Seeing that somebody has done it is very inspiring, and if I didn't see a high chance of moving in the next 5 years I'd be on it tomorrow.
Well - I say “off grid” but I’ve built a grid - I now have over a km of buried SWA cable linking the three houses on our land, battery banks at each (60kWh of OPzS down at the mill, 15kWh of LiFePO4 at each of the others), and victron inverter-chargers all over the shop. Two arrays of panels each 8kW, one winter optimised, one summer optimised, and planning on adding a third to make more of the morning sun, as we are in a deep and steep valley with awkward topography. Have mucked around with hydro on and off before landing on a plan for an overshot waterwheel using bits of a burned-out ‘88 hilux, which is my current project. Pessimistically it will give us a constant 1.5kW, but theoretically it should end up nearer 3. Either way, that’s a lot of power. Right now I’m stuck running a Honda generator off our biogas in the winter, and it works, but it’s noisy and I have to go yank the cord to start it, usually in the pouring rain.
Using victron and fronius gear all over, frequency shifting to control where the power goes, and home assistant to automate the whole shebang where it’s beyond what the inverters and chargers can do themselves.
As we aren’t grid connected, the permitting process is… “you do what you want”.
It’s all far, far more straightforward than most people think - the hard bit is the physical install, as you’re inevitably lugging awkward panels onto roofs or up cliffs (going for smaller panels can help with this if you’re doing it without any help), or incredibly heavy batteries to wherever they need to be. The lithium arrays weigh about 150kg each, the lead array the better part of 2000kg.
People assume it must have cost hundreds of thousands of euros, but no - all in it has been about €30k, and our ongoing costs are zero.
Out of curiosity, have you ever calculated the cost of the batteries over their expected lifetime ?
I draw 1-1.5kW for my servers in a spare bedroom. It’s not a lot of spindles/cores, just a few dozen.
Your toaster draws 1kW for maybe 5 minutes a day, which is maybe 30kWh per year.
The power in this comparison is not important, it's the total energy consumed (which is what you are billed for in the end).
Odd argument. A cheetah can run up to 110kmh, but that doesn't mean they can cross 110 kilometres in an hour.
If all he’s pulling is 1kW I’m jealous.
(I do have an epyc with a bunch of memory and storage, but never bothered doing the math since my UPS claims to be able to run with the average load for 30+mins)
Networking gear taking that much when it's not busy is really unfortunate. Did IEEE slack on adding effective sleep/downclocking features?
Oxide Computer found that going from tiny 20mm fans to 80mm dropped their chassis power usage bigly: they found a rack full of 1U servers had 25% of its power going to the fans (efficiency is to the cube of the radius).
He mentioned that he refuses downsizing for ideological reasons, and I totally get that, but there's a certain amount of rightsizing that doesn't hurt in practical operation, and still let's you keep what feels like an awesome, big, complex model train setup in your garage.
Not all rust has to spin, almost no ports have to be 10GE, and a lot can be virtualized. Consumer CPUs have much lower idle than old xeons, and having less DIMMs with the same capacity also seems to pay off.
I'd be surprised if he couldn't cut that energy usage to 10% with a clear separation between hot and cold storage, and realistic expectations of bandwidth requirements.
But hey, I'm not judging. Solar power is great, and I don't mind waste as long as he can afford it and it makes him happy. Nobody drives the car they actually need either, and that is a much bigger problem.
Running aircon to burn the excess is better than feeding an already overloaded grid, too. The second best outcome for them, neatly contained in a single euro amount.
There's a point where the grid has so much solar power that we need to start shedding production as a general rule and not just as an intermittent temporary measure, but I don't think we're anywhere near that point.
As an American I welcome you to our national pastime: burning kWhs on aircon! :P
Even if you are instead in Newfoundland, maybe ask cecooperative.ca if there us a project to create one in your province.
I also have 60kWh of batteries in my kitchen, but for the average person who doesn’t want to deal with this stuff, having to admin part of the power grid is a tragic waste.
If the PUC and power company weren’t bastards, this could all be in a giant field somewhere staffed by a tiny fraction of the people who have to waste their lives dealing with it in their garages. So many unnecessary struts, so much caulk and EPO switches, so many inverters.
