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Neat breakdown with data + some code.

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[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 29 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Basically why the grid exists to begin with. You're not supposed to be solving these engineering problems on a household budget inside a single home.

You'd be better off simply reducing your consumption or finding alternative methods of power (nat gas or maybe wind or geothermal) during the longer winter nights.

If you really want to go crazy, you should consider investing in a bigger home with better insulation and roommates. An apartment/condo block can at least leverage economies of scale, if you're dead set on DIY. More people benefiting from the setup dilutes the cost per person.

[-] Dave@lemmy.nz 13 points 2 weeks ago

I recently got a solar system and came to the conclusion that if you can sell power back to the grid (not everyone can) for some reasonable percentage of what it costs to buy it, then it will always be worth it to be connected (assuming you already are).

Quite simply, if you have enough solar capacity to get you through the winter (no house is going to have months of battery storage), then you will always be creating far more than you need in the summer. Selling this excess will easily cover any costs associated to being on the grid.

Also at current prices batteries are good for backup power only, it's always cheaper to sell excess power to the grid in the day and buy it back at night than it is to have battery capacity to get through the night. I worked out it would take 40 years for our battery to pay for itself (assuming the battery kept a constant battery capacity for 40 years...) but less than 10 years for the rest of the system to pay for itself.

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[-] HowRu68@lemmy.world 5 points 2 weeks ago

Basically why the grid exists to begin with

Agreed this is the best option. Economy of scales and our consumers wishes should dictate the Grids plan to incorporate cheap energy ( and emergency) storages.

And, also like you said, change your energy life style and insulate your house wherever you can.

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[-] PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml 25 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Something very important that anti-nuclear but otherwise environmental minded people should realize is this sentence: " There's no practical way to build domestic batteries with this capacity using the technology of 2025."
Also applies to grid storage. There does not exist a chemical energy storage solution that can substitute for "baseload" power. It's purely theoretical much like fusion power. Sure maybe in 50 years, but right now IT DOESN'T EXIST. Economically, practically, or even theoretically.

Why do I bring this up? Because I've seen too many people think that solar and wind can replace all traditional power plants. But if you are anti-nuclear, you are just advocating for more fossil fuels. Every megawatt of wind or solar, has a megawatt of coal or gas behind it and thus we are increasing our greenhouse gas emission everytime we build "green" generation unless we also build Nuclear power plants. /soapbox

[-] echodot@feddit.uk 15 points 1 week ago

It's very infuriating talking to people about this because they never really accept that nuclear power is necessary. They spend all their time complaining about how it's dangerous (it isn't) and how it's very expensive, and how you don't have a lot of control over its output capacity. And yeah, all of those are true, but so what, the only other option is to burn some dead trees which obviously we don't want to do.

Just because nuclear has downsides doesn't mean you can ignore it, unless of course you want to invent fusion just to spite me, in which case I'll be fine with that.

[-] PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 week ago

The new tack is to conflate nuclear energy with fossil fuels. As in assuming that nuclear energy is "legacy" power generation, and that obviously we need to use modern gernation like solar and wind, and magical grid-level storage technologies that don't exist. Also ignore that baseload power is still required, and is currently fulfilled with Natural Gas and Coal.

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[-] frezik 5 points 1 week ago

This has been studied, and we don't need nuclear. All the solutions are sitting right there.

https://www.amazon.com/No-Miracles-Needed-Technology-Climate/dp/1009249541

[-] echodot@feddit.uk 3 points 1 week ago

Well I'm not going to buy the book to find out what they are so all I'm going to go ahead and say is this. Yes there are solutions such as battery storage (although they do tend to be extremely explodey) and using the power to pump water around, or using mirrors to heat up salt in insulated containers, but they are all very specific solutions that will only work in very particular situations, which we don't always have.

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[-] humanspiral@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

In US, and EU is having similar nightmare, nuclear was last built at $15/watt. Installing solar is under $1/watt, and for 20 equivalent hours of nuclear per day (less demand at night means not full production even if available) equivalent to $5/watt-day. $1/watt capital costs is 2c/kwh for solar, and for full day production needs 10c/kwh. All before financing. Nuclear is 30c/kwh. It adds 10 extra years of construction financing, requires political bribes to suppress alternative supply whenever they decide to begin operations, uranium purchases/disposal, expensive skilled operations staff, security, disaster insurance.

