this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2024
166 points (97.7% liked)

Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

5392 readers
187 users here now

Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world.  About 1C of total warming.  Second chart:  about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability.  Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases.  About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:

Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] drkt@scribe.disroot.org 63 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

what?

Effectively cutting 30% of electricity going into the household isn't going to help the environment? It means less transmission losses. It means less grid infrastructure which consists largely of copper and steel, which both produce a lot of emissions in their production.

Even if it did nothing for the environment, local energy independence is still such a massive boon to any community that it can't be overlooked.

[–] Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

While the panels are important, the main reason why its important to also have the battery component is because most people tend to work when daylight is out (where the house is theoretically using up the least amount of power) thus, if one didn't have a battery, its pushing the power back into the grid. At the same time, power usage tends to spike when it gets closer to night, where solar is ineffective, and relies thus back on the grid if there's no battery. While personally(not the original person) would never claim it does essentially nothing, the battery component is extremely critical for energy independence as the time period people want to minimize grid usage the most should be during the peak hours, which inconveniently is when the sun is down.

[–] drkt@scribe.disroot.org 8 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

pushing the power back into the grid.

These units do not push electricity into the grid unless their fail-saves are bypassed deliberately or fail catastrophically.

Anyway, no, it's not that important. You already have a battery at home- your entire home. If you're overproducing electricity then you can convert it to another medium such as hot or cold air depending on the time of year and save on AC. You can run preload your washer and make it run when production is at peak automatically. Be creative. Most people will not be overproducing electricity with one of these kits.

Additionally, local energy independence is not about being off-grid, it's about being able to charge and use a radio or the internet in an emergency where the grid is out. A solar panel on the balcony provides that, it makes you independent of the grid even if you're still using the grid to run your washing machine and the oven in a non-emergency scenario. A battery will only be a boon to you if you expect the grid to go out for days at a time regularly or if your kit is large enough to actually overproduce at any point, which again, most don't; they supplement.

the battery component is extremely critical for energy independence as the time period people want to minimize grid usage the most should be during the peak hours, which inconveniently is when the sun is down.

I don't understand what you mean by this. The time people want to minimize their grid usage is during the hours of 16-19 which is peak usage and when electricity is most expensive. These panels will still provide a decent supplement in that time during the summer half of the year.

In summary, I just don't think a battery is going to add much unless you're expecting to overproduce regularly which a balcony panel isn't gonna do.

edit: I should mention that the larger kits do come with battery options, because those could be expected to overproduce, and thus would be useful.

[–] Asetru@feddit.org 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

These units do not push electricity into the grid unless their fail-saves are bypassed deliberately or fail catastrophically.

What are you talking about? Of course, energy that isn't used in the household is pushed back to the grid.

[–] superb@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 days ago (3 children)

No, that’s not how it works in the general case. There are ways to setup a house to back power but it’s more complicated than just plugging it in.

Without proper safeties in place back flowing power to the grid becomes extremely dangerous for line technicians

[–] eleitl@lemm.ee 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

On loss of power these inverters cut off within 20 ms or so. These are grid-tied, not insular (though with hacked firmware some of the models can be made insular-capable).

[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

On loss of power these inverters cut off within 20 ms or so.

20ms are exactly 1/50th of a second i.e. our grid frequency I think there's some more leeway. A whole oscillation being gone surely is suspicious and you want to shut off but that might take another millisecond or two.

[–] eleitl@lemm.ee 3 points 1 day ago

It's not a hard realtime cutoff spec, more a relais native actuation time. And from the behaviour I've seen they are ramping up slowly over minutes when the mains power is back, which seems a sensible thing to do.

[–] Anivia@feddit.org 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Maybe just look at how these inverters work before babbling about. These kits all come with standard off the shelf micro inverters, or rarely bigger string inverters, and will feed back up to 0,8wk into the grid if the energy is not used in the household. If the connection to the grid is lost they turn off within less than 50ms, making them completely safe for line technicians

[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

and will feed back up to 0,8wk into the grid if the energy is not used in the household.

Even more precisely: If the energy isn't used on the exact phase the inverter is connected to. You might be simultaneously backfeeding 800W on one phase and draw 3000W from the grid for your kettle on another, pretty much every single installation (at least in Germany) is three-phase at the main breaker panel, then distributing (and three-phase for the stove). Good ole Ferraris meters only record the total sum (the wheel would turn at the speed of 2200W) but you're still using grid infrastructure which is one of the reasons why the installations have to be small: Because your utility can't bill you for grid usage.

[–] superb@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 day ago

Yes that’s the setup I was talking about. Not every grid in every country is setup for this though

[–] Asetru@feddit.org 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

No, that’s not how it works in the general case. There are ways to setup a house to back power but it’s more complicated than just plugging it in.

So what you're saying is that the general case is that it feeds back into the grid unless there are additional measures taken? But at the same time, it's not the general case? Huh?

Without proper safeties in place back flowing power to the grid becomes extremely dangerous for line technicians

Which is why, where I live, you have to register your devices with the utility company.

[–] superb@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 day ago

So what you're saying is that the general case is that it feeds back into the grid unless there are additional measures taken? But at the same time, it's not the general case?

I was saying the general case is that they aren’t tied to the grid, but that they could be setup to do so. I’m almost definitely wrong about how often these are tied to the grid though.

Which is why, where I live, you have to register your devices with the utility company.

Yup! I’d be shocked if a country didn’t make you inform your utility.

[–] Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip 0 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I don’t understand what you mean by this. The time people want to minimize their grid usage is during the hours of 16-19 which is peak usage and when electricity is most expensive. These panels will still provide a decent supplement in that time during the summer half of the year.

the suns only up during that time period over the summer. during other parts of the year, it's only partially up. If you have to go for a specific time of the year in order to fix a problem, then it hasn't fixed much of the problem if it only addresses 1/4 seasons. solar is often not that strong during peak usage. It's basically effective if you have a lot of appliances at home that are timed specifically to run when most people are away, which is the part that you have to train an audience to do.

[–] eleitl@lemm.ee 2 points 1 day ago

These days we have lots of people with home office. There are appliances like refrigerators and home electronics which contribute to the domestic baseload. With battery buffering and higher production capacity you can flatten the generation peak and increase self-consumption, for the price of longer ROI.