Highly distributed energy lessens the peak demands on the T&D system, which means that the T&D system can be smaller, which greatly reduces the fixed cost of T&D. Utility scale solar requires greatly expanding transmission lines, to the extent that lack of transmission is the biggest barrier to adding solar to the grid in most of the US.
So even if installation costs of solar are higher on the grid edge, it usually makes a ton of sense, and this is evident in the payoff times of NEM3 systems that include batteries. As batteries get cheaper, or there's more vehicle-to-home systems out there, it will only increase.
This lessened need for T&D is the true reason that utilities in California hate solar and need to stop it. They can take a guaranteed rate of profit from anything they get to spend on T&D, but the same isn't true of generation. So utility solar, which requires building more lines and beefing up distribution substations more, lets them profit much more than residential solar.
This solves the T&D problem too, as generation remains distributed.
It’s the money.
Large neighborhood batteries seem to make a lot more sense to me than batteries in every home.
Even has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve
The solution of course is more batteries, but you can't really incentivize non-peak generation until you get the batteries. That's part of the NEM3 change that the blog mentions, to change the incentives from just solar to solar and battery.
Keeping capacity ready is probably the expensive bit.
Another way of saying that, if we were playing a city simulator as a disembodied beneficent dictator you'd want distributed generation and storage as part of your grid.
In reality there's all sorts of complications, compromises, trade-offs, graft and politics but on balance those factors are working against distributed solar which is succeeding despite them.
Some people have a knee-jerk reaction to anything that requires legislation, regulation or subsidies which clouds the issue though.
You could build fireproof mini storage substations in blocks or subdivisions to load shift, but taking a chunk out of everyone’s garage space and forcing every person to do inverter and battery maintenance is silly.
Democracy really limits governments
https://www.gbnews.com/money/energy-bills-rise-postcode-lott...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/energy-prices...
(nobody ever describes house prices as a "postcode lottery"!)
Make sure you are buying and not leasing from the company, have that all rolled into a single loan and then you claim the tax credits to help pay for the reroof.
To add to this, they take care of getting the certified roofers, the city permits for both the roof and solar and handle the PTO for you, which from what you called out is even more costs.
No, the smart move here is to find out where the installers buy from, and buy from them. I never explicitly stated I was or wasn’t an installer, they just assumed that I was, as I was buying pallets of panels and kilometres of cabling.
The one advantage of going with a professional installer is that it makes it a lot easier to get grants - I had to spin up a company and invoice myself to get my rebate.
Funnily enough back home along the equator, having a solar setup still is a social signal of luxury!
Giving up one foot of space along one garage wall is not a big deal. And if you're worried about physically getting the batteries into place, hiring people would still be cheaper than movers.
Also, a basement that removes cooling costs for the home lab would not make a big difference. If the 800W A/C unit runs 8 hours a day for 4 months out of the year, then it's only about 10% of the home lab power use. Since it's not needed at night it's probably even less.
There are benefits to being in the bay area, too. This happens to not be one of them.
Living in "a part of the country that has basements" is no utopia either.
Also: my house, in the bay area... has a basement.
There are plenty of more efficient ways of doing things, but I still stuck solar on this old, energy inefficient house.
Not the detract from the rest of the article, but - it's a company, what did you expect?
Eg basic environmental care/policies or how they handle staff and customers.
For actual labor - it's about half days to install roof racks (I have shingle roof so quite a bit of time on angle grinder). Another half day to put panels on (requires 1 or more helpers), run a cable thru roof space. I've installed 12 panels on 2 facia.
My hack was hiring electrician to install inverter so I can export to grid (I'm in New Zealand).
Wow these rates are crazy. A 10kW setup costs you maybe €10.000 all-in here in the Netherlands.
What's going on with these rates? Do they already include the ridiculous tarrifs?
A new battery setup for a 20kWh LFP battery + 10 kW inverter + installation is €7000 now.
And dropping, fast.
Assuming batteries and PV come from China, someone in California is making a lot of money or the government is straining the process with bureaucracy costing $30.000 per setup.
