Space and Science BS Thread

The biggest issue that lithium solved is maintenance. I know a few people that did their own solar and batteries for fairly cheap and have eliminated their energy bill. But that solution only really works in the suburbs or the back country. Cities are still screwed.

I was kinda digging tidal generators, but nuclear is still the best we have at the moment.

 

There's also lots of areas, like Canada, where we are charged for both the power and the transmission fees. The transmission fees, if realistic, are more costly than the actual power. So that kind of kills off the grid solutions unless you want to pay to have your house removed from the grid.

 

BTW this is funny as hell IMHO. Not a huge GM fan, but this is a good commercial for EVs.

https://youtu.be/yCy-a_E2I3s

 

Because transmission is all about managed loss. If we can get wind and solar generation decentralized (and I mean literally everywhere) then a lot of transmission loss is negated.

 

I was working on an unplugged HF amp one day. Yadayada, 3200v discharged from the capacitors into my hand. Said hand felt like it was continously being hit with a sledge hammer for 8 straight hours.

 

Yeah, we avoided the ones from the amps. The little ones in the tactical radios were okay for jokes.

You could have fun all day long with a field phone, field wire, 4 fresh D cell batteries, and metal folding chairs. Wire up the phone to the chair, pop in the batteries, and watch from a safe distance for your unsuspecting victim. It worked best when you cranked very slowly at first - it was more an itching. Then, whenever things were quiet or the embarrassment opportunities at their best, give the phone three hard cranks then yank the wire away. They scream, usually curse, and you're already 50 yards away before anyone starts to figure out what happened.

 

Now when you say pay to have your house removed from the grid, are you talking about a switch, or paying a tax/fee for the privilege of not using their service?

 

You have to pay a fee that includes lost potential revenue. At least a couple of years back that was still the case. Some have tried to fight it in court but lost.

 

That's some next level ridiculous BS...

 

Utilities are well protected in Canada. It's a catch 22 type of situation. They have to run power and natural gas lines to homes in most areas for free. So that's nice. The catch is you don't have the option to say no to having those lines ran and once they are there, you owe the month base fees to maintain the entire system.

 

Around here people voluntarily stay connected to the grid so that they can sell back excess generated electricity. There's a ranch out near Abilene near where my brother goes fishing that is fully self-sustaining in the winter, and in the summer sells back something like $1000/month of electricity. They're solar and wind (not blades, but smaller fans) and something like 10K head of cattle. And the smaller footprint spinning windmills are cheaper to install and maintain, and can survive all manner of Texas weather.

 

That brings up the second huge issue up here under the current system. While you can zero, or even get paid FMV, your consumption part of the bill you don't get the transmission fee back. Effectively you still owe transmission fees even if you are a net contributor to the grid until those fees are covered. Given over half of most peoples bill is transmission fees, it's a hurdle to home/cottage based renewables.

 

With all but the most rural locations running utilities to a house is pretty easily absorbed into the cost of building the house. It sounds to me like they are screwing you hard.

 

It's the cost of fair access here, at least for now. The lines are publicly accessible as well. You don't have to buy power from the line owner, you can buy from a secondary supplier or utilities company that has no stake in the local infrastructure and the costs that the utility providers can charge each other are heavily regulated. The power costs are also often capped. Last I checked we pay the equivalent of about 5 cents CAD per KWH here with transmission costs factored in.

To be clear I'm not defending the system, but it does have it's own Pros as well as Cons. It's the way of things here. Not going to make it political, it's just different than the US and it's limiting home energy planning.

 

I guess that makes a little more sense. Here the utility owns the lines. And depending on your usages here in cali it can be up to 58 cents per KWH. And in some areas of cali they turn your power off I'd the wind blows harder than a fart. Buddy of mine got tired of that, went solar with batteries, and disconnected himself from the grid over a year ago. Though that's just a switch and he can connect to the grid in 5 seconds.

 

Our benefit in Texas, especially in the summer, is to be residential solar (and overproduce) during the day (selling back all excess when it's expensive) and only drawing from the utility at night when the rate is lower. We'll be going solar as soon as we have some landscaping issues corrected (they're screwing with the foundation - don't live on the side of a hill). All of our neighbors had huge drops in the power side of their utility bill - from $300 to around $45 a month.

They're all 2-story homes with limited roof space - I'm the largest ranch home with over 2400 feet of roof space. If I can double-up on panels (now that the price per panel is half what it was 5 years ago) I should see an improvement over that.

 

I take it that $300 is because of A/C? Texas is on the list of places I might move to, but dayum that's a lot per month.

 

Yeah, that's AC. We've had some heat waves over the last few years that have been brutal. Nighttime temps down into the low 80s, and humid. With these energy star compliant super-tight homes, the AC has to run to pull the humidity out.

 

I didn't even run my ac last year. I'm going to miss the weather in San Diego...

 

I will be running my AC tomorrow. Forecast is the low 80s.