@jayceedee
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Sticking solar panels on water-ways is a tried and tested option.
That’s interesting. Caught me by surprise as I’ve not seen it before, definitely a little left field thinking.
I have just seen a fascinating YT video from Singapore. They say water and electricity don’t mix well, but they have just ( July 2021 ) brought online a huge floating solar farm the size of 45 football fields.
The problem they had was accessing clean water cheaply and efficiently, as green as they could go. Historically reverse osmosis worked well but used huge amounts of electricity generated by burning imported liquid gas. The solution was to take the power generation off grid and literally place it on-site.
Video HERE.
Interesting info as well on perovskite replacing silicon and inkjet style solar panel printing onto flexible thin layers.
😀😀
It really does need some focussed, co-ordinated thinking across County/National and State/National depending on which country you live, but we all know the likelihood of success with that, wherever you happen to be on this planet!! Unless that happens, all the good decisions made on one level, will be disrupted or negated at the other.
Only in America could this happen!! I was just browsing some info on solar farms and came across THIS article.
It must be the same thinking as Arizona.🙄
A Yank friend of mine lives in Arizona and has to PAY to get rid of any excess power!
I’d find something to use the excess on – even if it was air-conditioning his garden!!!😲😲 Maybe even a charging station for EV’s – that’s if there are any in Arizona!!😜
Very true and I thought about this for us, however, we are detached, with a ‘pointy in the middle’ roof, so it was a challenge. Luckily, our back extension ( 5m x 3m ) has a flat roof. We have four panels on the sloping roof, forming one string, with two banks of three, mounted on sloping pods, on the flat roof, forming the second string. Most solar inverters have two strings inside.
There is almost zero shading of the panels, one small single chimney that is more of an old boiler outlet flue made to look like a chimney and we’ve had all the leylandii ( 30 +) that used to go across the garden halfway down, felled, so even in winter now, with the sun low on the horizon, the panels will get optimum sun.!!
Our garden is SW facing, so we miss a small part of the early morning sun but even now at 10am we’re generating 1.6kW.
Planning permission for new builds should in future only be granted if it includes solar generation. With modern technology you can’t even tell when a roof has been built using solar tiles. The economy of scale would soon bring the cost of these down. Subsidising the cost of this and solar additions to existing properties would surely be a better spend than cabling electricity generated on a Moroccan solar/wind farm under the sea to the UK!! Link. Not taking into account the fault liability of the odd French trawler bottom fishing or opportunistic terrorist.
…and will likely then fit a battery if it looks worthwhile. Chances are after some further research, it could be worthwhile.
We missed out on a scheme provided by District and County Councils through SolarTogether which gave you the opportunity to go on a local list for solar panels or an add-on battery, at a discounted rate offered to the whole community. Once the list was compiled there would be a reverse auction to bid for the contract ( from MCS approved installers ) to provide the required services at a bulk discounted rate, if that makes sense. Keep an eye for a similar scheme in your area.
I have zero automation at home, but the panels do run through a Growatt inverter. Maybe getting that on the monitor would justify it’s use, I don’t know.
I will be getting CCTV cameras and an alarm shortly – I don’t know whether they might integrate into the Home Assistant, we’ll have to see whether one or the other justifies it’s use, without any automation.
It’s a shame you’re getting a soft hybrid instead of an EV as with your extra days at home you would have fully charged it with your excess daytime generated solar!!
Yesterday was the first really sunny day around here which resulted in our Solar generating more than we use.
May generation averaged around 18kWh, June around 20kWh and so far in July around 22kWh. Our average daily consumption has been constant so far at 7.5kWh. Octopus has some great usage data on their website, albeit a beta setup, with data available for input to a spreadsheet. I also love playing around with the app for the panels – ShinePhone – which I have on the iPhone and the iPad. Unfortunately they do one for Android but not for browser or I’d have it on permanent display on one of the monitors.😟 The geek in me never seems to get old!!
Unfortunately we would need a much more sophisticated PV controller with a ‘smart’ outlet that only trickle charged any surplus to use the car as a bi-directional house battery.
True – though the Zappi seems to be getting that way, but the most important thing is that the car needs to be Bi-directional too and that’s not a given across the industry at the moment. HERE. Just a couple of Nissans, some Hondas and Mitsubishis plus the top end Ford F150, with a promise that VW’s are ‘coming later this year. The main concern is over battery degradation, by adding more charge/discharge cycles to an already finite number, although if it can be programmed to keep within the 18% – 80% band there is thinking that that may have less of an effect.
A little moot though as anything more than niche adoption on trials or the like, general wisdom puts it to be at least 5 years away from mainstream, if not 10.
These are the sort of things that Governments worldwide should be getting their heads around instead of leaving it to industry and the ‘marketplace’. Having said that though, maybe Governments should finance industry as they don’t have the best track record with technology!!!
….I’m also looking forward to getting my solar panels
Best thing we ever did!! We had ours installed early March and we worked out ( in Jan/Feb ) that it would save us money, difficult to pin down a number for that as it was changing all the time and our fixed plan wasn’t ending till April. We found that £5k in the bank was earning us 10 – 12p a month interest. It turned out that £5k on our roof saved us £1 a day, by using what we were generating, with a surplus left over. That surplus is also currently ( pun intended ) giving us £34 a month in export payments.
