Posted on 01/21/2022 6:35:00 AM PST by dennisw
The expensive retrofit is to put scrubbers on coal plants. I have zero problems running dirty coal plants if they are going to be converted to natural gas. I do have a problem increasing the cost of burning coal. Go with the least expensive and most efficient. I should also say I am fine with nuclear power plants if that makes economical sense when compare to natural gas.
I just hope those 837 ft. tall towers are in full view of King Obongo’s oceanfront palace.
“A “lifeline” for whom???? Certainly not the people of the area, “
You are forgetting that when the government takes your tax money to subsidize windfarms, ruins the natural beauty of the coastline and blights it with 400 foot tall steel towers for miles in every direction, and replaces reliable power with power that disappears 75 percent of the time, they are HELPING you and you better be grateful or they will intercept your emails and put you in jail for sedition.
My theory about all of this is “follow the money”. Somebody, somewhere, is getting the gubmint gimmeedats. No doubt they’ve greased the palms of the proper politicians...
Indeed, Sweet Home Alabama. Plenty of sunshine if you want to go solar. We get our power from Alabama coal, lot’s of hydropower from our abundant rivers and nuclear for good measure. Low taxes and affordable property. What’s not to like. We have two farms here, going to have to slow down soon and sell one. Glad this is where I ended up.
>> Imagine a landscape with millions of bare windmill towers dotting the landscape like porcupine quills.
Now imagine a host of skilled painters, who turn each derelict remain into an art piece of individually designed, but coherent, pieces of art. A gigantic landscape art piece whose individual pieces echo the constantly changing, but always the same, ripples and waves. No danger to the birds. No sounds that assault the ears and dull the soul.
Outside of the approved art collection, cut the remaining posts off at sand level and create a new water environment surrounded with cameras - a potential tourist diving experience.
But we have to wait until the idiots overdose on their own self-satisfaction to see common sense attack the problem in all the myriad locations with varied and clever solutions.
Sea Animals - Joseph Blanchard
https://youtu.be/UQZME_dpC_s
Love your quill image!
Unless you do it on your own and make sure it's optimized for your specific needs. And even then things have to be just right. For example, I have no trees putting shade onto my roof. My roof is metal (if it was a 10-year shingle roof I'd have to remove my panels and replace them in 10 years when I replaced my roof, while my panels have 25 year warranties). I have a large portion of my roof facing south and at a somewhat steep angle (important particularly in the winter when the sun is low in the sky even at noon). My wife is retired and does chores (run appliances) throughout the day instead of waiting until both of us get home from work (after the sun is down, which would make us completely dependent on the batteries) and run many appliances simultaneously (my DC to AC inverter can produce at best 10 kW at any time even if I've got plenty of sunshine and my 30 kWh batteries are fully charged, so running all appliances at the same time like we used to would mean pulling power from the grid even in optimum solar days).
So we live in an almost perfect state for solar and I'm in an almost perfect situation for solar. That's why it's paying for itself.
Heh— yeah, one should be “grateful”. That is certainly their attitude, cause of course it’s their money not ours...sheesh.
I’m sure you are getting paid a premium for the power you generate. If you were getting paid the “avoided cost rate” (which is what it would cost the utility to generate the next incremental kWh), you wouldn’t find it anywhere near as economic.
Basically, when I sat down with my solar installer and showed him my notes on how much power I consume each month, average peak solar hour per month in my area, etc., he and I designed a system with the understanding that it produces more than I need most days from mid spring to mid fall, and not enough the rest of the year. I didn't overdo it with the expectation of selling excess to the power company to make up the costs.
There's a monthly fee you have to pay to participate in the power buyback program. That fee is a lot more than the little bit of money I'd get back (the power company buys back at about 20% the rate they sell it to you). Thus, I don't participate in it. Thus, I didn't err on the side of getting a solar system that's way more than I need. That's why I average it producing a hair over 50% of what I need (more than that in the non-winter months, less than that in the winter).
Plus there's another benefit to not putting power back onto the grid. If you do that you have to set up your system to automatically shut off when the grid goes down (like during a storm). My inverter doesn't do that. So when the grid goes down I still have power (assuming the batteries are charged, which if I planned ahead of time for a storm they are). If I have another big tornado that knocks the power out for a week but misses my house I'll have at least some power. I can reduce my luxury power consumption like not running the hot tub and have all of the power I need (since tornadoes here usually occur in the spring when the weather is great for solar).
