kgwilson

Community batteries are a good option for a street or suburb of homeowners with solar panels. They can be plonked pretty much anywhere just like sub stations. Homeowners who are part of the scheme feed their power in to the battery during the day when their solar is producing a surplus and draw on the battery at night. The concept is simple, has already been proven but few have been created or are operating. You get paid for the power you feed in and pay for what you draw out, less of course the costs associated with installing, operating and maintaining the system. To me this makes more sense than putting in your own home battery given the exorbitant installed cost of a 13 kWh Tesla Powerwall at $13-15,000. Of course if you have an electric vehicle you have a mobile battery of 40 to 100 kWh & now the government has approved V2H & V2G that will appeal to some though maybe not if your car is parked at your work every day.

I have not studied the detail of how photo voltaic arrays actually work but while they produce some power on cloudy days it is small compared to full sun. The angle at which the suns rays reach the panel also has a profound effect. Heat is also the enemy of PV cells and they produce less power in mid Summer when the sun may be directly overhead at a perfect angle of 90 degrees than they do in Spring when the angle is not so good but it is cooler. My system tracks the power output in real time & it is very clear when a cloud obscures the sum even for only a minute or 2. Most PV systems are fixed so face whatever direction and angle the roof is. Tracking the suns movement (though it really is the other way around) to get a perfect angle will provide the best results but there is a technology cost plus the system uses some power to operate & then there is maintenance. There are some solar farms that use tracking but most do not as it is not economically viable.

There are plenty of qualified Electricians who in my opinion are not competent. The cables in the ceiling of my house were loose and all over the place when I bought the place new. Some of this was caused by the insulation installers and some by the Electrician. Switches, sockets & junction boxes were generally OK but some showed bare wire as the stripped end was too long and not doubled or twisted when clamped down with the grub screws. Then the cables behind the meter and distribution board were a birds nest though all connected correctly. I always ensure everything is neat and nicely looped. I first became interested in electrical stuff when I worked for my flatmate Electrician in London in 1973-74 as a Sparky's mate. We rewired a row of 5 story Victorian mansions behind Kensington Palace. I got to know the certifiers & I signed a lot of the Final Inspection forms even though they knew I was not the boss.

I can easily do all that myself as I once was an electrical engineer. I installed my EVSE myself & all it cost was 12 metres of 6mm TPS and a RCCB (residual current circuit breaker). Total cost under $90.00. An electrician quoted me (under 10 metres and through 1 wall only $600.00. Over 10 metres more than 1 wall away from $1000.00 to $1,500.00 depending on complexity. The V2H & V2G solutions automate everything including the solar so power will flow from solar to the car or house or grid and vice versa I have done similar to yours for running 3 x 11 kVA generators and distributing the load at our SES shed. This time though I designed the system & a sparky installed it. Very simple & no power factor to consider. I separated all power points lighting, water heating, stoves etc based on load with 3 position circuit breakers & isolator switches for each. Nothing to plug or unplug. Just fire up the generators when the power goes out and flip the switches & the same when the power comes back & then just go to the shed & turn the generators off. Automating the process

I have 8.5 kW of solar panels connected to the grid. I use as much of the solar energy as I can & the rest (up to a maximum of 5kW) is exported to the grid. This is how most household solar systems work. The problem is that should the grid fail & there is a power outage I can't use the power still being produced by the panels. This was a fundamental decision by the energy suppliers and retailers to maintain control. Now of course with batteries that control is slowly being eroded. I don't have a home battery so I have to hook the car up when the power goes out. At present i don't have any V2H or V2G capability so just use a 15 amp extension cable to run the fridge, freezer, lights, TV etc till the power comes back on. V2H & V2G is now legal but at present the cost to install the hardware and software connected to your system at home is prohibitive. The maximum current that can be drawn from the car battery is 32 amps or 7.4kW & is single phase. Vehicles & houses with 3 phase supply have a maximum of 11kW. My car is always charged from the solar panels so at least I have free fuel for motoring and when there is a power failure it only takes 5 minutes to hook up the essentials. This is not as ideal as a V2H system that automates this or V2G where it would also automate export (& import) to/from the grid.

My average power use is 7 kWh per day. This is for a 2 person household with only electricity. Solar panels provide around 50kWh a day at present & most of that is exported. In July the figure is 28-30 kWh/day. Of course it is less on cloudy days. Since February I have produced 9.3 megawatts. I have done just on 20,000km in my EV and other than the 6 long trips I have done of about 2600km all the power has come from solar and my 2 hours of free power per day & most of that is my own solar anyway. My last power bill was a $30.00 credit. The car battery stores 64 kWh so in theory I could run the house for 9 days off the car battery. Duttons devotees ignore this but most people with solar on their rooftops know these are real benefits. The Rondo system and numerous other storage systems like molten salt superheated by the sun & stored for later release are way cheaper and simpler with no radio active issues and don't take years to build.