Markups due to subsidies are a part of it.
- Greed kicks in because capitalism: prices rise again, maybe not back to pre-subsidy levels, but they rise.
- Subsidy gets axed: prices rise to above pre-subsidy levels.
(Note: I'm personally entirely pro "subsidize things you want more of". But that requires a stable, trustworthy government that plans on longer timescales.)
the Netherlands had a net-metering subsidiy + good competition + frictionless install and as a result we have 3,5 solar panels per person installed.
- Demand drops due to increased price to buyers.
- Prices drop so manufacturers can remain profitable.
There were no greedy people before capitalism. Of that we can be sure.
Customer is willing to pay 10k, state is willing to pay 5k. Supplier will charge 15k.
Assuming the base cost is 8k
Supplier A and Supplier B charge 15k and have 100 customers between them, making 350k each
Supplier B decides to undercut Supplier A, and charge 14k, and get all the customers, making 600k profit
Customer might be willing to pay 10k, but if there's two identical quotes, one for 10k and one for 9k they'll go for the 9k
But you see the point. There's a comfortable cushion where everyone can make more money off the taxpayer and have an easier time of it. Spend a bit of it on better marketing to elevate yourself and justify the higher price in people's minds.
In France, the state pays max(rate * rent, cap) for apartments for students, unemployed and poor workers. Usually people don't qualify for ratio of the rent, because it's way over the cap for the subsidy. To keep up with inflation, the state re-evaluate the cap of the subsidy almost every year.
A french economist showed that there was a correlation between the cap of the rent subsidy and the rental market prices for small apartments. Of course, correlation is not causation, it could just be that the rental market follows the inflation as much as the cap. But this correlation doesn't happen for bigger and more luxurious appartments. Her explanation is that your poor household is only ready to afford €100 per month, as an example, the subsidy cap is €500, so the rental market prices these apartments to €600 (= 100 + 500). When the state re-evaluate the cap to €550, the rental market goes up to €650. (= 100 + 150)
[1] https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/fichier/1376573/es381-3...
In a market like solar, there is production of more solar systems. There are also multiple readily available substitutes. (e.g. on-grid power) The effect of the subsidy should drive increased volume from manufacturers, keeping net price stable.
Under the subsidy rules for feed-in-tariffs at the time, that had to be done with an MCS approved installer. All work in England would require an approved "Part P" signoff anyway. However it did not require council planning approva, nor grid approval for that size of system.
I have a powerwall 2 with 5kw panels, which I've had since about 2021. At the time it was the biggest, cheapest, had a grid isolation mode, and could be mounted outside. (I didn't trust tesla back then, and I sure as shit don't now. Moreover, once it catches fire, that shit aint going out anytime soon)
It still cost about £7k installed.
From about march/april to end of october, we are power sufficient (london, even with rainy days, gas hot water though.)
If I were to get a new system, 13kwhr of battery is something like £2k, plus inverter/charger.
The panels are dirt cheap, to the point where the scaffolding costs more than the panels. (and the mounts.)
A $45k quote would correspond roughly to 14k euro of materials.
There is a whole cottage industry of DIY 48V 15kWh batteries based on LFP prismatic cells (16x) and special battery case resulting a price of around 1500 Euro for 15 kWh.
A DIY setup is quite doable, Deye (EG4) or Victron make suitable inverters.
The continuous 1 kW power draw I find Ludicrous, probably especially as a European. I would realy rethink what is absolutely necessary. Huge data storage was my hobby but the storage server is only turned on when required, saves a lot of power.
Took me 1-2 month planning and then 3 month building it alone nearly each day. Sept 2023 til Xmas 2023. Got all the hardware from a PV dealer friend on his purchase price level. Even 24 panels I have put myself alone onto the roof. With two persons it was a bit better.
I've got: 420w x 71 Trina solar panels and two SolarEdge inverters. SE10K Hybrid and a SE17k. Also a 24kWh BYD LFP battery.
All prices without state funding: Offers from local installers for 56*410W Panels without battery were around 65k CHF.
I've paid now 44k CHF including every kind of cost associated with building it.
