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Our electrician invested ~$5600 in their battery and it's saving them ~$90/mo. So their battery is helping to put food on the table. No gas in the car though. Both cars are electric. They don't waste $$$ on silly things :)

There is now if you're clever enough. I just bought a pallet of solar for ~$0.25/w. You can get UL rated batteries for ~$200/kWh and a hybrid inverter for <$5k. So the materials cost of 30kW of solar + 70kWh of storage would be ~$45k. ~$32k after the FTC. That would save >$3k/yr. More and...

Signature Solar is offering a unit that is suspiciously similar that has UL9540A certification for ~$3400. LiFe is <$100/kWh at the cell level so we should be seeing a lot more packs at the ~$200/kWh price point. But over-production needs to be the first step. Mounting solar vertically to...

Our electrician lives in an area where he gets 0 credit for his exports so batteries have value. But the first step was to dramatically oversize his system since solar is hilariously cheap now. That's the first paradigm shift I needed to accept. MASSIVE curtailment. He needed to overproduce...

Not many places left where there isn't a supercharger every 50 to 100 miles. That's a much better solution than larger battery packs. They just started construction on a supercharger in Kalispell so Glacier will soon be accessible without too much effort.

aka... 'nighttime' :rolleyes:

Only day of the year that Ruzzians have 'tech' worth stealing. :) US Submarine first in world outfitted with Caterpillar Drive

The cable removal wasn't very sophisticated. Looked like they stomped on the cable until it finally came out. No tools used. It wasn't cut. Electric rate is ~$0.10/kWh. ~$0.13/kWh in the summer. McDs pays the bill. It's likely a rounding error on their other expenses.

No; They removed one of the cables. I'm assuming by stomping on it since it had been yanked out of the bottom of the enclosure. Both HPWCs shows signs someone had pulled down hard on their cables since the grommet was dislodged and the gland nut had been unscrewed on the other clipper creek...

Seems like this is a problem we should probably be taking more seriously....

We need a code change that requires better glass in hail prone regions. Many of the panels survived. With 5 or 6mm glass it's likely most of them would have. It's silly to have the same glass thickness in areas that ~never see hail and areas that see 3" hail every 4 years. It's clear the...

If that were true we wouldn't be closing nuclear plants simply because they're unprofitable. The other ISOs need to become like the TVA. With a CEO accountable to a board of directors which in turn are appointed by POTUS not shareholders. Nationalization not 'nationalism' is the only way...

Sure. Nationalization is a solution. Probably the only solution. That's where the conversation needs to be. It's not nuclear vs renewables. It's 'free-ish' markets vs central planning. The irony is that most nuclear proponents are trying to use nuclear as a wedge to encourage less...

I understand that they can physically vary their output. I have a degree in nuclear engineering. Economically they cannot vary their output. The cost to keep a GW of nuclear operational is ~$300M/yr. Regardless of whether it produced 1MWh or 8000GWh.

That's my point. Nuclear is the wrong shaped piece to fit in that hole. Nuclear NEEDS to run ~24/7/365. Not 'can'... NEEDS. That's not flexible. Not just when there's no wind and at night/cloudy days. And it's amusing when people say 'nuclear' in response to ERCOT needing ~4GW of capacity...

Supposedly it took over an hour for the police to arrive. They should have started singing the Ukrainian anthem... the police would have been there in seconds.

It's not a question of safety it's a question of economics. It's physically impossible to build a thermal plant cheap enough that it can operate viably with a CF <80%. Solar and wind have become hilariously cheap. I just bought a pallet of solar panels for $0.23/w. That's nuts. In bulk...

Fixed the vandalized EVSE just in time. Would also be nice if people were comfortable resetting tripped breakers... McDs has dispensed 85MWh so far.

That's the #1, 2 and 3 reasons IMHO. Everything can be installed 110% correctly but everytime you charge at 48A the connections get very warm/hot. Metal expands when it heats up. The amount of heat is the charge rate squared. So 24A reduces the heat by 75% vs 48A. Less heat, less thermal...

I installed a 'power pipe' in my house. It works great. Would be really hard for potable water to become contaminated since it's at pressure. The biggest catch is that it needs to be installed as a drain and it needs to be vertical. So the showers need to be on an upper floor. Drain heat...

... if learning from history was easy it wouldn't keep repeating itself... :( Peace for our time

I believe on 'Ukraine the latest' one of the hosts half joked that Ukraine should annex itself to Poland for ~5 years. Sort of like how Hong Kong had a 99 year lease to the UK.