Solar does need batteries for time shifting its daily supply. At current LFP prices of $100/kwh, 1c/kwh full cycle is prefinancing cost. and so 3c/kwh if triple the charging/discharging daily capacity. 6 hours of storage is a very high number in power systems. It will capture all energy from a northern summer. It will rarely fully discharge with any time shifting incentives to daytime (much higher convenience to consumers and industry) providing resilience to rainy days. A 2c/kwh value (before financing which is apples to apples comparison to nucclear) means a 5gw solar + 30gwh (much lower if enough private EVs are available for time shifting needs) battery costs 12c/kwh or $8B vs a $15B equivalent 1GW nuclear solution. Both last 60 years due to low battery charge/discharge rates and capacity cycle use, with much lower maintenance costs/downtime for life extension costs for solar/battery system vs keeping a nuclear reactor operational. No/minimal operations costs.

It’s very infuriating talking to people about this

Yes. Nuclear shills are frauds who should be frustrated in their theft of the commons.

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[-] frezik 5 points 1 week ago

That is completely wrong, and only shows you haven't kept up with developments in storage.

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[-] Baggie@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 week ago

I agree with this assessment of battery technology, I'm curious what your thoughts on storage through other means, such as dams, kinetic batteries, heat batteries, that style of thing? I understand that it'd be a massive undertaking, but if we really put our nose to the grindstone we might be able to pull off a good amount of power storage through methods that already exist.

[-] PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 week ago

Another myth is that hydroelectric is "green." It's absolutely not. The huge amount of land required to build something like the hoover dam or the three-gorges dam is massively destructive to the existing ecology. It's often overlooked, but land use has to be part of any environmentally sound analysis.

I would say that while the Hoover Dam, or the Three-gorges dam by themselves are acceptable, they are wholly impossible solutions for grid level storage for the entire united states/China. How practical do you think it would be to build thousands of hoover dams?

Other options like kinetic batteries etc, all come down to energy density. The highest energy density options that humans can harness are nuclear Isotopes like Uranium 238, or Plutonium 239 (what powers the voyager probes) After that is lithium batteries at ~<1% density of a nuclear battery. Everything else is fractions of a percent as efficient. Sure there are some specific use cases where a huge fly-wheel makes sense to build (data centers for example) but those cases are highly specific, and cannot be scaled out to "grid-level." The amount of resources required per kilowatt is way too high, and you'd be better off just building some more power-plants.

[-] trailee@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Unclear if you’re misinformed or disingenuous.

Hoover Dam does generate power, but it’s not an energy storage project to time-shift intermittent clean energy generation to match grid consumption. That’s known as pumped hydroelectric energy storage, and it requires having paired reservoirs in close geographic proximity with a substantial elevation difference. It’s not an ideal technology for several reasons, but it’s the largest type of grid-scale storage currently deployed. Fundamentally it’s gravitational potential energy storage using water as the transport medium.

A higher-efficiency but not yet fully proven technology also uses gravity and elevation differences, but relies on train rails and massive cars. Here’s one company leading the charge, as it were.

Nuclear isn’t a good option to balance out the variability of wind and solar because it’s slow to ramp up and down. Nuclear is much better suited to baseline generation.

There are plenty of other wacky energy storage ideas out there, such as pumping compressed air into depleted natural gas mines, and letting it drive turbines on its way back out. That might also be riddled with problems, but it’s disingenuous to claim that chemical energy storage is the only (non-) option and therefore increasing wind and solar necessarily also increase fossil fuel scaling.

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[-] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 week ago
[-] PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 week ago

Do some quick math. How much pumped hydro in terms of acre-feet would be required to power a hypothetical city like Chicago at night? Where would this theoretical reservoir be built?

