this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
1479 points (96.4% liked)
Microblog Memes
7494 readers
3892 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's a very capitalist way of thinking about the problem, but what "negative prices" actually means in this case is that the grid is over-energised. That's a genuine engineering issue which would take considerable effort to deal with without exploding transformers or setting fire to power stations
Home owned windmills, solar panels and battery storage solves that.
Edit: Look at this awesome diagram of how it's done for a hybrid setup that's about $400 on Amazon.
PIKASOLA Wind Turbine Generator 12V 400W with a 30A Hybrid Charge Controller. As Solar and Wind Charge Controller which can Add Max 500W Solar Panel for 12V Battery.
Home owned windmills are almost a total waste. Its surprising how little electricity they generate especially given how much the cost to buy and install. Some real numbers. A 400w can cost almost $18k to buy and install. A 410w solar solar panel is about $250 + $3k of supporting electronics and parts. And that same $3k can support 10+ more panels. I looked into it myself really wanted it to be worth it for home, but it just isn't. Now utility grade wind? Absolutely worth it. You need absolutely giant windmills with massive towers, but once you have those, you can make a LOT of electricity very cost effectively.
Solar panels worth it? Yes. Absolutely.
Batteries, not quite there yet for most folks. Batteries are really expensive, and don't hold very much electricity $10k-$15k can get you a few hours of light or moderate home use capacity. For folks with really expensive electricity rates or very unreliable power this can be worth it financially, but for most every else. Cheaper chemistry batteries are finally starting to be produced (Sodium Ion), but we're right at the beginning of these and there not really any consumer products for home made from these yet.
Yeah, right now end of life EV batteries are great for making your own power storage but that's a level of diy beyond what 95% of people are willing or able to do
What's infuriating is that we had electric cars before ICE powered cars. 1899. If we would've been investing money and effort into research for battery technology since then, we wouldn't have this problem. Salt batteries, solid state batteries, and other promising tech is in it's infancy because we just started to take this seriously as a society like 10 years ago.
Better late than never but it grinds my gears that the best argument against solar and wind is power storage requirements due to unpredictable power generation. Like this is an extremely solvable problem.
End of life EV batteries are great for grid-scale operators doing power storage, but I highly recommend against homeowners use them this way. Not just because they are complex DIY projects as you point out, but because the EV batteries that are aging out of car use are NMC chemistry. These are great for high density power storage, which you want in a car, but they are susceptible to thermal runaway if they get too hot. The original Tesla Powerwall and Powerwall 2 also used these same chemistry batteries. I wouldn't want these in my house. However, in a utility grid scale? Sure, they won't be anywhere near people so in the unlikely event they do catch fire its a property problem, not a lost human life problem.
I understand your concern, I totally agree that the volatility isn't ideal, but putting it in a steel box outside your house isn't that beyond the scope for a diy-er. Envision it the same way a generac sits outside and ties in to your house but with a safe enough enclosure.
As long as you check the cells you use when you deconstruct the car battery it should be fine. All the projects I watch online they don't even need the liquid cooling system that it utilized when it was in the car because the discharge rate is so far below the C rating the battery that they don't generate great like when they are in cars
I understand that cell could go bad though at any time, so the box is necessary imo
Oh yeah, super expensive. /s
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087BY2YV7/?
The first link that came up: https://www.bobvila.com/articles/best-home-wind-turbines/
Ahh I get it now. You have no idea what you're talking about. You have the smallest understanding of something and assume that is everything. You're so very far away from understanding the practical applications and limits. You're also clearly not interested in learning, so I'll leave you to your impractical delusions.
Oh I'm willing to learn. Explain it to me.
https://youtu.be/oiB1Sm_f48w
Did you not look at the specs on that product? It only produces energy when winds are above 7mph and don't actually hit the rated output unless the winds are almost 35mph.
Almost none of the country averages an amount of wind power per square meter equivalent to the rating on home turbines at 10 meters above ground level (yellow and red on this map):
Compare to this map of average insolation:
It's a hybrid solar and wind. Also, that's why you have batteries for storage.
