please report back in the future when it’s 1.21 jigawatts
Gettin jiggawatt it, nana na na nana na
Whoa. This is heavy.
How long did that take?
Its a 400w array permanently mounted to the roof. Its been continually topping up my lithium batteries since 2018.
It probably would have hit 1MWh sooner, but the batteries are almost always full so there's nowhere to store the excess charge.
I've done a similar build out in my Northern Lite camper. 800w on the roof and 400ah of lithium. I want to convert the fridge to an electric compressor fridge and the stove over to induction next. I hate it when the batteries fill back up by 10am and I waste solar meanwhile I am still buying propane for the appliances.
Based on the image, I'm going to guess about 500 days.
That’s about 6 kilowatt*weeks or equivalent to 31 gallons of gas.
Quite a bit then?
Yeah humans burn about 100W so it’s like 60 weeks of human metabolism, more than a year of food energy!
If the van had a generator, like days of old, the sun has replaced like 3 full tanks of gas.
This is so cool. I’ve got no place to put solar panels, but I invest in a solar cost sharing program with my local power company.
My city (San Francisco) has a program where you can elect to get 100% of your power from renewables which are primarily hydro, solar, and wind and it comes out cheaper every month than buying power from PG&E. It's pretty great.
So, those sort of programs are confusing and often pretty misleading. First off, you can't choose which electrons go to your house of course; all you can do is draw power from the grid. That's fine, it doesn't really matter at the end of the day, but more importantly most of those programs work by purchasing "renewable energy credits", or RECs, from wind and solar farms across the country. So what does that REC mean? Well nothing really, it just means you "claim" credit for that kWh of renewable energy. If you want you could buy them directly from some random wind farm in Kansas in theory. Or buy for twice as many kWh as you actually use- now you're 200% renewable and you're sucking carbon out of the air! Oh wait.
At the end of the day, RECs are a good idea because they provide an additional revenue source for renewable energy producers, but it isn't all that much. Last I checked they sell at like 3% of what the energy actually sells for on the grid. So for example if a wind company sells electricity for 20 cents a kWh to the grid operator, they could separately sell the RECs for that power on the open market for something like 0.6 cents per kWh, if the grid operator doesn't want the RECs for themselves as part of the power purchase agreement.
I myself subscribe to Arcadia, which is one of those companies that promises to make your power 100% green via purchase of RECs. I consider that to be false advertising. But, I still do it because it does help drive the market for RECs which is good because the ability to sell RECs makes producing green energy a bit more viable, which in turn hopefully spurs growth in the industry.
So in conclusion, it's a good thing to do, but not as good as you might think based on how it's presented. Sorry for the wall of text.
My roof top system has done a bit.
I've been able to store a bit to use at night into several old AGM batteries.
Just moved from Starlink to 5G so that's another kW per day I'm saving.
Thats a little bit less than my solar house install has produced in the last year, and it was only up for half of it.
Just imagine how much fossil fuels we could save if everyone had solar on their roofs and if wind power would be more widespread as well.
It's still just too unaffordable for many people. It would cost us over $10,000 to get panels installed and that doesn't include the multiple trees that would have to come down because they are really old oak trees with huge branches that stretch over the house and sometimes fall on the roof.
There should be much bigger subsidies. That wouldn't help us, but it would help a lot of others.
Only if or when storage becomes cheap and widespread, otherwise even if you produced 100x the energy when the Sun shines you'd still need some other source of energy for the rest of the time. There are some glimmers of hope but they perpetually seem 4-5 years out.
I have 10kwh of storage, which helps a lot, and it wasnt that expensive, especially compared to a few years ago.
Now that sodium ion batteries are actually starting to become available we will see them taking over stationary storage, but for now LiFePo4 works pretty good.
Yes! Every bit helps.
The more people thay buy in, the more optimized the production and distribution becomes.
Thanks for helping in the way that you can.
Time descending on the x axis. :(
That's really cool. My shed is at 18kWh after a few months. I don't use much so most days it just keeps the battery on float.
Don't have batteries and cannot resell yet (paperwork submitted and waiting) so production is restrained to autoconsume....
But 640kw in 73 dsys here... (6kw rooftop, but mixed rainy weather)
Damn, that's like a 6% power factor. How does it compare to your power consumption during the same period?
Red is my power consumption and blue production. My solar is currently capped at my production because I cannot resell and I have no batteries.
1/1210th of what is needed to travel in time
Nice. I managed to make my house almost power neutral. It would be power positive but i have a EV.
That's great, really exciting to be able to gain power self-sufficiency, especially with transport as well.
