Random Renewables Thread

I'd say that's one place battery swaps would be very useful. Have a couple of packs charging while you work and swap when needed

Of course handling a 300kg would be a bit of a tricky task. Kind of thing a tractor would be handy for, except you just took the battery out 🤦‍♂️

Smaller modules might be the trick, but there's a point where it's too much of a hassle

Something that fits into a pallet truck might be the sweet spot between capacity and portability

Or something a forklift could handle, but then you need a forklift as well, or a second tractor with front loader

200l of diesel in a day, not 20l

I guess a solution depends on how often you do this. If a few times a month, then a battery solutions starts looking like a real option. You could have a 100kWh pack on the tractor and a 300kWh pack in the barn. Start the day with both full, then after a quarter of the day when tractor is empty, parallel the tractor to the barn, this will extremely rapidly charge the battery up to near full again (during breakfast break), do the same again for lunch and mid afternoon breaks and by the end of the day you will have used all 400kWh and job done, another few weeks time to charge the barn battery up and the battery would have enough charging overnight to be ready for lighter work again the next day

I expect NaFePO4 chemistry to be down commercially to about half what we pay for LiFePO4 now shipped and landed from China, so about €60 per kWh or €24k for 400kWh. Cost of 5c electricity €2400 for 5 years

Twice a month burning 200l of diesel costs €34k over 5 years, so yes it would be a good business case with a ROI of about 4 years. Could even be viable plan right now with current battery prices for a ROI of about 8 years. Thoughts @graememk?

Aye, lots of benefits of having a battery that is far bigger than you thought you needed. How do I know? 😂

I have no doubt you could buy cells and make the batteries for less than you'd spend on renting them for a single year.

What's your total diesel usage per year Graememk? I guess you must have some storage on site for the tractors?

Yeah I agree, but I think it's also safe to assume the majority of customers will just want something ready made and off the shelf

Also you wouldn't be renting them all year, at least not multiple packs, maybe 1 or 2 assuming they're 100kWh each

You'd rent extras when needed and the vendor puts them to use as a grid battery at other times so they aren't a sunk cost that's sitting idle

We are talking @graememk here, not your average customer who wants ready made off the shelf, with a pay back period of 30 years 😂

Hey folks,

I have an unused 5 core 2.5mmsq swa cable going from the attached garage to side lawn where a ground mount can be located - ~20m from garage. It used to connect to a fountain pump, which is long gone.

The cable comes in and up 1m to a dead junctionbox. The garage has has no ceiling so no issue in running a cable from the junction box back to the consumer unit via the attic.

Question - how big of an array do you think I could get with using 2 cores or even combining the two pairs of 2.5mmsq or is this cable a non-runner?

I was thinking having the inverter outside at the ground mount, so AC over the 5core.

The plan would to run 6sq or larger in a few years which will exit the back of the house from the main consumer unit.

But for the short term, use the 5 core as its there at the side of the house.

No consumer unit in garage. Garage will be converted to home office. So no issue having a small breaker box there on the wall for where the cable comes in. Then it's a 15m run to consumer unit where the electrician could run 6sq twin and earth back to.

10x 430w = 4300w / 230v = 18.9a

With doubling up 2.5mmsq, I was hoping for 2-3 additional panels.

Looking at ground screws instead of a concrete bases for the unistrut.

Lonely Planet should do a book, Boards.ie on a shoestring.

Plus another €450 in 3 payments from January

Also they're doubling the tax free allowance for export payments

Well time for some very random time wasting, found the video below which I thought was a good laugh

Okay so it's a video game playthrough, you've been warned 😉

The game is Factorio, a game about building automated factories which is probably more addictive than crack.

Honestly there must be a few people who starved to death playing it because they spent all day optimising their conveyor belt layout and didn't eat

This particular video is of a mod called Seablock, where you have nothing to start with other than a tiny patch of land and one rock to mine to some resources

The only way to get more resources like iron or copper is to distill seawater and chemically leech the trace minerals from the residue

One of the biggest challenges is electricity, because your resource gathering is so energy intensive and land is limited it's hard to power everything from wind or solar (particularly since you can't build turbines on water, that'd be too easy)

This player comes up with a pretty novel solution, he used automated farms to grow beans which he then processed into biofuels. The waste material was composted and the excess CO2 was pumped into the farm so it became a semi closed loop

So that got me thinking, how much energy can you get from beans? They've a high calorific value so it must be good

Well, time to engage in some unproductive labour 😁

Turns out someone has already thought about the same thing, found the paper below on using whole bean crops as feedstock for a bio refinery

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0308521X15300354

Of course, I still think biofuels are mostly smoke and mirrors, but it makes me wonder; what would happen if you chucked a few bags of expired dried beans into a pellet burner 🤔

Given the size and shape, they should make it into the fueling system without jamming. Would they burn, or just gum up the whole burner...

I suppose it's lucky that I don't have a pellet stove and won't be trying it out 🫣

I kinda feel like it's a bit of a paper tiger (or whatever the giveaway equivalent is)

Yeah they raised the allowance, but how many households will ever see a benefit of it, particularly if deemed export is ending

There's a bunch here who will be exporting that amount, but it's also probably fair to say that the regular posters here don't represent the average consumer

And with Flogas cutting their FIT rate, that could be a sign of things to come