Random Renewables Thread

Yeah sounds about right, I got lucky with the traffic at that roundabout (for once) so didn't want to stop for the look

Pavillions shopping centre also have planning permission to put a pretty gargantuan 2700 panels on their roof, probably up to 1.1MW with conventional panels

Haven't noticed any works started yet though, I hope they get a move on

You'd imagine they'd be an excellent candidate for a battery store as well, demand is probably extremely variable with people cranking the heating up or down in their rooms all day

The last 10-15% is more inefficient to charge, you'll put in significantly more kwh than you'll get out, so if you're charging off the grid, then back to FIT in daytime or self use, you're saving very little on that top kwh of a 5kwh battery, just ageing it quicker with heat.

Very much slower, so the overhead of the BMS system is higher in relation to the trickle power bring inserted into the cells, and even if the energy transfer of this voltage sensitive charge phase was as efficient as the mid constant current phase, it's not ideal to have a power shifting device effectively out of service on a trickle charge, when it could be pushing it back out as FIT.

I wonder why so many mobile phone batteries die after a few short years, despite having abundant processing power to micro tune the last trickle stage of charging? It all depends on how cautious the BMS are in the final fifth. Perhaps more years of evidence needed before we can definitively say that actual100% is good for your cells in the long term. I say actual to distinguish the practice of manufacturers underrating their cells to give them some headroom for protection, which is a good idea in any engineering field.

If you go to 0% and more or less immediately charge them back up is fine, just not good if they stay there for too long.

But yeah 5-10% is a good stopping point, gives you a bit of a buffer in case of an outage, you can make a few cups of tea 😂

That time of year again to look at energy usage. We've reduced 2500kWh of gas heating per year by adding 2 small electric rads (over the last 2 winters). I did that intentionally to reduce the amount of gas we use. It's a 20 year old boiler that started with 79% efficiency. Whose guess as to how low that is now.

The rooms the electric rads are in a much more comfortable and stay at the exact temp we want.

Ok, small house and we don't mind lower temps than most. And it's a poor BER, which we're slowly working on improving for this heating season. And of course we're not saving energy (well, we are on the gas boiler that is likely 60% off efficient V electric rads), more substituting some gas for some electric heating.

Dream would be DIY heatpump hence the fluting around to see what we're need. But that's down the list of other household jobs to do

A large ground system just outside of Kinnegad.

The amount of commecial solar farms going up these days is insane and I reckon they are downplaying or not really drawing attention to it because it means a rugpull for domestic solar systems is nearly upon us

Massive solarfarm built 5km from me went in without a mention, poor bog land, the sheep can still graze under it. What's to complain about. (There was ructions though about the windmills originally planned).

Google image not fully up to date.

What's the capacity on sunny day I wonder? The only nimby issue they had was being forced to run the 3 phase HT underground on the public road for several km to get to the HT grid. Complete nonsense and must have cost a fortune.