[-] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 12 points 1 week ago

acre-feet

I can't stop laughing at this as a unit of measurement

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[-] frezik 3 points 1 week ago

That's a completely unnecessary way to do things. The mistake you're making is that this specific way must provide all power.

It doesn't. You combine methods for a reason. The wind blows at times when the sun isn't shining, and vice versa. We have weather data stretching back many decades to tell us how much a given region will give us of each. From there, you can calculate the maximum lull where neither is providing enough. Have enough storage to cover that lull, and double it as a safety factor.

Getting to 95% water/wind/solar with this method is relatively easy and would be an extraordinary change. Getting all the way to 100% is possible, just more difficult.

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[-] tal@olio.cafe 15 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

What I want to do is find out what the maximum size battery I would need in order to store all of summer's electricity for use in winter.

I mean, I think that it's probably not a good idea for this guy to try to go fully off-grid if he has access to the grid, but for the sake of discussion, if one were honestly wanting to try it and one is in the UK, I'd think that one is probably rather better off adding a wind turbine, since some of the time that the sun isn't shining, the wind is blowing.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/322789/quarterly-wind-speed-average-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/

Wind speed averages in the United Kingdom are generally highest in the first and fourth quarters of each calendar year – the winter months.

The UK is one of the worst places in the world in terms of solar potential:

https://globalsolaratlas.info/

But it's one of the best in terms of wind potential:

https://globalwindatlas.info/

[-] echodot@feddit.uk 9 points 1 week ago

I could probably get away with putting solar panels on my roof but I think my neighbours would have something to say about a wind turbine. They're pretty loud.

[-] MagicShel@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 week ago

Ugh! Just tell your neighbors to shut up or at least keep it down.

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[-] pstils@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago

Right but he’s not serious, he’s just doing a “in theory, what would it look like?”

[-] sobchak@programming.dev 9 points 1 week ago

Guessing it would be more practical to have enough solar panels to fulfill energy needs in winter.

[-] edent@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

Not really. As I say in my article, our roof is full. On a bad day in winter, we might generate 0.5kWh (assuming the panels aren't covered in snow). So we'd need 20x the panels - there's no room for that.

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[-] Sxan@piefed.zip 8 points 1 week ago

Factorio has prepared me for þis challenge...

[-] kalkulat@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago

Author's diagram is about summer. Fall, winter, spring is about heating-degree days. If you're heating your home with electricity, you'll not get there with batteries.

So, working towards a solution, there are other ways to store excess energy than in batteries. One example is sand, which can be heated to very high temperatures. Insulate a sand container well and its storage can do a lot of home-heating.

Example: https://www.livescience.com/technology/engineering/a-scalding-hot-sand-battery-is-now-heating-a-small-finnish-town

We'll need to put a lot of different methods into use. There are many practical ideas out there, and they'll need to be tried.

[-] bstix@feddit.dk 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

The sand storage is used for district heating. It's not much of a substitute for single homes that have electrical heating or are off-grid.

It's a great way to balance both the electrical and the heating grids so that more electricity from renewables can be used to offset other means of heat production, but it needs to be done by the district heating supplier. I doubt it makes sense for individual houses.

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[-] acchariya@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago

It's practical for someone with limited space for panels on a small room, but I ran these calculations by moving almost all loads to daytime, sizing the panel array to the (minimum daily usage + efficiency losses) * buffer factor for days long storms or equipment failure.

Start with the comparitively cheap panels if you have the space, move electrical loads to the daytime and design the house for thermal momentum, and size storage to the minimum inclusive efficiency losses times buffer. If you have the roof space the panels are the cheapest part and you should usually way, way over panel.

The most important thing is having thermal mass enough or living in a climate that allows your home to not need thermal input or extraction at night. Heat is expensive and exponentially moreso if you need to produce it from conventional storage.

[-] humanspiral@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 week ago

It is possible that, not too long in the future, every home could also have a 1 MegaWatt-hour battery. They would be able to capture all the excess solar power generated in a year.

Braindead strategy, that most likely is discrete fossil fuel shilling, for purposes of making decision inpractical.

