[freebeard]

A sarcasm shortage in Brazil? Who knew?

Originally Posted by redpoint5

Solar can make financial sense at the micro level because individuals don't have to contend with the enormously difficult problem of balancing power supply with demand in real time.

Solar MQTT. Selfish Solar on a Global Scale - BOB (Battery on Board). - EVTV Motor Verks

Hurricane Florence again pointed up both the vulnerability of our grid system and the advantages of solar power – along with its’ principle weakness.... One nuclear power plant was shut down entirely and two others operated at limited capacity, while over half of Duke Energy’s 3.4 million customers were without power for nearly a week and some 80,000 suffered outages for nearly two weeks.

But the damage to solar installations across the state was trivial with a handful of panels damaged.

If we take the costs of the national average kiloWatt-hour of electrical power, we find that less than 30% actually goes to power production. Another 30% goes to transmission, that is the transportation from a power plant to an urban area. And about 40% goes to distribution, the local wiring within a community.

And of course, both transmission and distribution are still done primarilly with overhead wires that also feature efficiency losses of 10-12%.

This is why I’m increasingly focused on the concept of generating power AT the point of use. Solar photovoltaic technology is no longer a science project.
....
And so for the present, we advocate maintaining a link to the grid. But we advocate you remain under the utility grid radar by simply maintaining a basic 200A 240vac link to the grid and paying the monthly minimum connection fee. Do NOT seek a “net metering” agreement or do anything to alert them that you are anything but a very low usage residential or commercial customer.

As it is QUITE common to have empty houses or apartments or dark warehouses for months or years, they really don’t have much in the way of tools to DETECT that you don’t use much electricity – as long as you pay that $11.24 connection fee every month. And you quite likely need to have a grid connection just for local code compliance.

And so you should have one. And use it as little as possible as a backup to augment your power system.

So we’ve inverted the usual scenario. Instead of a battery back up system for grid power, we envision a grid backed up battery system.

And we advocate abandoning the kumbayah vision of everybody sharing and loving each other. Do NOT seek net metering or compensation from the grid operator.

We call this SELFISH SOLAR. And of course the end mission remains the same – total independence from the grid ultimately. And we further see it as based on repurposed EV batteries for solar energy storage.