Random Renewables Thread

They also build more coal power stations than anyone else - I heard it was like one a fortnight or something bonkers?! But I guess it's not to be surprising. They have a huge population, many millions of people going from effectively a subsistence agricultural mindset to more of an urban one and of course the power requirements are different. More (Electric) cars being bought etc.

Massive power requirements

True - a trade war with China will end only one way :-)

Still....

China is building more than half of the world's new coal power plants | New Scientist

Even with the best CO2 scrubbers in existence, you're still getting a lot of emissions out there. Granted their options are somewhat limited. They need the power and they need it to come online quickly, and they have the worlds largest deposits of coal, so i understand the willingness to use that, but it's worrying.

yeah, that's what I was saying above Raisin. They have one of the largest, or thee largest coal deposits on the planet, so it's a readily available resource for them to exploit. One thing that makes them different from the rest of the world is that 50 years ago in terms of ecomonics, most of the western world was 1st world. Most of china 50 years ago was peasant farmers. That's not to say that there weren't high tech people in china 50 years ago, but rather the dominant demographics isn't/wasn't the same. So the need for power there has exploded exponentially as the "urbanification" happened. Car ownership, computers, etc.

While it looks like the growth rate is nuts, it's only cause they are in some respects catching up - but yeah, the "law of large numbers" will catch them....eventually.

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No energy monitoring but good value.

Who is "we" in this case? Some multinational investment corp looking after the pensions of well-to-do New Yorkers? They can well afford a new one I'd say

GE renewables in this case, but we've lost the generation capacity at a time when we need all the renewables we can get

I know Arklow bank is pretty outdated, and a shell of what it's supposed to be. But it's always frustrating to see a turbine get destroyed

How does it work? You get paid not to use power, or you get paid £3/kw to inject power during peak times?

Seems you get paid to shift demand to night time. It seems that OVO are doing it on as a percentage of your usage, if less than 12.5% of your usage is during peak times you get a bonus

Not sure how the others are doing it, maybe they're using power profiles to figure out what appliances are running at what times

It's a bit intrusive, but it's also a great example of how smart meters can actually be used to save money for both the customer and the grid

Has the Guardian sacked all editors and do they not use any free spell checkers either? 🙄

KW hour

kilowatt hour 

kW/h

Tbh, this is great to get paid in UK to load-shift. We humans change very reluctantly for the most part (me included). And often go back to the old way of doing it quickly. So here’s the carrot (save money on bills, which most are likely worried about to some degree anyway). The stick is rolling power cuts otherwise.

For now it’s a simple step1 of the journey. Cut usage between X and Y hours and get paid (somehow).

Then as people get better at it, the industry can do more to change the time we load-shift to. IMO peak TOU rates are gonna keep climbing. So if we can all learn to load shift (and electricity industry can then tell us what times are the best), it’s all good. I know there’s load on this forum already ninjas at it.

But even for me as recently as maybe 2+ years ago, I’d no sense there was an impact to using power at certain times of the day. But I'd be very much the only one in my family (siblings and parents) now with that understanding. So money talks, and this carrot helps behavioural change.

I agree 100%, saving money is often a harder sell than it should be. But as soon as you start dangling money in front of people to do something fairly simple then they'll jump up and pay attention

One thing I was thinking recently to get rid of that evening peak would be to roll out hot dinners in schools. A lot of that peak demand is from cooking dinner, and a lot of the reason people are having dinner in the evening is because their kids haven't had a hot meal all day

Giving kids a hot dinner in school would make it easier for the parents to also do the same. It would then mean you could have something a lot simpler in the evening which doesn't need to be cooked (or not as much), reducing the electricity demand

It would also have the side benefit of hopefully getting some more nutritious food into kids. I know that somehow when my kids see other kids eating fruit and vegetables they have no problem eating them, but whenever they're at home you'd swear they were worried about being poisoned 🙄

4 or 5 year old JA Solar 300W Mono Si 60 Cells

Do they have to be the same or would just the same wattage do?

Ya basically looking for the 2 x cheapest over 300W panels I can get my hands on