If Russia attacks French forces in Ukraine would this trigger article 5?

More senseless carnage because stupid is still normal. :(

Never a good sign when reality becomes satire. :(

Best use of community notes ever?

.... so you CAN have your grid service disconnected but you need to watch out for bears?

.... so if you ask to have your electric service disconnected they simply say 'no'?

Sure seems like there would be a 4th Amendment issue there. Is the utility going to narc you out to the AHJ that you went off-grid? How would the county know you're 'off-grid'? How and where would there be any consequences to getting your electric service disconnected?

Imagine if most homes had just ~2 hours of battery storage. This would be 100% a non-issue. Even if just 20% of homes had ~2 hours of battery storage.

Don't over complicate it. CO2 reduces outgoing energy more than it reduces incoming energy because it interacts with photons in the visible spectrum more than it interacts with photons in the IR spectrum. Since Earth receives most of its energy from the sun in the visible spectrum and radiates...

No it barely acts on incoming. Incoming light is in the visible spectrum. Outgoing is in the IR spectrum. CO2 is transparent to visible but opaque to IR. ~ALL the energy is 'reflected' out. If Earth receives ~340w/m^2 from the sun it needs to radiate ~340w/m^2 to neither cool or warm. Some...

I offered my link. Where's yours? No one says 'it should be warming up high first'. Radiative forcing is acting on outgoing energy. Outgoing energy is coming from the ground. The ground is going to warm first. The upper atmosphere is going to cool because it's getting less energy from the...

Where is it predicted that the upper atmosphere would warm? Energy transfer is from the ground up. The upper atmosphere should and IS cooling because less energy is reaching it from the Earths surface due to more CO2. Kinda proves it's not the sun. More energy from the sun wouldn't cool the...

The average temperature of the atmosphere is always higher than the average temperature of the oceans. How has the atmosphere 'not gone up first'? We didn't have accurate ocean temperature measurements until long after AGW kicked off. How would you know air temp hasn't gone up first...

Because the oceans are receiving energy from the sun and losing it to the air. The primary heat source isn't the atmosphere, it's the sun. The change in the atmosphere is just reducing the rate of heat loss. You've got this flipped. It's not the air heating the oceans. It's more the oceans...

You're still confusing energy in with energy out. (1) ok.... how does the ocean lose the heat it just received from the sun? (2) ok.... how is that energy 'lost'? (3) ok.... so warmer air means the oceans lose less heat? The oceans aren't being warmed by the air. They're getting energy from...

... how does the ocean lose the heat it just received from the sun to maintain the same temperature? If Energy in doesn't equal energy out the oceans warm. 1 m^2 of ocean will get a few kWh/day of thermal energy from the sun. It also must lose the same amount or the temperature rises. How is...

Doesn't the ocean generally already absorb more energy than the air during the day because 'the sun'? And CO2 would just make the air warmer so something that already doesn't 'work well' (water - air heat transfer) would now 'work even less well'? So CO2 is going to reduce the rate at which...

So why are coastal cities more temperate than non-coastal cities? Large bodies of water DON'T work well as a temperature buffer? It's just a coincidence that they're near the ocean?

Our pathetic addiction to fools fuel has altered the radiative balance of the atmosphere. That energy has to go somewhere. Measuring Earths energy imbalance.

It will depend on what the cafeteria was serving or what they packed for lunch. :)

Mostly new features. Most newer panels output a bit over 10A and SMA inverters clip at 10A. Growatt can take ~13A per channel and it's a hybrid. They also don't have anything larger than 7.6 in their residential line while GroWatt has a 11.4kW. SMA has a new generation nearly identical to...

It's not like micro-inverters are a panacea for that. One of the systems I repaired was micro-inverters. It was down for over a year. That's why it's so important to use a local installer. The hail damaged system we repaired had two non-functioning M215s. Since it wasn't our system it...

In real world conditions if 1 or 2 of 3 cell groups are in hard shade those diodes are tripped and you lose the cell groups regardless of optimization. Only in full shade are you going to see a difference and full shade is generally closer to a ~95% reduction in irradiance levels. Optimizers...

Depends on the shade. If only one or two cell groups are in shade the results are the same with a string, micro or optimizers. It's only full or partial shade across all 3 cell groups that there's really a difference and then you're only capturing maybe ~20w.