In hindsight we should also have got batteries fitted but we were taking easy steps and it was another £3.5 – £5k on top of the panels depending on which size/brand.
We switched to Octopus as they had the best export payment at 7.5p, but if we had stored the excess generated after what we were using, each unit then used would have saved 30p. Those numbers are a no brainer!!
If you have an EV it opens up a whole world of opportunity. The big thing to look for is bi-directional charging. V2H,V2GandV2L are all really exciting. EV’s just need to become more affordable, ( and available at the moment ) did their popularity really catch all the manufacturers asleep at the wheel??
Well, he made no friends with that speech. Somebody needs to tell the spoilt brat that government needs to continue, so get out of the way, re-instate all the people who resigned in order to get the message across to those who’d cocked a deaf’un, because they can do their job better than a new recruit.
If there’s any rules that need changing it should be to re-introduce to the government all the people who lost to Boris on his way up, because history has shown that they were better than this idiot – Rory Stewart immediately comes to mind, but the same logic would put Jeremy Hunt to the fore, so maybe that logic is flawed!!
Thoughts??
The stats seem to have disappeared from the news and media in general. Boris puffing and fluffing about the speed of business recovery etc, not wanting to put a downer on it by telling us just how bad it still was. I see so many people without masks when I’m out shopping ( masked ) also so many shops now have taken away the hand/trolley sanitisers and screens. Are they really surprised it’s still raging, if not rampant!!
Maybe now Boris is on the outs there’ll be a common sense re-assessment of what the general public are told by whoever influences things from here on!!
I bought one of THESE for home checking.
They’re great, self-checking for correct sleeve fitting, bought mine Christmas 2018 and it’s on the same batteries. You just have to chill and stay still while it sets up and reads. Very quick really.😃👍
Good news on the job and settling in OK, less so with the health!!
I also had high blood pressure diagnosed 3 years at about 160/120 but with daily tablets ( 5mg felodipine ) that’s down to 145/85 now. It’s annoying how your body reacts to the things you enjoy and they end up on the sh1t list!! All part of getting old(er).
Other than hugely better, how’s life at the seaside comparing to Bradford?? Even living in London’s suburbs, especially working in London, I noticed the change of pace and other people’s attitude – so much more placid and easy going as opposed to the hectic scrum before!! Drivers actually stop and give way with a smile and mostly either thank with a smile or a wave if you have – an absolute sea-change from London and the M25!!
Just been YT’ing again and saw THIS . Useful in explaining the difference between Fission and Fusion – I just about got it – it’s also good to hear that Oxford is having early success, albeit on a small scale.
Fantastic that the largest capacity individual reactor currently under construction is in the UK at 1.7Gw. No surprise that the biggest overall capacity currently under construction at 15Gw is China.
….but it’s a good mini PC, can’t multi task, it’ll do for me.
Sometimes that’s all you need.😃 Good luck with it John. 👍👍
little box? maybe link not working?
Looking at the photo of it mounted on the back of a monitor, it looks to be about about 6 inches square, ( monitor mounting screws are 4 inches apart ) ………
…….but the dimensions given say it’s 11″ x 6″ x 3″ ( 28.2cm x 15.7cm x 7.5cm ). Correction, that’s the package dimensions🤦♂️!!Oops!!
What are you expecting it to be, John?
I made a stupid mistake with my 5th jab – so far I’ve been on the AZ, but due to brain fog or whatever, I mentioned that one of my previous may have been the Moderna, I did know that I couldn’t take the Pfizer for sure. Well, I got given the Moderna on the Saturday at 9am and that was it. By 4pm I was feeling like sh*t. Wasn’t eating – that alone is unusual for me – felt like I was about to throw up my lunch and was starting to shiver. This was a low level version of the reaction to my Lymphoma antibody treatment. All that was missing was the shakes and temperature spikes and fitting. It might have been a good idea to take my blood pressure as I have a home monitor, but that was the last thing on my mind.
I decided to get myself off to bed, with the intention of getting up for dinner later. No way at all. I stayed in bed through the night and best part of Sunday morning. My next meal was dinner that night.
I checked up on my vax history and found that, in fact, all my previous jabs had been AZ, as will be all my future ones!! I neither know, nor care, whether it was just a reaction to the Moderna or an unlikely combination reaction with the ( non-live ) shingles jab but I will be avoiding a repeat at all costs.
Good luck PM – hope your feeling a bit better now.
You’re welcome Ed. I used to view YouTube as a bunch of extroverts telling the world how clever they were, sort of thing, but actually there is some great, real-life focused content that I now actually prefer to almost all of the Reality/Lifestyle content on commercial TV!!
With a side benefit of being a research tool for new tech and some science which is explained in an understandable, but not over-simplified fashion, for those who get the theory behind it, if not the detail. A little bit like Tomorrow’s World used to be.👍
But it can be a rabbit-hole you disappear down for a few hours without surfacing.😊
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