The Mother 'Effin WEATHER Thread

I hope it is an acoustic concert.

Holy crap. You are saying its really $40-50,000 for solar panels and a battery storage solution?
Thats toally, utterly, insane.

We have a tiny ground-mounted solar array (10 panels) mounted on very sturdy steel frames concreted into our driveway. Full details here:
https://www.positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2011/06/08/first-solar-payment/

solar3

Cost was roughly £11k, or $14,000. Thats for 2.1kwp, which frankly isn’t enough to power the house fully unless its a very sunny day, (we also have electric car & cooking and work from home so our power usage is high).
Now even assuming it cost DOUBLE that to include a battery ($28,000) thats still way cheaper, and frankly this was EIGHT years ago, in a time when solar panel costs are in freefall.

A tesla powerwall is about $6,000 to store 13 kwh, so roughly 2 days UK use or 1 day of US use.

Given you only really need ‘emergency’ power during a cut-out (phone charging, maybe a router/laptop, some light microwaving etc), it seems this surely MUST be affordable already?

So how would those fare with hurricane winds?

honestly no idea :D, although TBH they are pretty sturdy, we lose tiles from the roof (stone ones) now and then, but these never budge.
I’m not suggesting they are indestructible, but if the power grid is hit and wiped out, and you are not, you can still lose power without being directly affected.

A distributed grid, which lots of local solar generation is always going to be more resilient than concentrated power plants and a load of power cables on sticks everywhere.

You can also reinstall and repair solar power installs quickly and progressively, rather than everyone being helpless until one single power station / cable gets fixed.

This is a fantastic (though technically deep article) on why most solar systems can’t work without the grid:

https://syonyk.blogspot.com/2018/05/why-typical-home-solar-setup-does-not-work-off-grid.html

Good luck convincing most people who can’t afford a car or health care that they need to invest in their own home power generation system… It’s mostly wealthy, technophiles, and preppers who go for these.

2017 survey of 8K American families; accessible cash savings:
$0 saved: 39 percent
Less than $1,000 saved: 18 percent
$1,000 to $4,999 saved: 12 percent
$5,000 to $9,999 saved: 6 percent
$10,000 or more saved: 25 percent <====

More likely the ones who care will get an emergency generator to keep the freezer cold, and a tiny 5-20W solar panel to recharge their mobile phone.

Edit for Armando:
$0 or less saved: 39 percent +1

Does debt count against savings? Cuz I might be the 39%. . .

l was actually expecting something closer to 20k and then minus the tax incentives to get it down in the teens. They heavily push that 30% federal tax credit too, which they think makes it way more affordable, but again there is no battery. Without the battery as soon as the grid goes down the panels stop producing as a safety feature. She tried very hard to talk me out of getting a quote for the battery, and when they did the written quote they took it off.

Now my area doesn’t have a lot of competition and probably not huge volumes. We’ve got great sun in the spring and summer but maybe Southern California might be more competitive.

Oh and that doesn’t even cover 100% of my energy, estimated 85% ish. It doesn’t cost anything to get a quote but I would not expect this to be widespread anytime soon. I also have no expectation these would survive hurricane level winds but pretty good against strong winds.

Green Mountain Power, the largest electric company in Vermont is one of the only (if not the only) power companies actively pushing the power wall. They’ve got a program where you can get one for either $1500 up front or $15/mo:

https://greenmountainpower.com/product/power wall

My ex-mother in-law got the first one and wrote an amusing article on it:

That’s awesome. Directly from Tesla it’s:

$11,800 2 Powerwalls
$700 Supporting hardware
$12,500 Total equipment cost

And that’s without the panels so add the 30k for the panels… without the extra incentives that Green Mountain is doing it’s right up there too. Still If my power company gave me an less expensive way to get this set-up, I would do it…

With noting that it’s actually a ten year lease from GMP rather than a straight purchase

What’s the useful life of one of those anyway?

That article talks about microinverters, which may be the common way residential solar is done in the US, but here, its always a big chunky inverter box, and a separate chunky big scary looking isolation switch to disconnect stuff.

I’m under no illusions that this stuff is affordable for everyone, definitely not, but I’m surprised its not more common than it is, especially given panel costs dropping so much (at least in europe).

FWIW there are a ton of small foldable solar panels designed to power mobiles & laptops that are probably a good interim solution for geeks who cant live without a charged mobile.

Yeah, microinverters are becoming more popular, but that is because they are usually easier to install grid-tied and easier to scale into. But they are also the type which stop working when the power is out. Only the older off-grid setups with big battery banks are useful off-grid or grid-down/disaster.

AT the end of the day even a $5-10k increase in cost of solar panel installation is pretty hefty considering I’ve only lost power to my house once in the last 5 years. For a lot of people (like me) that’s not worth it over the cost of solar alone.

If I could get a powerwall for $1500 yeah, I would have one already. $2000 would be awesome as well, but it’s more like $10k in socal.

It’s not really an issue for me since we so rarely lose power, and never for very long.

I was just going to link this, it’s an excellent explanation on why it’s not so easy to have off grid solar at the flip of a switch. I almost went with a regular inverter that had as an option a single socket you could use if the grid went off and it would pull straight from the cells, but that’s not terribly valuable to me and I wanted microinverters.

buried are harder to fix, and still can go out.

Sounding really bad for flooding:

Some times to watch

Thursday High Tide:

  • 12:31 p.m.

Friday High Tide:

  • 12:53 a.m.
  • 1:20 p.m.

Saturday High Tide:

  • 1:41 a.m.