Why not skip the middleman and go straight solar, then?
For places like Seattle.
Look at Seattle and tell me which parts have enough wind power for your home windmill:
Chiming in on this... Installed home energy in Europe. Close to the coast, so rather windy. Rather far to the north, so not that sunny. Home solar usually pays for itself after 6 to 10 years, with installations usually being guaranteed to last 20 and of course usually lasting even longer. Home wind is a niche that doesn't pay for itself within the lifetime of the turbine. You're always better off just installing more solar and more storage unless you're building a 200m high wind power plant that essentially always generates enough energy for a small city. We opted for a solar solution with about 10 kWh storage and an energy management system that charges the battery during the winter when prices are low (usually at night when the large turbines nearby are running). The turbines can't compete with ordinary energy pricing, they sure as hell can't compete with a system that grabs electricity at its cheapest from the grid. It's just not worth it.
Lets be generous and assume that the blades of your turbine are 1 square meter.
Looking at the map, we can see that the entire Seattle area has an average ground level wind energy density of maybe 50 watts per square meter.
Assuming that the windmill is twice as efficient as every other windmill and can extract 70% of that wind energy, we can estimate that your windmill will output roughly 35 watts of energy on average, enough to slow-charge a laptop, for a total of about 25 kWh per month.
The average American home uses more than 850 kWh per month, so it'd need at least 35 of these twice-as-good-as-normal windmills. A more realistic figure would be "more than 75".
75 * $320 = $24k, more than twice the price of the average solar install in the Seattle area.
And while this hypothetical example gives the best case scenario for home wind provided in our discussion, I can give you the real world data from a residential solar array. I'm one step away from Seattle's solar radiance. I just looked at my home solar data. Last month (March), I generated 36.3kWh from a single 405W rated panel for the month. This is calculated by the total monthly solar power generated divided by the number of panels I have on my roof. I can also tell you March is not a good month for solar in my northern state. During my best month (June) last year I generated 59kWh from the same single 405w rated panel.
So you're revising your position previously stated position that wind is a great solutions for home power then?
Which part of Seattle is that 😇
I’m joshin ya! Curious though if there’s evidence parent commenter was wrong
Wait so the same people that can't drop 500 USD for an emergency are expected to drop 300 USD for a wind turbine and provide the installation of it to boot is that right
"put the excess energy into batteries" is an idea, and is already pretty much what is done, but the large scale implementation still requires a lot of time, effort, and expense.
How, exactly, does that solve anything? It's not like we can add some kind of magic automatic residential cutoff system (that would just make it worse) and residential distribution is already the problem! Residential solar is awesome (tho home batteries are largely elon propaganda...) but they only contribute to the above issue, not solve it. There are ways of addressing it, but they're complicated and unglamorous.
I don't see why home batteries are propaganda. Those prices are plummeting and they have decent payback times in some markets.
The reasons for getting solar is the same reasons for getting batteries.
Because home batteries, while provisionally useful in the same way as a standby generator (though the generator is going to be far more eco friendly than the batteries over their respective lifetimes), is a vastly inferior solution to the implementation of even local grid scale solutions. Also because there is essentially 0 infrastructure designed to handle said batteries, they wear out quite quickly at home scales (unless you're using uncommon chemistries, but if you're using iron-nickle batteries you're not the target audience here) and because Elon popularized them with his "powerwall" bullshit entirely to pump the stock value of Tesla's battery plant (which is it's own spectacular saga I encourage you to look up, it's a real trip).
Batteries in the walls are useful in niches, but the current technology which uses lipo/lion/lifepo4 chemistries is inherently flawed and a route to both dead linemen and massive amounts of E-waste. They could be useful potentially, but as it stands, it's really bad right now.
A generator can provide backup power for unlimited time if fuel is available, but it is highest cost power in the world. Batteries can be charged/discharged every day, displacing dirty energy. A generator is either rarely used or eco destructive.
