times when electricity is cheap. They can also do backups and stuff at cheaper times, although this doesn't always work out since there's an agreement they'll run this stuff within a certain time frame

I wouldn't be surprised if we end up with time of use export tariffs, where it pays out less during the day or pay out a bonus during peak times. We're probably a bit aways from that

It'll be interesting to see how the new dynamic tariffs go, particularly if they allow dynamic export tariffs as well. This would be a great driver of people using their batteries to charge up off their own solar or when there's excess renewables and then discharge to the grid during peak times

While it seems a bit counterintuitive, it once again reduces the need for gas generators overall

Busman Paddy Lasty

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122701202#Comment_122701202

As the ancient Egyptians used to say, Up the Ra!

Jonathan

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122701694#Comment_122701694

How certain are you that spot instances are based on electricity pricing, and not just the CSPs stimulating demand for underutilised compute resources?

the_amazing_raisin

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122702504#Comment_122702504

Hmm, fair point, I thought I read in the documents that it was low electricity demand, but looking back it just says low demand

One imagines the two probably coincide somewhat, generally companies would pick the data centers in Ireland for low latency to the EU market, so when everyone in Europe is asleep then compute resources should free up

conor_mc

One might argue that it already is vastly more efficient/easier to transmit data rather than power across oceans. Therefore one potential significant climate change mitigation would be for blocs (EU/UK/US, etc) to recognise and agree to respect each others data protection regulations so that cloud-based workloads can be moved between geographies, thus leveraging sustainable energy sources more efficiently.

the_amazing_raisin

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122703536#Comment_122703536

You're in for some disappointment there, a lot of the data traffic you use is relatively local

A lot of sites use what's called a CDN, Content Distribution Network

It basically copies a lot of the data intensive stuff on a website to multiple data centers across the globe. So if you're in Australia and looking up RTE News, you'll probably get a local mirror of the site

I'm not sure how much compute resources are moved to the edge but you'd typically have a presence in at least 3 regions for availability and latency reasons (often America, Europe/Africa and Asia)

I'll also be 100% honest and say I'm not sure the difference in power needs per application. Calling data from an object store should be pretty efficient compared to something like running a ChatGPT query

The downside from a power consumption point of view is that you now need to power multiple data centers for the same workload and that data center is local. So it'll be following the same duck curve as you

In other words, browsing YouTube at 2am is better for the environment 😂

conor_mc

yeah, I get that for real-time/streamed workloads (content, transactional processing etc) but still lots and lots of batch jobs like backups, nightly ETL jobs, etc, etc. that could be shifted around. The speed/capacity across fibre at the lab stage of development is frightening compared to ye olde modem baud rates I grew up with!

https://www.livescience.com/technology/communications/scientists-achieve-record-breaking-402-tbps-data-transmission-speeds-16-million-times-faster-than-home-broadband#

the_amazing_raisin

Was driving past the Travel lodge in Swords yesterday and noticed the whole roof has been covered in solar panels.

Didn't count them obviously but there must have been at least 100

Always great to see businesses jumping on board and trying to do something to reduce their carbon footprint

SD_DRACULA

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122707160#Comment_122707160

I'd say closer to 200-300, goes all the way around, saw them putting them up a few months back, fair play to them.

graememk

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122707245#Comment_122707245

If you think most hotels now are heated and cooled with A2A the electric use could be very high.