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avg 5.5 hrs/day over the year. ie 10kW system. 55kWh/day avg over year. winter less, summer more. max output, latitude - 15 degrees tilt to max summer sunYou got to keep your kW and kWh straight ...
In addition, a roof PV system won't ever generate its rated output for 10 hrs a day because of sun angle variation.
Mitch, without storage, Hawaii can't go 100% renewables. Last I heard, the local utility was seriously curtailing new solar installations.
This means that a new solar install might be forced to adopt storage, and either go off grid or be limited to purchasing electricity only off peak and be forbidden from selling to the grid at peak solar hours. Just guessing, based on available information.
A while ago, before we had this compelling solution I argued with a lot of people right here about this. If everybody goes solar, and there is no storage, and combined solar generation exceeds demand, the grid will collapse at peak solar hours. That's the point you religious pro solar people forget.
That is particularly true on an island. In Calfornia at least we have the regional grid to sell excess power to. The best solution of course is grid storage. Let's hope that Tesla, LG Chem and others can ramp up production to supply that capacity. If you look at the duck curve from the California Independent System Operator we will need about 12 gigaWatts of capacity to ramp up in the three hour period from 5-6PM until 9pm. Some of that capacity exists with peaker plants, but as pointed out above, they are expensive and put more CO2/kWhr than baseline plants............ If everybody goes solar, and there is no storage, and combined solar generation exceeds demand, the grid will collapse at peak solar hours. That's the point you religious pro solar people forget.
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Just to be clear, the power pack cannot be used to power your home unless there is a blackout. Period. You may store free solar energy on it and sell it back to the SDG&E. However they only buy it back at something like 3.5 cents per KW. Crunch the numbers and you'll see right now that it's not a good investment unless you live in an area with an unstable grid.
That is a huge inverter 300-600 Volts DC 300 amps. 3 phase AC. I would guess $100,000. My little Radian cost $4,000 which is $1000/kWatt. I would expect the cost per rated Watt decreases as capacity scales up.
Outback did announce a high voltage DC bus inverter in the works, but I don't know if they operate on Tesla time. LOL Inverters like the Radians can be coupled so you can increase capacity in 8kW increments like WK057 did.
I don't know what features you want that don't exist in a Radian or similar hybrid inverter? The reason I bought the Radian is that it was firmware upgradeable. That isn't going to get me a high voltage DC bus but any load shifting, increased backup, rate arbitrage that I might want is available now. In the future I expect features to be added. I recently received an upgrade that allows me to run my inverter from my PC or phone.
Obviously you are living something that I'm just learning about. What I don't like about the Radians, Sunny, Schneiders, etc is the fact you have to couple/string them. Too much engineering, too much effort, etc. These companies are focused on solving a problem that existed 10 years ago (in my humble opinion)- how to sell inverter (s) to clients with a 4-20kw battery pack or something like that. They need to be ahead of the industry a little bit or Tesla will identify the inverter business as a weakness and put $100mln into overcoming that problem and away goes the off grid inverter business model.
Anyhow, that is just my outside observers view on things, I'd like to be able to buy 2 power packs and 2 inverters to support them and a large set of panels I can live with the charging electronics. Simplifies installation, a little bit of redundancy if a battery pack fails or if an inverter fails. My power room would not look like wk057 (envious but I'm not doing that) and that is a good thing for me. Better yet, the powerpack should come with an inverter built in. It doesn't have to have all the bells and whistles, it could even be closed like the sunny systems (which I don't get).
But I believe you have already said basically the same thing in multiple threads and fortunately you don't have my immediate frustrations...thanks again for the insight and patience.
I'm confused about your objection to the stringing of inverters. I have the same - a few years' earlier version - model of Radians that wk057 has - two of them to obtain 16kW inversion. But each of those is a doubled 4kW inverter. So how it functions is that side A of the first inverter always is on; when need jumps to more than 4000 watts then side B kicks in; when >8kW side A of #2 starts in; if I need more than 12kW side B of #2 (and wk057's then jumps to #3, and so on).
It's quite an efficient process, and it is a minuscule amount of wiring ("engineering/effort").
I am just trying to get the word out about the possibilities today. I think you are correct about existing systems. As for tomorrow, I think Tesla and SolarEdge have found a simple and elegant solution that is plug and play. That means time saving for the installer and cheaper for the consumer. We are in an exciting age.
It is hard to tell from the skimpy press release. This Youtube video explains the process but no details about DC bus connectivity or availability.
[HD] SolarEdges HD-Wave Inverter Technology - YouTube
Umm - it appears to be a transformerless inverter design or am I missing something? Nothing new here unless they are transitioning to VHF for switching frequency or something. My Power-One solar inverter is nearly five years old and transformerless. Other major solar inverter companies like SMA have been doing this for some time as well. Having a look at the Solaredge inverters on their website - it appears they are just behind the times a bit and now trying to catchup with the majors.
My Power-One unit is 3.6kW rated and weighs 8kg and is the size of a Pizza box. Their current 3500w unit weighs 20kgs and is huge. The SMA TL (tranformerless) range is very similar in weight and compactness to the Power-One unit.
Umm - it appears to be a transformerless inverter design or am I missing something?
My Power-One unit is 3.6kW rated and weighs 8kg and is the size of a Pizza box. .