You need to look up how much grid storage lithium batteries are being built. It's exponential growth. Faster than solar.
The reason it's worthwhile is because solar makes energy with 0 or near 0 price to the owner in certain places, if they store that and use it for later they save money. There are cost calculators out there and for certain markets they make sense.
Of course Tesla pushes it they got a product people want and it makes the consumer and Tesla money. Win win. That's business, nothing shady about that.
Yes batteries are better on the grid but that's for exactly the same reasons why solar is better on the grid.
O...kay but that doesn't address anything I actually said.
That's just not true.
Same as solar. But you seem to be pro rooftop solar but not home grids and no explanation why.
Makes no sense because the struggles the grid currently has with solar will be offset. Home batteries reduces demand on the grid and internalise production and demand more into the house.
In a cost exercise if the batteries last longer than the payback period they are worth it. Which is the case so that point is meaningless.
I don't under a CEO pushes a good product that helps the grid and helps consumers make money. Your bias against Elon is just limiting your world view.
Chemistry has nothing to do with electrons on the wires so that doesn't make sense. Lithium ion batteries are recyclable. Yes batteries are Bette Ron the grid but getting them connected is hard. Same solar, waste on roofs but thats how it goes. The arguments are the same.
They are useful. They aren't bad.
Neat, a point by point breakdown. Love those. In no way are they fingernails to the blackboard of internet discussion.
Lets just get this over with:
Okay it's pretty clear you're very unfamiliar with this subject.
The entire rest of my comment explains why. That's what the whole comment is about. "Why" is the entire thesis of the comment. It is the comments entire raison d'être. In summary: the inefficiencies inherent to distributed implementation, the lack of service infrastructure, the short lifespans of the high-density battery chemistries needed in residential installs, etc.
I don't really care, though. It's got nothing to do with the points I was making, which is why I didn't address it. It's largely irrelevant.
Okay, no. This is not how residential demand or load balancing or power infrastructure works. There's components you're assuming exist that would have to run on magic to be safe (some kind of automatic interlock cut-in), and even those would absolutely devastate the grid by constantly adding and removing whole residential loads at random.
Oh buddy... buddy no. Come on.
My gaster is well and truly flabbered. I honestly don't know what to say in response to this.
Phew, that sure was a lot wasn't it? Please please please take the time you'd use to write a response to this comment and go watch some electroboom videos instead, he's very entertaining and a great educator of the concepts at play here.
After installation, a home owner has free electricity? I'm not trying to solve the issues for the power grid people, they have teams of people for that.
Spain and Portugal had almost complete blackouts today. You know who wouldn't have had blackouts? The people with their own solar panels and windmills.
I acknowledge that there's no real way to communicate sincerity online, but I'm gonna go ahead and promise I'm not trying to be a dick here when saying this:
I think you're bonking up on the Dunning Kruger limit here, because that's absolutely not how it works. Not only are the vast majority of homes not candidates for useful solar installs (you can pay someone to do it, but holy cow nearly every residential solar installer is a scam looking at you, Lumio International (how's that RICO case going?)), but solar for home-use power generation is very much not the norm for a whole host of reasons (dead linemen one of the biggest ones) and the safety considerations for implementing it generally make it an onerous enough task to manage that it's appeal is restricted largely to special interest users (homesteaders, preppers, S&R, power system enthusiasts, van life, etc ). There are ways this could be mitigated, but it would require a massive grid overhaul and additional constant upkeep beyond what any current grid already requires.
Here in Australia 37% of households have rooftop solar. Hardly "only special interest groups".
Australia is an edge case for everything solar and I'll quite happily admit that! Yay Australia, well done. That said I'd be very willing to bet that the majority of those are not-above-50%-ideal installs (don't take that bet, I'm cheating)
Sorry, you've misunderstood, I was talking about direct home power generation being special interest, not residential solar in general. Aussies don't have a higher rate for direct power generation than anywhere else because grids are, by and large, all suffering from the same fundamental design issues. I'm not at all attempting to argue that solar installs in general are special interest, and especially with the incredibly well thought out incentives the aus gvmt has been offering for both new construction and residential conversion/installation. 100% best handling of it in the world right now.