The cost of storage as a baselines is how much you can charge/discharge per day. Bonus for smaller (= cheaper) that can have more discharge/charge than its capacity per day. Plus the resilience/reserve capacity value which is a convenience factor. Resilience alternatives include fire places or gas generators (that are not expected to be used often) which tend to be cheap per kw. But noise, smell, variable costs, and startup effort are all inconveniences. Driving an EV to a public charger can be a similar inconvenience level to a generator for resilience value. If a 1mwh battery is used 10kwh/day it costs 100 times more per kwh than a 10kwh battery.

OP gives an example of 12kwh summer use (no AC?) which is very high for most people, but can include cooking and floodlights.

The braindead analysis parts are "because 100 days of 10kwh surpluses happen, I need 1mwh battery". Actual battery storage requirements are the lowest theoretical winter solar production over 1-2 weeks, together with running pumps for heat (stored mostly in fall) distribution. A 10kwh/day maximum deficit for 1 week straight, with 60 day average deficit of 5kwh/day (without requiring additional heat input), means that any consideration for a large static battery should stop at 70kwh. This is sharply reduced with 1 or 2 EVs where summer surpluses are free fuel, and EV provides backcharging at 3kw whenever needed. 30kwh battery is plenty to charge an EV overnight (300km range for small car) before next day's sunlight exceeds needs. Even less battery with 2nd lightly used EV, but 30kwh will be cheaper than un-needed EV.

Instead of relying on batteries for heat generation, which is where $100k 1mwh delusion proposition comes, heat generated from solar stored in under $1/kwh hot water and dirt storage. Outside of winter, this also provides completely unlimited showers and hot tub use, and a $10-20k heat pump and heating system (fossil fuel systems often cost the same) and insulation improvements is the the unquestionable non-distracting path.

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[-] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 6 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

battery and solar at the home level is what makes the most sense.

60% of the planet lives between the subtropics and tropics. There is way more than plenty of sunlight hitting our earth to support all of our energy demands, and any naysaying around battery technology is missing the forest for the trees.

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[-] AA5B@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago

There was an article posted somewhere on Lemmy a few months back where someone tried to do similar calculations for the US as a whole. What I took from the result was 95% renewable was achievable and still cheaper than fossil fuels. However the over provisioning of renewables and over double the storage needed to reliably achievable 100% made that infeasible with today’s proving and technology. Basically you can install storage to cover when the sun is not shining but it’s much more difficult to cover weeks of gloominess

[-] JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week ago

Solar isn't the only renewable choice, though. It's just the easiest to do on an individual level. Also, there are plenty of areas for which weeks of gloominess will never (on human timescales) be an issue.

[-] anon_8675309@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago

We have a whole home generator that runs in natural gas. They’re not the quietest things. Been tossing around the idea of having batteries added so that when the power cuts we go to battery. Then when the battery gets low the generator cuts on just long enough to charge the batteries. Wash rinse repeat.

[-] humanspiral@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 week ago
  1. Is HVAC excluded?
  2. Do you have an EV?

With an EV you can have 80%-90% of days covered, and top up with EV. You also get to dump daily surpluses into EV, and you can think of covering winter heating with solar and a heat pump. Easier if you have a fireplace for extreme cold possibility.

Storing heat with fall surpluses is path to get winter heating covered. Heat pump can make hot water very efficiently, and resistance heating can make a pile of dirt 300+C. Radiant floor heating is most efficient because water is distributed around 30C. This means your 90C water volume is 60C effective heat storage that is generated at 600% efficiency in fall, and 300% efficiency in typical UK winter, and your dirt heat storage can be 5x more dense.

A 2nd EV even if not frequently used during the day can be an attractive option, especially if used, and tax credits will go away soon, or have gone away (makes used prices lower) can be much easier than home batteries, and much cheaper if it remains uninsured/unused, and resale value doesn't go down much because of few miles driven. Where utility service includes a high fixed monthly charge, ($50/month in Toronto), $12000 over 20 years savings creates high incentive to remove electric utility. Gas utility has similar fixed vs variable equation, but for Toronto, heat is somewhat reasonable from high supply on our continent.

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this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2025
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