Should write a blog post about it :-)
Next project is a solar fence with 6kWp.
When I charge the car via battery then only down to ~75% for now. The remaining energy is needed by the house during winter months.
Just for comparisons sake, our 8.6kwP setup with a 10kwH battery cost us (after subsidies from governemnt) appr. ~€11.5k. Haven't received all the subsidies yet, so the total will be lower by about 1.5k (I think). Everything was done through installers, we didn't lift a finger (also couldn't, because when it comes to electricity I have as much experience as the dog next door).
If I had more due diligence before I would have scaled up the panels up to at least 10kwP, for future proofing probably to 12kwP. This is mostly just to make sure winter is covered better, as our production is really low as we have a 10° flat roof installation.
We’re living in a big river valley where we have fog from October until March. On some days in November the fog is so dense that the whole system does not produce any kind of energy. On the other days the produced kWh are enough to charge the battery.
We have a heat pump (extrem efficient), servers, one electric car, etc which consumes all together around 13MWh per year. The solar system produces around 27.5MWh. Most of the energy gets fed back into the grid.
We’re currently investigating to connect the neighbour houses physically to us. But that takes even more time here :-(
For example, you can buy kits on amazon for powering your shed or boat and it's essentially a smaller version of what you would put on your house. No electricians needed. No permits required. Here in Germany you can buy balcony solar kits in the supermarket. They only deliver a few hundred watts of power but it's plug and play. And you can get a nice little subsidy to do that. Some of these kits only cost a couple of hundred euro.
I could see that eventually adding a microgrid to a building is not going to break the bank. Car batteries are much larger than what goes in a house and kwh prices are trending well below 100$/kwh now. Meaning it should not cost tens of thousands to get a couple of tens of kwh to store energy. Inverters shouldn't break the bank either. The going rate for solar panels is around 200$.
Mostly current prices for home setups are much higher than the component cost mainly due to regulations, labor cost, certifications, etc. If you go off grid, you can just DIY and you end up much closer to the component cost. But of course long term both component cost and other cost are coming down. With the exception of labor cost probably. Though the skills needed will become more common and you might be able to do a lot of work yourself.
This summer I'm building a solar oven to cook bread and veggies with .. and if this works well, I'll build a solar death ray to play with while I wait for lunch.
It seems to me that this is a potential route for the popularization of off-grid/local-energy-harvesting movements to gain more traction. Sure, its nice to have a whole roof full of PV panels and a battery bank to sip juice from now and then, but this still requires a heavy investment in foreign-originated parts and materials.
A solar oven/solar death ray, however, is a lot more feasible to produce locally.
I recently got a second hand electric car. I bought an EV plug (total fucking ripoff. its a fucking plug with a contactor, RCD and a CAN interface. no way is that worth fucking £600)
It has some basic control to allow me to charge from excess solar. What is not easy to do is charge at night without draining the house battery. Its fine for me, because I have Home Assistant, with enough fiddling I can get all the systems to talk to each other to play ball. (to add to the complication, I'm on a variable rate tariff, so price can be negative or £1 a kwhr)
I would really love a "house power API" that would allow a "controller" to locally control the power behavior of all the things in a house. Because at the moment, a "normal" person wouldn't be able to charge their car and have house batteries and have solar, and optimise for cost.
This way the battery does not see the load and does not provide power to your EV.
That way you can still use excess solar (before you inject it into the mains) to charge your car + you do not pull power from your battery :)
I might ask to see if thats possible. I probably need more panels to cover the winter load.
Liability coverage, and UL certification (or UK/EU equivalent), for the company is. Though see perhaps:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenEVSE
> I would really love a "house power API" that would allow a "controller" to locally control the power behavior of all the things in a house.
With regards to EV and the grid, see perhaps:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_15118
* Also: https://www.ampcontrol.io/post/what-are-ocpp-iec-63110-iso-1...
For an (industrial) electrical communication protocol, perhaps:
This is insane. And here I am shutting down nightly the drives in my synology to save 20W.
stevoski•5h ago
And not a cosmic solar system.
stevoski•1h ago
pantalaimon•55m ago