In no home outside of fringe uses are any lights 12vdc, with the exception of maybe led strip lights for undercabs. They're all designed for 120vac. That lightbulb in the diagram is an e37/medium base for 120vac.
Couldn't solar farms just strategically disconnect some of their panels from the grid to avoid that? Solar panels are always collecting energy, but if you disconnect them that energy just goes into making them a bit warmer rather than overloading the grid.
You can have your own batteries as well. If those then get overloaded, disconnect.
Nothing an open/close gate couldn’t fix. The real problem is how overly complicated we feel we need to make things.
This is some real "basic biology" level thinking here. Even if it were as simple as "Pull the lever Krunk!" then you've just turned all that solar infrastructure into junk for the majority of the time that we need power.
People use the vast majority of electricity in a day in the afternoon and at night - times that are noticeably after the peak solar production time. So you have all that energy going into the system with nowhere to go because battery technology and infrastructure isn't there, and then no energy to fulfill the peak demand. This is an issue nuclear runs into as well because a nuclear plant is either on or off and isn't capable of scaling its power to the current demand.
There are times where power companies have to pay industrial manufacturing facilities to run their most energy consuming machines just to bleed extra energy out of the grid to keep it from overloading and turning into a multi-million dollar disaster that could take years to get people back on the grid.
Sorry for the naive question, but is it not possible to send the excess electricity to the ground (in the electrical sense)?
It would definitely need to be ground in a literal sense.
And even the earth has its limits. Soil is only so conductive, pump enough energy into it and you'll turn it to glass (which won't conduct anymore).
To effectively waste electric power like that would take quite a bit of effort. It would be easier to make a giant heater that heats up air. But that would of course also be absurd. Just turn off the wind turbines etc. to reduce power generation.
Not an engineer but I sometimes watch them on YouTube.
Could you not just set up a breakout point and have it arc to ground? If the power source is renewable then wasting a little when you have a full grid shouldn't be a big issue. I'm thinking something along the lines of StyroPyro's arcing plasma flamethrower should chew up plenty of excess power if you scale it up. As you ramp your total storage up toward 100% capacity I'd start shutting off inputs (disconnecting solars, etc) and then have what's basically a big old Tesla coil to vent excess power over 95% capacity.
There's obviously a lot of issues with that idea, but I'd like to throw my wholehearted support behind it anyways, just to see the expressions my FCC/Radio buddies would make when they realize someone's running a MW-scale tesla coil as some kind of electrical blowoff valve. I can't easily tell you the exact size of the area you'd utterly obliterate all radio communications in, but it'd be hilariously large.
Faraday cage should cover that no? Styro even mentions in the linked video that he needed to encapsulate his workshop in one in order to not get angry visits from the FCC. I'm sure for something scaled up like this you might want to nest a couple of them together.
Again, not an engineer, I could be (and likely am) wildly off base here. Not sure what makes it such a terrible idea though. I am pretty certain that a MW-scale Tesla coil probably wouldn't blow out a larger area of communications than, say, nuclear testing would, and we do that all the time in the Midwest.
Mmmmm no, a bit of napkin math here but the RF this thing would throw off would just melt any faraday cage smaller than a midsized town.
Also no, there are not nuclear tests all the time in the midwest.
The grid is always over energized. That’s not a problem. Large solar and wind farms connect to the grid with great specificity about the maximum amount of energy they will put on the lines. The problem would be not enough energy. Batteries are beginning to solve the dispatch energy issue with renewables. As long as republicans don’t get their way and ruin renewable energy with unfair fossil fuel mandates, the grid will continue to modernize in this way and we’ll be fairly independent of fossil fuels in the future for electricity.
No it's not, it's energized just right. Otherwise you run into either over or under frequencies. Both pretty catastrophic.