Random Renewables Thread

Will you ever stop peddling this Irish low temperature advantage making Ireland one of the best countries for PV nonsense? The very slight improvement in PV output due to low temperatures in Ireland doesn't make solar energy in Ireland economic or sensible as it does not remotely compensate for the overall apalling lack of direct sunlight.

PV capacity factor in Ireland is 11%, a solar farm in WA had a capacity factor of 30% in 2022. Those panels would absolutely bake in summer, You could probably boil water on them some days. Their efficiency might be terrible at such times, but it doesn't matter, because the vastly greater amount of direct sunlight more than compensates.

EV sales are still growing worldwide, the rates of growth had slowed and in some countries it has dropped (e.g. Germany) often due to a reduction in grants

Seems last year's consumption for me was 7.4MWh, although that's from end of February onwards so likely closer to 10MWh

Based on that I'm 30% more efficient than the EAB usage even with transportation added on top 😁

It's Norway going for 100% renewables by 2030, already in the high 90's.

They're using their massive sovereign wealth fund (ironically generated from sales of fossil fuels) to develop further hydro and wind projects to go far beyond their own needs, and are aiming to be a leading seller of renewable electricity instead of oil / gas.their geography lends itself massively to both sources of renewables as well as a bit of geothermal.

Long but good video on it.

1/3 of cars are already electric and 80% of car sales on 2022 were EV's.

2/3 of houses use heat pumps already.

It must be added that their government have (as they can easily afford it) huge incentives for domestic EV and heat pump adoption.

In the past, in other threads, you have made the claim that Ireland is one of the best countries in Europe for solar on account of the higher efficiency of PV panels at lower temperatures.

You should take this 50% capacity factor off the west coast with a pinch of salt, and the cost even more so. The recently commissioned East Anglia one off scotland manages 46.8%. The highest capacity factor wind farms, exceeding 50% CF are the 2 commercial floaters. I think these would be best for comparrison when considering wind off the west coast, Hywind Scotland managing 52.6%, for example.

All the turbines of the Hywind Scotland floater were shredded after just 7 years of operation, with all of them having to be towed back to Norway. At the Kincardine floater, one of the turbines was destroyed after just 2 years of operation, having to then be towed back to the Netherlands.

In other words, the current generation of wind turbines can not hack the severe conditions off the west coast.

Even fixed base offshore wind is a costly joke. East Anglia one cost €4.07 billion per GW - €5.21 billion if you add the massive 28% O&M costs. This is simply not cost competitive with S Korean nuclear costing €2.97 billion per GW, that has double the capacity factor and lasts twice as long as an OSW farm - 60 years vs 30. And lets not forget that this is before even considering the cost of needing around 2.? times as much OSW capacity plus batteries or hydrogen electrolysers storage and generation plant, to match an equivalent capacity for nuclear.

There is no government costing for supplying the countries entire energy needs just using OSW or solar plus storage. You can get a fairly good ball-park idea of the cost using nuclear, but the entire renewables plan we are attempting is completely uncosted because it's unknowable.

"In the past, in other threads, you have made the claim that Ireland is
one of the best countries in Europe for solar on account of the higher
efficiency of PV panels at lower temperatures."

False. I have never said that.

Divide by 10, since it's just the box and add those sweet nkon cells. So almost 3 times cheaper including the cells.

Looks to be same box except mine has the breaker instead of the switch and the DE one maybe doesn't have the inverter jkbms? The screen looks different

Only thing I would prefer is flexible bus bars instead of cables in between the bms and front plate and main +/- but at least it is 50mm2 which plenty as I plan to limit all 3 boxes to 100a each anyway

Where'd you get it, and what cells does it fit? Looks similar to the Gobel power kit

Did you get the cells from Ali also? Great video tutorial on their ad, and Respect, a great leap of faith to knock all that together and trust it to all work without a glitch or a big bang.

Does the configuration give a choice of inverter brands to communicate with?, the German look alike comes configured for the Victron brand it says, (whatever they're like), and other brands are 'available'. Is this similarly set up, or is it manually matched when installing.

I'm also curious about the " Men seed Storage" that's in that link. The mind boggles...

What you don't have a seed box with a BMS and tomato seeds? 🤣

And yeah it is the jk inverter BMS and you can also specify whatever config you want to buy 100a, 150a, 200a

It's the one Andy from the offgrid garage keeps testing for us and should work with most inverters.

Looking for some advice on discharging the battery to the grid

I've noticed with the good weather the battery is sitting at a high SoC some evenings

I've a rule to charge it to 40% on the night rate so there's something there for cloudy days. I'm thinking I'll raise it to 80%

I'm thinking of setting a rule on my inverter to discharge down to 50% from 9pm onwards since my consumption is pretty low after that

Anyone got any thoughts on this idea?

My rate is a bit closer with Flogas, I'm importing for 13c and exporting for 20c

I'm probably close to the point where losses will erode any profits I'm making per kWh

Having said that, maybe I'll give it a go and see what happens

Yeah with a 20c profit margin it definitely makes sense, with 7c it's a bit more shaky

Mostly I don't want the battery sitting for days at 100% when we're away for a weekend

I know I'll be adding cycles by discharging to the grid, but I'm of the opinion that sitting at high SoC for days is as bad if not worse for battery health