That sounds like an excellent system design you created!
Did you consider an Automatic Transfer Switch to cut off the mains circuit if it goes out? That’s what we use on our natural gas fired emergency generator.
My inverter usually gradually switches, though it can do a hard switch if needed. Right now my solar system is producing only 0.8 kW (800 watts) because it's cloudy and in the afternoon in January. My house is using 2 kW (2,000 watts). Thus I need more power than I'm getting from solar, so my inverter is pulling the remaining 1.2 kW from my batteries that got charged earlier today.
If my batteries were drained (I don't let them get below 30% charged so we'll count that level as drained) my inverter would be pulling the 1.2 kW from the grid. That's less than the 2 kW I'm consuming. So it's not a hard slam switch like an automatic transfer switch where you're either connected to the grid or connected to the generator.
The same for when I'm consuming more power than my inverter can convert to AC (9.5 kW at a time). Yesterday late in the evening my solar batteries were still well charged, but I was needing 12 kW because my wife and I were in the hot tub while my variable speed heat pump was on full blast keeping the house warm during 30 degree weather (really it was the heat strips in my system). So my inverter was pulling about 3 kW from the grid and the other 9 kW from the batteries -- even though the batteries had plenty of charge and could have powered the whole thing, the inverter was at full capacity converting DC to AC and had to get help from the grid.
So that's what a transfer switch looks like with an inverter managing many things at once and being set to save on pulling from the grid whenever possible.
As long as the grid power is on then both of my panels are powered, even if I'm not using grid power at all because my solar system is producing everything I need.
My backup generator installation has two load shed modules. If the 26 kW generator can’t make enough power, it will drop off the oven first, then the AC. I’m going to add a 7 kW garage heater and that will get a load shed module, too.
We ordered a 20 kW generator, around March 2021, but the manufacturer came out with a 26 kW model for not a lot more money, so we went with that. That upgrade allowed us to reduce the load shed modules from four to two saving a lot there.
Now we are waiting for a big storm and extended outage to get some benefit out of the system!
There isn’t a lot of solar energy in North Idaho and we are in a heavily wooded area anyway.
Alabama has tons of trees too. Most of my property is fairly thick woods, but a sizeable clearing was made for my house. I have about 1/2 acre of grass to cut surrounding my house within an almost 2 acre lot that's mostly trees. Plus it's built on a hill with the south facing downhill (thus my solar panels on the south portion of my 2-story house are above the tree line at the bottom of the hill of my yard).
So when we have storms we have lots of trees to fall on the power lines like you probably have. Plus I have tons of privacy from the trees. But the trees don't block my solar system because they're not close enough to the south side of my house.
Is the generator loud? Is it natural gas powered? My natural gas bill was going way up before I went all-electric last year. But I guess if you use it only rarely the natural gas cost isn't an issue.
Yes, it is powered by NG. We really didn’t have room for a big propane tank.
“Is it loud?” — LOL, I’m still waiting to find out. I was out of town when the installation was completed and it was tested. We put it on a side of our house buffered by the attached garage, so we probably won’t hear it. It runs two minutes per week for a self-check and exercise cycle. It also runs 30 minutes once a year for a more exhaustive check. I’ve been meaning to go out and put the “Start” button to hear it myself, but haven’t gotten around to it yet. Our neighbors will probably hear it more than we will. The units have good sound enclosures and mufflers, so the sound is rather subdued.
We hear other generators in the neighborhood during their self-test runs, but theirs are set for 20 to 30 minutes once a week.
A) Like I said my solar system is backup only when the sun's out or only if I have charged my batteries (which means the power outage can't take me by surprise, because usually I have my solar system set to save money, which means drain the batteries before pulling from the grid).
I've been thinking about getting an EV truck if they make one cheap enough. I've also been thinking about upgrading my solar system after it's paid for itself (imagine after it's paid for itself in the 10th year I keep putting what it saves me into an investment account until the batteries have to be replaced around the 19th year, thus I'll have lost of cash that I consider "solar money" to maintain or upgrade the system and be more efficient). Also in the back of my mind is if my power company starts charging me $80-ish a month for the solar fee even if I don't participate in their buyback program. I might say screw them, upgrade my solar system to be what I need except for when it rains for a week at a time, and use a generator on those days (my inverter can automatically fire it up if needed).
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