Australia is the sunniest county on earth so solar makes so much sense. Even though the subsidies have all but gone, the rooftop solar installation industry is still going gangbusters now with more than 4 million installations. The one thing we are not short of is land. The problem is that the vast open spaces where huge solar farms could easily be installed are a long way from where most of the population lives. This though has not deterred the plan to export solar generated electricity to Singapore vi an undersea cable. Plans for solar & wind has met with considerable resistance from locals in outback areas, mostly due to fear of the unknown. Even though solar & wind generation has been around for decades and there a proven cases where cropping and grazing co-exists perfectly with both there is still a lot of resistance. Of course a lot of the negativity is promoted by the fossil fuel industry especially coal & gas. California now has almost 14 gigawatts of battery storage. It took 5 years to get to 10 GW & just 6 months to add another 3GW. here in Australia our total is just 3GW. This is forecast to increase to 36GW by 2035 unless of course stupidity over rules logic and common sense.

Politicians especially the conservative lot are always talking of base load power. Energy experts say this is an invalid term and relates to coal fired power that is unable to change with demand and operates in the very small window from full on to flat out. Nuclear generation falls in to this same category. The term that is relevant is peak demand and the ability to address this as it happens at any time. This is where batteries come in to play as does Gas and (if we ever get any) pumped hydro. Batteries react almost instantly with Gas and pumped hydro a little behind. Renewables especially solar provide huge amounts of electricity on sunny days and when it is hot everyone uses air conditioning. The biggest cause for alarm is on hot sunny days when brown outs are likely due to demand. Dutton & Co are always on about what about when the sun don't shine & the wind don't blow. Simply it is the ability to store energy. Coal & nuclear won't do this and have never done this. It is just that there has been more being produced than we can use. We need a lot more storage capacity. At times there is more energy being produced from rooftop solar than required on the Eastern Seaboard. South Australia regularly exports excess wind and solar energy to Victoria & NSW. There are lots of battery projects on the way & these will have the capability of reacting to peak demand. 7 nuclear plants won't & they are supposed to use the existing supply infrastructure but Duttons mob have forgotten that this infrastructure has mostly already been repurposed. The rollout of renewable projects should be full on but it is thwarted by red tape, NIMBYs and basic ignorance.

Anything that describes how it is without political or financial bias should be promoted and celebrated.

The US considers itself the bastion of democracy and freedom but the reality is far from that. While Joe has been President the US stayed pretty steady, the economic indexes improved, inflation went down as did unemployment, climate change was an issue with green energy and renewables high on the agenda but perceptions of what was happening and where they were headed spiraled downward. Reality verses perception, all in a post truth world where now perception IS reality. The US national debt is now over $36 trillion. take a look at the debt clock, the interest payments alone are now more than $US 20,400 per adult. Only a few years ago they stopped paying government workers as they did not want the debt to get higher that $US13 trillion. I wonder where the tipping point is. We may find out in the next 4 years.

I hope the driver was put away for that.

My MG4 is the first car I have had without a conventional handbrake. It took a bit of getting used to. The rotary gear selector is D N & R & pressing it in the middle selects the parking brake. It is all automatic for hills etc & has an auto hold process when at traffic lights. Just tap the foot brake a bit harder when you stop & it puts the parking brake on & the brake light stays on then just use the accelerator to move off. Hill starts are exactly the same. In one pedal drive mode you don't need to touch the brake pedal at all. The car just comes to a complete stop & the park brake is automatically applied. It also has an emergency stop 1 or 2 finger operated brake lever right next to the rotary selector which is also electronic but uses an independent system & can be held on manually if required. I have only used this once to see how it worked. All very weird till you get used to it but I wouldn't go back to the old manual handbrake now.

Chicago is one of the coldest places i have been as well. I was changing planes there and there was a blizzard outside. Temperature was minus twenty something fahrenheit & windchill well below -30 or about -35 deg celcius. There were 3 doors to get to the outside (2 airlocks). When I breathed in my nasal hairs froze & I felt like I couldn't breathe at all. You could throw a boiling hot cup of coffee in to the air and it would freeze instantly and fall to the ground as ice crystals. This was back in the late 80s.

Chinas power is in its economy. The last thing they want is to be drawn in to any conflict that will stop or severely reduce their European and American customers. Xi has been flat out garnering friends from the latest APEC meeting in Peru to oppose Trump & his proposed tarrifs. A major war is not good for business. Putin is a megalomaniac and any attempt to use Nukes will result in him falling out a window at the vey least. His Oligarc mates will see to it.

Electric motorbikes have been around almost as long as electric cars. The bigger ones have stunning performance with low mounted batteries providing a low CoG & superb handling.